for the enema he required before the examination. She asked him to take off his boots, jeans and underwear. Half-naked, he felt old and inept, his shame fused with self-pity. She asked him to lie down on his side on a cot as she inserted a nozzle. He could barely hold the fluid rapidly entering him. About to finish, unconcerned, the nurse told him to retain the fluid for five minutes. He turned around and saw her shapely calves and knees, her thighs firm under the uniform. He wondered whether, in approaching her outside the hospital, he would do so as an obscurely humiliated patient, as the invulnerable man he felt himself to be in his VanHome, or as a potent athlete sitting on his horse in a polo game.
Alone in the brightly lighted toilet, he noticed that his pubic hair had begun to go gray. This surprised him: the last time he had consciously examined himself—how long ago, he could not recall—the hair was all black.
Back in the examination room, he found the doctor, young, unusually good-looking, exuding the self-confidence and strength of a winning player. Fabian, naked except for his loose and dangling shirt, crawled clumsily onto the examination table. His thighs spread wide by the pedal-like traps clamping his feet, his braced knees and elbows exposing his buttocks below the doctor’s face, Fabian thought of himself as a woman explored by her gynecologist, then as a man entered in sodomy by his lover.
The doctor put on rubber gloves. Applying lubricant to a pipelike instrument, he noticed his patient’s uncertain glance. “Afraid of the sigmoidoscope?” he asked.
“Of pain,” said Fabian.
As the sigmoidoscope entered him slowly, his muscles offering little resistance, he felt discomfort, then pain. The doctor moved out of Fabian’s view.
“Does it feel sensitive?” he asked.
“It doesn’t. I do.” replied Fabian.
The mascot Fabian always kept on the dashboard of his VanHome resembled a heavy-duty letter opener. It was an aluminum blade, long, tapering and curved, dull, but crowned by a large knob of shining chrome. No visitor had ever guessed that the mascot was an artificial hip joint, used to replace an irreparably shattered or deteriorated one. It was there to remind Fabian of his fear of surgery. He recalled one of his uncles, a celebrated scholar and writer, whose lectures Fabian often had attended as a student. In the course of surgery for a minor growth in the ear, the surgeon’s hand slipped and injured a nerve. Fabian’s uncle came out of the operation with one side of his face drooping, unable to close one eye tightly, his mouth drawn down to the side, so that food and saliva dribbled from its loose corner when he ate and his words slurred when he spoke. When corrective surgery failed to remedy his deformity, Fabian’s uncle resignedfrom the academy, then volunteered for the war. He never returned.
When Fabian had to have his tonsils removed, his parents, whose only child he was, insisted that the operation be performed by a famous surgeon, an eminent professor in the medical school. Then seventy years old, he operated only on serious cases and had not performed a simple tonsillectomy in decades. But he agreed to operate on Fabian for the benefit of medical students who would observe his performance.
A large auditorium was transformed into an operating theater. Fabian sat bound in the operating chair, his head extended backward, his mouth fixed open. Under local anesthetic, he felt no pain, only fear and discomfort. The surgeon began the operation, with a microphone under his chin, describing to his students each step of the process, his choice of move and instrument.
Suddenly, Fabian coughed. Taken aback, the professor dislodged and dropped to the floor a clamp that tied off a blood vessel. From the open vein, blood flooded Fabian’s throat. He began to choke. Reaching for a spare clamp on a portable tray, the nervous assistant knocked the tray down. Another assistant ran out to