Horn

At first it was just a rough spot under his fingertips as he shampooed his hair. He would pick at it and scour it with conditioner, thinking it a strange place to get eczema. Some mornings he didn’t notice it at all, and was mildly surprised when it seemed to reappear. Was it really coming and going? Pulling aside his thinning hair, he tried to get a look at it in the bathroom mirror, but it was too far back on his scalp. He had more important things to worry about, like the New York Yankees and how much gasoline was in his car, so that’s what he did.

A few weeks later, he got the stunning and obvious idea to simply take a photo of the top of his head. Cellphone in one hand, making a part with the other, he took eleven photos before he was sure of what he was looking at. It was a scabby, fibrous formation, about the size of a dime, that by now had risen an eighth of an inch from his scalp. It wasn’t pretty and, after revisiting the images for a third look, he made his first medical appointment in a number of years. His doctor had retired, and he was routed to a physician’s assistant who could see him in three weeks. Great.

For twenty-one days he fretted, bothering the spot the way one troubles a newly-empty tooth socket.  Perhaps it was cancer and he would have to have his head amputated, ha-ha. Internet searches didn’t help, as leprosy wasn’t likely and a google of “human skin conditions” produced a smorgasbord of unsightly ailments, none of which bore an exact resemblance to his creeping scab.

By the day of his appointment, the bump had evolved into a legitimate protuberance, perhaps a good quarter-inch high. He sat in the waiting room feeling relieved and unburdened. This disquieting conundrum would now be in the hands of someone else. Qualified people who could diagnose and cure. Even if it was cancer, it was relatively early, and it shouldn’t be cancer because they’d made him wait three weeks. Most likely it was some kind of mutant wart or mole that they could lop off right there, today.  Or maybe they’d send him home with a bottle of Compound W, to freeze it off at his leisure. Why hadn’t he thought of that? He flipped through a health magazine and did his best to tune out the talk show playing on three televisions.

Finally, he was ushered into the examining area. First to a corridor, where his measurables were taken. Height: Five feet, eight inches. Weight: Two hundred pounds, even. He was certain he heard an audible Tsk as the nurse jotted this number down on her clipboard. Temperature: Ninety-Seven point three. Fairly mundane, except for that Tsk. In the blank white examining room, his blood pressure clocked in at 124/78. Pretty good for an office worker in his thirties without a gym membership. His mind briefly considered the image of a treadmill as the door closed behind the nurse.

Time moves more slowly without stimuli. Just ask prisoners in county lockup or snowed-in inhabitants of the Yukon. He catalogued the items in the room—jars of tongue depressors and cotton balls, a metal box with a biohazard warning on the wall. All was in readiness for whatever affliction or disease might present itself.

The physician’s assistant popped through the door without warning.

“Hey!  Mr….”  He checked his clipboard.

“Ishmael,” said Ishmael, trying to be helpful.  They were about the same age, but the differences ended there. Clearly, the medical officer had been been on course for success his whole life.

Ishmael pointed at the top of his own head.

“Strange growth. Dr. Google wasn’t any help.”

“Well, we’ll just take a look at that.” He sounded like a man who enjoyed being smarter than a search engine. “Tilt your head toward me, please.”

Ishmael leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. Fingers parted his hair and he felt the tentative probe of a finger. Then a deep breath that was held longer than was natural.

I’ve got him, Ishmael thought with a touch of triumph. He can’t unlock this befuddlement. In a minute he heard the clicking of a cellphone camera.

“Okay. This is what we’re looking at.” He shared the image with Ishmael. The growth was wider, less circular, and had turned a glossy black. Involuntarily, he drew back.

“Pretty impressive, huh? I’m going to confer with a colleague and see what she thinks. To me, it looks like simple aggressive psoriasis with some necrosis, but let me check.

The door shut behind him with an almost imperceptible click and Ishmael was dropped again into a white blank. Back to Dr. Google. Wikipedia. Lists of skin diseases.

Sheesh, he had it easy. Acneiform Eruptions. Autoinflammatory Syndrome. Chronic Blistering.  Congenital Anomalies. Lichenoid Eruptions. What on Earth was a Lichenoid? Resulting from errors in metabolism. Perhaps his enzymes were messed up, and it was causing his scalp to turn into an eggplant. He would have to look up what an enzyme was, exactly. This was turning into work. He clicked over and sifted through his email, spam from replacement window companies and people in Nigeria needing to get their money out of the country. Selecting all, he watched them vanish into the ether.

A lot of time passed, more than he had spent in the waiting room. Looking for wifi, he found that every doctor and clinic in the facility had secured their systems. Even the cafeteria. Where’s the logic in that? No one wants to visit the physician or dialysis clinic to begin with. Making them burn data while they’re doing it seems a bit much. Insult to injury, and probably some other cliches. He clicked on cracked.com and read a few items, trying to cleanse his palate of Pyoderma Gangrenosum.

A small eternity later, the physician’s assistant swept soundlessly back into the room.

“Okay, then.  I had a conference with Dr. Bridgewater, and what we have hear is a real head-scratcher.  Heh-heh.” He was very pleased with his humor. “So I emailed the photos to Highview Dermatological Associates. They want to see you immediately. ‘Intrigued’ is the word they used.  Here’s the number; they should be able to get you in next week.”

He left the office deflated. The whole afternoon had been a big nothing burger, and he was still hungry. Walking through the parking garage, the cold wind hit him from one side, rebounded from a wall, then hit him from the other. In his car, he pulled his phone out and called the number. They had closed five minutes before and he got a recorded message. The futility was real, here.

