WIP [Wound Man]

 
He sat in the room where the nurse practitioner had left him, white walls and plastic chairs, an illustrated diagram of the human ear decorating the wall. Here he would wait with his injuries and ailments, long overdue for a check-up. Once every hundred years he scheduled an appointment with his doctor, the doctor different every time. Between visits his physicians had a habit of growing old and dying, so he was forever scheduling with younger and younger versions of the same. Sadly human lifetimes, being short, could hardly accommodate his needs, for he was deathless and eternal. To offset the inconvenience of all that, he was often intrigued to learn through the doctors of certain advances in treatment and prevention. So much had changed since those crude early days when he’d first been stitched together by an artist’s hand for purposes of illustrating varieties of malady that might beset a human body in the Middle Ages. No more leeches, no more trepanning a skull to relieve it of humors. Medicines reliably targeted illnesses they were purportedly most effective at treating, so rarely would a patient die from a doctor’s efforts to heal them. On the counter of this white room, he noted, was a box of fresh latex gloves, sterilized instruments. Heralds from an inconceivable future he was already living. None would have been found in a medieval apothecary. 
Good, the nurse had said, pressing the stethoscope to his heart. Pumping the wrapping around his bicep full of air, she timed the thump-thump of heartbeats to gauge blood pressure. Systole, diastole, she told him, all normal. With an otoscope she checked his eyes, with another instrument scrounged around in his ears. All his vitals appeared to be functioning well, news that didn’t surprise him. What was surprising was her humdrum demeanor, as if he were just the usual sort of patient, didn’t see the horrible wounds that sprouted all over him, head to toe. This was new, this blindness. Or no, wait, he considered, maybe it wasn’t so much a matter of her not beholding the obvious but that his wounds had become so subtle as to become invisible. It could be this was something else that had changed since his last appointment with a physician, people had grown so accustomed to looking for specific ailments they tended to look past the general affliction. Finished with the examination, she peeled gloves off her hands, dropped them into a silver shiny waste bin which opened when she stepped to a pedal attached to its base, strange invention! She typed notes into a kind of paperless typewriter, another novelty. The doctor would be with him soon, she told him before leaving. When the door closed, he sat listening to the mumbles of other such conversations through the walls. Could it be he was finally healing, no longer a monstrosity? Over the past several hundred years he’d become used to turning the stomachs of poor souls who had to look upon him, attend to his many gaping, weeping wounds. 
He looked around the room. Peaceful, unbothered by nature, wind or rain, door closed to secure his privacy. It had been storming outside when he’d entered. Before he stepped through the double glass doors into the waiting room, he couldn’t remember who he’d been, what had brought him there. Unconsciously, as he’d been many many times before, he’d more than likely been carried along by one life or another, one person or another, then had caught a pain, a weakness, so scheduled a meeting with a doctor. Then drove to the office, parked in its lot, rushed umbrellaless with head bowed through the downpour to push open the door. Then stepping indoors had slipped from the curse of perpetual amnesia to remember himself, awareness snapping into place instantly as the door eased closed behind him. Here he was. Where was he? At another doctor’s office, apparently, in some other century. Ill as he has always been but more numerous in the illnesses he carried. There to meet with a knowledgable representative of the medical profession, to be assessed then told what new forms of awfulness he bore within him, a living example of how one person might survive despite themselves.