Joshua Cohen - Witz

If one needed in order to satisfy an unimaginable impulse, or wanted out of some derangement or another, I’m sure a term exists, to diagnose the office, the physical plant — I have the address somewhere out on Long Island — of the twin Doctors Tweiss, dispensing their office and its forsaken environs a dose of their own medicine, transferring temperament, displacing aims and verbiage in an inevitably misguided attempt to describe, preliminary examination would result in recommendation for the immediate destruction of the facility entire, on second opinion along with its parkinglot, too, and with dynamite. It’s squat stucco with not enough windows; altogether against the human — in no way a place of healing, better interested in hurt. Before they’d moved in, it’d been a funeralhome.

As if to say, Aesculapius, I don’t know. Never heard of him. Aesculapius, think I took his sister out once.

An office a mere block away by carpool from their home, in which they’ve lived ever since a disproportionately protracted birth resulting in the death of their mother and, aggrieved, as if in response, in the eventual feminization of their father, beginning with a regimen of hormonal therapy and then, ultimately, a surgical procedure necessitating a second mortgage — a vaginoplasty in which his testes had been severed to form a labia with the remnant, the shaft of his penis, inverted to manifest the hollow of a shallow vagina. Their office, it’s situated across a meridian from a takeout, drivethru concrete box, at the far end of an icy asphalt lot rented at a nominal monthly fee from that once promiment, national fastfoood purveyor just beginning bankruptcy proceedings, its paving recently annexed into adjacency with the mediating island homeopathically weeded, untended, disused — a tar openness providing ample space for the parking of their modest twin sedans, with the smaller, otherwise zoned expanse just past the island made unofficially available to their patients, too, and to any other visitor to this facility of which their practice, or practices, are at present the only two tenants. Here there used to be seven lawyers, six accountants, five actuaries, four insurance firms, three dentists, two dermatologists, and that lone funeralhome, groundfloor fronting the one pear tree, now barren, stripped by wind of partridges and bark. All of whose space is theirs as of last moon, an expansion from their previously tiny office that had been approximately one street, one address, one suite number too far to the west, which is already Queens. This ever since their official retention, an agreement to diagnose exclusively for Garden, Inc., from the aborted bris on to remain oncall; though they still, if guiltily and with a semblance of quiet, are willing do a number of things, grudging favors, for friends and friends of friends, too, for hard money on the side: accepting diamonds, gold, and other precious gems and metals, free meals, drinks, and High Holiday tickets in return, you didn’t hear it from me, for circumcisions and the mental health counseling their effect would subsequently require, both procedures always ritually performed. If with a handful of weird personal touches: as Doctor Tweiss the plasticsurgeon never uses anesthesia, whereas his twin the psychoanalyst always does, explain that; both having practiced for performance upon Ben, they’re thinking, why not put their work to abuse on a person truly grateful and willing — the general paying public. All at the Garden tolerate it, they have to, it’s too lucrative for them not to, and so they take their cuts both sharp and blunt, and look the other way — at their shoes, on the advice of their counsel.

The doctors, they’re booked for moons.

Through the door to the office that’s wide enough for a gurney, a prehumous coffin and its two medically fit pallbearers — this to facilitate the twins’ coming and going, the two of them at once through the lobby — there’s a sign: The Tweiss Group . One to the left and one to the right, then they meet in the middle. A lobby that also serves as the first waitingroom, as the initial station of a series of rooms that would test the commitment to recovery of each individual patient: however long they’re willing to be kept waiting indicative of how badly they’re in want, or need, of healing. Ratty pornographic periodicals they’ve recovered from the trash of a lawyer vacated or dead, facsimiles of transcribed testimonials provided by, if extorted from, patients former and present, promotional materials for ever newer prescription narcotics designed to alleviate the aftereffects of elective surgical procedures, too, fanned out atop little rickety, unmatching endtables, the nicest of them hardwoods topped in fauxmarble. A scattering of vases with even their cracks chipped, their fill a handling of left umbrellas, corrupt caducei. Antiquities behind frames that once held glass, stationed on both sides of the door, cabinets of rare fragiles shuddering with the entrance of every patient, never exit — and so their shattered statuettes with the heads of dogs and Gods, their idols in shards and showy halfamphoræ. Against that wall an analysand’s settee forbidden for sitting, at its sides two armchairs dermatologist’s purchases smokedamaged, tossed out, then divested by the brothers from a temporarily neighboring dumpster; the other wall hosts the receptiondesk, which is splintering, set on shapely legs — set on highheels — forbiddingly high.

