Three Stories

    The average man is not what he used to be.  At first, he thinks this is normal.  The average is a function of time and one can reasonably expect to remain average only for so long.  In history’s current predicament the average man is slightly past his prime.  He is fully aware of is.  There is age and decay to consider.  Yet when the average man wakes on a spring morning in a wet season his thought is this: I am not what I used to be.
    The average man looks in the mirror more often than he cares to admit.  Doing so this morning, he spots nothing that can account for the vaguely run down feeling, not quite disease, not quite exhaustion, something more spectral and unaccountable.  The average man consults his wife at such moments of doubt, as, though he is loath to admit it, her instincts in these matters tend to be better than his own.
    “You’re paranoid,” she says.  “That’s so like you.  That’s your forte, your favorite thing.  The only time I’m surprised is when you feel fine, which you should, obviously, more often.  I imagine it’s common for men of your age and disposition to think they are less than what they once were.  Which does not mean there’s nothing wrong with you.  I’ve held that opinion for quite some time, actually.  Rather, I expect that whatever phenomenon you are experiencing afflicts millions of men like yourself and perhaps even more.”
    The average man does not agree with his wife’s diagnosis, but he remains quiet.  He has been married long enough to know that she is not finished speaking.  The meat is still to come.  In recent years, the average man’s wife has taken to wearing her bathrobe all day long.  As well, she tends to favor expensive medications whose effect is supposed to be a pleasant mood but which actually leave her irritable.  This does not strike the average man as particularly funny, only sad and untimely.  His wife slowly lights a cigarette, nearly igniting one of the sleeves of her robe.  She shrugs.  “Go to the doctor.”
    “We’re pleased,” the GP says, two weeks later, two weeks in which the average man’s malaise has not so much worsened as settled in, a growth slaloming the course of his spine.  The GP leafs through page after page of test results.  “You did quite well.  You held up like a trooper.  It didn’t look like you were going to be able to sit still through some of those procedures, but you managed nicely.  The results show it.  Nothing exceptional, but that’s what we hope for.  We don’t see that too often, actually.  This is not that kind of facility.  Everything is in the range we have come to expect.”
    “For a man my age?”
    “For a man any age.  We’re really quite happy.  We’re still somewhat confused, of course.  After all, you’re here.  But we’re quite impressed.”
    “We,” the average man says.
    “Well,” the GP smiles, “you and me.”
    The average man stares at the doctor’s stethoscope, its heavy hypnotic nugget dangling over his own heart.
    “May I ask a personal question?” the GP says.  “Granted, I am a doctor, so all of my questions are personal, but may I elevate the level of personalcy?  How hard is it for you to achieve erection?”
    “Not that hard.”
    “And how hard is it?”
    “Well, you know, when...oh, I get it.”
    “Our little joke to break the ice.  People don’t often stop to consider the humor available through the medical industry.  People focus on the negative.  A-, Dys-, Hypo-, Hyper-.  It’s a depressing vocabulary.  Plus, you expect your doctor to talk over your head.  You expect him to pulverize you with obscure theory and phlegmmy Latin.  It wouldn’t be therapy without a complete language disconnect.”  
    The average man glimpses graphs and minuscule analysis in his test results.  The GP makes a note somewhere deep in the output.
    “Well,” he says, offering his hand, “we’ll be hoping you feel better soon.”
    As a rule, the average man does not trust the GP because he lacks specialty.  It’s now altogether common for the average man to be aware of the lag in the dissemination of medical know-how, and the average man is certain that whatever ails him will require exhaustive study in a novel field.  Effective treatment may take decades to trickle down to him.  The average man resolves to confront his malaise by ignoring it--all evidence aside, the average man is still a believer in the healing power of self will – and he reasons that in all likelihood it is the divergence from strict routine that accounts for his dysfunction.  As it happens, it is just his morning habit of coffee and newspaper that brings to him the advertisement that he is at once certain lead to remedy.  He burns his tongue taking in the words.


        “Ouch,” the average man says.
    “Are you all right?” his wife says, refilling his cup.
    Generally, the average man considers the double entendre of such questions only fleetingly, perhaps unconsciously.  “Do you have to make it so hot?”
    “Classic,” she says, shaking her head.  “Run-of-the-mill.  It’s coffee,” she explains.
    But there is no phone number attached to the advertisement.  The average man pinches the oniony pages of the phone book, but oddly finds only an address, deep in the city.  He calls in sick from work, which may very well be the case.  The average man kisses his wife as he leaves, confident for some reason that whatever he has isn’t catching.


