I visit my doctor every month or two, not that I’m sick. Nothing’s wrong with me that wasn’t wrong a year, two years, four years ago. I come for the five minutes he promises between blood pressure checks. Five minutes which settle the body, revealing truer numbers. Systolic, diastolic, improper fraction. “Borderline high,” the nurse says on first attempt. “I’ll come back.” Leaves me five minutes. Shutting down what systems I can spare, I yield my time to moving pictures which crawl across eyelid screens. I follow a train chasing predestination before the face of God and New Mexican mesas formed by his hands. Watch cool agua pour from a stainless pitcher tilted by no one, hovering against the artifice of a Mexican restaurant made up like an Old Town plaza; an ice cube, praying to be a glacier, breaks free, troubling the water in my glass just so. Step inside a mermaid bar in Great Falls, Montana or one of those Los Angeles neighborhoods I’m forever mixing up, where a red-haired beauty named something like The Incomparable Ingrid makes eyes at patrons behind aquarium glass; I would never touch her, never presume to come within six feet of her, but I stay after the show just to watch her half-dry hair hang, to watch lips part as she breathes gin-scented air and gives her gills a rest. Turn flipbook images of joy traveling the latitude of my son’s face on one of the three, maybe four days a month he seems really, truly happy. Notice a still from Twin Peaks compose itself, then reconfigure: Donna crying, Audrey considering, Laura Palmer gazing back before nicotine fires and Angelo Badalamenti consume the frame edges in. Crawl across my wife’s naked torso for a kiss that becomes an Annie Lennox song that becomes a shroud of light ushering me into the end of all matter. Knuckles rap at the door, the hypnotist’s magic word, and the cuff slides to surround still-life flesh. “There it is, practically perfect.”