But nobody showed up, so he sat awhile looking at the wall. It was one of those Saturdays that feel like Sunday. He didn’t know how to explain this. It happened intermittently, more often in the warmer months, and it was probably normal, although he’d never discussed it with anyone.

•

After the divorce he felt an odd numbness, mental and physical. He looked in the mirror, studying the face that looked back. At night he kept to his half of the bed with his back to the other half. Over time a life slithered out. He talked to people, took long walks. He bought a pair of shoes but only after testing them rigorously, both shoes, not just one. He walked from one end of the shoe store to the other, four times at various speeds, then sat and looked down at the shoes. He took one shoe off and handled it, pressing the instep, placing his hand inside the shoe, nodding at it, tapping with the fingers of his free hand on the rigid sole and heel.

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The salesman stood in the near distance, watching and waiting, whoever he was, whatever he said and did when he wasn’t there.

•

In the office his desk was set alongside a window and he spent time looking at a building across the street, where nothing was visible inside the rows of windows. There were times when he could not stop looking.

He looks and scratches, semi-surreptitiously. Certain days it’s the left wrist. Upper arms at home in the evening. Thighs and shins most likely at night. When he’s out walking, it happens now and then, mostly forearms.

He was forty-four years old, trapped in his body. Arms, legs, torso. Face did not itch. Scalp developed something that a doctor gave a name to, but it itched only rarely, then not at all, so the name didn’t matter.

His eyes swept the windows across the street horizontally, never vertically. He did not try to imagine the lives inside.

•

He began to think of the itch as sense data from the exterior, caused by some outlying substance, unanalyzable, the air in the room or on the street or in the atmosphere itself, a corruption of the planetary environment.

He thought of this but did not believe it. It was semi-science fiction. But it was also a form of comfort during those long periods of unrest when he was stretched and then curled and then belly down in bed, a raw body in cotton pajamas, awash in creams and lotions, trying not to scratch or rub.

•

He told his friend Joel that Saturday sometimes felt like Sunday and he waited for a response. Joel had two kids and a wife named Sandra. They were Sandra and Joel, never the reverse.

“Saturday, Sunday, so what. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if Tuesday felt like Wednesday? Even better, if Tuesday of this week felt like Wednesday of next week.”

Joel was a fellow-member of the office staff. He wrote poetry when he was able to find the time and he’d recently stopped trying to get the work published. He said, “How’s the itch? I think of the itch in world history and my mind goes blank.”

The friend, the former wife, the doctors and nurses’ aides in scrubs and sneakers. They knew. No one else.

“An emperor, a member of the royal family. You need a context that you can work with. A famous statesman scratching in secret. Something that you could research, find some satisfaction.”

“You think so.”

“Or Biblical, absolutely. You might find that you’re part of a great narrative, thousands of years. The Holy Land. The Itch.”

“One word. A single syllable.”

“Four letters. Do you read the Bible, ever? A plague in Bible times. I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Do the research. I know I would. I can imagine how awful. Middle of the night.”

“Middle of the day.”

“Even worse,” his friend said.

•

He was seeing a woman, superficially seeing her. They were two reticent individuals, and he hadn’t said a word about the itch. When and if intimacy occurred, he hoped it would not be unanticipated. She might otherwise feel traces of the lotions and ointments, his body to hers, arms, legs, elsewhere, the ointments and hypoallergenic creams, the super-high-potency corticosteroids.

They had dinner now and then, went to a movie, implicitly working out a routine that did not bury them in total mutual anonymity.

Her name was Ana with a single “n,” and this was a fragment of information that interested him. The fact of the missing “n.” He liked to scribble the name, pencil on notepad, large “A,” small “n,” small “a.” In the office he entered the name on his desktop device in different fonts, or all caps, or upside down, or cursive, or boldface, or in the characters of remote non-Roman alphabets.

At dinner she spoke about the movie they’d just watched. He’d nearly forgotten it, scene after scene of foreboding menace. The near-empty theatre was more interesting than the movie. He leaned across the dinner table, sort of half comically, and asked about her name. Adherence to a family tradition? A name from a European novel?