    The building had been erected by a powerhouse corporate entity long since extinct, the structure since invaded by a variety of unlikely enterprises.  A woman trained exotic reptiles on the first floor, secret psychological research was conducted on the second.  Civilian attaches for military intelligence held quiet think tanks on the third, a flying saucer cult lived year round on the fourth.  And so on up through the heart of the building, only the window washers witness to it all, ascending bimonthly like lazy souls past a succession of bizarre industry.
    The average man double checks the fly of his slacks in the elevator, as he is wont.  He exits on the eighth floor, finds the door of United Statisticians, pushes it aside quietly.  A small waiting room can accommodate half a dozen.  The average man tends to approach receptionists cautiously in a polite attempt to defuse the nearly imperceptible sexual charge in these encounters, and as he does so now the young woman, hair coifed and mouth neatly painted and planted in her chair as though the slightest curvature of spine would give her pain, does not notice him and continues a pencil drawing that appears to have been occupying her for some time.  The receptionist is left-handed.  The average man is charmed by this.  Her drawing is that of an eye as large as a palm.  The eye is blurry but correct, and nearly complete as she adds a lash or two with quick turns of her crimped hand.
    “It’s very nice,” he says, the only reply the average man uses in responding to others’ attempts at art.
    “Oh.”  The receptionist jumps and slides the eye into a desk drawer.  “You frightened me.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She is quite lovely, really.  It is not something he is keen to admit, but the soft charge of social routine conducted with strangers is the most rewarding form of intimacy the average man knows.  Although it’s been several decades since the average man wore a hat with regularity, he finds that as he stands before the receptionist his fingers fondle the brim of an imaginary bowler suspended in front of his groin.
    The receptionist gathers herself, dabs at her coif and threads her slender fingers.  “What are you looking for?  Cosmetic irradiation is one floor up, sex catering is one floor down.  Stairs are around the corner, facilities are at the end of the hall.”     “I think I’m in the right place.”
    She looks at him more closely now, eyes pinching so that for a moment they resemble the eye in her drawing.  Contemplative, searching.  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says.  “I didn’t realize.  So many people get lost.  It’s an odd building, you see, and--”  Now she seems to recognize something in him, something that takes her quite by surprise.  She adopts a more delicate tone.  “You’re not feeling--yourself, are you?”
    His simple presence there has tilted his hand.  The average man is embarrassed as when someone he does not know calls him by name.
    “Not really.”
    The receptionist reaches for a phone and presses a heavy button that lights at her touch.  “Alert the Maestro,” she says to the receiver.  She cradles the handset again and turns back to him.  “I’m so sorry.  I’ve botched things.  I was given several weeks of training, and I really did have it down quite expertly.  A number of other girls stumbled over the script, or just didn’t have the exact look they were looking for, they said, and they remarked on my progress and speaking skills, but now it’s not at all clear that I was the right candidate for--”  She sees a pleading look in the average man’s eyes, sees that he is admiring her, and the smile she produces when she cuts herself off is not quite flirtation but, the average man concludes, an acknowledgment of romantic potential.  It quickly passes, and the receptionist puts on the air of an actor before delivering a speech she was presumably supposed to deliver initially.
    “We need a life not correlated with death,” she says.  “Health not liable to illness.  Good that will not perish, good that flies beyond the good of nature.”  She smiles, pleased with her performance.  “You may have a seat.  Someone will be with you shortly.”
    

    The Statistician appears in a doctor’s white coat, holding a filing folder over his chest as though to block a bullet.  He is a smallish man with glasses.  He extends a palm to invite the average man back into the office.  “Welcome,” he says.  “Please.”  The Statistician is quite excited, as though the average man is of status and fame, which of course he is not.  The Statistician introduces himself, but the average man has never been particularly good at remembering names.
    The Statistician leads them to an examination room.  White cupboards stand against white walls, chrome devices with crooked elbows lurk about a curling dentist’s chair.
    “You saw the ad, didn’t you?” the Statistician says.
    “Yes, just this morning.”
    The Statistician claps his hands together before him, where they stick as though to trap a fly.  He shakes his head in happy disbelief.  As with the receptionist, the average man senses that the Statistician’s outburst is a digression from protocol.  Somewhat overwhelmed, the average man fits himself into the reclined socket of the dentist’s chair.
