Act of God

down looked like a long list and handed me a clipboard with an even longer printed form to fill out. After she told me to take a seat and I would be called, I asked her when that might be, and she gave what I took to be an honest shrug.
    Thanking her, I risked losing whatever priority I had and took the clipboard and the elevator back down to the gift shop. Their choices of magazines were slim and their paperbacks slimmer, but I found a Lawrence Block novel Nancy hadn’t bought for her own library and went back upstairs. As I hit the waiting area, a woman in a nurse’s white pantsuit with a stethoscope around her neck was calling my name.
    “Right here.”
    The woman gave me a measured look. “Where were you?”
    I gestured vaguely with the clipboard. “Bathroom.”
    She didn’t take it well. “This way, please.”
    I was led around a corner to a little alcove with a plastic formed chair like those in the waiting room, a water cooler, a scales, and some kind of vertical post that rolled on wheels. The nurse pointed at the scales.
    I said, “With shoes or without?”
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    I got on the scales and she niggled the counterweight. “One-ninety-eight. Hold still for your height.”
    She slid the horizontal piece down until it slanted at some angle off my head. “Seventy-six inches.”
    “Between six-two and six-three, actually.”
    She didn’t respond. “Sit down for your blood pressure, please.”
    I asked her if she wanted me to roll up my sleeve. “Doesn’t matter.”
    She wheeled the vertical post over, wrapped the black leather bandage around my sleeve at the bicep, and starting pumping. Then she placed the stethoscope pad on my arm and released the pressure slowly. “One-twenty over eighty.”
    “Is that good?”
    “It isn’t bad. Please return to the waiting area and have a seat until the doctor can see you.”
    “Do you know how long that’ll be?”
    She said, “No.”
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    “What?”
    “Never mind.”

    “Were you waiting long, Mr. Cuddy?”
    “About seven chapters.”
    “Sorry?”
    I held up the book.
    “Oh, I see.”
    We were in a windowless, characterless examining room with one of those padded tables, a desk, and two chairs. The doctor sat at the desk, me next to it. Reading through the form I’d completed on the clipboard, she paused with the eraser of a pencil on certain lines. About five-foot-three and Asian-American, a Chinese surname appearing before the “M.D.” on the tag above the breast of her labcoat. Attractive with short black hair in a shingled haircut, she also was a good decade younger than her patient.
    “Mr. Cuddy, you say here you served in Vietnam ?”
    “Yes.”
    “Any wounds?”
    “A couple, but I doubt they’re involved with my knee or shoulder now.”
    “Just the same, could you describe them?”
    “Mortar shell took a little chunk out of one thigh, knife—”
    “Which thigh?”
    “Right.”
    “And it’s your left knee that’s bothering you now?”
    “Correct.”
    “You started to say knife?”
    “Slash wound, across the ribs.”
    She nodded. “Any others?”
    “Not from the war.”
    “Tell me.”
    I did. She had to turn the form over to use the other side. “How about other injuries, sports or accidents first.”
    We went through those, a lot shorter list.
    “Mr. Cuddy, I’m most concerned about the bullet wound to your left shoulder.”
    “It healed fine.”
    “Well, we’re going to have to take the shirt and pants off sometime. Let me step outside while you strip down to your briefs and put on this johnny coat, open side to the back. Feel free to leave your socks on if you like. Some people find the floor a little cold.”
    I did as she said, at first leaving my socks on, then realizing I looked like a bad imitation of Jack Lemmon in an early sixties comedy. The doctor knocked before she came back into the examining room.
    “Let’s start with the knee.”
    As I repeated how I’d hurt it on Nancy ’s stairs, the doctor manipulated my leg until the joint had bent at all the usual angles and a few that made me squirm. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, but she knew how to use leverage to achieve the effect she wanted.
    A frown. “Patella feel like it’s floating a little?”
    “If that’s the kneecap, yes.”
    “And the buckling occurs mainly going downstairs?”
    “Going down, period. Even just getting out of bed.”
    “But not on level surfaces or