There were several visits weeks apart, during which she removed her brocade of stitches—more painful, oddly, than their insertion—and then a two-month follow-up. As if they had shared a rapture too keen to be soon repeated, these appointments were prophylactically cursory, hurried: she was always running late, and the traffic of patients at the clinic approached gridlock. Anderson’s bruised and swollen face horrified him in the mirror. The reassurances of his girlfriend—a new one—that he was looking better and better every day meant nothing to him; they were the predictable rote of female flattery, its customary irritating stratagems. Only Dr. Kim could be trusted to provide him with the cool, unbiased truth. Verity was in her touch.

At his eight-month visit, she studied him from an arm’s distance, and slowly pronounced, “It came out well. Your canthi still show, but the lids are very taut. The yellow bruising on the jaw will diminish”—di-min-ish, three even syllables, like a doll talking—“over time, as will the vertical red scars in front of your ears.” She leaned forward and lightly stroked them, with bare fingertips. The halves of her lab coat parted, and he saw that she was pregnant again. She handed him a heavy plastic hand-mirror, and said, “You look. You tell me what you see still to be improved. I will go out of the room.”

Her rapid rolling gait, in low black heels rather than the universal, deplorable white running shoes of hospital habit, took her out the door, her lab coat floating, her pinned-up hair from behind glistening like a rope of black silk. It was Christmas season, and a little one-piece crèche unexpectedly stood on her desk. In the mirror he saw a face Oriental in its impassive expression, its smooth, hardened surface marred only by a few lingering welts. The faded blue eyes were the wrong color, and his gray hair was gauzily receding, but otherwise he saw little to improve.

He had never been left alone in her office before. He got out of the examining chair, with its bothersome folding footrest, and walked to her desk. The crèche was of plastic, but rather lovingly designed, with identical startled expressions on the baby, Mary, Joseph, the sheep, the ox, and the shepherds. Next to it were tinted photographs of a toddler and a kindergarten-age child—a boy and a girl, both of mixed race—and an old man. Not old, exactly, perhaps no older than Anderson, but craggy, Caucasian, grinning, big-nosed, rather monstrously bumpy and creased.

“Oh!” Dr. Kim’s voice behind him sounded girlish in her surprise at finding him at her desk. She regained her level, professional, rather murmurous pitch. “That is my husband.” Husbannnd, deliciously prolonged, the very concept come from some far and perfect world. Keeping his back turned, as if to hide his foolish face from her, Anderson touched his right tear duct. It was still there.

RABBIT REMEMBERED

i.