My 3rd housecall

Dear diary,

Then, while walking back to my sledge with my snowshoes on, I meet the real Toshiro Mifune, and he volunteers to join me — “My wish is to accompany you on your housecalls, and, if possible, to extend the sequence of doctor visits that you shall make by adding a few unscheduled trips,” he announces. 

“Climb in!” I say. So he helps me steer the sledge better; and the first thing we do is go back and slay that xeroxed version of himself that I inherited after a 3-D printing scandal got the better of me.

So our first stop is a house on Lone Oak Road. I get out of the sledge and dust off my trench coat. 

“Shouldn’t you wash your hands?” asks Toshiro. 

“Why?” I say. 

“Because you’re about to perform a complex operation upon this family’s lungs, and you’ve been petting every wild creature from the forest that has come out to see us as we’ve passed them in our sledge on this nighttime journey.” 

“Oh, yes, you’re right; good call,” I say. Then I swish my hands around in the snowy water of the porcelain bowl that Toshiro Mifune is offering me. “Could you call an attendant from faraway to give me a hand towel?” I ask, holding my arms awkwardly before me while standing in the snow, as my hands are dripping. 

“Sure,” replies Toshiro. Then he bellows for an attendant, and a man straightway hastens toward us from over the horizon. This attendant stops before me and stiffly holds out a fluffy white hand-towel. 

“Thank you so much,” I smile.

Now we enter the house. “Family!” I shout. “Where are you? Show yourselves!” 

“Who is it, may we ask,” sez the family.

“I’m Doctor Bryan, and this is my new nurse, Doctor Toshiro Mifune — not the mechanical 3-D printout but the actual person. We’re here to fix your broken lungs.”

Now the family slowly arises from their sofas and comfy armchairs where they were sitting in the living room, leaving the visual aspect of their TV on while its sound remains off. (Before our invasion, they were all staring at their large-screen television and watching the nightly Fake News with the volume blaring. Then, when Toshiro and I arrived, the television’s sound instantly was muted, while, throughout the present and following scenes, its picture continues to provide a distracting backdrop of manic imagery as we Medical Professionals exchange preliminary greetings with our patients and then attempt to perform an operation upon the entire household to swap their lungs out with something better.) The family approaches us:

“Welcome,” they say.

“Should we begin?” I say.

“We’re here for the lung-transplant operation,” adds Toshiro. “There will be blood.”

The family’s eyes widen in terror, and they take a deep breath and say: “Follow me.”

The family leads us into the kitchen, which is large enough for them all to be able to lie flat on the linoleum. I now look at Toshiro: our eyes meet.

“Ready?” I say.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” he grits his teeth.

Then we unbutton the blouses of all the family members. (Don’t worry — there’s technically no nudity in this scene, because all the actors are men. There are two dads and four young boys, all played by grizzled warriors from the jungles of Maine.) Then Toshiro and I pry apart the ribcage of each patient and push aside his or her beating heart. We detach the lungs at the trachea, just under the voice box, so that each patient is able to keep talking to us as we do this: “Any plans for the weekend?” we ask whoever we’re operating on, just in order to keep them awake and responsive, so that they don’t get weirded out by being temporarily lungless (we’re performing these procedures on a Friday evening, hence the line of inquiry). — Most of the family cheerfully relays their plans to attend a group prayer that aims to alert their religion’s God about the benefits and drawbacks of using lightly cooked spaghetti in modern wig-making, tho one of our patients dies from loss of blood before he can finish his answer. — Toshiro and I try to work fast. Once the lung sacks are out, in their place we install a set of pressurized canisters that were donated by deceased robot cops. “These canisters are pressurized, now, so be careful,” we warn their recipients. And the first words out of each patient’s mouth, once he’s gotten his smoker’s cough solved, are usually “Mama mia!” but some say “Papa...” (etc.) — the point is that they speak way too loud at first, and this makes us all laugh; but soon they learn to moderate their dynamics, by willing the nerves from the section of their brain that controls their faculty of speech to tug upon the loose ends of the part of the canister that has the “flow rate” gauge, which is either a knob or a slider tab; and that solves the problem.

“Wonderful job today,” I say to Toshiro Mifune as we exit the house of the Man Fam. We slap our hands together like athletes who have just won a tournament. Then I fan the stack of banknotes that the family insisted we take: “Look at all this bread!”

“Let us give it to the poor, this instant,” Toshiro suggests.

“Good idea,” I nod firmly.

So, before we proceed to our next housecall, which is in Boston, Massachusetts, we make a detour and visit the Grand Ducal Palace in the Duchy of Luxembourg. Handing them the stack of bills, we say: “Sorry that your country is so landlocked.” Then we bow and leave, walking backwards in our snowshoes, and hop on our sledge.