The Waiting Room
The door I open is a gateway into something I want nothing to do with. I open it anyway to remind myself that what I want is pretty much moot. It looks normal, assuming I know what’s normal in a door — a light gray metal frame inset with a large window. It’s a glass door, essentially, which is strange for a basement floor, though it knows not to let me see to the other side. The pane’s got a milky quality to it, neither clear nor opaque.
I push the metallic crossbar and step inside, leaving behind the weeping stone steps that brought me down here, and beyond that — the rabid traffic racing down the one-way street like a mad river with no ocean at the end.
An empty waiting room is awaiting me. A small room with short rows of milky stackable chairs running along three of the thickly painted gray walls. I take a seat against the side wall closest to the entrance, staring diagonally at a solid door at the far corner of the fourth wall. It features a tiny window up top allowing for the light to hit the retinas of someone at the right height, which would be your average North American male. Myself, I’d have to tiptoe if I wanted to look through the little window, if it was still there when it’s my turn.
The reception desk occupies the rest of that wall. The seated female at the desk isn’t protected by a scratched plexiglass panel customary in waiting rooms of this ilk. Perhaps she isn’t a receptionist but rather an executive assistant. Or a former animal trainer at an African circus suffering from PTSD after being mauled by a tiger. Or she’s a Chinese astronaut with an injured knee, which consigned her to desk duty forever and more. Or it’s what she always wanted to be when she grew up — a front desk office manager at some dreary operation helping to heap bureaucratic bullshit on clients showing up for their appointments spic and span and on time.
I stare at the door beside the reception for twenty minutes, or maybe thirty minutes, or maybe eleven minutes and twenty-three seconds. I’ve left my phone at home when I left home, which was many years ago, and I can’t see a clock on any of these walls, which is far-out for a place that charges you by the minute.
Two new clients have appeared in the waiting room while I was mulling over humanity’s overarching need to wait. We each wait against a separate gray wall with our disposable face masks on. One of them sports a hairdo like Marge Simpson, brushing against the cobwebs on the low bumpy ceiling. The other’s got her legs splayed out in a W-position, her rude shoes resting on the two chairs flanking her. It’s the kind of agility you’d expect from little tykes, before they learn to sit still at a desk throughout the day and get stiff about the hips like your standard-issue grownup.
She must be a contortionist, I think, ’cause she sure ain’t a young child. Little kids wouldn’t make a story out of a factoid in which we’re all breathing the same stifling air in the room. As if reading my mind, Marge says, “I’m done breathing,” and takes off her mask. She then puckers her lips at me, offering me an air kiss, and the contortionist says, “What the fuck.”
“Where are your violins?” I ask. I’ve expected these two to pull out their violins and play a mournful duet about what a fuck up life is but all I get is a shake of the head from Marge, her air kiss becoming, “tsk, tsk, tsk.”
The door by the reception creaks slightly ajar as a real-life match girl with a matchbook stands in the narrow opening and takes a deep breath.
Marge looks at me. “She’s got air?”
I shimmy my head in bewilderment. “You mean like, oxygen to light up her matches?” How should I know?
The receptionist squints at the girl as if she’s just blew up her matchbox. “Well? How did it go?”
The girl says, “There’s no floor in there.” She must have gone to the dressing room and back while I blinked because her tattered canvas dress has been swapped for a white ballerina costume, tutu and all.
“Where did you get this costume?” the receptionist asks.
The girl pirouettes once on the spot, the hem of her tutu brushing the inside of the door and its frame.
The receptionist insists, “Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
The girl scans the room. “Why? We all look alike. I see my face on you, on her — ” she pauses on me. When she looks at Marge and the contortionist, they both reach up and pull their faces off. Looks like they’ve been wearing full-head latex masks. “We’re all the same.” Marge, in cropped hair, cackles, and the contortionist repeats, “What the fuck.”
We’re all new improved match girls in ballerina costumes. We don’t need to strike a match to keep warm. We can just jack up the thermostat.
The match girl says to me, “You don’t want to go in there.”
“Shut up already,” the receptionist says to her. “You’re not the doctor, you don’t get to say shit in the waiting room.”
The girl looks at me, ignoring the receptionist. “There’s no floor in there, just a droning void or maybe a black hole — different kind of gravity, is all. And you can’t see shit.”
Marge says, “It’s spring in Springfield, the hills are alive with the sound of weed whackers, the birds remember Rachel Carson with a never-ending moment of silence, and the bees are collapsing their colonial aspirations around the nuclear power plant.”
The girl says, “Nuclear reactors are needed to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The power they generate is an excuse, akin to propaganda.”
Marge points at her and laughs uproariously. “She’s a Russian plant.”
The receptionist says, “We have a pill for that.”
The contortionist says, “I’ve been really good about taking my ADD meds. I can sit for a long time in a waiting room and not make a fuss.”
The receptionist says to me, “If you go in now you’ll be able to close the door behind you.”
I say, “This isn’t the door I came from.”
The receptionist says, “But it’s the one you should exit from.”
“Where is the exit sign?” I say.
“You’ve got to go first through the exam room,” the receptionist says.
The contortionist says, “What the fuck,” and Marge says to her, “Would you quit repeating yourself? A door is not a metaphor.”
“It’s not a breathing living thing either.”
“How do you know?”
These two are giving me a headache. I bury my face in my hands and murmur, “Biology, technology, what’s the difference? Things are gonna fuck up any way you look at them, especially if you look at them, if your retinas know what to do with the light — ”
The receptionist says to me, “Are you done yet?”
I shake my head in confusion. Language can be so fucking ambiguous.
“Would you like to give up your time slot?”
Time slot, time slot, what does that even mean? I’m not sure but I nod anyway. Like others before me have said — What the fuck.
The receptionist says, “Okay who’s next,” and the contortionist points at the match girl and says, “Have her close the door first.”
We all follow her gaze but the girl has disappeared.
The contortionist grumbles, “She left the door ajar.”
The receptionist says, “She left without paying her bill.”
Marge says, “You expect dead people to pay their bills?”
The receptionist says, “Of course we do. You can’t have civilization if everybody slips away instead of checking out in the prescribed manner.”
I get up and say, “I want my time slot back.”
The contortionist says, “What the fuck.”
It’s only a few steps to the far corner of the waiting room. I mouth, “Fuck it,” as I slither through the gap the match girl has left, reach behind me and close the door.
May 2021