As the firstborns are put through their battery of tests, subject to the painful whim of any government granting or other ostensibly official disbursement, many, though, private and so privately festishistic, insane, Ben’s kept waiting, shifting in one of the waitingroom’s armchairs, sloppily womblike, leaking its stuffing. His appointment scheduled for a lifetime ago, hours, an hour. Reduced to the abject, demeaned by each knifing lick of the clock above, He’s become its lowly ward, and that of the desk below it, too, not to forget behind the desk its girl, sitting low as if unaware of her power. All the waitingrooms, and there are many, as many of them as there are hells, even as many as there are ways and means by which to earn your hell, to become cursed and damned, to deserve it here on earth — all are the domain of this young woman, the offices’ shared receptionist and sole fulltime employee; according to the nameplate her employers would often fantasize nailing to her forehead, her name’s Minnie Tung de Presser.

No, I have Misses Abernathy down for three this afternoon.

Yes, she says, she dialed me frantic from work and I just managed to squeeze her in…squeezes herself, then realizes the telephone’s disconnected, plugs its jack back into the wall. What did she do, what didn’t she do: she’d settle disputes in case of scheduling conflicts, though often she’d be the one responsible for scheduling the conflicts, in an effort to assert her dominance over the doctors who’d woo her, this hourglass shiksa maybe a few grains shy of legal age. Domineering, like she’s making double what she makes, with spoiled ascension pretensions though of trashy stock, a Midwest import, eightfathered Bible Beltbeaten provenance, this who does she thinks she is requiring no analysis and even less anatomical enhancement. The Doctors Tweiss, they’d both been trying to bed her for years, to no avail, though they’ve become quite successful at their fantasy, wetdaydreaming of penetrating her small, pinch-veined, hairless, O so tight nostrils with what they think, they hope, passes for professional abandon; straddling her face, their testes dumbly smacking like tonsils her soft lips glossed in red, then leaving their seed there, shooting it deep and up to store, gunking her septum, behind her eyes then to her brain, giving her recurring sinus headaches they’d surely charge her to cure, deduct it from her minimum wage. They give her no insurance; they pay her in cash only when they don’t miser her in coin. To sit with her breasts rising from the fall of her halter uniform, midnight pleather; her chair’s retrofitted with a dildo, its modification to her feeling natural, the ultimate in cervical comfort, and a bonus to her employers, too, who for relaxation would sniff and lick it after hours: she’d sit impaled on it all day, her legs dangling for the floor, their feet nude, vanillapale and perfect. If perhaps indicative, or so the doctors would only wish, of the laterlife lymphatic — edema, a swelling from pregnant idle. If only she’d let them inseminate; if only impotence wasn’t physiological, too — then, they couldn’t have cared less. Dominatrix pleather except for the naked feet with their toes tapping to the rhythmlessness of her altogether tuneless hum, both accomplished at a volume enervatingly low amid the loud of her lipchewing, gumclacking, and the sucking of her sweets, which are ostensibly sugarfree, a panoply of red and green lozenges she’d enjoy herself while denying them to the uninitiated impatient from a jar atop her desk; rationing them in return for humiliation, to be perpetrated only during breaks from her work of all break, which is nothing more than losing things, not limited to files and office supplies. Abutting the jar, a holder hosts a single businesscard, lonely, its corners crumpled stale — that of the funeralhome director, having long required his own services.