bag of bones

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 12 years ago

Bizarre visit to the local physiotherapist today. For one thing, we speak different languages, and the overlap (in creaking German) was slim. It took us a while to understand each other. At the top of his full-length consulting room mirror was a Post-It note with a downward arrow, which said, “This is what a person who is loved by God looks like.” But we didn’t get to talking about God straightaway. First he had to ask, what is the matter. I summarized the very ill-advised dance improv manoeuvre which originally tore my knee. The physio ran away with my first half sentence, making sketches to explain, building rapidly a diagnosis that showed the problem with my ligaments. “It’s not the ligaments,” I said. I finished my sentence and off he raced again. This happened five times before he grasped what was the matter.

Ok not a good listener, no worries. I told him what I think (after various scans & examinations) is going on and eventually he heard me. “Please take off your jeans.” Then I sat in my t-shirt while he asked me about any previous illnesses, the age of both my parents, was I married, etc. During this time the physiotherapist’s ten-year-old son wandered in and was kissed by his father all over the top of his head. The boy left. I lay down. The physio asked if I would consider giving his son English lessons, “for his pronunciation.” He reached into my knee and began inflicting intense pain, good pain, pain which bore out his relieving theory that there was nothing wrong inside the joint, it is just that the muscle is cramped. “What religion do you have? Are you Catholic?” I blinked. “I don’t have any religion.” He looked grave. “We say, there are two ways to live. The good way. And: the bad way.”

The bad way, it seems to me, involves ceaseless physical pain. Sometimes it wakes me out of my sleep. It’s a small kind of hell. “How’s the knee?” I asked him, pointedly, to bring him to the task. He had stopped massaging and was leaning on the sore leg, gesticulating. The weird thing is that when he stuck with it, his ministrations were lucid and effective. He worked his way into the joint and eased it, more professionally but in the same way as I have been instinctively doing. When he looked me up and down and said thoughtfully, You’re built like a mannequin, he wasn’t being creepy. “Know what I mean? Like a model? Like… an athlete?” (Yes, I said). “And when you were a teenager, clearly you would have been: Wow! Pretty as a picture!” (He flicked his loose hand as though shaking off water, to convey to me how goodlooking I used to be. Yes, I said. And sighed) ~ When he said all of those things, he wasn’t being grisly. It was said benignly: innocently, almost. A simple observation. Never mind the fact that his fingers were under my kneecap and I was lying there in my underwear.

I might have forgotten to mention the skeletons. They were the first thing I noticed, apart from the Post-It on the mirror. Just plastic, educational skeletons – but somehow he stores them in an open-weave kind of hammock, suspended directly above the treatment table. I was gazing at them as he concluded his appearance-based theory of diagnosis: “I think you’re just athletic, and you’re fit and strong, and your muscles would naturally cramp up.” (Makes sense. And *of course* it would have happened a lot more – or is it less – when I was prettier.) He asked me to turn on my stomach. He dug his fingers into my shoulder, which has also been sore. I am stoical about pain but, man, this was pain. I did not cry out. I opened my mouth and rolled my eyes at the row of musculature posters. He dug his fingers in further and I gasped. Then he swooped down so that his head was level with mine on the table, and said in my ear, “Jesus said ~”

Who?! “Jesus said, I am the vine. I am the roots and the trunk. If the branches are cut off from the roots, no grapes can grow.” Finally he let me sit up. The pain in my knee began to ebb, more than it has for months. “You see, Jesus is the only true teacher.”

Like a traffic cop I put up my hand. “Actually, there have been lots of teachers. Plenty of great teachers. And not all of them men. Some are even alive today. The Dalai Lama for example.”

He picked up the clipboard with his sketches of my ligaments and sat down beside me to draw the roots, the vine, and the grapes cut off from the source, apparently believing I’d missed the metaphor. “No other teacher rose from the dead,” he told me. “I get it,” I said. “I understand that this is what you believe. But I don’t believe it.” “What do you believe in, then?” I hardly knew what to say. “I believe in people. I believe in nature and people. I believe people’s hearts are full of love and that we want to be good to one another.”

“If you’re cut off from the vine…” But I stopped him. My knee was throbbing. “Have you not noticed something? All of these teachers say the exact same thing. They say, love. They say, be good to one another, try to understand, treat as you would be treated.” We stood up and he put out his hand to shake mine. “I’m a philosopher at heart,” he said, unexpectedly. Walking me back down the corridor to Reception he asked was the little girl I’d been playing with when he came out to fetch me my daughter. “But you looked so happy together!” He asked about my health insurance and when he worked out I don’t have any, because I am not Swiss, said, “Then give I you this session gratis.” “I think you will find that in a few days,” he said, “all of your pain will have vanished.”