No expense had been spared on the interior design front to make the building seem as little as possible like what it really was. They had even eschewed a traditional matter-based directory in favor of a touch screen. Dodge employed this to remind himself which floor his appointment was on. The thing read like an electronic compendium of maladies. To browse it was to be grateful for all of the things that had not yet gone wrong with his body and his mind. Almost as miraculous as life itself was the number of ways it could end, or at least turn into a living hell. And for each of those there was a different, exquisitely evolved medical sub-subspecialty. He almost felt that he was failing this stupendous industry by not being sick in any interesting way. For today’s procedure was utterly routine, a thing done a thousand times a day. He found his destination on the screen and walked to the correct elevator bank, casting a glance toward the entrance to the parking garage just in case C-plus might happen to show up. But this did not happen and so he had the elevator to himself at first. His clinic was on a high floor. En route, people with various impairments got on and off. Either they were lost or else they were being transferred between cooperating sub-subspecialists. For the most part they were oddly cheerful. Beyond a certain point it was all just kicking through wreckage.

A prominent sign on the check-in counter at the clinic read, PATIENTS: DO NOT EAT OR DRINK ANYTHING BEFORE YOUR SURGERY. But it gave no instructions as to what you should do if it was already too late, and so Richard socked it away in the same round file as the cancer warning signs that were posted on every single flat surface in the state of California. The nurse who was checking him in asked whether he had anyone lined up to take him home. Richard pulled out his phone, shingled with texts from Corvallis Kawasaki complaining of traffic delays, and held it up as a sort of affidavit that his ride would be here long before he was needed. On went the inevitable plastic bracelet. They led him back and had him change into the obligatory gown. An unseemly fuss was made over his wallet, phone, and other valuables, for which they wanted it understood they could not be responsible. Dodge once again scented lawyers with too much time on their hands. He heard C-plus’s voice outside, and thought of calling out a greeting, but didn’t really want to be seen or communicated with in the bracelet and gown—these made him seem sick, which he wasn’t. The pace of preparations was accelerating almost exponentially. Dodge got a clear sense of the proceduralist doctor as a cash cow of such fiscal immensity that his time and movements had to be scheduled and accounted for as carefully as an airline did with each 737. Dodge’s slot was next. They invited him onto a gurney and wheeled him into the procedure environment. An IV was started and taped to his arm. Sensors were clamped to his fingertips and Velcroed around his bicep; machines came alive to him and began to display information about his vitals. He knew where this was going. They were about to render him unconscious with amazing pharmaceuticals. In a minute, Atropos would snip the thread of his consciousness and he would, for all practical purposes, be dead. But when the procedure was finished Clotho would resume spinning his thread and he would come back to life as if it had never happened. It was weird stuff from that deeper and older stratum of myth, pre-Greek, pre-Norse, definitely nothing he would share with Sophia later, when he showed up at her house with the books.