1.12 Infirmary

Back in the cell, I’m quickly losing my mind trying to scratch all the itches that crop up on right my shoulder, now on my right cheek . . . my forehead . . . my left ear . . . the back of my right leg, and now my knees. The soap I washed myself with has left my skin, from scalp to shins, dried out, a tanned hide baking under the noon sun.

Outside in the corridor, I hear the jangling of keys, and as I’m giving my stomach a vigorous scratch, the door slides open. Bear is standing there. He tells me to put my uniform shirt on and get ready to go.

“Where to?”

“The infirmary,” he answers.

I pull the gray short-sleeved, button-down shirt over my head, slip on the sandals and step out of the cell.

"Tuck your shirt in."

The shorts issued to me yesterday are three inches too big around the waist and have to be rolled up just to keep them from dropping down to my ankles. Tucking the shirt in just makes the whole get-up look all the more ridiculous. That, of course, is the least of my concerns.

From the far end of the cellblock a ragged-looking man in an orderly's uniform slinks towards me like an ambivalent angel of death. Sickly pale and scrawny, he is a paragon of ill health. The orderly’s skin is so severely afflicted with dermatitis it makes you itch just to look at him. Brushed back, his scraggly gray hair barely hides a scalp covered with thick eczema.

The orderly asks if I speak Japanese. Not so much a question as a forlorn whimper. I tell him I do and his dry, scabby face cracks with constrained relief.

"Follow me, then."

At the end of the corridor we come to a wall of bars. The orderly asks me to turn towards the wall as he fiddles with the lock.

When the barred door is opened, I’m told to walk through and face the wall again. From the corner of my eye I watch as he locks the door up. Of all the keys dangling from a chain on his belt, I see he’s using the only one with a blue rubber collar.

The orderly leads me up four flights of stairs and down a wide hallway, walls covered with posters of Kyushu's scenic spots--Takachiho in Miyazaki Prefecture, the hot-spring town of Beppu in Oita. It’s hard to know if they’re trying to taunt or entice us.

Down another flight of stairs we go to the third floor, where, turning a corner, we arrive at the infirmary, a cramped, dimly lit, and dingy room.

As I enter, one of two thugs seated on folding chairs looks up at me with weary amusement, and, elbowing the other, whispers, “Check out the gaijin.”

Holding up a paper cup in his scabby red hand, the orderly gestures towards a toilet in the rear and tells me to piss into the cup. I take the cup from the orderly and head for the lavatory.

On the wall above the toilet is a calendar.

It’s been ten days . . . Ten days since Sunday . . . I should be in the clear by now, but Christ . . . you never can tell, can you, what will show up if they know what to look for . . . God, what was I thinking?

I take a deep breath and start dribbling into the paper cup.

A moment later, I emerge from the lavatory and hand the warm cup back to the orderly who dips a slip of paper into it.

"Right, nothing out of the ordinary here," he says and makes a notation on a form attached to a clipboard. Returning the cup to me, he tells me to flush it down the toilet.

After washing my hands, I sit down opposite the orderly at a clunky old steel desk, easily as old as this tumbledown jail, and answer a questionnaire.

“Number?” he asks.

“Six,” I reply.

After asking my name, age, date of birth, and so on, the orderly wants to know if I’m gay.

"No," I reply, indignant.

What the hell are you throwing out a question like that with those two bruisers sitting just on the other side of this curtain?

He ticks a box that says “no”, then moves onto the next question: "Have you got pearls or piercing of any kind in your genitalia?"

Good grief! Enough with the pearls in my dingdong already!

"No," I answer.

"Have you got any tattoos."

"No."

"You ever go to Soapland?"

"Excuse me?"

I know exactly what he means. I’m just floored that he'd be so ask so matter-of-factly if I get my pipes cleaned at massage parlors.

Listen: the part of me that insists on acting like one of the Lost Boys still clings stubbornly to the belief that there is no reason to pay money for a commodity that remains abundant and free. After all, even at the age of forty with my graying hair and all, young Japanese women still manage to find me only slightly less attractive than they did when I was ten years younger. The day I have to go to Soapland in order to get my knob polished is a day I dread with the same trepidation I imagine many women must face the prospect of menopause.

