Podiatry and the Optometrist

The optometrist awoke with his ears tacky with wax.  The night before, just as he was contemplating the line between wakefulness and dawn, and before the forgotten moment that tallied all his day's activities and lulled him to sleep, he had lodged in his mind an unexceptional nugget of remembrance.  There, like a lump of coal, the fascinating object of memory proclaimed its existence in the form of a chart.  In his lengthy years as a professional he had held his eye to many an other and stared into their sinewy depths at optical illusions and detach tissues and retinas, but this thought was drawn in bright overlays and transparency sheets and arrows and words.  Everything he saw was entirely text book, a bit glanced at in the first year of his residency at the Saint Mont Claire Hospital in Halifax.  But the words, tiny and angular, pointing with abbreviated correspondence to the picture, were unlike what he had ever seen before though they arrived from a not so forgotten, yet never so easily remembered space in his mind.  First he thought he was reading a foreign language, a chart drawn from a medical encyclopedia he had picked up in a flee market in Portugal.  But as e looked closer he discovered the words were in fact made of tiny pictures, each a small depiction of the thing itself to which it was signifying.  Retina spelled out in tiny diagrams of eyes, ocular film, little wisps of lines each showing a variation of some degenerative disorder.  In his memory before his mind he turned the words on their sides, the little diagrams retaining their form as the meanings their congregation displayed passing into an even lesser known gibberish.  The optometrist shook this vision from himself just as a linear lash of wind took his curtain and curled it into a wound knot beside the bed frame.
    He rose from bed, first his first foot hit the floor then his second.  He reached for his glasses and found them upon the bedside table where he had left them, just to the right of the magazine that had slipped from beneath the lamp where it had been propped.  By now the sun was fully fresh and the cool air had begun to compete with the warm air rising to fill the atmosphere.  He rubbed his eyes.  Climbing from bed the toothbrush by the water basin hastened his morning ritual.  After dressing and eating he made his way down the four flights of stairs counting the third railing as he slid his arm along its frame.  He made his way to the office, just about noon, and there he arrived in time for his first appointment.

The optometrist shared a wall and a filing cabinet with a podiatrist.  The arrangement, struck many years ago, was by now quite unnecessary.  Each man had since developed quite an extensive profession with many more clients than that first four draw filling cabinet could possibly suit, and yet despite the wings that had been added to the building, the multiple cabinets and draws, rooms for surgery and examination, the filing cabinets had remained where they were, placed equidistant to the main receptionist desk of each other's office, on the optometrists wall, just three meters from the door that behind which was another door, behind which was the podiatrists office.  Both doors were kept locked after business hours, and the first person to arrive in the morning would open their side and await the second person to arrive to open his side.  Directly opposite the filing cabinet, on the podiatrists side of the wall, was a small glass cabinet with a collection of dentures and fossilized teeth, a museum like display with shiny brass tags explaining the prehistorical origins of each specimen.