There was a man who worked as a medical technologist. He was good at his work and fairly happy in his job. The people who worked with him liked him. He hardly ever called in sick. He never avoided the more unpleasant work - like mixing and weighing out seventy two hour stool collections which he did as often as any one.
He liked microscope work best. When he found cholesterol crystals in a joint fluid, their stunning beauty under polarization lit up his day. Lovingly he would scan the endless fields of purple, gold and turquoise. The crystals like the house plans of an insane architect strewn randomly on top of each other.
On quiet nights he could easily spend thirty minutes meditating on the microscopic part of a batch of routine urinalyses. He would wander back, forth and around among the epithelial cells shaped like the fields in an ancient and long settled country. The yeast like broken strings of pearls. The white cells green and grainy and sometimes glittering...
And then of course the fertility studies. Estimating the percent motility of sperm was an adventure to him. Sometimes he would follow a two headed cripple as it struggled and pushed its way in random circles. He liked to speculate on what kind of child this sperm would have engendered.
He had never married. He lived with his senile mother, and spent all his time caring for her. She was ninety two and showed no sign of dying.
He was a lonely man.
As the years passed he became quieter and quieter. A woman named Sandy could make him laugh, but Sandy left. She was replaced by a man from the Philippines who spoke little English.
The man became a concern to the lab manager. He would no longer answer the phone. He was one of the few people on the evening shift who spoke good English, who could answer questions coherently. But he would not pick up the phone.
One evening he was found at the scope without his mind.
They took him away and medicated him.
``He'll be alright,'' the psychiatrist said, ``he'll come out of it.''
But he never did.