Dr. Shelpin wiped his forehead, girmaced, then shook his hand vigorously to get the wet off of it. No use trying to pretend nothing was  wrong - he was sweating like a pig. Hopefully, it looked like he was just hot. He glanced around the waiting room nervously. He accidentally caught another patient's eye and forced a sickly smile. He wasn't capable of more.

Mr. Sheparin? Bruce Sheparin? the receptionist called.
He shot up out of his chair, dislodging magazines that he had glanced at, then discarded, wedging them down in between himself and the armrests, in his nervousness. The magazines slid down into his vacated seat in a heap. He gathered his sweater and jacket in a ball and hunched over towards the door that the receptionist had indicated with a single index finger. She hadn't moved from her perch behind the massive desk. She looked like a parrot perched on a stool, pointing the tip of a wing. He looked back into the waiting room one more time as he coaxed the door open with his sheer body weight, his shoulder the wedge. No one was really looking, yet it seemed that they were all trying not to look. Could they know?

He sat on the silver-paper-covered table, his feet dangling incongruously from his expensive, well-tailored pants. He was of average height for a man, but his feet did not usually dangle. He had tossed his shirt into a low visitor's chair with wooden arms, and he sat, bare-chested, arms around his middle, breathing heavily. He sat for a long time. He began to look around for anything to distract him ... charts on the walls, ads for prescription medicines, scale models of a human jaw or knee, even a jar of cotton balls or swabs, but there were none. 

Instead, there were some odd metal instruments lying in the sink, some hand-held item that looked like it ran on batteries, and not much else. If he twisted all the way around on the exam table, he coud see a life-size skeleton in the far corner. That was a nod to the past, all right. In his day, all doctors' exam rooms had one. The empty eyesockets were creeping him out, though, so he looked away. He hadn't seen any of those in a long time.

He didn't have to deal with this stuff every day, you know, not with the kind of job he had.
  

(To be continued ...)