• • •
“Was that Don Camillo?”
I look up from my desk. It is Dr. Ludtz who, in his anxiety, failed to knock at my door.
“Yes, it was.”
“What did he want?”
“The usual. He always comes before one of El Presidente’s visits. You know that, Dr. Ludtz. He merely wants to make sure that proper arrangements have been made.”
The tension in Dr. Ludtz’s face dissolves. “And was he satisfied?”
“Quite satisfied.”
“Did you tell him about the red and orange motif?”
“I’m sorry, no. He inquired about you.”
“Inquired? What do you mean, inquired?”
“As to your health.”
“What about my health?”
I smile. “Really, Dr. Ludtz, everything is quite at ease. You don’t need to disturb yourself.”
“All right,” Dr. Ludtz stammers breathlessly. “If you say so.”
“Everything is quite all right.”
“Good, good,” Dr. Ludtz says. He does not move. For a moment he seems in a trance.
“Are you all right, Dr. Ludtz?”
Dr. Ludtz shakes his head. “No. No, I’m not. I think I have a slight fever. It seems to have come upon me rather suddenly.”
“Have you checked it?”
Dr. Ludtz looks slightly embarrassed. “I tried. But — I don’t know how it happened — I broke the thermometer. I dropped it. I’m a little shaky, I suppose.”
He is sweating more profusely than usual. His shirt looks as if it has been dipped in drool. “Let me check it,” I tell him.
Dr. Ludtz steps over to me. I take a thermometer from the black bag that sits beside my desk. “Here, put it in your mouth.”
He takes the thermometer and places it under his tongue. In the Camp, I once saw him holding the brain of a three-year-old boy in his hands, lifting it toward the light. On the table, the boy’s eyes had plopped into the hollow of his skull like egg yolks.
I take the thermometer from Dr. Ludtz’s mouth and look at it. “You have a slight fever, Doctor.”
“Do I?” Dr. Ludtz says worriedly. “I thought so.”
“Very slight, that’s all.”
“But why? What do you suppose it is?”
“Perhaps a virus,” I say casually. “I wouldn’t be overly concerned.”
Dr. Ludtz glances apprehensively at his prickly monument. The grasses are gnawing at its base.
“Really, Doctor,” I tell him, “there is no cause to be alarmed. You know how these things come and go.” I smile. “Perhaps it’s the season. Even the orchids are unwell.”
Dr. Ludtz turns to me. “The orchids?”
“A blight has afflicted them.”
“Frankly, it’s not the orchids that concern me, Doctor,” Dr. Ludtz says. He is slightly irritated. “Men are not flowers, you know.”
“True.”
Dr. Ludtz wipes his brow anxiously. “I wouldn’t want to be ill during El Presidente’s visit. He might take it as a slight. You know how he is about things like that. He might become rather offended.”
“If you are ill, I will explain it to him.”
Dr. Ludtz laughs. “He is not a man for explanations, Doctor. He could easily get the wrong idea. He could take it as … I don’t know … as an insult, a personal insult.”
“And do what?”
Dr. Ludtz looks at me knowingly. “You know what. I don’t have to tell you.”
“He will not send you home, Dr. Ludtz.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he wants the diamonds.”
“But it’s you who have the diamonds, not me.”
“I would not give him any if he did any harm to you.”
Dr. Ludtz gazes at me beatifically. “Would you do that for me? Would you really?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
Dr. Ludtz grabs my hand and squeezes it gratefully. “Much thanks, Dr. Langhof. I can’t tell you what that means to me.”
I ease my hand from his grasp. “Go to bed, Dr. Ludtz. Take care of yourself. What would I do in this place without you?”
Dr. Ludtz stares at me, transfixed. “Dr. Langhof, I had no idea that … that …” He is practically in tears.
“Go now. Get some sleep.”
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Ludtz says. He starts to move toward the door.
“I will be up to check on you this evening,” I tell him.
“Oh, that would be fine, Dr. Langhof. Thank you so very much.”
I watch as Dr. Ludtz walks away. He moves heavily, something infinitely curious washed up out of time like a bone from the sludge-pit, strange in shape and texture, belonging to no known creature, a small particle of mystery floating in a galaxy of crime.
FEAR IS a great constrictor. In his terror of the fever and what it might portend, Dr. Ludtz mires his mind in the rudiments of the physical. It is in the nature of illness to reduce the parameters of one’s world to a tight little knot of injury. Nothing contracts the self into a small, aching center of restricted consciousness more than a sudden assault upon the integrity of health. The I that is not in pain, the I that is not afraid may follow the ballerina in her flight, may feel the swell of symphonies, may soar along the glimmering rim of verse. But once under assault, once in the grip of terror, the I draws in upon itself in a horrible deflation of sense and understanding. I know this to be true because I am a doctor, and my becoming one had to do with stars.
After his dismal march through the workings of the city, the boy found himself in the park once again. Though weary, he still resisted the idea of going home. He sat down on a bench, stretched his legs before him, and looked up at the sky. And there they were, the stars. Above all else, they seemed to him immensely clean. In his tortured brain he tried to think of something in his earthbound existence that might bear some relationship to this shining cleanliness, this perfect radiance. Nothing appeared. He waited. The stars were silent overhead, as, of course, he fully expected them to be. And so, in the end, he left the park with no grand vision. But that does not mean that he left it with nothing at all. For somewhere during those moments as he sat mournfully watching the sky, the process began that ultimately fused two ideas in his mind: one concerning the workings of the physical universe and the other concerning the workings of man. The thought was simple enough: that man only approached the beauty and clarity of the physical order when he himself studied that order; that is, in the practice of scientific investigation. Later he would find the nature of man’s disorder in the metaphor of disease, and that would lead him to what he fully expected to be his life’s work: hygienic research. His dream was to discover the secret formula of health, to comprehend the very roots of malady, to touch the darkest pits of sickness, and then to cauterize them until they blazed visible before him.
• • •
“And so you want to be a doctor, Herr Langhof?” Dr. Trottman asked.
Langhof sat in the book-lined office of the powerful and decisive Dr. Trottman, his hands turning waxy in his lap. “Yes, Dr. Trottman,” he said.
“You don’t need to be nervous, Herr Langhof,” Dr. Trottman said softly. “This little interview is not an inquisition.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Dr. Trottman stared at the curriculum vitae of our hero as if it were a mysterious specimen from the tropics. “Quite an impressive record.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You must have applied yourself with great vigor to achieve such distinction in the gymnasium.”
“I am a dedicated student,” Langhof said, hoping he did not sound haughty or self-serving.
“Yes, I can see that,” Dr. Trottman said. He looked up from his desk, his small eyes twinkling energetically through the lenses of his glasses. “Tell me, then — why this determination to be a doctor?”