No such tradition, she said. No foreign influence. Just a name spelled a certain way.

He nodded slowly, marooned in his slanted body posture and surprised at the disappointment he felt. Eventually he sat back, still nodding, and found himself imagining her body. Always the body. This was not an erotic set of curves but something even more wondrous, the basic body, the primitive physical structure.

She said that her mother’s name was Florence.

But her body, here, in the chair across the table, the human, the person, the mass of flesh and blood ascendant over hundreds of thousands of years or more, millions of years, a body no different, essentially, in its sheer bodiness, from the humped and half-crawling forms that preceded it.

He told himself to stop. They talked about the food and the restaurant. He asked her what her father’s name was.

•

In the morning he walked along the hallway in the building where he worked, careful not to look directly at others heading toward their offices, four or five, suits and ties, blouses and skirts. He liked to imagine them going nowhere, remaining in place with their feet moving up and down and their arms swinging slightly.

•

His former wife had a certain kind of smile that he kept remembering. She isn’t looking at him; she is smiling into space. Those four years together, before the seething weeks of conflict, how she blew kisses across the dinner table to wish away the itch, those summer-evening jogs along the river.

The symmetry of the itch, both thighs, the crook of each elbow, left ankle, then right. The crotch does not itch. The buttocks, yes, when he removes his trousers before going to bed, and then it stops.

He could not forget the smile. It was a beautiful moment, borne in memory, her head turned away to the transfiguring past, the grandmother with a gift for storytelling, something way back then, and he wanted to follow the smile into her life, to join her spell of recollection, a minute or an hour, in flawless time.

•

They were at Sunday brunch, two couples, and there was a football game on the TV placed over the bar at the other end of the room, the sound turned off. He could not stop looking at the screen. The brief action, the slow-motion replays, three or four replays of an ordinary run or pass or punt, different camera angles, and he joined the conversation at the table and ate his pancakes and kept on watching. He watched the commercials.

The term “Sunday brunch” suggested a world of well-being.

But Joel was talking about the current situation, non-stop global turmoil, naming countries and circumstances, putting down his fork so he could raise his hand and gesture in a whirling motion, elbow pinned on the table. Then he stopped speaking and paused to think, finally seeming to remember what he wanted to say next, hand still raised but motionless now, a request for silence from the others, and he stared into time and space and finally said that all the letters in the name Ana were also in the name Sandra.

Sandra said, “What do we do with this information?”

Three or four commercials every two or three minutes. Commercials in clusters. He began to think that he was the only person, anywhere and everywhere, who was looking at the commercials. At this distance the words on the screen that accompanied the images were just barely readable.

Ana said, “I’m looking at the food on my plate.”

The others waited but this was all she had to say.

He held his fork in a poised position. The first half ended, and after a long pause he was able to stop watching.

•

“I take off my shirt, the itching starts.”

He was in the examining room describing his situation to the dermatologist as he lay flat on his back wearing a knee-length garment, open-fronted, over his boxer shorts. She was checking his ankles, shins, and thighs. She spoke absently about the pathology of the skin. He liked this term. It suggested a kind of criminal intent or an evil that befalls a person, hurled down from above, and he recalled Joel’s remark about the curse-worthy nature of the itch, something semi-Biblical.

He was nearing the end of his third visit to this doctor and he wondered whether she would tell him to return next week or in six months or totally never. She recited the names of soap and shampoo brands, described conditions that might arise from symptoms such as his, and he tried to memorize all this, which was difficult to manage in his state of partial undress.

She listed the hidden dangers of a number of ingredients in certain external analgesic medications.

Do we need to be fully dressed, he thought, for our memory to function properly?

“I give some patients a pill, a patch, an injection. But what I am seeing in your case is that you need to think of your itch as a long-term commitment.”

The doctor checked his face, putting her gloved fingers to his cheekbones, forehead, and sideburns. Her assistant, Hannah, had materialized in a corner of the room, and they looked at each other blankly, he and Hannah, and then she left.