Three weeks passed until his eventual appointment with the head-growth specialist, Dr. Horne (You can’t make these things up. If you do, it’s not very funny). In the meantime, he skipped his monthly haircut at Tri-City Barber College and began parting his meager coiffure on the left, which allowed his new appendage to fester unobserved. It also made him look like Hitler’s demented cousin. Occasionally, while engaged in a spreadsheet at work, he would feel a faint breeze through his hair and know that Donkirk, his co-worker, was leaning over the wall from his adjoining cubicle, checking in on the progress of this disease. This was often accompanied by an almost-imperceptible whistle.

“Man, that thing is taking off. I mean, it’s galloping.”

Ishmael could feel a finger poking his head, but kept his eyes on his monitor.

“No foreplay in the workplace,” the supervisor admonished.

“The love this man and I have is real and cannot be constrained by the social mores of this office. Then Donkirk began rocking Ishmael’s head back and forth with both hands.

“Every night I ride him like a pony.”

Somewhere deep down, he knew he’d be known as War Admiral or Secretariat for the rest of his tenure, but he appreciated that Donkirk wasn’t blabbing about the growth. In a few days he’d visit the specialist, maybe burn a couple of sick days after they sawed that woody monstrosity off the top of his head. He looked forward to feelings of gratitude and relief. That night he sat on his sofa, watching TV reruns and debating whether to get a rescue cat. What if they got attached and the original owner turned up? Pets just set you up for heartache, a future loss. Either for you, the animal, or both. Then he spent time fingering his growth and wondering if he’d live long enough to bond with anything again. The horn was now nearly as tall as the last digit of his pinky finger was long, and it was growing upward, not spreading out. He should have scraped it off when it was little more than a skin tag. He who hesitates is toast.

*******

The diagnosis was in, and Ishmael was very drunk. He sat across from Donkirk in the back of Dutch’s Tavern and vented.

“So, they think it’s a…kertinous tumor,” he announced for the fourth time. A rare, weird syndrome where the patient turns into a unicorn.  Not an adorable My Little Pony unicorn, either. An asymmetrical junkyard version of a mythical beast.”

“You are really not used to drinking,” Donkirk observed.

“Horn,” replied Ishmael, pointing at his head. “Horn, horn, horn.”

“It’s a temporary thing. In two weeks it gets lopped off and you have a story to tell people. Your life as a centaur.”

“Unicorn.”

“Right.”

*******

In Dr. Horne’s waiting area, the exact same episode of the exact same talk show was playing. If he were an excitable person, he would panic. Instead, he reposed with the acceptance of the vanquished.  I’m in a Kafka story, he told himself.  And nothing truly bad can happen because it’s fiction. The other waiting patients were a varied group, including a case of acne vulgaris that made him grateful his own situation wasn’t worse. There was a man with keloids draped around his neck like an ascot. The most unsettling was a very pretty girl of high school age, sitting with her mother. Her skin was perfect porcelain, and Ishmael wondered if the mother felt it wasn’t perfect enough. Perhaps her own malady was hidden by her thick brunette hair.

About the state of his horn: It was now a thumb jutting up through his hairline like it was the tallest tree in the forest. Just lop it off, he told himself. Lop it off and go home. After his shortest wait yet, he was called back, remeasured, reweighed and seated in an examining room. In less than a minute the door sprang open and Dr. Horne walked in, followed by two other physicians, one male and one female.

“This is Mr. Ishmael.”

“Wow. I can see it from here,” the female said.

“That’s not very professional,” Ishmael objected.

“But I can. It’s like Ankor Wat towering above the jungle.”

The second physician took his pen from his pocket and began poking the horn

“Hey! Stop that!”

“Good news and bad news, Mr. Ishmael.” This from Dr. Horne.

“You guys are killing me, here.”

“The good news is it’s not gonna kill you. The bad news is that it has a bundle of nerves and a humongous vein running up into it. We’re not sure why. Maybe it has plans.”

“Humongous is not a medical term.”

“We’re currently not sure how to remove it and we’re not sure how large it will become.”

“So what am I supposed to do until you figure it out?”

“Buy a hat,” the female doctor advised. “A big one.”

“You would absolutely rock a fez,” the other doctor chimed in.

“Huh.” Ishmael assessed the damage in his head. “How long is it gonna take?”

I’m sending the MRIs to our people in Atlanta. They will look at them and, if necessary, send them to Minnesota. I’d say another month, minimum.”

“Maximum?”

“Never. We just don’t know.”

The lab tech scraped additional skin cells off the protuberance and he was released back into the wild. Walking to the parking garage, he took stock of his life. Decent job, decent apartment, no romantic partner, and a horn that currently hurt like hell. Something had to change. He couldn’t, wouldn’t spend the rest of his life cowering in dread of some biblical affliction.

Why hide anything? Or Hide from anything?

The thought popped into his head from someplace else, Istanbul or a self-help book or a late night television ad. The idea immediately began to grow and, by the time he unlocked his car and slid behind the wheel, he had a plan.

*******

Hello again, everyone. I’m Ishmael, the horniest guy you know, and this is the latest episode of my video podcast, “Horns of a Dilemma.” On today’s show, we discuss not only the catastrophe occurring atop my skull, but also philosophical questions that have arisen over the centuries. Today I will talk about determinism versus free will and what the Greek Stoics and Friedrich Nietzsche had to say on the subject. Plus, I have new MRI images of my antler. And away we go!

(Theme music starts.)