The Breast Read Free Page B

interest to medical science. That miracle continues to be studied by microbiologists, physiologists, and biochemists working here in the hospital and, I am told, in medical institutions around the country. They are trying to figure out what makes me still tick. Dr. Klinger thinks that no matter how they put the puzzle together, in the end it could all come down to those old pulpit bromides, “strength of character” and “the will to live.” And who am I not to concur in such a heroic estimate of myself?
    â€œIt appears then that my analysis has ‘taken,’” I tell Dr. Klinger; “a tribute to you, sir.” He laughs. “You were always stronger than you thought.” “I would as soon never have had to find out. And besides it’s not so. I can’t live like this any longer.” “Yet you have, you do.” “I do but I can’t. I was never strong. Only determined. One foot in front of the other. Good grades in all subjects. It goes back to handing homework in on time and carrying off the prizes. Dr. Klinger, it’s hideous in here. I want to quit, I want to go crazy, to go spinning off, ranting and wild, only I can’t. I sob. I scream. I touch bottom. I lie there on that bottom! But then I come around. I make my mordant little jokes. I listen to the radio. I listen to the phonograph. I think about what we’ve said. I restrain my rage and I restrain my misery—and I wait for your next visit. But this is madness, my coming around. To be putting one foot in front of the other is madness— especially as I have no feet! This ghastly thing has happened, and I listen to the six o’clock news! This incredible catastrophe, and I listen to the weather report!” No, no, says Dr. Klinger: strength of character, the will to live.
    I tell him that I want to go mad, he tells me that it’s impossible: beyond me, beneath me. It took This for me to find that I am a citadel of sanity.
    So—I may pretend otherwise, but I know they are studying me, watching as they would from a glass-bottomed boat the private life of a porpoise or a manatee. I think of these aquatic mammals because of the overall resemblance I now bear to them in size and shape, and because the porpoise in particular is said to be an intelligent, perhaps even rational, creature. Porpoise with a Ph.D. Associate Porpoise Kepesh. Really, it is the silliness, the triviality, the meaninglessness of life that one misses most in a life like this. For aside from the monstrous, ludicrous fact of me, there is the intellectual responsibility that I seem to have developed to this preposterous misfortune. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? HOW COULD IT HAVE HAPPENED? IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE, WHY PROFESSOR KEPESH? Yes, it is clever of Dr. Klinger to keep to what is ordinary and familiar, to drone on about strength of character and the will to live. Better these banalities than the grandiose or the apocalyptic; for citadel of sanity though I may be, there is only so much that even I can take.
    Â 
    Â 
    AS FAR AS I KNOW, my only visitors other than the scientists, the doctors, and the hospital staff, have been Claire, my father, and Arthur Schonbrunn, formerly my department chairman and now the Dean of Arts and Sciences. My father’s behavior has been staggering. I don’t know how to account for it, except to say that I simply never knew the man. Nobody knew the man. Aggressive, cunning, at his work tyrannical—with us, the little family, innocent, protective, tender, and deeply in love. But this self-possession face to face with horror? Who would have expected it from the owner of a second-class South Fallsburg hotel? A short-order cook to begin with, he rose eventually to be the innkeeper himself; retired now, he “kills time” answering the phone mornings at his brother’s booming catering service in Bayside. Once a week he comes to visit and, seated in a chair that is