The Affair with the Radiologist

This flow traces the narrator's affair from the radiologist's first obsessive sightings to the morning after the attic encounter.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

The Radiologist's Dry Mouth

The Radiologist's Dry Mouth Context The radiologist, in charge of the X-ray department at the city health clinic, becomes spellbound by a woman he sees lying on her lawn. Half an hour before his motorcycle ride, his mouth is already dry. Turn He is a married man with a disabled daughter, yet he heaves with desire and calls the image an aura expanding. He wants to skin, flay and escape what pursues him. Aftermath At dawn he cries on his kitchen floor and longs for her finger bones, her hips, the flesh of her buttocks. The obsession has already begun to poison him.

The Midnight Visit

The Midnight Visit Context The radiologist leaves his sleeping family and rides his motorcycle through the darkness to the narrator's house. He pushes the motorcycle a block away, then enters her territory for the first time. Turn She appears in the garden, suspended in the wind, and he feels they share the tragedies of their lives without speaking. She tells him to grab a knife and slice his lip open, and he obeys while she watches him bleed. Aftermath He escapes on the motorcycle, waking everyone up. The night visit establishes the affair as a pact between two people who recognize each other's wounds.

The Kiss at the Fence

The Kiss at the Fence Context The narrator hears the radiologist at the fence and leaves the house barefoot, her presence becoming his mouth's desire made flesh. She knows that afterwards she will go into the woods and vomit. Turn They kiss as if firing silver sparks into the black air. She knows that afterwards she will have a beak, feathers and talons, and that her husband is sleeping while the baby falls out of bed. Aftermath The kiss transforms the bucolic countryside into something arousing and predatory. The affair is no longer imagined; it has crossed into her body.

The Attic Encounter

The Attic Encounter Context Having bicycled to the radiologist's house and watched him care for his disabled daughter, the narrator hides in the vegetation until he finds her in a ditch. He takes her by the hand into the house. Turn She goes into the attic alone, and he locks the door behind them with an iron key. They mangle each other on a single bed, her open mouth becoming many mouths. Aftermath For a moment there is no day or night, no attic or countryside. The affair reaches its physical peak in a space that belongs to neither of their ordinary lives.

The Prosaic Note

The Prosaic Note Context The radiologist gets up in the middle of the night and leaves a prosaic note. The narrator wakes naked, with a pasty mouth, and finds no one downstairs. Turn She pedals the twelve miles home wanting to vomit, with the taste of him still in her saliva. Desire follows her like something sticky, putrid and servile. Aftermath She imagines needing aggressive laser treatment to forget his jaw and forehead. The affair has begun to rot, even as it continues to pull her.

before the affair begins, in the radiologist's account

a night early in the affair, before the first kiss

a following night, after the husband is asleep

after the narrator spies on the radiologist's house

the morning after the attic encounter