Kilter

Yolanda takes me to her doctor, who she met at the gym, and says he’s better than a regular MD. This doctor doesn’t dress like a regular doctor, either. You know, white coat, stethoscope. He sports cargo shorts and a tight tee on his muscular frame. Like Yolanda’s sinewy arms coming out of her tank top, her brawny shoulders.

His office is his remodeled garage. With shiny hardwood floors and woven Navajo rugs. Paintings hang on the textured walls: a granite dale, soaring buttes, a lonely campfire. I especially notice an oil landscape that depicts a buffalo hunt. Cowboys baring their teeth, horses with gaping eyeballs, the terrifying gallop down a verdant slope of sod, rifles blazing. The hoofs of buffaloes escaping out of frame.

Yolanda and her doctor frown at me, these bodybuilding fiends.

“He’s too puny and weak,” is Yolanda’s diagnosis. “And he’s indecisive and doesn’t pay attention.” Even after she rescued me from my loser roommates, I guess, moving me in with her. Even after she helped me with my mouth: “See, his gums are feeble, too. I paid for every tooth drilled into his head. He owes me big.” She reminds me of this constantly on a loop; she thinks I don’t listen, I’m not getting it.

“Out of kilter,” is the doctor’s diagnosis. “He’s unbalanced.” Apparently, he notices the wild seesawing energy rise off my skin. “If he beefs up, he’ll find his footing. His attention can get back to charging ahead.” Then he tells me to hold a plastic jug with a green label against my chest, to scrape the roof of my mouth with my tongue to clear the palate. Like sorbet between courses. But I’m busy looking over his stocky shoulder at what seems to be a waterless aquarium, its inhabitants of lizards penned in a tangle of twigs. At the floor to ceiling bookshelves on another wall. But instead of the spines of books, numerous jugs with green and blue labels fill the racks.

The doctor announces that this supplement powder against my chest will work. He wants me to ask the jug, I guess, if it is good for me. Evidently, if my body leans forward, it’s a yes, backwards for a no. I wonder, Do buffaloes have nightmares about horses, and do horses have nightmares about saddles? When I don’t speak, he commands the air, “Is this rejuvenating powder good for him?” His meaty fingers cup my shoulder, then the slight pull.

Yolanda places the two jugs of powder, one green label and one blue, on the roof of her car. She pulls me in for a hug. She tells me to scrape the roof of my mouth with my tongue.

“Am I good for you, baby?” Her fierce embrace does all the work.