Stiff, crinkling, and obviously sterile, as though the germs were just waiting to take a whack at you. I always had this physical in the middle of March to see what the winter had done to me. The diplomas on the wall were from Berkeley and the University of California Medical School, and so I was able to take a little comfort that where education was concerned, I didn’t go to the medical version of a junkyard, surrounded by barbed wire in Braintree, as though in Uzbekistan, but to the medical ghetto in Boston, out by Brigham and Women’s Hospital. My doctor, Michael Stevenson, came in, the tape of the electrocardiogram in his hand: a starched lab coat, cheeks recently shaved, hair precisely trimmed, skin at dermatological perfection. He glowed. Now, though, with that strip of the electrocardiogram in his hand, he looked into the distance. “How did your father die?” he said. “Stroke.” “That makes you the last of the line,” he said. “I have a daughter,” I said. “Is she going to have kids?”
