Nearest Person

by Harry Benjamin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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1. Name, age, occupation

Lothar Weisbrod, fifty-seven, bookbinder, was early. He was always early. He had come down from Eighty-sixth Street on the Lexington Avenue train with a quarter of an hour in hand, and he spent it walking twice round the block at Seventy-first Street, because a man who sits too long in a doctor's waiting room begins to look like what he is.

Dale walked with him the first time round and then stopped at the corner and said, "I'll wait inside. My feet." Dale's feet were not the trouble. Dale had stood in the projection booth of a picture house on Eighty-sixth Street for eleven years, and his feet could have walked to Albany. But he went in, and Lothar did the second lap alone, past the doormen in their green coats and a woman walking two dachshunds that wore little tartan jackets, and he thought: in Breslau we would have laughed at that, and here I am fifty-seven and I do not laugh at anything before an appointment.

The office was on the ground floor. There was a brass plate. There was a nurse with a fountain pen who wrote his name on a card without asking him to spell it, which was so unusual that he looked at the card to see what she had written. She had written it right.

Dale sat in the corner chair under a print of some Alpine lake, holding both their hats on his knee, the grey felt and the brown, one inside the other. He did not look up from his Popular Mechanics. They had agreed about that on the train.

2. Referred by

Dr. Hollerer on Lexington had written the referral on a prescription blank, and Lothar had read it on the stairs of Hollerer's building, because he was a bookbinder and he read everything that was put in his hand. Climacteric fatigue. Anginal episode August. Pt. requests no hospital. ? Glandular therapy — Benjamin.

The question mark had been there before the word Glandular. Lothar had considered it for some days. Hollerer was a decent man from Vienna who had treated half of Yorkville for twenty years, and he had once, in 1948, after an examination, put his hand on Lothar's shoulder and said in German, kindly, "You know there are treatments now, for the other thing. Testosterone. They have had results." He had not said what results. Lothar had said thank you, and paid, and not gone back for three years.

So the question mark could mean two things. It could mean this man is tired and fifty-seven and the doctor on Park Avenue gives injections to tired rich men. Or it could mean the other thing.

He had decided, on the train, that if it was the other thing he would put his hat on and go.

3. Presenting complaint

The doctor was older than Lothar had expected: seventy, perhaps more, a narrow man with white hair brushed straight back and a very clean collar. He stood up when Lothar came in. That also was unusual. He spoke English with an accent Lothar placed at once and then, out of politeness, pretended not to have placed.

"Mr. Weisbrod. Sit, please. Dr. Hollerer says you are tired."

"Dr. Hollerer says many things."

"He does." The doctor sat. He had the prescription blank on the blotter in front of him, and he turned it face down, which Lothar noticed. "Tell me about August."

So Lothar told him about August, and it was small, and he made it smaller. A Tuesday, very hot. He had been paring leather for a set of Goethe in half-calf for a customer in Riverdale, and the paring knife had become heavy, very heavy, and there was a band round his chest as if someone had put a strap on him and was tightening the buckle. Then he had been on the floor of the bindery with his cheek on the boards and the boy who swept up was shouting.

"They took you to hospital."

"For two nights."

"And you were afraid."

"I was not afraid of the heart," Lothar said. Then he stopped, because he had not meant to say that, and the doctor had not asked anything, only waited with his pen lying across the blotter, not in his hand.

The doctor had a way of waiting. Lothar had been waited at before, by the analyst Hollerer sent him to in 1949 for six sessions, a young man on Central Park West who had waited in order to see what Lothar would reveal, like a man waiting at a mousehole. This was not that. This was the waiting of someone who had sat a great many times in a room with a person who was deciding how much to say, and who did not mind how long it took.

"The heart is not the trouble," the doctor said at last. "Very well. Then I will examine the heart, because Dr. Hollerer will want a letter about it, and afterward you will tell me what is the trouble."

4. Examination

He listened to the chest for a long time, moving the stethoscope with small precise steps like a man reading a page with his finger. He took the blood pressure twice, once sitting and once lying. He looked at the ankles, pressing his thumb into each above the bone and watching the skin come back. He asked about stairs, about the bindery's steps up from the street, about whether Lothar woke at night needing to sit up.

"Three pillows," Lothar said. "For a year now."

"Who noticed that? You or someone else?"

Lothar looked at him.

"It is usually someone else," the doctor said, and wrote. "A man does not count his own pillows."

He wrote in a small upright hand on a white card, and the card was ruled and printed, and Lothar, who knew paper, could see it was a good rag stock and that the printing was letterpress and not offset, a little bitten in. It was a form. There were headings. He could not read them upside down at that distance, and he found that he wanted to very much.

"You may dress," the doctor said. "The heart is tired. It is not finished. Digitalis, a little; less salt; the Goethe in half-calf can be pared more slowly. No glands."

"No glands," Lothar repeated.

"Testosterone would ask your heart to do more work. It is the wrong medicine for a tired heart." He put the cap on his pen. "And it is the wrong medicine for anything else Dr. Hollerer may have had in mind. I say that so you do not have to wonder whether I am going to say the other thing. I am not going to say it. It does not work. It has been tried. Glass and Johnson, in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology, 1944. The men were given the hormone. They became more of what they were. That is all hormones can do with desire. They cannot change what it is aimed at."

