6.

Joshua walked into the doctor's office. He paused and reached into his wallet to retrieve his appointment card, to make sure he had the doctor's name right. Yes: it was Doctor Houser, number #401. He opened the door, to see a carpeted, immaculate, empty waiting room.

He approached the counter where a young mousy white lady sat with glasses that had thick black plastic frames. She sat with her head bent down writing something. Her nose was the most attractive thing about her--a fleshy white nose that made one want to see it purse up and down. She did not purse it up and down when she pulled her head up and asked Joshua, "Your name?"

"Joshua Washington," he said, and it was only now that he had no idea whom he was seeing, whether this was a doctor or dentist or psychiatrist, what he was seeing him for, why he had this appointment.

"You're seeing Doctor Houser at 10 o'clock?" she asked. Joshua looked down at his appointment card. It was tattered and gray. "Yes," he said. Abstractedly, he turned the card over. It had a photograph of a naked woman, her legs spread wide, her young white breasts hanging down from the top of the photo, her vagina dark and lovely.

Joshua suddenly felt his erection, which sprang up with little warning. He sat down and crossed his legs over it quickly.

A few minutes later the receptionist told him to go back to a room. It was a physical doctor's room--not a psychiatrist's office or dentist's--it had a chrome examining table and medical instruments and a little orange plastic chair. He sat in the chair and waited. He was relieved that no one demanded he take of his clothes.

Dr. Houser came in after about ten minutes. He had a thick mustache--vertically wide across his upper lip, a bent rectangle of hair, close-cropped and gray.

"Well, Joshua, I suppose you'd like to know what's wrong with you," said the doctor.

"Yes," said Joshua.

"Well, the first step is to realize that it is indeed something wrong with you--that it is not something outside of you--that it is your anguish, your confusion, belonging to you alone."

"I'm not quite sure I understand," said Joshua.

"Are you troubled by wars, Joshua? Are you troubled by terrorism, disasters, earthquakes?--when you hear of a riot in another city are you disturbed?"

"Yes," said Joshua; "but I hardly imagine I came to a doctor to--"

"Have you ever considered that all of this--all humanity's troubles, the anguish of the human condition--might have been averted, never having existed at all, had you been a potato instead of a man?--young man I should say."

"A potato?" said Joshua.

The doctor started to gaze at his own forearm and hand, as if in wonder. He moved it about, tried flexing and relaxing his fingers curiously, as if it was his first time seeing a hand at all, his first time moving it.

"This . . . this hand . . . we both see it . . . we're both in a common world. How does that come about? I cannot see through your eyes--your consciousness, all your senses I am blind to. Do you . . . do you see this hand?" He looked up to Joshua now, still moving his hand about in curious astonishment.

"I see it," said Joshua.

"How is it we take it for granted that there is some world--some substance in which we all sit--some background common to us all. How is it I believe you see what I see, that we share an environment, some communal groundwork?"

"I'm not sure what you mean by all this. In fact I'm not sure why I'm here."

"Why, you're here to be cured."

"I suppose so," said Joshua.

"But I'll do something better. I'll solve the world's problems--every problem known to man will disappear--I've discovered the key, the answer to everything. It was so simple! How is it everyone missed it? So easy to solve it, and no one realized it at all!"

Dr. Houser jumped up with a quick backward motion to land on the chrome examining table and reached down to slap Joshua's left knee with delight. "I've got a machine--it will solve all of this forever. Wars. Earthquakes. Famines. All of it. It's a machine that can turn a man into a potato. Well, not quite turn him into it. Rather put his soul into it, so that he is a man no longer--so that he is now a potato. Potatoes cannot contemplate so much as a paper cut, you know. All of this will be gone."

Joshua stood. "You're not--you're not turning me into a vegetable! That won't solve a thing, no!"

The doctor leaned his head back in hearty laughs. "No," he said. "What would that solve? Turning you into a potato? Everything would go on as before, except we'd have one more potato. No, not you. Me."

He walked out of the door, his eyes dancing with giddiness.