_Scherzo_
1
It happens to millions.
They sit in doctors' offices trying to hide nervousness in the pages of
magazines. Wondering what germs their predecessors have deposited in
_Life_ and _Harper's Bazaar_ or _Action Comics_.
The nurse calls:
Mr. So-and-so. Mrs. So-and-so. Miss So-and-so.
They go in.
"Doctor," they say, "just lately I've begun to notice...."
They have begun to notice Death.
And now the doctor notices, too.
Millions of us, in this century, find out before angina curls us like
insects in flame. Before the stone is lodged in its screaming cavity.
Before the final, involuntary issue of bowel or bladder or foamy lungs.
It is one of the marvels of science.
"Tom," I said, for the doctor is an old friend, "lately I've noticed
a feeling of fullness in my nasal passages. And this morning, before
I flew down from the country, I looked at the back of my throat. Up
behind the uvula. Something is--growing there."
"Let's take a squint."
Tom was calm. He hadn't spent his forenoon staring from an airplane
window at the landscapes of New York and New Jersey, but seeing only
a reflection in a bathroom mirror. A reflection of his face, yawning
unpleasantly in the lavender fluorescence, the vertical tubes of light,
and there, on his throat's arch, a foreign tissue like a clot of paint
scraped from a bright palette.
He had merely shaved, as the rest of us had shaved on thousands of
mornings, thinking of this and that.
Now he switched on a light, tilted the circular reflector above his
forehead and removed his gold spectacles. I yawned.