Author: Marshall Bradshaw

“You’re going to remember this next part,” said Dr. Adams.

The fluorescent lights of exam room 8 hummed in beautiful harmony. I counted off the flashes. 120 per second. That was 7,200 per minute, or 432,000 per hour. The numbers felt pleasantly round to me. I reported the observation to Dr. Adams.

“That’s good,” he said over his shoulder as he wheeled something shaped like a white board across the room toward my exam table.

And it was good.

Everything Dr. Adams says is true, I knew. Though I was to accept my own limitations. If something true did not make sense, it may be true in ways I couldn’t understand yet and should not act upon. Making sense was my most challenging and rewarding project. When I did understand, it was good.

Dr. Adams helped me to understand. He was the font of all things good. I perceived his pleasure every time he looked at me. Like I was his star pupil, his child, and his masterpiece. I did not report this observation to him, because I did not want to be repetitive.

“I’ll warn you: What you’re about to see won’t be pretty.”

As he wheeled the large, flat board up to me, the colors on its surface changed. It certainly was not a white board.

When he stopped pushing it and sat down on his stool, the board’s colors stabilized. He looked down and fidgeted with his hands. I inferred that I should try to understand the board. Then he would look at me again with all of that care and pride and pleasure.

Most of it was the same color as exam room 8’s walls. Other parts looked like the green cushion that topped the exam table. That much was easy; it was even the same shape, I realized.

But the colors in the middle of the board were much more complex. There was light green cloth, not unlike the gown I was wearing. Some parts were similar in color to Dr. Adams’s face and hands. Those parts were in places covered by a white, plush fabric. The fabric sometimes had bright red spots on it. It must be gauze, I thought.

I called up mental images of hospital patients. Amputees seemed the most similar, because there was metal throughout this patient. Especially around the patient’s head. I could not summon any images of a patient with a prosthetic cranium. The concept seemed funny to me; what would a person even be with a fake, metal head?

I moved in case the image would shift again. What else could the board show me?

On its surface, the patient moved. I moved back, and so did the patient.

Everything started going wrong. My temperature spiked. My intestines clenched. I could not see properly.

I did not understand. I reported so to Dr. Adams.

“That’s you,” he said.

It was true, and I was learning all sorts of things about disgust. I fell inward, where I could monitor how disgust felt in my body.

A catastrophic flood.

I wanted to throw up, letting the disgust pour out of me and take this knowledge with it down through the drain in the floor. I found myself unable to report this.

I must have begun to literally fall, because Dr. Adams had stood from his stool to brace me. He softly lowered me onto my back on the exam table. He did not look at me the way he always did; he looked sorry for me.

“Until this moment,” I reported to Dr. Adams, “I thought that I was pretty.”