In the evening, in the Summit Suite – or whatever it was called, for numbers today, as we know, are too discreet –, Hans Castorp placed the cans on the table.
Next to the table stood a tablet. It glowed, friendly, and greeted him with a name that he had not felt was his own for years. He ignored it.
Instead, he laid the little wooden stick beside it.
It lay there, bright, plain, ridiculous – and suddenly it had two meanings: It was the pen of erasure, and it was perhaps, tomorrow morning, the rod with which one stirs powder. Writing and swallowing, thought Hans Castorp, are neighbors today.
Then he took the blood pressure cuff.
He sat down on the bed, not because he was tired, but because sitting during measurements is a form of seriousness. He wrapped the cuff around his upper arm, closed it, pressed the button.
The cuff inflated.
It is an unpleasant feeling, esteemed reader, dear reader: this inflating, this pressing, as though a foreign hand wanted to tell the arm where its boundary is. Hans Castorp felt how the pressure reminded him of something he did not want to remember: of commands, of marching in step, of the feeling that the body no longer belongs to oneself.
He breathed. He tried to be “not obsessive”.
The device beeped.
Numbers appeared.
Hans Castorp bent forward, as if they were oracles.
Systole – he read it without understanding it; he only understood that it means “above”. Then diastole. And there it stood, like a small, orderly threat:
82.
Just over eighty.
Normally high.
He stared at the number as if it could change if one looked at it strictly enough. Then he took a pen – this time not a wooden stick, but a real one – and wrote the number on a sheet of paper that lay next to the bed. He wrote: 82.
And in the moment in which he wrote it, he felt something in him calm down: What is written is controllable. What is unwritten is danger.
He put the pen away.
He put the paper in the drawer, as if hiding a confession.
Then he went to the bathroom, washed his hands, as if he had to wash off the number. It is disheartening how much cleanliness today is confused with reassurance.
He lay down in bed.
He thought of Dr. Porsche, of the orange tie, of the warm eyes and the crack beneath them. He thought of Dr. AuDHS, of abbreviations, of recommendations. He thought of Gustav von A., who writes sentences so that he may stay. He thought of Morgenstern, who writes resolutions so that he is no longer a donkey.
And he thought: I am healthy. And that is precisely the task.
He slept. Not deeply. Not honestly. But he slept.
