Young Widower by John W. Evans

Author:John W. Evans [John W. Evans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography and Autobiography
ISBN: 9780803249523
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska Paperback
Published: 2013-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

How far into the aisles might I wander before I inevitably turned back toward the pharmacist? Her office in the store was emblazoned with back-lit, neon letters three and four feet tall, outlined in bright plastic tubing, turned on in the morning and turned off first thing at night, before the store closed down, a regulated and regimented space from which all clarity might arrive, into which there would be no certain crossing, no means or way to step across the white badge, white jacket, white skin, and close-cropped hair, the white aisle behind which every drug and symptom, on white stacked shelves, waited to be summoned for the body’s need, want, and desire.

I was accountable now. I was being watched. My driver’s license was scanned; the number was printed on the bottom of the receipt, next to the legal percentage of each drug I might own in the remainder of the year. I signed one paper to claim my drugs. I signed another to agree I understood how to use them. At a booth, at the far end of the wall, a different pharmacist waited to make some explanations. A man stood behind me, with his own plastic cart.

Near the last aisle I sat down at a blood pressure machine. I unbuttoned and rolled up my shirt. I inserted my arm into the black cuff, all the way up. The machine clicked and whirred. The cuff tightened. The digital screen ran a circle of hashes. I waited for two numbers and checked them against the graph. For my height and weight, my blood pressure was high. Both numbers were outside of the normal range.

I walked back to the pharmacist and waited to ask my question. Did I need to worry about these numbers? The pharmacist explained that she was not a doctor. She could interpret and explain, but not evaluate. I should be sure to talk to my doctor if I had any concerns. The machine in the aisle, she explained, was only there to make approximate measurements. My doctor was the person to ask about my health, but could her colleague answer my questions about the drugs I was buying?

Was I doing something wrong? Was it right to ask the neighbor about the numbers? Should I report them to someone and hope for intervention, clarification, purpose, sensibility? A doctor would probably process the numbers into some system of accountability. Did I require supervision? Would I die soon? Did the numbers predict my death? Did they matter, at all? Or, had they already disappeared into the ether, never made certain; had they become nothing other than some red digital light shone briefly against my skin, reflected out under the fluorescent lights, bouncing back and forth against nothing, disappearing nowhere as the store’s motion sensors recognized the movement of my leg, then opened the door to convey, even ferry me out of the strip mall and back to the world?

4.

From patterns of domesticity a persistent vein of illogic was made to shine.

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