•

Joel yielded to rapid-fire blinking when he had something personal to say.

Here is what he said.

There were times, standing over the toilet bowl at home, when he heard what sounded like words as his urine hit the water in the bowl.

“This happens how often?”

He said that it happened on average every two weeks or so. Words. He heard the semblance of a tiny voice saying a word and then maybe another word and he tried to describe the sound, his feet spread and his hands semi-cupped near his groin, in demonstration.

“Tiny words.”

“I’m not imagining this.”

“Or a noise that is saying something.”

“Only when the flow is light.”

“Like something said. An utterance.”

“Monosyllabic.”

They were in the locker room of a local gym, in workout gear, getting ready for the squat jumps and the treadmill.

“You’re a poet. Words everywhere.”

“Zaum. Transrational poetry. A hundred years ago. Words that have shapes and sounds.”

“The little blips in the water in the bowl.”

“Zaum.”

“Transrational.”

“Words and letters are free, outside reason and tradition. When was it ever the case,” Joel said, “that language could truly describe reality?”

•

They look at each other. It happens sometimes. She always initiates the look, her face empty of affect, and he stops speaking or eating and tells himself that it is time to settle into the look.

He begins by closing his eyes and holding his breath for a long moment. He will allow himself to be her recruit in whatever it is they are doing. They never talk about the look. It happens and then it stops.

When he opens his eyes and resumes breathing, there she is, Ana, eyes trained on his face, and she is intent on seeing into him or through him, dissolving the man in all his particulars in order to find something else. Never mind what.

Her face is cool and studied. Is this meant to be some kind of mutual introspection? Is it a simple respite from the skein of endless human exchange? He tries not to analyze the matter. A playful fragment of her childhood, a memory of bittersweet longing.

Is each of them trying to imagine who the other person is within the freeze-framed face and eyes? A wordless glimpse of identity or just a vacant gaze?

He tries to go blank, to drain his eyes and mind of the spatial array of sensation, the mental debris.

Maybe she simply wants to see and be seen.

•

Then there is the crude feeling of some unmeant gratification, a creaturely need. The right hand on the left forearm and at first he uses his fingertips to ease the itch but in time the hand is in motion and the fingernails are digging in like an earthmoving machine. He sits back, eyes closed, and feels a hovering sense of revenge. It doesn’t matter to him if this is idiotic.

“Revenge on your body,” Joel said.

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I can’t help thinking of the itch as a symbol. See what you can come up with, personally, about yourself.”

“Stick to your poetry.”

“I’m trying to decide on a title for the thing I just wrote.”

“Do you talk to Sandra?”

“Sometimes, yes. She has opinions about what I write.”

“Do you talk to Sandra about the itch?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not. I know that. Thank you,” he said.

•

He stood on the corner waiting for the light to change. Dogs on leashes lunging at each other. The left hand rubbing the right wrist, then the right hand rubbing the left wrist. There was a pause in traffic and two people crossed the street, but he chose to stay where he was, knowing that the light would change in three, two, one second. He liked to watch the numbers drop.

The eczema cream with two-per-cent colloidal oatmeal.

The multi-symptom psoriasis-relief cream with three-per-cent salicylic acid.

The emollient-rich formula that provides twenty-four-hour moisturization.

•

His gangly frame and large front teeth gave him a friendly look. People in the office entrusted him with the occasional squalid secret. He was not a threat to do anything or say anything, to take advantage in some way of their faith in his apparent blandness.

He and Joel were access specialists, facilitating the delivery of home-health-care services to disabled consumers of illegal drugs.

They rarely spoke about the job they were doing. They talked about things that came and went, local news and weather, men firing guns nationwide.

Now and then Joel read an obituary to the others in the room, six men and women confronting their screens. Some of the obits were improvised, pure fiction, and he got a few laughs and sometimes a burst of applause.