    “Please forgive me,” the Statistician says.  “But, you see, the advertisement was my idea, perhaps my largest contribution to the project.  There was a great deal of doubt about this idea, even within our small circle of confederates.  I was the subject of hushed insults, of which some believed I was unaware.  But of course I knew there would be talk.  Still, I proceeded, and the advertisement brought you here, so it’s validation for me, don’t you see?”
    “Congratulations,” the average man says.
    The Statistician initiates another vigorous handshake.  “Thank you.  My, I can’t tell you.  Our circle has been subject to a number of attacks from outside, in some cases from quite well-placed sources.  These attacks had begun to have a certain effect, and, to be honest, it had gotten to the point where some members of our little conglomerate had begun to question whether you did, in fact, exist.”
    Charmingly, the average man’s response to confusion is to repeat established information.  “I saw the ad when I was drinking my coffee,” he says.
    The Statistician smiles.  “Perfect.  Top of the curve.  Now, I’m sure you’re quite curious as to what we’re up to here, yes?  My.  How to begin.  You think you’ve prepared for a thing, and when the thing arrives you realize you’re entirely ready but for the easiest of first steps.”  He taps his lower lip.  “You’re not feeling yourself, correct?  You feel unwell, off, and that’s what’s brought you here.  Let’s start with this.  The Greeks were the first to offer a model of disease that went beyond the ontological.  Health is harmony.  Disturbance of equilibrium is disease.  Agreed?”
    “That’s what I have, I think,” the average man says.  He is pleased the conversation has turned to his ailment.  The plastic cushion of the chair begins to mold to his form.
    “Gosh, if only those old theories applied, eh?” the Statistician says.  “Wouldn’t that be nice.  Now it seems inevitable to us that disease would be understood first as either exaggeration or deficiency.  How quaint!  But I ask you.  What about the anomaly that does not produce deformity?  It’s just that easy to confuse variety with dysfunction.”
    “I feel sick,” the average man says.
    “Of course you do.  What other word would you have for it?”
    “I want to get better.”
    “Quite right.  The normal state of the body is the state one wishes to reestablish.  This is text book.  But press just a little and it stops seeming so simple.  Answer honestly now.  Do you want to get better because therapeutics has determined it is a good goal, or because you think it’s normal that therapeutics aim at getting better?  Or think of it this way.  What are your symptoms?”
    The average man stares.
    “You see?  The standard diagnostic procedure.  In medicine it is the sick man who decides when he is sick, and it is the sick man who decides when he is well again.  But where is the evidence of your disease?”
    “I don’t feel normal.”
    The Statistician rears back and throws a hand into the air.  “Ha!  That’s a whole other can of worms.  Normal in what way exactly?  Are human traits normal because they occur frequently?  Or do they occur frequently because they are normal?  If everyone gets sick then illness is quite normal, isn’t it?”
    “You’re not a doctor, are you?” the average man says.
    “Sure I am.  This is a hospital.  Nurse!  Bring the mind-cures!  Bring the leeches!  Bring the chemotherapy!”  The Statistician spasms with laughter.  He nibbles a knuckle to stifle it, but it is persistent as a cough.  “I’m sorry.  Consider a blocked artery.  Is it still an artery?  Or is it an obstruction?  Is a necrotic cell still a cell?  A man who dies is no longer a man, is he?  He’s a corpse.  In medicine, opinions are formed on palpation, interpretation.  We are outside of science.  Whether a tumor is malign or benign is a question for philosophy.”
    “So this is a lab?”
    The Statistician squints at the ceiling.  “I might have predicted you’d say that.  What else could this be?  Call it a clinic.”
    “A clinic.”
    “Now do you see the problem of the quantitative model of disease?  Any range of intensity is labeled sick.  The average is synonymous with mediocrity.  Well, I think it must be apparent to you by now that once we rejected this as fallacy you were bound to sense a change.”  The Statistician scans the average man’s eyes.  “I see you don’t understand.  Think of this.  An animal is normal within its habitat.  But what happens when its habitat changes?  In the new habitat, it’s no longer normal.  Quote.  Pathological phenomena are expressions of change in the relationship between organism and environment.  Unquote.  Now what of man?  Man creates his environment.  And this environment includes that which he understands of himself.  Thus, the average man will continue to feel well only as long as no one successfully challenges that which defines average.  Once the old theories have been struck down, he will begin to feel less than average.  He will feel below average.”
    “That’s it,” the average man says.  “That’s what I feel.”
    “Now do you see why we are excited?  Your illness is evidence of progress.  You have been ontologically jolted, my friend!  The Maestro is better at explaining, but one way of thinking of it is this: you were sicker before.”
