The family went to the hospital together, but at first his wife left the fat man in the waiting room and went upstairs alone with Eeyore. Half an hour later, dragging her heavy, shrieking son and obviously exhausted, she staggered back. The examination had scarcely begun, and already the doctor, the nurses, even his wife was prostrate, while Eeyore himself presented a picture of such cruel abuse that the other patients were looking on in dismay. The fat man, furious to see his son in such a state, and menaced, understood why his wife had left him in the waiting room and gone upstairs alone with Eeyore. There was no longer room for doubt that a thorough examination of a child’s eyes was an uninterrupted ordeal, rife with some kind of grotesque and virulent terror.
Eeyore was still producing at the back of his throat something like the echo of a feeble scream when the fat man dropped to his knees on the dirty floor and embraced his pudgy body. The hand which Eeyore wound around his neck was moist with the sweat of fear, like the pads on the foot of a cat that had tasted danger. And the touch of his hand infused the fat man with the essence of his son’s entire experience during the thirty minutes past (so he believed at the time). Every hollow and rise of the fat man’s body was possessed by an aching numbness that followed thirty long minutes in the spiney clamps of medical instruments he had never actually seen: had not Eeyore quieted gradually in his arms until now he was only whimpering, he might have raised a terrific scream and begun writhing on the floor himself.
Unique in his household for her excessive leanness, the fat man’s provident wife had taken the precaution of stopping downstairs in hopes of preventing the two of them, himself and his son, from behaving in just this lunatic way.
____They must have been horrible to him, the fat man moaned, sighing hoarsely. What the hell did they think he is, the bastards!
____It was Eeyore who was horrible: he kept kicking the doctors and the nurses away, one after the other, and he broke all kinds of things, said the fat man’s wife. It wasn’t that she always tried for fairness or objectivity so much as that she refused to participate in the fat man’s paranoia. The fat man listened to her sighing now, mournfully angry at her violent son, and felt that he was included in her attack.
____No, there must have been something wrong basically, otherwise Eeyore wouldn’t have been so wild. Think how gentle he always is! And you said the examination had just begun—then how did Eeyore know there was something so bad in store for him that he had to fight that way? There has to be something fundamentally wrong, I mean with the eye department here, and you just missed it, that’s all, the fat man said rapidly, forestalling his wife’s almost certainly accurate rebuttal and beginning to believe, because he was insisting it, that there was indeed something wrong with the hospital. He even established arbitrary grounds for the judgment: his son, who had finished rubbing the back of his neck with his sweaty palm and was simply moaning softly at his side, had communicated it to him telepathically.
____I’m going to take Eeyore back up there. We may not be able to get a diagnosis, but at least I’ll see what they’re doing wrong, the fat man rasped, his round face an angry red. Otherwise it will be the same business all over again, no matter how many times you come back, and Eeyore’s experience here will haunt him like the memory of an awful nightmare without ever making any sense to him!
____It won’t take Eeyore long to forget about it—he’s nearly forgotten already.
____That’s nonsense, Eeyore won’t forget. Do you know that he’s been crying a lot in the middle of the night recently? It’s frightening enough just that Eeyore’s frightened, can you stand to think of him having nightmares he can’t make any sense of?
With this the fat man decisively silenced his wife, who did not sleep in her son’s room at night. He then swung Eeyore on to his shoulders with the same emphaticness and marched up the stairs toward the examination room, the dirt from the floor still on his coat. Being able to parade the truth this way, that the existence essential to his pudgy son was not his mother but himself, inspired the fat man with a courage close to gallantry. At the same time, the prospect of the cruel ordeal the two of them might have to undergo left him pale and dizzy, and at each breathless step he climbed his head flashed hot and his body shook with chill.
____Eeyore! we have to keep a sharp watch, you and I, to see they don’t put anything over on us, said the fat man, lifting his voice in an appeal to the warm and heavy presence on his shoulders which sometimes felt, to his confusion, more like his guardian spirit than his ward.