•

The new doctor’s name, online, in tribute, was the Itch Meister. He was short and broad with the look of a man who lives with one central obsession. He studied the patient, who was standing in the examining room in his boxer shorts. Then the doctor whirled his hand and the patient turned around. The doctor spoke authoritatively about the patient’s history, based on what he’d gleaned from reports and from what he was seeing on the body itself.

Now the patient lay face up on the table.

“I take off my shirt or my pants and the itch begins. Or the itch is just there, comes and goes, night and day.”

They talked about the clothing he wore, the underclothes, about the pillow and the bedsheets. The Itch Meister instilled confidence with a few short sentences, although he didn’t seem to address the patient’s remarks directly and unequivocally.

“From what I see, you are not suffering from weeping lesions or atopic dermatitis.”

He went on to name different creams for different kinds of itches. He warned against a steroid that thins the skin if used repeatedly. He wore a surgical gown so long that it concealed his footwear.

“This one stray rash, here near the underarm. Do not touch. It is not scratch-worthy.”

The medications he cited were encased in language of a certain kind, fogbound words and terms, syllable-ridden and somehow, strangely, totalitarian.

Doctor told the patient to turn face down.

“The symmetry is astonishing. The left-and-rightness of it. Don’t you think? People who itch, worldwide. Forearm, forearm. Buttock, buttock. The simultaneity.”

Doctor spoke not to the body on the table but to the room, the walls, maybe to a recording device concealed somewhere. It occurred to the patient that this entire session was for the benefit of the doctor’s associates in a research institute in some crime-free suburb.

When the visit was over, the Itch Meister did not simply leave the room. He seemed to flee.

•

In the early days when he was running along the river with his wife he felt that he was leaving the itch behind. He was outrunning it. Sometimes he raised his arms as he ran, surrendering to a benevolent life force.

•

Joel would not discuss the lines. They were just the lines. The spacing, also, was simply what it was. The space breaks, the word breaks, the dangling word.

“I want to be a poet to the bone. But there’s nothing in the work that I want to talk about.”

“You want to talk about the itch.”

“Tell me again what the doctor said.”

“Weeping lesions. I keep forgetting to look it up.”

“Whatever the science, the term itself has terrific aesthetic appeal.”

“Atopic dermatitis.”

“Inhuman. Forget it.”

Joel kept repeating the phrase “weeping lesions,” thinking into it, trying to say something funny.

•

When he took off his shorts, his thighs began to itch. Ana was in bed, watching and waiting. He kept his hands steadfastly at his sides. The surroundings in her bedroom were unfamiliar and he stood a moment, smiling, acknowledging her sweet scrutiny. The itch went away but she was still there. What a deliverance it was for him, a release from day-to-day, he and she, so simple, being happy for a time.

•

They stood against the wall of the building, lunch break, two women, colleagues, smoking, and he positioned himself near the curbstone, watching them.

“I smoked twice in my life,” he said.

The first woman said, “How old were you?”

“Seventeen, then twenty-seven.”

“You remember these numbers,” she said.

“I remember them. I think about them.”

He liked watching them smoke. There was a casual grace in their gestures, the sort of autonomic movements of hand gliding toward face, lips parting, the way the head slips back, barely noticeable, as the woman inhales, first one and now the other, and then the head rocking slightly when she blows the smoke out of her mouth, the deep relief, eyes closing, one woman, briefly, then the other.

He had to remind himself that he was separating the act from its consequences.

“How long did you smoke?” the first woman said.

“First time, maybe a week and a half.”

“Second time?”

“Second time, two weeks.”

“And now you expect to live forever.”

“Not when I’m in the office.”

“What do you expect then?”

“I expect to jump out the window next to my desk.”

The second woman said, “Take us with you.”

•

At home he walked from one room to the other and then forgot why he was there. His smartphone rang and he went back to the first room and picked it up, half expecting to see a message telling him why he’d gone to the other room.

Two hours later he was back on an exam table, seated at the edge, doctor in her sixties studying his left forearm, lifting and looking, peering into the scratch marks, into the pores, the tissue itself.

