It was now two hours I had been waiting in the anteroom of Doctor Porcheria's office. There had only been one patient before me, a slight Chinese gentleman whose eyebrows drooped at their outer edges, giving him an expression of continual woe. At the doctor's signal, an irate metallic buzz, he slipped in through the office door and they immediately launched into a loud and impassioned dialogue. This gradually petered into more civil tones, then a confidential murmur, and now, perhaps two hours later, I could hardly be certain, howevermuch I strained my ears, that they were still in the office at all. Through the frosted glass it seemed I still saw the rough outlines of their silhouettes; but these were perfectly motionless, and truth to tell, they could have been anything – a table lamp and a decanter.

My gaze drifted about the anteroom. There was a gilded screen behind the likes of which a woman might have disrobed in some Oriental fantasy, a table fanned with magazines, and a number of pictures in frames: landscape paintings. 

I had come to Doctor Porcheria with a certain ailment of a very private nature, an ailment which my sense of dignity – an outdated thing, my acquaintances kept telling me – had not allowed me to disclose to anyone, not even those nearest to me. I would say without exaggeration that my ailment had given me a renewed sense of the obscenity of the human body. With it came a peculiar sort of shame, a distant cousin to how the pubescent feels upon discovering the new workings of his body; but in place of the young man's accompanying shudder of excitement, I found this horrible discovery had laid a stone in my chest, and one which has lodged in place to this day.

At the time, however, I had experienced only the first forebodings, a dark glimmer of what was yet to come. I had only gone so far as to mention to an old friend that I was deeply troubled by this certain ailment, and with a snap of his fingers he was off to make a few telephone calls; half an hour later he had, much to his evident satisfaction, fixed me up a rare appointment to see Porcheria.

When he was done, he insisted we drink a coffee, standing up in the Waldorf, and he spent a long time fingering his little stubbly mustache before he spoke. The Italians, he said, should never be trusted in matters which require a scrupulous attention to detail; but our Porcheria (he actually said our Porcheria) was in fact from Switzerland, he confided, and this was quite another thing altogether. Naturally, he would not invite a Swiss man over to his home for dinner to meet his family – as he had on previous occasions, I would be astonished to learn, a German urologist, a wiry man with sharp features, whose laugh was a painful, choking thing to behold, it sounded quite as though he were trying to dislodge a fish bone from the back of his throat – much as he would not permit a Swiss man to make serious advances upon his daughter; but he would, for example, allow a Swiss man to borrow his toothbrush, something that would be out of the question with a Greek or a Hungarian (he flinched at the word), and he would most certainly allow a Swiss man to make a discreet medical examination, even an Italian Swiss, though perhaps not a Swiss-born Italian; this last matter required more attention. At any rate, our Porcheria, my old friend assured me, waggling his eyebrows, was simply the most thorough medical professional in the country, and thoroughness, he added, was a doctor's cardinal virtue. In some quarters he was unfairly dismissed because he was incorrectly supposed to be Italian, and not Italian-Swiss, as he, my old friend, had mentioned, and because [here he dropped his voice to a stage whisper, though the two of us were practically alone in the cafe] he is monstrously fat, and to be obese – and with a name like Porcheria, on top of everything – was seen, in some quarters, as a thing that was incompatible with his practice as a doctor, or which even nullified his medical opinion. These people are nothing more than wrong-headed idiots, he said, his face betraying a rare flash of emotion, who have confused form with content to their own stupid detriment. By the nature of things, my old friend confessed, he himself did experience shudders of discomfort around the grossly obese, but this was not because he considered them unsightly – though, he stressed, there was no denying this simple fact – nor because he was continually mindful of their overtaxed hearts and caving muscles, but it was rather a question of the physical disproportion, the sense that he was a dwarf before another man, this was what kept him from feeling at ease, if he was to be perfectly frank. Or then again, perhaps it was the knowledge that this human body, being of the same species as other human bodies, lithe and supple ones that made the heart leap and palpitate in erotic convulsions, showed bodies as such to be a thing of total repugnance when the proportions were only slightly adjusted. Whatever the case, he concluded with a stiff shake of my hand, he trusted that I would not let any of this superstition come between me and the soundest medical advice the country could offer.

Of course, so far I knew Porcheria only, as the saying goes, by reputation, and by the muffled sound of his voice, and there was no good reason, I recalled, that he should have the little snub nose and the sausage fingers I was imagining; he could be, I reasoned, the kind of fat man who looks neat and prim in an expensive suit.

With this resolved I picked up one of the glossy magazines on the table and found, much to my surprise, that it was filled with nineteenth-century engravings. As if this were not peculiar enough, the engravings were nothing more than a cavalcade of grotesqueries – beasts half-human and half-ape, in various stages of evolution or devolution. A top-hatted man swung from a lamppost by his tail, a chimpanzee turned to stare quizzically at her hairless derriere or painted her toenails. I was beginning to find the pieces rather witty, if in questionable taste, and I turned to read the note on the artist:

Dudley Horner – a 19th-century bookbinder, a tubercular, possibly related to the inventor of the Zoetrope (1833). The vulgar, sometimes degenerate scenes he portrayed in his hundreds of drawings are purported to reflect the viewer's hiddenmost thoughts (a technique which Horner was wont to call “Spectrism.” He died in 1889, alone and rejected by all except his housekeeper.