Lothar had his shirt half buttoned. He stood with his fingers on the fourth button for some time.

"You read that," he said, "in a journal."

"I read it in a journal. I knew it before, in Berlin."

5. Previous history

In Berlin, in the autumn of 1929, Lothar Weisbrod had been thirty-one and a journeyman at a bindery off the Oranienstrasse, and he had walked through the Tiergarten one Saturday to a large house on In den Zelten with a stone porch and a great many windows, because Joachim had told him to.

Joachim Pfund set type at a printing works in Kreuzberg. He had black hair that would not lie down and a habit of reading the newspaper backwards, last page first, to see how the type had been justified. He had been to the Institute already, the year before. He had sat in a room on the first floor and answered the questionnaire, and he had come out, he said, lighter. He did not say lighter of what.

"They ask you everything," Joachim said. "What you dreamed at twelve. Whether you like to sew. The size of your hands. Whether your father drank. And at the end, nobody says Schweinerei. Nobody says anything. They write it down and it goes into a cabinet with thousands of others, and you are a fact. You are a fact of nature, like a fern."

"I do not want to be a fern."

"You want to be something. You walk round Berlin like a man carrying a parcel he has stolen."

So he went. Joachim waited for him on a bench outside, under the plane trees, with a bag of roasted chestnuts going cold in his coat pocket, and Lothar sat in a high-ceilinged room with a green tiled stove and a young woman in spectacles who gave him the questionnaire and a pencil and a glass of water and went away.

It was a hundred and thirty-odd questions. He had thought he would lie. He found, by about the twentieth question, that he was not lying, and by the fortieth that he was writing in the margins because the lines were too short. Some of the questions he had never been asked by anyone, including himself. At the bottom of the last sheet he signed his name, and the date, and then, because the space was there, he wrote one more line, which nobody had asked for: I have been with J. P. since March of last year and I am happy.

When he came out it was nearly dark and Joachim had eaten all the chestnuts.

"Well?"

"I wrote too much," Lothar said.

"Everybody writes too much. That is why the cabinets are so big."

They walked back through the park in the dusk, not touching, because the park was the park, but close enough that their coat sleeves brushed. Lothar remembered that. He remembered nothing that the young woman in spectacles said, and nothing of the stove except its colour, but he remembered the sleeve.

In May of 1933 the students came with the lorries, and the brass band, and the files went out of the house and onto the lorries and four days later into the bonfire on the Opernplatz. Lothar read it in the Berliner Tageblatt, standing at the bench in the bindery, and he went into the lavatory and was sick. Not because of the books. Because somewhere in that fire there was a sheet of paper in his own handwriting, with his name and his date and a line at the bottom that said J. P., and he did not know, nobody knew, whether the students had read the papers before they burned them, or taken any of them away.

Nobody came for him. He never learned why. He left in 1936, on a visa that his mother's cousin in Hoboken had spent two years arranging. Joachim did not come. Joachim's mother was ill, and Joachim was the only son, and Joachim said, next year, and then after she is better, and then the letters came less often, and the last one was dated August 1939 and said the weather was fine and the chestnuts were early.

After the war Lothar wrote to the Red Cross tracing service in Arolsen. He wrote three times. The second reply said there was no information. The third said the same, in different words.

6. Social circumstances

He did not tell the doctor all of that. He told him the house in the Tiergarten, and the questionnaire, and the fire. He told him about the line at the bottom of the last sheet. He did not tell him about the sleeve.

The doctor listened with his pen lying across the blotter again. When Lothar said In den Zelten the doctor's eyes went for a moment to the window, and stayed there, and came back.

"I knew the house," the doctor said. "I knew Magnus Hirschfeld from 1907. I was in that house many times. I sat in that waiting room. Not as a patient." He moved the pen a quarter-inch on the blotter, squaring it. "I have thought often about those cabinets. There were things in them that nobody had ever written down before, anywhere in the world, and nobody has written them down since. I have tried. Here. One practice." He did not say it with any pride. He said it the way a man reports the height of a flood. "It is not the same. They had a whole house."

"I do not need a whole house," Lothar said. "I need one thing."

"Tell me."

And so he told him the trouble, which was not the heart.

In August, when the ambulance took him to the hospital, Dale had followed in a taxi and had been stopped at the door of the ward by a nursing sister who asked what his relation was to the patient. Dale said friend. Dale said I live there, I'm the one who called you. The sister said visiting on the ward was for family, and a friend could telephone in the morning. Dale sat on a bench in the front lobby all night, under a portrait of some benefactor in a frock coat, and at six in the morning a porter asked him to leave because the floor was to be washed. He went and stood on the pavement across the street until eight, when he telephoned from a drugstore, and was told that Mr. Weisbrod was comfortable.

