The Doctor Is Sick by Anthony Burgess

deliberately. ‘This doesn’t do any good. I mean, it’s so artificial. We’ve nothing to say to each other really, and we both keep looking at our watches in a surreptitious kind of way. It’s true, isn’t it? It isn’t normal, this kind of thing – it makes me all jumpy. And you know I hate hospitals.’
    â€˜You mean you don’t want to see me, is that it?’
    â€˜Oh, it’s not that. While you’re in here I get a feeling that it isn’t really you at all. And it isn’t, is it? It’s you sick. It’s you sort of suspended – you know what I mean, suspended animation. And I hate this lack of privacy and this clock-watching and the artificiality of it all. So would you mind very much if I didn’t come in every night?’
    â€˜Well,’ said Edwin slowly, ‘if you really feel that way about it. I do understand, you know, don’t think I don’t. Could you,’ he asked, ‘possibly write me letters?’
    â€˜I could do that, yes. Yes, that’s a good idea.’
    â€˜Although it does seem a bit stupid, doesn’t it, when you only live a couple of hundred yards away.’
    â€˜And,’ said Sheila eagerly, ‘there are quite a number of people in the Anchor who’d be only too pleased to come and visit you. So you won’t be too lonely.’
    â€˜All right, if you want it that way. You mean I can look forward to a procession of colourful low-life characters to cheer my solitude?’
    â€˜Well, it was kind of them to offer, wasn’t it?’
    â€˜And when are you coming to see me again?’
    â€˜Oh, in a few days. At the week-end. Please, Edwin,don’t tie me to anything. You know how I hate being tied.I’ll come fairly soon, honestly I will.’

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The tests that followed required more than a single white-coated operator, so that greater opportunities presented themselves for treating Edwin as a thing. Impotent on a cellar table, he could be discussed or, when a social mood prevailed, ignored. The tests were intimate and searching, so that he was fingered more, heaved about more, recalcitrant parts of his body were scolded more. But when he was particularly docile and plastic he was elevated to a pet’s level and patted.
    The doctors wanted an arteriogram. A pink vermilion-lipped pudding of a nurse squirted a tranquilliser into his buttock, then he was wheeled into a lift and carried below. Radiographers greeted him cheerfully – maturer women, and perhaps more virginal, than those he had met on previous occasions. He was slid on to an operating table under the nozzles and eyes of X-ray apparatus, and there was happy talk and bustle while the doctor, opener of arteries, was awaited.
    â€˜I’ve put a new cone in, Mabel.’
    â€˜Oh, good-oh.’ A yell above Edwin’s head.
    Edwin saw faces, upside down, peering at him incuriously. The inverted human face is horrible: too many holes, far more monstrous than any monster from outer space.
    â€˜And what did she say then?’
    â€˜She said she wasn’t going to wait all her life looking forthe right man. By the time she’d found him, she said, it’d be too late anyway.’
    â€˜Who’s she to go on about waiting for the right man? Have you seen that hair?’ There was a puff of derision.
    The inverted face
    Of any given member of the human race
    Is far more monstrous than
    â€˜Hiya, girls.’ It was a Canadian doctor, keen-faced and with thick hair en brosse . He was young and evidently most accessible to the laity. ‘This our patient? Hiya, Mister.’
    â€˜Doctor,’ corrected Edwin.
    â€˜Yes?’ said the doctor. ‘That’s right, I’m the doctor. Now I’m just going to give you a small local.’ He grasped the artery on the right side of Edwin’s neck and pumped in his ansthetic. Then he sat down and waited. Two other young