“Do not let others scratch your itch. It will not succeed,” she said. “You yourself must scratch.”

The room was small and seemed semi-abandoned—stale air, rumpled documents pinned to corkboards, things scattered randomly.

The doctor asked him questions and then repeated whatever he said. He tried to place her accent, Middle Europe maybe, and this gave him confidence in her abilities.

“When itching stops now and then, five minutes, six minutes, you are a little bereft. What do you think?”

He looked for a smile but it wasn’t there.

“You will spend less time in the shower.”

“I have been told this.”

“You have been told this. But not by me,” she said.

She was looking directly into his face now. She looked and talked. He was sure that she spoke four or five languages.

“Other patients, they are worse.”

“I am also worse.”

“You are nowhere in the competition.”

“I fool myself. I try to talk myself out of being worse.”

“You are eating. You are sleeping.”

“I am eating. I have forgotten how to sleep.”

“The older you will get, listen to me, the less you will walk and talk and the more you will itch.”

She kept on looking, staring him into deep levels of retreat.

“Look at where we are, in the last room at the end of the long hall. I will walk four times a day from there to here and then from here to there and all over again. I try to tell myself this is not a thirteenth-century hospice for the destitute and the dying. But it is not so easy for me to be convinced.”

He liked listening to her but she was speaking into free space.

“When I talk to non-itching people about the itch, they start itching.”

“This is true?”

“This is true,” she said. “I spoke to a group in Warsaw. They were professors and students. The longer I spoke about itch-specific nerves, about sensory neurons in mice, the more scratching I could see in the audience.”

“Did they ask questions about this?”

“No questions. I do not accept questions in public forums.”

When she was finished poking at his extended arm, she did not return it to his side but simply let go, dropping it abruptly, and then took the long way around the table and lifted the other arm.

He said, “Do you ever itch?”

She looked at him, finding new dimensions in this particular patient, and then repeated the question in a voice meant to resemble his.

“My only itch is what is around me,” she said in her own voice, “and why I am here.”

When the visit was ending, the patient put on his pants, shirt, and shoes, and the doctor wrote a couple of prescriptions.

“When you pick up the medications, you will be reading the instructions printed on the inserts but you will not follow them. They are stupid and misleading. Do not use the medications two, three, four times a day. You are hearing me say this. Once a day.”

He felt obliged to repeat this.

“You will scratch and scratch. But you will also remember what I am saying.”

“What are you saying?”

“You are nobody without the itch.”

He took the long walk along the hall and thought of the doctor alone in her castaway office. The elevator took forever to arrive.

•

When he and Ana went for a walk, sometimes bumping hips along the way, talking about nothing much, all they were doing, he thought, was being themselves. There was an innocence that placed them, for a time, beyond responsibility.

But the affair gradually changed from a liquid to a solid.

“If we fall in love, what does it mean?” she said. “I find it strange to feel so much affection for a man I don’t really know.”

He walked with his head down, concentrating on what she was saying.

“I don’t really know you. This is not just a detail,” she said, pretending to laugh miserably.

•

People in the lobby were arrayed and waiting. One elevator was being repaired, the other was blinking down at them from the fifth floor, delayed in its descent.

He decided to climb the stairs to his office, eleventh floor, a few others joining him, a sense of shared complaint. Halfway up the first flight he began counting the steps and then decided that he needed to go back to the bottom step and start over, properly, from one.

He did this, occasionally looking down as he counted, aware that he was moving his lips. A man in a suit and tie and baseball cap squeezed past, taking two steps at a time.

He’d gone a floor and a half before he began to notice the shoes he was wearing. He looked and counted, reminding himself of the fact that he didn’t like these shoes and trying to understand why he’d bought them anyway.

He began to climb more slowly, seeing himself walk back and forth in the shoe store trying to feel his way into the shoes. Not truly seeing himself but experiencing a misty image somewhere in the air within arm’s reach. People kept passing him on the stairs and he kept looking down, counting the steps, seeing the shoes.

