In the corner, a sign hanging from the ceiling read, “New Patient? Sign in Here!” Lisa sat down in a pleather padded chair and picked up a New Yorker as though she had nowhere to go and nothing to do except sit in this stifling ward and wait for Carmen’s diagnosis.
He headed across the room and sat down in one of two vestibules. Before him was a computer with a laminated sign taped to the monitor: “Fill in the Online Questionnaire to Let Us Know How We Can Serve You.” He clicked the mouse and the screen awoke.
Name: Carmelo Luis Roderigo Guero
Status: Student (Undergraduate)
I would like to: Set up a new appointment.
Carmen looked over at Lisa. She smiled above her magazine, then looked back down to read. Carmen returned his attention to the waiting screen.
I have been suffering from the following (prompted the screen):
-trouble sleeping/oversleeping X
-obsessive/compulsive behaviors
- drug, alcohol or substance abuse
In the clear light of a psychological survey, Carmen felt less crazy. He had not come to SPS with “suicidal thoughts,” “homicidal thoughts,” “delusions/hallucinations” or “obsessive/compulsive behaviors.” His high-risk sexual behavior was still years ahead of him. And who, he wondered, abused exercise? That one must have been reserved for the bleary-eyed rich girls with their paid-for problems.
Carmen had begun to relax, to feel comforted by the total normalcy and non-overwhelming-majorityness of his selected survey answers, when the screen presumptuously prompted him for prose:
Please describe your symptoms or concerns to help SPS find and brief a therapist who is best able to help you:
Fucking text box, Carmen remembered thinking. Self-indulgent gringa medicina. But he typed.
I am here at the prompting of my English teacher (Carmen wrote) because I did not turn in the last essay so she want me to write this one. A joke. She worried about me so she took me here. My concerns as I selected above is that I have trouble sleeping in a hostile environment and have chosen to prioritize other interests instead of a stupid paper
interests instead of a paper for class. Mostly otherwise I am fine. Well, I am at risk of losing my scholarship if my GPA drop below 2.5. But I don’t think this will happen. Only if I fail Lisas class. Also everyday my roommate call me pardon my language a fat fucking faggot. While this is true still I find an unkind thing to say to a person with whom one share a very small off-campus apartment. On the checklist I did not check homesick. This is because my mother is dead my father I never knew him and we grew up in Albuquerque first and then some other horrible places so not much home to miss. I do miss my mother though. You could say I am grieving every second of every day in my heart for her. You see my mother she was the most beautiful girl in her village in Oaxaca but her father used to beat her so she ran away to America with money she won in a beauty contest but when she reach Tijuana the coyote who bring her to San Diego took everything and him he is my father. Not the most wonderful origen myth but that is the story of Carmen Guero so plenty of good causa to be here. Thank you for your time.
Carmen clicked “Submit” and the computer asked him to wait while it generated appointment times. He selected one two weeks later and wrote it on his hand.
“Did you get an appointment?” Lisa asked, holding the door for him. Carmen presented her his palm. “But that’s Thanksgiving!”
Carmen shrugged, and his whole miserable history shrugged with him. “If they are open, I am free.”
This memory and others drifted away back down into the bowels of the Port Authority. Carmen gripped his duffel more tightly and with the other hand held the rubbery conveyor belt handle of the escalator. Up, up, up it pulled, up to the heel of Ground Zero, to basecamp, to the bottom of the top of the world. He clutched the molded rubber strip which how many other travelers and protestors and investment bankers had held. Before him through a cavernous opening the feet of giants were visible against the blinking darkness of a New York night.
Near the mouth of the bus depot he could smell the water and the money and the steel. Vertigo flirted with the edges of his occipital lobes and his feet wove on their corrugated step and a histrionic voice in Carmen’s mind cried, “No, no, no, not like this, darling be careful!” and Carmen gripped the rubber more tightly until the escalator topped off and he stepped neatly onto the New York City sidewalk and realized like a game of Where’s Waldo that among the besuited yuppies around him were dirty vagrants with long unwashed hair and tattered backpacks. These were his people now. He followed them to Occupy Wall Street.
The narrator in Carmen’s head, the one that years ago used to say things like, “Though he knows he should go home immediately, Carmen follows the man into his apartment building,” tonight this wary voice said only, “Carmen followed.” Carmen sighed. How fine it was to follow. He felt a profound relief at simply falling into step with the myriad weirdos whose density he realized was rapidly increasing relative to the total number of Twin Towers tourists wandering Wall Street late on a Tuesday night. Relief to discover peers worth following, worth joining and emulating, peers with a social conscience he could agree with, for once, instead of the meth-peddling sixth-graders he’d grown up with in Albuquerque and the racist hicks he’d woven around at Oklahoma State and even his Indigenous Studies majors with their calamity-atrocity-genocide circle jerks too indignant to engage with the world that had so disappointed them.
With the crowd, Carmen moved through wide streets rendered narrow by the height of forms which enclosed them. The sharp trace of body odor floated through the mulchy New York night. The crowd flowed through empty downtown streets like a flood. And then, in the distance, Zuccotti Park, a tent city on a concrete plateau on the stony surface of an overripe island. Carmen’s body trembled all over. Around him, some of his new comrades ran. But Carmen let them go. He took deep breaths. He clutched his bag. This of all times was a time to arrive with dignity, not wet-browed and red-faced. One foot after the other was all it would take, all revolution ever takes, mere movement forward, forward against the regressive undertow of conservatism and cronyism and greed, forward to the edge of a concrete boundary within which the hemisphere’s gadflies twittered and plotted and teemed. Carmen let go his duffel on the stony partition.
“Hello, darling,” said a voice, and our unlikely hero turned to find himself face-to-face with the slim visage of a mulatto boy. “I’m Antron,” said the child. He extended a birdlike arm and rested his slight fingers on Carmen’s hand, still wrapped around the handle of his bag.
“Antoine,” Carmen said dreamily. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“Antron, darling,” said the sleepy-voiced creature. He motioned to this new wide world with his hand. “Welcome to Occupy Wall Street.”
You’ve been reading my novella, “Sorry For Partying.” If you enjoyed part 7, check out part 8, or start at the beginning.
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