____Eeyore, if we can finish this up together, we’ll go out for some pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola!
____Eeyore, the pork noodles and Pepsi-Cola were good! his fat son lazily replied, satisfied to be riding on his father’s shoulder and seemingly liberated from the memory of his experience a while ago.
This seemed to testify to the accuracy of his wife’s prediction, and if the fat man had not been spurred by his son’s voice he would certainly have lost his courage at the entrance to the examination room and returned meekly as he had come. For not only was a young nurse bolting the door which she had just closed, with the unmistakable intention of locking further patients out, the clock having struck noon, but when she turned and saw the child riding on the fat man’s shoulders a look of panic and protest came over her face, as if she were re-encountering a ghost she had finally managed to be rid of, and she scurried behind the door to hide. The fat man, counting on the elitism of a university hospital, announced unbidden and as pretentiously as possible that he had been referred by a certain Professor of Medicine, and named the brain surgeon. The nurse didn’t answer him directly; it was unlikely she even considered chasing away by herself the large, fat man who had planted himself in front of the office without even lowering his son from his shoulders. Instead, leaving the door half open, she ran back inside to a dark corner which was curtained off at the rear of the room and began some kind of an appeal.
For just a minute, the fat man hesitated. Then he stepped over the lowered bolt and strode to the back of the room, where he encountered a shrill voice protesting behind the curtain in what sounded like uncontainable anger.
____No, no, no! Absolutely not! It would take every man in the building to hold down that little blimp. What’s that? He’s here already? I don’t care if he is, the answer is No!
This was a point for the fat man’s side. With calm to spare, he slowly lowered Eeyore to the floor. Then he thrust his large head inside the curtain and discovered a doctor so diminutive that he looked in his surgical gown like a child dressed up in grownup clothes, arching backward in the dimness right under his nose a tiny head that recalled a praying mantis as he shouted at the disconcerted nurse. The fat man took a long, brazen look, then said with stunning politeness,
____I was referred here by Professor of Medicine X. Could we possibly try again, perhaps I can help?
So the examination began. How can you refuse when the patient’s enormous parent interrupts you with that deadly politeness in the middle of shrieking at your nurse? seemed to be the question smouldering in the praying mantis’s head as, peevishly ignoring the fat man, he began his examination by shining a pencil light in Eeyore’s eyes. It was to increase the efficiency of this tiny bulb that half the room was kept in shrouded darkness. The fat man crouched uncomfortably in the narrow space behind the swivel chair, his arms locked around Eeyore’s chest. It made him proud to think that the boy was sitting in the chair at all, although his body was straining backward and continued to shudder, because it was himself, who invariably stayed with his son through the night, who was holding him around the chest. Thirty minutes ago, not realizing that Eeyore’s fear of the dark could not be overcome unless it was directed through the conduit between father and son, his wife and the doctor and these nurses must have driven the boy to the desperation of a small animal at bay in this same stage of the examination. But this time, he was able to think with satisfaction, the fat man had observed himself that the darknes
s in this room was not particularly frightening, and the essence of his judgment had been transmitted to Eeyore through the pressure of his hands and was lowering one by one the danger flags flapping in the boy’s dim mind.
