Unit 8
The Discus Thrower
Richard Selzer
1 I spy on my patients. Ought not a doctor to obrve his patients by any means
免费在线翻译and from any stance that he might take for the more fully asmble evidence? So I stand in the doorways of hospital rooms and gaze. Oh, it is not all that furtive an act. Tho in bed need only look up to discover me. But they never do.
2 From the doorway of Room 542 the man in the bed ems deeply tanned. Blue
eyes and clo-cropped white hair give him the appearance of vigor and good health. But I know that his skin is not brown from the sun. It is rusted, rather, in the last stage of containing the vile repo within. And the blue eyes are frosted, looking inward like the windows of a snowbound cottage. This man is blind. This man is also legless ― the right leg missing from midthigh down, the left from just below the knee.
It gives him the look of a bonsai, roots and branches pruned into the dwarfed facsimile of a great tree.
3 Propped on pillows, he cups his right thigh in both hands. Now and then he shakes his head as though acknowledging the intensity of his suffering. In all of this he makes no sound. Is he mute as well as blind?
4 The room in which he dwells is empty of all posssions ― no get -well cards, small, private caches of food, day-old flowers, slippers, all the usual kickshaws of the sick room. There is only the bed, a chair, a nightstand, and a tray on wheels that can be swung across his lap for meals.
5 “What time is it? ” he asks.
“ Three o ' ilinkclock. ”
“ Morning or afternoon? ”
“ Afternoon. ”
He is silent. There is nothing el he wants to know.
“How are you? ” I say.
“Who are you? ” he asks.
“It 's the doctor. How do you feel? ”
He does not answer right away.
“ Feel? ” he says.
“I hope you feel better, ” I say.
I press the button at the side of the bed.
Down you go, ” I say. Yes, down, ” he says.
6 He falls back upon the bed awkwardly. His stumps, unweighted by legs and feet,心灵成长
ri in the air, prenting themlves. I unwrap the bandages from the stumps, and begin to cut away the black scabs and the dead, glazed fat with scissors and forceps. A shard of white bone comes loo. I pick it away. I wash the wounds with disinfectant and redress the stumps. All this while, he does not speak. What is he thinking behind tho lids that do not blink? Is he remembering a time when he was whole? Does he dream of feet? Or when his body was not a rotting log?
7 He lies solid and inert. In spite of everything, he remains impressive, as though
gestetnerhe were a sailor standing athwart a slanting deck.
“ Anything more I can do for you? ” I ask.
For a long moment he is silent.
Yocuan bring me a pair of
Every morning he orders
“ Yes, h”e says at last and without the least irony.shoes.
macheteIn the corridor, the head nur is waiting for me.
Wehave to do something about him, ”she says.法语学习入门基础
scrambled eggs for breakfast, and, instead of eating them, he picks up the plate and throws it against the wall. ”
“ Throws his plate? ”
“ 征服英语Nasty. That ' swhat he is. No wonder his family doesn 'ctome to visit. They probably can 't stand him any more than we can. ”
She is waiting for me to do something.
“ Well? ”
“We'伞的英文单词ll e, ” I say.
8 eminenThe next morning I am waiting in the corridor when the kitchen delivers his
breakfast. I watch the aide place the tray on the stand and swing it across his lap. She press the button to rai the head of the bed. Then she leaves.
9 In time the man reaches to find the rim of the tray, then on to find the dome of
the covered dish. He lifts off the cover and places it on the stand. He fingers across the plate until he probes the eggs. He lifts the plate in both hands, ts it on the palm of his right hand, centers it, balances it. He hefts it up and down slightly, getting the feel on it. Abruptly, he draws back his right arm as far as he can.
10 There is the crack of the plate breaking against the wall at the foot of his bed and
the small wet sound of the scrambled eggs dropping to the floor.
11 And then he laughs. It is a sound you have never heard. It is something new under the sun. It could cure cancer.
Out in the corridor, the eyes of the head nur narrow.
“ Laughed, did he? ”爱国演讲
She writes something down on her clipboard.
12 A cond aide arrives, brings a cond breakfast tray, puts it on the nightstand,