    “I felt fine.”
    “That doesn’t matter, of course.  And now that you feel off?  Someone else has woken this morning feeling shiny and chipper.  Of course, you want us to cure you.  Even the average man has an understanding of health.  You want to be well again.  You want to be yourself.  You want us to do it.  But I ask you, good sir--my God--how?”
    Honestly, the Statistician’s words, to the extent he can follow them, are not wholly unrewarding for the average man.  The average man secretly suspects his entire life that he is the subject of some distant experiment, that civilization itself is a ruse constructed so that truth can be deduced from his decisions.  The average man is a secret solipsist, and now through his terror he feels excitement.
    “Who is the Maestro?”
    “The Maestro is preparing.  We--well, I, I suppose I should say--are quite proud of him.  He’s a revolutionary.  We--you and I--we’re both honored by our association with him.”  The Statistician steps toward the door.  “I should help him with his preparations.  He’ll be coming to speak with you before the performance.”
    “The performance?”
    The Statistician smiles.  “It will be just a minute,” he says.


    The average man sits the room drolly for a time.  He pushes aside the curtain over a window only to find that it is not a window but a compartment with a fluorescent bulb masquerading as one.  The Statistician has left behind the file folder that is presumably the record United Statisticians has compiled on the average man, but when he opens it all that flutters to the floor is a lunch receipt from a nearby deli.  The average man jerks upright when the door opens again and the Maestro enters the room.
    There is no mistaking him.  The Maestro tugs the cuff-linked sleeves of a tuxedo shirt to their proper length as he crosses the room’s threshold.  He has long white clean hair, and a perfect white beard.  The tails of his jacket follow him into the room, lay against his calves.  Once he has properly arrived, he shudders once head to toe to allow the tuxedo to settle about his entire frame.  The Statistician follows him into the room.
    “Have they begun to assemble?” the Maestro says, speaking through his entrance.  “Someone has contacted Forchet, yes?  He’s a twit, but I want him here.  Did you read what he delivered in Vienna last week?  Bah!  What about Lautier?  Not the Canadian one, the French one.  I’ll show him numerical models.  What about the Old Man?  Have we sent for the Old Man?  It’s nothing without the Old Man.”
    The Statistician smoothes the shoulder of the Maestro’s jacket in an intimate touch.  They are both quite absorbed in the Maestro’s speech.
    “The limousine is on its way, Maestro,” the Statistician says.
    “Good.”  The Maestro exhales and finally cannot think of anything more to do.  It is boredom that brings him to look about the room and lay his eyes on the average man.  He freezes.  He squints as though to induce a trance.  The Maestro flows forward a step, offering his hand, and the Statistician scurries along behind.
    “Ah.  It’s odd to see him in the flesh, isn’t it?” the Maestro says, and even though their hands are clasped his words are not meant for the average man.  “My, the feeling.  To confront your epiphenomenon.  Is it more like the pride of a father whose son has grown, or the artist whose vision has realized?”  The Maestro smiles and laughs out loud.  He grabs the average man by both shoulders and squares him.  “Before modern medicine, the average man was understood as an expression of God’s will.  You might as well cast bones.  But now, the average man is an expression of our will.”
    The average man is naturally curious and uncomfortable when people discuss him as though he is not present.  But at the same time he is quite susceptible to the awe of men with stature, to social hierarchy in general, and thus he can neither adequately express his discomfort nor convey the authority or self will of which he is occasionally capable.
    “What’s going on here?” he says.
    “It’s funny,” the Maestro says with a grin.  “If he was an automaton I would say he was remarkably lifelike.”  Behind him, the Statistician can’t help a fiendish smirk.   The Maestro’s expression now changes, like a parent putting on a pleasant face to address a child.  “Medicine is linked to the whole of culture, wouldn’t you agree?” he says to the average man.
    In situations in which it is not clear that one need reply, the average man’s policy is to remain silent.  The Maestro only waits, and the Statistician leans between them.
    “Maestro, if I may, we spoke at some length earlier--quite the little exchange, really--and although it’s certainly a premature assessment, I’m not quite sure that he is capable of--”
    “Hogwash!”  The Maestro releases the average man and points emphatically at the ceiling.  “The man who feels sick is obviously mistaken in thinking that he knows why he feels this way.  But it does not follow that his theory, too, is in error.  The average man is perfectly capable of understanding.”
