This Is the Kind of Thing Nicholson Baker Does Very Well

from A Box of Matches:

Yesterday towards evening I started to feel better and decided that I would in fact like to know my temperature. If I didn't know, I wouldn't be giving my sickness its fair due, since the only real achievement of a sickness is the creation of a fever, the rest is dross. I found the thermometer and got back in bed, leaning against the pillows, and slid the glass swizzle-stick down in to the fleshy church basement below my tongue, on the right side of that fin of stretchable tissue that goes down the middle. The cool glass almost had a flavor, but didn't; maybe it was the flavor of sitting at a lunch counter in the afternoon, looking out the window. My bottom jaw came forward a bit so that I could gently cradle the instrument with my teeth, and I held my lips pursed, waiting for the mercury to warm itself in my deepest salival catch basins; and as I waited I looked around the room, grazing my fingernails on what proved to be an unusually interesting stretch of wall. Every once in a while the thermometer would slip out a little ways and I would frown and clamp it firmly with my teeth and chimp it back into place with my lips. Finally, it was time to see what my temperature was. I held the glass very close to my eyes and turned it. At first I saw liquidly swollen numbers dancing and drinking sherry on the far side of the triangle, and then, turning more, these hove around and became precise and fringed with well-tended gradation lines, and behind them flashed the infinitely thin silver band, the soul of the body's temperature, stopped at a little under 101 degrees. I sank back with some relief: I did in fact have a fever.