Even so, Eeyore was afraid of the pencil light itself and refused to look in the direction the doctor desired, straight into its tiny beam. By tossing his head from side to side and watching out of the corner of his eye, he continued to evade the agitated pursuit of the pencil light in the little doctor’s hand. Presently, the young nurse stepped in to help, probably hoping to redeem herself with the doctor. Garuk! Garuk! The fat man heard an odious noise and felt Eeyore’s body contract with anxiety, and when he looked up in reproof he saw a hair-raising rubber frog, coated with phosphorescent paint which made it gleam in the dark, dancing back and forth in the nurse’s hand and croaking horribly, garuk, garuk, garuk, as she attempted to attract the patient’s attention. The fat man, more in response to the formidable protest rising from his own bowels than to stop the nurse for his son’s sake, was about to utter something angrily when Eeyore succumbed to total panic, began to rotate around the axis of his father’s arms, and kicked to the floor not only the doctor’s pencil light and the rubber frog in the nurse’s hand but a variety of objects on a small table diagonally in front of him. Even as he gave vent to a moan of rage in secret chorus with his son the fat man saw in a flash that Eeyore had brought clattering to the floor, in addition to several large books, a bowl of rice and fried eel which seemed to be the doctor’s lunch. And from the abnormally rapid pitch of the examination after this, it was impossible to avoid the impression that the little doctor was indeed provoking his intractable patient, and out of anger which derived at least in part from hunger unappeased. This permitted them—the composite of his son and himself—to sample the pleasure of retaliation. At the same time, it was the basis for a very grave fear. Here was a doctor tired and hungry after a full morning of appointments, and now his lunch was in ruins, yet he lacked the courage openly to revile this idiot boy and his corpulent father who flaunted a letter of introduction from Professor of Medicine X—how could the fat man be sure the little man wouldn’t work some subtle vengeance on his son’s eyes? This new terror was accompanied by regret; the fat man withered.
The doctor loudly assembled his entire staff, and when the young patient had been stretched out on a bare, black leather bed, he gave triumphant instructions that all hands were to help to hold the boy down (the fat man just managed to appropriate for himself the task of securing Eeyore’s head between his arms and pinning his chest beneath the weight of his whole body), and then jumped ahead to the second, unquestionably more complicated, stage of the examination, though it was clear that the first test had not been completed.
With Eeyore secured so firmly to the bed from head to foot that his only freedom was the screaming which wrenched open his mouth and bared his yellow teeth (it was impossible to train Eeyore to brush his teeth: he was terrified of opening his mouth under coercion from no matter who it came; even if you managed to work the toothbrush between his closed lips, he would act as if it hurt or sometimes tickled him and simply clamp down), the nurse placed at the head of his bed a slender aluminum rod bent into an oblong diamond so as to fashion a kind of forceps. The fat man had only to estimate that the slender, tapered apex of this instrument would be introduced beneath the eyelid and then opened to bare the eyeball for a throbbing pain to spread like fire from his own eyes to the central nerve of his brain. Ignoring him and his panic, the doctor squeezed two kinds of drops into Eeyore’s eyes, which, though tightly closed, continued to spill tears like signals of the boy’s protest. Eeyore renewed his screaming and the fat man shuddered violently. Only then would the doctor say, by way of information:
____This anesthetizes his eyes, so he won’t feel any pain.
When the fat man heard this, the silver shimmer of pain connecting his eyes and the marrow of his brain flickered out. But Eeyore continued to moan, as if he were being strangled to death. The fat man, rubbing the tears out of his own eyes with the back of his hand, just managed to see the doctor insert the slender instrument under Eeyore’s eyelid while the boy’s moaning surged even higher and then completely bare the eyeball only inches away from him. It was truly a large sphere, egg-white in color, and what it felt like to the fat man was the earth itself, the entire world of man. At its center was a brown circle, softly blurred, from which the pupil, lighted with a poor, dull light, blankly and feebly gazed. What it expressed was dumbness and fear and pain, and it was working hard to focus on something, laboring to resolve the blurred whatever-it-was that kept cruelly bringing back the pain. With this eye the fat man identified all of himself. He was not in pain because of the drug, but there was a numbed sense of terror, of discord, in his heart, and this he had to battle as he gazed up helplessly at the crowd of faces bearing down on him. He nearly began to moan along with his son. But he could not help noticing that the brown blur of the eye conveying only dumbness and fear and pain was including his own face in its scrutiny of the crowd of Eeyore’s unknown tormentors. A jagged fissure opened between himself and his son. And the fat man forced the first finger of his right hand between Eeyore’s yellow, gnashing teeth (not until after his experience above the polar bears’ pool would he recognize that he had done this because he was afraid of that fissure, afraid that if he saw to the bottom of it he would have to confront what certainly would have revealed itself there in its true form, the self-deception impregnating his conscious formulation Eeyore = the fat man), saw wasted blood begin to spurt in the same volume as the tears his son continued to weep, heard the sound of teeth grinding bone and, clamping his eyes shut, began to scream in chorus with his son.