“No, I have never been to a Soapland,” I tell him, indignant again.

"Right,” he says. “No worries about AIDS, then."

Well, that was certainly thorough.

After making a notation on the form, the orderly scratches a dry spot behind his ear with the end of the pen that sends a small flurry of dandruff fluttering onto the desk.

“Do you drink?”

"Yes," I answer, averting my eyes from an eczema snowdrift forming at the edge of the desk.

"How much?"

"Depends."

"On average?"

I shrug. On average, I suppose I don't drink much, but I do go on the occasional binge if the mood struck me. I can polish off a bottle of Ron Zacapa Centenario in a day and a half and not feel the worse for it. I can hold my own in the company of Russians over a bottle of raspberry vodka. I drink, but I'm no drunk.

"A beer, maybe two, a day," I offer the orderly.

"Tobacco?"

"Yes."

"How many cigarettes a day?" he asks, ticking a box on the form.

"I don't smoke cigarettes," I reply.

"What? You smoke, right?"

"Yes, but I don't smoke cigarettes."

"What do you smoke then?"

"Argileh," I reply. "A water pipe."

"Marijuana?"

"No, no, no. Tobacco."

"With a water pipe?" It doesn’t seem to register in that scabby head of his, and, to be perfectly honest, I couldn't give a flying fuck if he did.

"Yeah," I say. “With a water pipe.”

"How often?"

"Once or twice a week."

"How about drugs?" he asks.

"Drugs?"

"Do you take drugs?"

They guy must be high to think he'll get a straight answer out of me after what all the straight answers have done for me so far?

"Aside from alcohol and tobacco and caffeine and the occasional aspirin? No, no drugs."

"Marijuana?"

"No."

"Amphetamines?"

"Amphetamines? No."

"Right, stand up against the wall over there. Cover your left eye with this," he says, handing me a plastic spoon.

The eye chart is across the room on the opposite wall and I have to look past the two thugs to read it.

Completing the eye exam, I learn that my eyesight isn't nearly as good as I thought it was, one ripple on the sea of upsetting news I've had all week.

Next, the orderly sits me down before a sphygmomanometer set on a small table just to the right of the eye chart.

I stick my arm through the cuff. A button is pressed and the cuff inflates, constricting my arm. Red numbers flash on the screen.

"It's quite high," he says grimly.

"I just humped up four flights of stairs," I remind him.

"Stay there and I'll retake it in a few minutes."

As I wait, the orderly tells one of the thugs that the doctor is ready to see him. He stands up, dawdles past me and disappears behind a shabby gray curtain where the doctor is waiting.

"What's the problem," the doctor asks, his voice is tired and unsympathetic.

"My foot itches."

"Show me."

"You've got athlete's foot," the doctor says blandly. "Well, don’t scratching it then. Next!"

The man returns to his seat, cursing under his breath, and the other inmate stands up with a groan and walks around the curtain where the doctor asks again: "What's the problem?"

"I've got the runs."

"It'll pass,” the doctor replies. “Drink plenty of water, in the meantime."

The orderly returns to check my blood pressure again and a minute later says, "Mild hypertension."

Boy, that is the least of my worries right now.

I am then instructed to lie down on the examining table and wait quietly for the doctor.

Lying on my back, I notice a strip of flypaper the color of earwax hanging from the ceiling directly above my head. Speckled with the black remains of flies and gnats, I can’t help but be reminded that the two thugs, the orderly, who must surely be an inmate himself, and I amount to no more than bugs trapped in flypaper.

After a few minutes, the doctor comes to the examining table, where, tired and apathetic, he gives my abdomen a few perfunctory taps.

"How are you feeling," he asks looking pensively out the window.

"I'm a bit depressed."

"Yes, well, aren’t we all? Aren’t we all?"

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. (wink, wink)

The first installment of No.6 can be found here.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.