Torval had the man's arm yanked up behind him now. He pressed the man into the side of the automobile. Eric leaned toward the window and lowered it. Food odors mingled in the air, coriander and onion soup, the funk of beef patties frying. The aides formed a loose cordon, both facing outward from the action.
Two women came out of Yodo of Japan, then went back in.
Eric looked at the man. He wanted Torval to shoot him or put the weapon at least to his head. He said, 'Who the fuck are you?'
'Dr. Ingram.'
'Where is Dr. Nevius?'
'Called away suddenly. Personal matter.'
'Speak slowly and clearly.'
'Called away suddenly. I don't know Family crisis. I'm the associate.'
Eric thought about this.
'I flushed out your ear holes once.'
Eric looked at Torval and nodded briefly. Then he raised the window.
He sat stripped to the waist. Ingram opened the satchel to a set of vivid instruments. He put the stethoscope to Eric's chest. He realized, Eric did, why his undershirt was missing. He'd left it on the floor of Didi Fancher's bedroom.
He looked past Ingram while the doctor listened to his heart valves open and close. The car moved incrementally westward. He didn't know why stethoscopes were still in use. They were lost tools of antiquity, quaint as bloodsucking worms.
Jane Melman said, 'You do this what.'
'What. Every day.'
'No matter.'
'Wherever I am. That's right. No matter.'
She tipped back her head and plunged a bottle of spring water into the middle of her face.
Ingram did an echocardiogram. Eric was on his back, with a skewed view of the monitor, and wasn't sure whether he was watching a computerized mapping of his heart or a picture of the thing itself. It throbbed forcefully on-screen. The image was only a foot away but the heart assumed another context, one of distance and immensity, beating in the blood plum raptures of a galaxy in formation. What mystery he glimpsed in this functional muscle. He felt the passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geologic time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars. How dwarfed he felt by his own heart. There it was and it awed him, to see his life beneath his breastbone in image-forming units, hammering on outside him.
He said nothing to Ingram. He didn't want to talk to the associate. He talked to Nevius now and then. Nevius had definition. He was white-haired, tall and stalwart, with a trace of Middle Europe in his voice. Ingram spoke in mutters of instruction. Breathe deep. Turn left. It was hard for him to say something he hadn't already said, words arranged in the same tedious sequence, a thousand times before.
Melman said, 'So you do what. Same routine every day.
'Varies, depending.'
'So he comes to your house, nice, on weekends.'
'We die, Jane, on weekends. People. It happens.'
'You're right. I didn't think of that.'
'We die because it's the weekend.'
He was still on his back. She sat facing the top of his head, speaking to a point slightly above it.
'I thought we were moving. But we're not anymore.' 'The president's in town.'
'You're right. I forgot. I thought I saw him when I ran out of the park. There was an entourage of limousines going down Fifth, with a motorcycle escort. I thought all these limos for the president I can understand. But it was somebody famous's funeral.'
'We die every day,' he told her.
He sat on the table now and Ingram looked for swollen lymph nodes under his arms. Eric pointed out a plug of sebum and cell debris on his lower abdomen, a blackhead, slightly sinister.
'What do we do about this?'
'Let it express itself.'
'What. Do nothing.'
'Let it express itself,' Ingram said.
Eric liked the sound of that. It was not unevocative. He tried to notice the associate. He had a mustache, for example. Eric hadn't seen it until now He expected to see glasses as well. But the man did not wear glasses although he seemed to be someone who should, based on facial typology and general demeanor, a man who'd worn glasses since early boyhood, looking overprotected and marginalized, persecuted by the other kids. He was a man you'd swear wore glasses.
He asked Eric to stand. He adjusted the examining table to half length. Then he asked him to drop his pants and shorts and to bend over the near end of the table, legs apart.
He did this and was facing his chief of finance.
She said, 'So look. We have two rumors working in our favor. First there's bankruptcies for six straight months. More each month. More on the way. Large Japanese corporations. This is good.'
'The yen has to drop.'
'This is loss of faith. It will force the yen to drop.'
'The dollar will settle up.'
'The yen will drop,' she said.
He heard a slidy rustle of latex. Then the Ingram finger entered.
'Where is Chin?' she said.
'Working on visual patterns.'
'This thing doesn't chart.'
'It charts.'
'It doesn't chart the way you chart technology stocks. You can find real patterns there. Locate predictable components. This is different.'
'We are teaching him to see.'
'You should do the seeing. You're the seer. What is he? A kid. He has the streak in the hair. He has the earring.'
'He doesn't have the earring.'
'If he was any more dreamy, we'd have to put him on life support.'
He said, 'What's the second rumor?'
Ingram examined the prostate for signs. He palpated, the finger slyly prodding the surface of the gland through the rectal wall. There was pain, probably just muscles tensing in the anal canal. But it hurt. It was pain. It traveled the circuitry of nerve cells. From his stooped position, Eric looked directly into Jane's face. He liked doing this, which surprised him. In the office she was an edgy presence, skeptical, adversarial, aloof, with a gift for sustained complaint. Here, she was a single running mother in a foldout seat, knock-kneed and touchingly, somehow, gaunt. A splash of hair lay moist and flat on her forehead, showing the first faint veining of gray. The water bottle dangled from a lank hand.
She did not recede from his gaze. She made complete eye contact. Her clavicle showed knobby above the droop of her tank top. He wanted to lick the sweat off the inside of her wrist. She was wrists and shinbones and unbalmed lips.
'There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now,' she said. 'Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing.'
When Nevius did the finger, it was in and out in seconds. Ingram was probing for some murky fact. Jane was the fact. She had the bottle in her crotch, knees flopped outward now, and watched him. Her mouth was open, showing large gapped teeth. Something passed between them, deeply, a sympathy beyond the standard meanings