When the fat man had received emergency treatment and descended to the waiting room, his wife reported to him, with Eeyore sitting at her side, still pale and limp but calm again, the little doctor’s diagnosis. Eeyore’s eyes, as with mice, had different fields of vision; like mice again, he was color blind; furthermore, he could not clearly resolve objects farther away than three feet, a condition impossible to correct at present, because, according to the doctor, the child had no desire to see objects in the distance clearly.
____That must be why Eeyore nearly rubs his face against the screen when he watches commercials on TV! The fat man’s wife valued the practice of maintaining the will in good health at all times, and she spoke with emphasis in her attempt to raise the fat man from his gloom, as if she had discovered even in this hopeless diagnosis an analysis of benefit to herself.
____There are children with normal vision who rub the TV screen with their noses, too, the fat man protested apprehensively. That little doctor didn’t do much of anything, you know, except frighten Eeyore and hurt him and make him cry. In which part of the examination is he supposed to have discovered all that calamity?
____I think it’s true that Eeyore doesn’t see distant objects clearly and doesn’t want to, said the fat man’s wife in a voice that was beginning honestly to reveal her own despondency. When I took him to the zoo, he didn’t get the least bit excited about the real animals, and you know how he loves the animal pictures in this books—he just looked at the railings or the ground in front of him. Aren’t most of the cages at the zoo more than three feet away?
The fat man resolved to take his son to the zoo. With his own eyes and ears for antennae and their clasped hands for a coil, he would broadcast live on their personal band a day at the zoo for Eeyore’s sake.
And so it came about one morning in the winter of 196— that the fat man and his fat son set out for the zoo together. Eeyore’s mother, anxious about the effect of the cold on his asthma, had bundled him into clothing until he couldn’t have worn another scrap; and the fat man himself, who preferred the two of them to be dressed as nearly alike as possible, had outfitted him on their way to the station in a woolen stocking cap identical to the one he had worn out of the house. The result was that, even to his fathe
r, the boy looked like an Eskimo child just arrived from the Pole. This meant without question that in other eyes they must have appeared, not a robust, but simply corpulent, Eskimo father and son. Bundled up like a pair of sausages, they stepped onto the train with their hands clasped tightly and, sweat beading the bridges of their noses and all the skin beneath their clothing, a flush on their moon faces where they were visible between their stocking caps and the high collars of their overcoats, enjoyed its lulling vibrations.
Eeyore loved the thrill, which was why he liked bicycles, of entrusting himself to a sensation of precarious motion. Bu the thrill had to be insulated by the secure feeling that his own never very stable body was being protected by another, ideally his fat father’s. Even when they took a cab, one of Eeyore’s delights, if the fat man tried to remain inside to pay the fare after Eeyore and his mother had stepped into the street, the boy would disintegrate in a manner terrible to see. If ever he got lost from his father in a train, he would probably go mad. For the fat man, riding the train with his son who was so dependent on him, in the face of the strangers all around them, was a frank and unlimited satisfaction. And since, compared to the feelings he normally identified in the course of his life from day to day, this satisfaction was so pure and so dominant, he knew it did not have its source within himself, but was in fact the happiness rising like mist in his son’s turbid, baffled mind, reaching him through their clasped hands and being clarified in his own consciousness. Moreover, by identifying his own satisfaction in this way, he was in turn introducing in Eeyore a new happiness, this time with focus and direction—such was the fat man’s logic.