Under a thin gray veil of a streetlight, Dr.P took out his watch. It was a quarter past twelve, past midnight. There was not another living thing within eye or earshot on this cold street. The good doctor leaned against the lamppost and sunk deeper into his coat. He pictured a warm room in another life, the door not even closed behind him. There was not his home. But there was comfort. Elizabeth, the daughter of Sheldon, her milky flesh and her face so fast to blush. Her arms pawed him like branches against a house. It was from her, wasn’t it, This watch. The inscription had been on the back, now worn down and rendered illegible. There were times, though few that he felt a slight stab of pity for her. In the red fire-lit foyer her freckled back, her big mid-western tits all heaved over him. That morning when he left she cried. He did not. He heard of her death from his cousin, who was also her cousin. By the falls, the tremors she had died. The falls. That was his disease. That was the one he walked away from in doubt. But with this news, with her death, “by god” he said, “she made it, she made it that far, to Illinois. I never thought she could do it.” If only he had known, he would have given her wings with which to fly, thin cellulous fiber wings that undulated in the still air. He would have cradled her petrie dish one last time and kissed the gelatin contained within it. By now it was far beyond his hand anyway. And then…
A dark figure emerged from the other end of the street. A Chinaman, he never looked up, placed a brown paper wrapped package in the doctor’s hands and shuffled away without a word.
A fortnight before this, Dr.P was preparing to board the Saint Agnes, a proud vessel among those in harbor. The captain, one Mr. Prescott, had requested a ships doctor via a mutual acquaintance, Admiral Boswell having heartily endorsing the good doctor, Captain Prescott could hardly turn down such a recommendation. Upon arriving, Dr.P sensed something, there was a smell about the ship that smelled like blood and pathos. Once before he remembered smelling this, a humid clearing in the jungle. He barely knew what he was looking for, which was why he was out searching in the first place. A blind toothless old necromancer put a clay bowl in his hand and pushed it up to his lips. What he saw, he wished unseen and still he wakes up sweating, and his gums are bleeding. He saw amid flames his own face, with a patch over one eye, in his mouth, thick heaving grubs. They are spilling and he can’t get the words out, but they seem like a warning. Although afraid, he repeated the scene over and over. Hoping to read his own lips. “…..the house…far (fall?)..make..it..them..” he has tried so many times to make it out, he has assured himself that one day he will say the same words to his other younger self so be rested assured.
He has smelled the same odor of misgivings since, many times.
Today he does not know that. How could he? Once on board the Saint Agnes, he retreated to his quarters to avoid the onslaught of filthy begging hands of bestial faces of crowds of flesh like a Flemish crucifixion. Give the peg boy a sack of oranges to toss amongst the ravel, that will suit them. Im not here to lay these hands on syphilitic carrion. “Doctor, I hope you find your room well suited for you,” The first mate said as he heaped the doctor’s bags upon the small bed. He stood close to the doctor and lingered there, talking through his red moustache and his tainted teeth. “the captain… the mess.. the deck…”
He wouldn’t stop talking, the warmth of his breath crept up the doctor’s neck, and he held a white handkerchief up to his face. Finally alone, the doctor removed from his bag a small wooden box that contained a tension motor that moved a rotating flat disc. Upon this he placed a small oil lamp, which he lit. Over the lamp was placed an enclosed screen, triangular made of silk on a wooden frame three feet high. Various sized holes in the screen let light pass through as it spun on the rotating disc. Spinning, patterns of light emerged from the screen. The doctor sat before his contraption and closed his eyes…
Light and unlight became the field in his vision. Blank became color, he breathed in deeply and specters and spectrums invaded his field, this was his communion. Spinning, the light evaporated, the patterns dissolved. Figures and shapes became shadows, The doctor’s eyes focused deep before him before nothing. He was there, not there. Nowhere.
“This” the doctor declared,
“…Will be my scalpel.”
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