After Hours: A Glimpse of My Radiologist

Through the seamless window that is the café's outer wall, I see him facing his wife over a candlelit table, a white-aproned waiter moving—intent, unnoticed—around them. The sidewalk and streetlights frame their late supper, begun for him with a squat glass of merlot, I'd guess by the stouter stem, the dark wine thick, legs heavy. The flute slender and tall, hers is more certainly champagne—the bead I can see streaming clearly from here, despite the light fall of mist forming on the glass between us. All day, he has been reading films and ultrasounds, x-rays, scans—looking inside our bodies—the gray-marbled breasts sequenced by shadowy lungs and hearts, the rarer brain, the hand's delicate bones rendered into translucence. In this moment, though, he pauses to offer a toast— to her, I imagine, and to the most ordinary survival of a long week, or, perhaps, to the routine nothing here of any interest he has had the unusual pleasure to say all day, becoming beautiful and absolute, the nothing here at all.