He’d walked back and forth several times and then sat awhile, the only customer in the store, and examined one of the shoes, hand and eye, scrupulously.

Was it too much trouble, too awkward, to tell the salesman that he didn’t want the shoes? Did he think that the salesman would be disappointed, his day ruined?

He didn’t know the answer but he was beginning to feel victimized, belatedly, by the salesman, the shoe store, and the shoes, and he stopped counting the steps one flight before he reached his floor.

In the office he sat at his desk, left wrist in the prime of its morning itch, and he looked out the window, his eyes sweeping across the face of the building in the semi-distance, revisiting the horizontal pattern of the windows. He looked left to right, reading the windows like a book, line by line.

•

Finally, not to tell her felt like cheating.

They had a corner table in a nearly empty café. His plan was to avoid details and simply say that the itch was a livable condition but not likely to be alleviated anytime soon.

In the meantime they listened to thunder bouncing around the sky and she spoke of country thunder when she was growing up, an approaching storm, her fearful wonder at the drumrolls and jagged flashes.

He watched her talk.

Her fairness, the face and hair and small hands, the way she used the three middle fingers of one hand to brush lightly over the corresponding fingers of the other hand. A gesture of remembrance, anxious or soothing—he wasn’t sure.

It’s not a contagious disease, he would say, or some ancestral burden that trails a family into future generations. And he might end with a dash of deadpan humor.

If you itched, too, think how much we’d have to talk about.

The building where he lived was within walking distance and he suggested that they go there. She’d never been to his apartment and she shrugged a small O.K. When she went to the rest room, he paused briefly and then hurried to the men’s area and locked himself in a stall and lifted his left trouser leg and scratched frantically, in terminal haste, returning to the table before she did.

The rain was just beginning to fall and they went single file along the walls of buildings, muttering mild swearwords. In the apartment he watched her stroll around the living room, noting the books and photographs and looking briefly into the small, neat, narrow kitchen.

She sat on the sofa and he was in a chair on the other side of the coffee table. He gave her a brief history of places in which he’d lived. He was whispering for some reason.

He said nothing about the itch.

In bed it was all body action, wordless, and in the interval that followed he lay alone, absently scratching, and reminded himself that he’d placed all the tubes and jars inside the medicine cabinet and in the small storage area beneath the sink, beyond her range of vision.

This was not an involvement, he thought, in which each of them was no one without the other. But he didn’t know what to make of it.

He spoke her name aloud when she returned to the room.

Then he walked her home, two hunched figures behind an umbrella that he held tilted against the wind.

•

Joel talked to him quietly in a corner of the office. It had happened again, an instance of spoken words in the soft splash of his urine in the bowl.

“Where, here?”

“Home, has to be home. Here I use the urinal. Home, there’s just the bowl.”

“Not simply a sound that resembles a word.”

“It’s saying something.”

“But if it’s a word, why can’t you identify the word?”

“I look at the little splash. I look and listen. I try.”

“You think it’s saying something.”

“It has a certain expressiveness. It conveys, it communicates.”

He was blinking rapidly.

“O.K., it’s a word, but how do you know it’s an English word?”

“That’s my language.”

“This is getting dumber and dumber. You know that.”

“I’m telling you because I trust you.”

“Sandra knows about this?”

“I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell her.”

“Tell her. I’d be interested to hear.”

“Picture the scene,” Joel said. “She follows me to the bathroom, stands and waits while I unzip.”

“You can tell her without showing her.”

“She’ll laugh. She’ll tell our kids.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Eight years old, six years old. Imagine their response.”

“Zaum.”

“You remember. Good for you.”

“Transrational poetry.”

“Shapes and sounds. The futurists. Zaum. You remember. A shape, a sound.”

“Tell your kids. Zaum. Let them say the word.”

They went back to their desks and bent into the screens, scrolling through their messages.

•

This is how near-sleep attenuates a person’s awareness. Everything else is gone. He is funnelled into himself, no past or future, the living itch, man-shaped, Robert T. Waldron, thinking incoherently, a body in a bedsheet. ♦