    The Maestro paces the room a bit, rubbing a meaty palm over his hairy mouth.  He turns back to the average man.
    “Therapeutics was at first a religious, magical activity.  You know--witch doctors, shamans?  Disease is evil, health is good.   Health and disease fought over man the way Good and Evil battled for the world.  Truth be told, we’re all witch doctors in retrospect: Paracelsus believed he had found the elixir of life, Van Helmont identified health with salvation, and Stahl himself believed in original sin.  But here’s the thing.  When we denied the ontological conception of disease, we denied the possibility of evil.”
    The average man climbs back into the dentist’s chair.
    The Maestro follows, frustrated.  “Surely you must acknowledge that the average man knows he is average only in a world where all are average.  Otherwise, he feels special, singled out.  Perhaps he even feels unreasonably oppressed or used.  He begins to suspect that he is not average at all.  He becomes a tragic fool.  Ignorant and brow beaten.  But can one innocently know that one is innocent?  No one who is good is aware of being good, and no one who is healthy knows that they are healthy.”
    The Maestro pauses to see if his words have found purchase.  The average man can only nod weakly.
    “Bah!  You’re like the rest of them!  Don’t you see?  The abnormal is not what is not normal.  It constitutes another normal.  To be sick is to live another life.  Health is organic innocence.  Innocence must be lost for the sake of knowledge.  The sick man advances knowledge of the average man.  To be ill is to be wise.”
    “You did this to me,” the average man says.
    “Notice his verb choice,” the Maestro says.  “Quote.  The sick man is not abnormal because of the absence of a norm but because of an incapacity to be average.  Unquote.”  The Statistician nods and jots a note.
    “Do you know Everyman?” the Maestro asks the average man.  “Of course you don’t.  How extremely unlikely that you would.  Morality play.  John Skot.  Early sixteenth century.  Perhaps oversimplified for its uneducated audience, but quite popular in its day.  Everyman is the embodiment of mankind.  At the beginning of the play, Everyman has become so enamored of his wealth that he has forgotten the father in heaven and his own mortality.  God sends Death to guide Everyman on a tour of his vanity.  Everyman tries to bribe Death, then agrees to a journey to confront various virtues: Knowledge, Beauty, Goodness, and whatnot.  A clunky tool to be sure.  But the message is more interesting than the method.  Everyman comes to think of his odyssey as a disease that needs remedying.  He is advised to go to the priesthood to receive a sacramental ‘ointment.’  There he is told:

            For the blessed sacraments pure and benign
            He beareth the keys and thereof have the cure
            For man’s redemption it is ever sure
            Which God for our soul’s medicine
            Gave us out of his heart with great pain.

You see?  God becomes the metaphysician to cure Everyman’s sin!  And at the end, it’s not an angel who appears to advise the audience as to the play’s moral reckoning.  It’s a doctor.  A doctor!”
    The Maestro lays a hand on the average man’s shoulder, kneading it like a lover.  “It is every scientist’s hope that his hypothesis can change the world.  My friend, you are my evidence, my truth, my epiphenomenon.  I have waited for you.  Our own audience is gathering.  Are you ready?”


    The average man is left alone to prepare.  In the chair he experiences an odd sensation of vertigo, and he lifts himself upright in its cup.  He feels sicker than when he arrived, yet at the same time he senses that he may be on the cusp of that which will assuage him.  He is anxious.  It is the receptionist who retrieves him, knocking first and peeking at him from behind the jamb.
    “Hello,” the average man says.
    She enters the room carefully, schoolgirlish and shy.  She puts her feet together and shrugs.  “I suppose this is awfully obvious, isn’t it?  Sending me in here to fetch you along.  Rather transparent.  If I had my say I’d say even the average man can see through such a ridiculous ploy.  I would!  I’d say, the average man isn’t nearly the dupe you think he is.  I’ve seen one or two in my time, so I should know.  Besides, being average only means that the average man makes average mistakes, and if the world’s got any real problems it’s that exceptional men make exceptional mistakes.  And it’s just those jokers who turn into monsters behind closed doors!  Hm!”
    The receptionist nods once, and the average man can barely contain the swoon of his heart.  The receptionist holds his stare.
    “I hate to do this.  But there are some things I’m supposed to tell you before we go.”
    “What things?”
    She looks to the ceiling for her recital.  “Quote.  Even a sick man can carry on the moral warfare.  He can will his attention away from his own future.  He can train himself in indifference to his own suffering.  He can cultivate cheerful manners and be