The Signs
Larry Page
I can feel each of my kneecaps has split into four separate and distinct pieces. My knees scream like wild ponies about to meet the gelding knife as the fat Hawaiian picks me up, laying me out on the bed to have a look. Poi stink is hanging in the air like a bad smog.
“Yep. I thought so,” he said finally.
“Thought so, what?”
“You’ve got signs.”
Sounds like rickets. Scurvy. Signs!
His finger traces the knee skin draped slightly between the four islands of bone that make up each broken knee cap.
“As you can see, the space between the four broken pieces creates something of a symmetrical cross design. It indicates a condition distantly related to the appearance of stigmata. And although the medical community will tell you otherwise, signs are relatively common: tilesetters get ‘em; jockeys; really old nuns; and downhill skiers, from years jamming the bumps.”
He cups each knee with a smooth Polynesian palm – the kind of palms that are fleshy and muscular from husking coconuts, heaving sacrificial virgins down the mouths of volcanos, and gripping handcarved oars that powered boats along the ancient route of the Kon Tiki. His palms are comforting now, like warm Hawaiian sugar.
“But when a person’s got signs like this, they never realize the divine import of what is happening to them. The doctor puts ‘em in a cast but the knees just never heal right. They creak and they ache. People fight the pain for years with handfuls of Tylenol, anti-inflammatories, immunosupressants, human growth hormone… but it will eventually lead to one thing: total knee replacement. Little do they know, they just replaced the living secret to the Universe with a piece of polyethylene plastic.”
“On the other hand…” He mercilessly squeezes each knee in the vice grips of his cruel-to-be-kind Polynesian hands.
I wail like the siren of an ambulance that should be coming for me right now but won’t, because my broken knees are in the hands of this fat Hawaiian faith healer.
“ON THE OTHER HAND,” he yells over my screaming, “MAYBE YOUR KNEES ARE JUST BROKE.”
Maybe so. But when he removes his hands, my kneecaps are as perfect as two newly minted silver dollars.