My eyes drifted to the adjacent page and grew wide – for there I saw two naked humans, faces grimly set with resolve, copulating in the most bestial sort of fashion, the female, it seemed, screeching in pain. The image quite naturally captured my attention, I became quite engrossed in it for several seconds, that is, until I heard a gentle cough from the seat beside me.

Sitting next to me was a rather plain woman in a tan skirt and a frilly top, holding her hat in her lap, looking quite embarrassed for me. Her features were regular but uncomely, her eyes had something vaguely dazed about them, so that even when they looked straight into mine, I did not really feel as though we were seeing each other. I slapped the magazine shut and gave her a look that said I was a decent and respectable man, and that it would be lunacy to hop to any conclusions.

This look, however, missed the mark.

She shrugged her shoulders. It is not as though it is the first time it has happened, she said in a gentle, almost monotonous voice. You sit here for a couple of hours and the trance takes hold. It is in the slow dimming of the lights (this was true: the room had grown darker since my arrival), the insipid music (for the first time I noticed music playing a repetitive piano piece, distorted, as though heard underwater), the furniture, which seems to cradle you in its arms. I've been watching you stare absently at that engraving for almost twenty minutes.

This was a jolt. I took a hasty look at my watch, which made her chuckle. Apart from being a medical doctor, she confided, her voice dropping to a whisper, Porcheria is a marvelous hypnotist. Hypnotism was his first love. All of his things her are just saturated with hypnosis.

Her lips, plump and red, drew so close that they grazed my ear.

No one knows how much he can actually hear through that frosted glass, she continued in her throaty whisper. There could, of course, be microphones.

He is said to have archives in one of these walls, filled with conversations between patients. Piles of old reel-to-reel tapes. Ten minutes of anteroom conversation tells him more, they say, than any conventional patient interview. So of course we must watch what we say.

With these last words I could now feel the moisture of her lips on my ear, which was not altogether unpleasant. She inclined her body at such an angle that I could feel her warmth beat up from under her shirt in pulsing waves.

A sick feeling slid up my throat and I abruptly stood, wiped my palms on my trousers, and strode over to examine the paintings on the walls, inquiring, with an air of idle curiosity, into what sort of disease had brought her to see the doctor. Her look showed me that she found my question rather piquant; she began fiddling with the buttons on her blouse and explaining that such things were of an extremely intimate nature, because, here she tilted her head and smiled, there was something in a disease, didn't I think, which burrowed into the nether stuff, which touched and probed our nightmares, our anxieties, and yes, also our fantasies, though she hoped I wouldn't demand that she explain just precisely what she meant, it was all rather muddled in her head, and as she was thus speaking I bent over to examine a painting to find it was not an undulating landscape at all, on the contrary, it was the naked body of a woman lying on her back, an arm folded over her face as though to block out the sun. The light, however, had grown so dim that I had to squint to make it out. It was an easy, even a natural mistake from a distance, the woman's body rippled and furrowed, quite imitating the supple contours of the hills, the crevices and hazy colors of an autumnal landscape.

I unfolded my reading glasses from a breast pocket, trying to make out her gesture – was she fainting or shielding her eyes? – and found now, to my astonishment, that her features had an incredible affinity to Lisa's. The bend in her arm, the slope of her neck, it was all quite unmistakeable. And what was this memory that foisted itself upon me?

Ah yes, the last time I lay beside her naked, a faraway, perhaps disappointed look in her eye as she shielded her face from the glare slicing through the crack between the curtains, explaining to me that it was remarkable how, given the strength and, she had once erroneously supposed, invincibility of the feelings she had nurtured for me, it was inexpressibly odd to be lying there beside me now without the faintest glimmer of emotion. And I may only be stating the obvious when I say that her words sounded scripted, her voice unnatural and metallic, as though filtered through a machine. I even found myself wondering: Who has penned this script? Or: Who has built this machine? Was it possible either of us was to blame? And, not without a sense of absurdity, I began weeping softly, now, fourteen years after the fact, hunched over to scrutinize this pornographic picture.

I slid my fingers under my glasses to wipe the tears, the world smeared about then sharpened, and I turned to see if the women had been observing the maudlin scene I had been making. She had not – in fact, her chair was empty, and now I swept my eyes around the room a bit frantically to find where she had gone to, terrified for a moment that I had concocted her, that the lights and the music – now a barely audible waltz – had so played havoc with my senses that I had begun seeing things that were pure fantasy. But then, I reminded myself: If indeed I had fantasized a woman, then why had I chosen to make her so thoroughly unremarkable, so unalluring to the extreme, when this choice for once was apparently mine to make. Why had I made her hair so limp, her face so like a horse's?

The thud of a falling shoe made me swivel to face the pseudo-Oriental screen; I could discern through the gap beneath it that the woman was letting her shoes drop from her feet, unrolling her stockings so that they puddled on the floor.

This Porcheria, I thought, he is completely out of his mind.

My thoughts were flying feverishly now, trying to unravel it: Why was this woman undressing? And no matter how I framed the situation, it always came back to the same thing. She was undressing for me.

This was more than I could bear, that they – for there could be no doubt that Porcheria was at the bottom of this – would have me just sit still and allow this to unfold, as if I were not a man with my own drives and convictions, as if all this were a matter of supreme indifference. 

Keeping one eye trained on the pseudo-Oriental screen I began edging toward the door, my shoes muffled in the plush carpet, and I managed to get the door open without so much as a click, then I padded down the hallway and out the front door, not looking back, not even for an instant.