"For two days," Lothar said, "they told him I was comfortable. He is the one who has my keys. He is the one who knows I take my coffee without sugar and that I cannot lie on the left side. He brought pyjamas. They took the pyjamas at the desk and gave them to me with a label. From a friend." He put his hands flat on his knees. "The next time it will be longer than two days. Dr. Hollerer does not say so. I know it. And the next time I do not want Dale on a bench."

The doctor did not say anything consoling. He did not say the law is unjust or times will change, and he did not say you must be careful, which was what Hollerer said, and the analyst, and Lothar's cousin in Hoboken, and which meant you must be invisible.

What he said was: "What is his full name?"

"Dale Everett Pruitt."

"Age?"

"Forty-four."

"Occupation?"

"Motion picture projectionist. Local 306."

The doctor wrote each answer on the card. Then he turned the card round on the blotter so that Lothar could read it.

It was a case card, ruled, with printed headings: Name. Age. Occupation. Referred by. Presenting complaint. Examination. Previous history. Social circumstances. Disposition. And near the bottom, above the line for the date, a heading Lothar had never seen on a doctor's form in America, though he had once, in a room with a green stove, written something very like it in a space nobody had asked him to fill:

Nearest person.

The doctor had written, in his small upright hand: Dale Everett Pruitt, 44, of the same address.

"I print these myself," the doctor said. "That is, a printer on Second Avenue prints them. I had the heading put in in 1949. Most of my patients are not in a position to have a wife, or a husband, or a family that will come. Some of them have a mother. Many of them have a friend." He turned the card back. "The hospitals do not know what to do with a friend. So I tell them."

7. Disposition

He took a sheet of letterhead from the drawer, the heavy cream laid paper, and uncapped the pen, and wrote for some minutes without stopping. Then he blotted it and read it over, his lips moving very slightly, the way Joachim's had moved reading type backwards. Then he wrote a second copy, the same words, and blotted that, and signed both.

He handed both across the desk.

To the Admitting Physician and the Nursing Staff:

Mr. Lothar Weisbrod is under my care for a cardiac condition. In the event of his admission to any hospital, Mr. Dale E. Pruitt, of the same address, is to be admitted to him at any hour. Mr. Pruitt is acquainted with the patient's medication and his history, and his presence is in my medical judgment necessary to the patient's recovery. I am to be telephoned at once if there is any difficulty about this.

Under the signature there were two telephone numbers, the office and a residence.

Lothar read the top one twice. He was a bookbinder; he read everything twice. He looked at the paper against the light from the window, from habit, and saw the watermark.

"Will they listen?" he said.

"Some will. Some will not. A letter from a physician is not a law. But a ward sister who has a letter in her hand from a doctor who says in my medical judgment has to decide to disobey a doctor, and most of them do not like to do that. In my experience." He capped the pen. "The second copy is for Mr. Pruitt. He should carry it. Not in a drawer at home. On his person."

"He has a wallet," Lothar said, "that he has had since 1946. It will go in there with his union card. He will not take it out until he is dead."

"Good," the doctor said. "That is the correct place."

Lothar folded the two sheets along the lines the doctor had not drawn but that a sheet of letter paper suggests to anyone who knows paper. He put them in his inside breast pocket. He stood up. He found that the strap was not round his chest; it had not been there all morning; and he did not know what to do with his hands, so he held out one of them and the doctor shook it.

"I wrote too much," Lothar said. "In 1929. At the bottom of the last page."

"It was the only page in that house that anyone wanted to read," the doctor said. "The bottom of the last page. I used to say that to Magnus."

8. Notes

When the patient had gone the doctor did not call in the next one at once. He went to the window.

The office was on the ground floor and the window gave onto Park Avenue between the doorman's awning and the corner. It was the middle of a bright October morning, and the planting in the central islands was the dark red of late chrysanthemums, and the wind came down the avenue from the north with a little grit in it. The two men stood at the kerb waiting for the light. The younger one, the heavier, in a brown suit that pulled at the shoulders, was holding out the grey hat, and the older one took it and did not put it on.

The doctor watched the older man take the second letter from his breast pocket and hand it over. The younger man unfolded it there, on the kerb, with the wind at it, and held it in both hands and read it. It took him a long time. The light changed and changed back. A taxi sounded its horn at nobody in particular.

Then the younger man folded the letter into its thirds again, very carefully, as if it were a film he was threading, and took out his wallet, and put the letter in behind something, and put the wallet back in his inside pocket, and buttoned his jacket over it, all three buttons, though it was not cold enough for that.

The light changed. They crossed. Halfway over, at the island with the chrysanthemums, the older man put his hand under the younger man's elbow, as an older man might, crossing a wide street, for steadiness; and the younger man allowed it, as a younger man might; and anybody watching from Park Avenue would have seen exactly that and nothing more.

The doctor went back to the desk. He took the card, Weisbrod, Lothar, and under Disposition he wrote Digitalis 0.1 g. daily. Salt restricted. Letter given, two copies. He dated it, the second of October, 1955. He opened the long oak drawer of the card cabinet beside the desk, which held the W's, and found the place, and put the card in, between a Weill and a Wendt. There were a great many cards in that drawer. There were nine drawers.

He closed it, and pressed the bell for the nurse.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Harrīcō Beniāmīn per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Harry Benjamin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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