The Waiting Room - Part 2

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There’s something invigorating about being in the room, at first. You are waiting for something. Something will happen, and it doesn’t matter that you don’t know what it is or what form it will take. It’s a special wakefulness of hopeful uncertainty that keeps your mind and body pulled tight like a guitar string.  It makes it hard to eat and sleep. You have to be ready; you have to be aware.

But nothing happens.

They send you crossword puzzles and math problems, The Officer turns the lights on and off; you debate the sheets and try to find the right word for the shade of yellow in each identical plastic chair. You create timelines. You ask questions. You build a veneer of sense over the insensible.

Still nothing happens.

The tautness you began with draws too far, until the sinews of your expectation start to pop or lag with overextension. The something you’re waiting for becomes salvation, complete with an aura of holy unapproachability. It falls into myth, though you don’t always realize it. In a final flare of faith, you defend, evangelize, project – you ascribe impossible goodness to this something you can’t define, to lure it to you with the blindness of your devotion.

Nothing happens.

***

Cambridge organizes us when he feels motivated. He must have been a good executive; he says that’s what he used to be, or still is, if time has stopped, which is one of our theories that keeps cycling back.

He coordinated the discussion about the sheets, when they came.

The room had been quiet in the lights and darks before that. psychokitten’s eyes were swollen from wakefulness and crying. They often were back then, before The Baby, but she could usually be cheered or chided to composure. There was no one, this time, to cheer her. Even Marco hunched alone, his brows knitted. The garbage pile heaped untended in the corner.

Cambridge had slowed to stillness in this time. I’d been watching him, morbidly fascinated with the process of his despair. His shoulders fell first; then his chest sank; his belly sloughed a fraction further over his belt. I could stand very close to him and he wouldn’t notice me. His familiar mask of charming confidence cascaded into resigned folds. Then he slumped against the wall and slid to the floor, where he stayed for a long time. 

When The Officer flipped on the lights to reveal the stack of white linens neatly folded on the linoleum, all I thought from my hard yellow chair was that I had slept again, and missed an arrival, again. None of us moved to pick them up or look more closely. We had all missed it. And we would keep missing it, and there were no answers, and nothing would ever be clearer than this.

Then Cambridge’s voice rang out, metallic against the walls. “Warmth or privacy?”

I looked up at him wondering for the billionth time if I was delusional; he sat immobile, just where he’d been, his face still and apathetic. As I watched, though, his mouth formed the words a second time: “Warmth or privacy?”

He rose unsteadily, with the focused exertion of a man climbing a mountain. He walked in a wavering line to the center of the room. He squared his shoulders, looked at each of us, and stooped to pick up the stack of sheets with both hands. His shoes clomped hollowly as he raised himself up onto the plastic seat of a chair, brandishing the stack high above his head.

“Warmth or privacy?”

No one responded.

“Come on. We have a decision to make. Sit up. Wake up.”

One by one, we gave over, shuffled to our feet, turned our sluggish thoughts out into our palms.     

“There you go. Now let’s talk.”

Cambridge arranged a debate, laid out the guidelines, moderated the proceedings. Marco, Harry, and I argued for privacy. We would hang the sheets up; we’d make spaces to be alone in.

“Look at these! They’re too thin to warm us up anyway,” sniffed Harry. He tried to snatch one off the stack but Cambridge pulled it out of reach. “The temperature is always the same; it’s not like we’re going to freeze.”

“Also there are the mental health considerations,” Marco added, in his light Chicano accent. “Without privacy one feels unable to escape. Unable to breathe one’s own air. I think we can all agree we are in an unusual situation here,” he laughed, a doctor’s laugh. “Shouldn’t we do all we can to squash our sense of helplessness? Shouldn’t one have a room of one’s own, so to speak?”

I’m not sure why I fought for privacy. It isn’t real privacy when you know you’ll still see the outlines of your neighbors’ bodies against the light, when you’ll still hear them sitting and rising, when their movements are so familiar that your mind will show them to you even when your eyes don’t. But I had to fight for something.  

We bickered for a while, and eventually privacy won.

To be fair, the other side didn’t offer an argument. The Officer rarely speaks and never takes sides, psychokitten said nothing but watched us, her feet tapping the floor, and Begonia countered every point with the same retort: “But I’m still cold!” In the end, we let her keep one sheet.

We shoved the corners of the other ones between the ceiling tiles, standing tiptoe on chairs, holding each other up, laughing at one another as we reached and stumbled. That night we talked after the lights went out and pretended that every deep breath didn’t make the walls flutter. They fell down before long. It didn’t matter, really.

***

Begonia pokes me with one sharp finger.

The room trembles in droplets on my eyelashes, its inhabitants for a moment blissfully undefined. I blink the sticky sleep away.

“He’s doing it again.” The old woman’s voice needles and cracks.

In the opposite corner, the figure of Harry sharpens. He squats, cutting his eyes at us. I shift The Baby into my other arm, waking her, to see what he will do. There. He’s watching her, not us. His gaze shifts with her.

She wriggles against me, her lips smacking, her tiny fists jerking. When I lift my shirt to feed her, Harry’s face doesn’t twitch. The Baby latches and releases and latches –the tension unsettles her.

Begonia shuffles to her feet. She leans forward at the waist and waves her hands at him as though he were a troublesome tomcat on the front stoop.

“Psshhhht!” she spits. “Sssssstt!”

Harry aims a stony grimace at her, gargoyle knuckles of one hand pressing into the floor.

There’s nowhere to shoo him off to. He’s still over there.

***

Harry’s transition into the room has been different, they say, than everyone else’s. I guess that’s to be expected; why should we all handle the same trauma in the same way?

Night got harder when Harry came. He screamed through the dark hours.

He hasn’t read the book that is his namesake. He wears glasses, and he has a scar. He was hit in the head with a bat when he was four.

He and psychokitten have been the youngest. They bonded at first. They would curl up together in the corners and she would trace his lightning bolt with one finger while he stared at nothing and told her in a monotone all the stories that his head played out when he closed his eyes:

The voice that spoke too fast.

The numbness.

In one nightmare he was a fly and he was also the giant finger that crushed the fly.

In another he was dropped from a height by skeleton hands, collected from the ground, and dropped again. And again. And again.

He was an epileptic soldier in one, his hand glued to his assault rifle, so when he had a tremor he fired wildly, shooting himself in the legs and murdering everyone around him as he fell.

The way he told his nightmares gave us nightmares. When he told the soldier dream, he recounted the searing in his legs explicitly. “It’s true,” Marco whispered to me. “What he’s saying … that’s too accurate. You don’t know that much about pain from playing video games.”

***

  

We keep a timeline, written on a crumpled sheet of notebook paper, stuck to the wall with a piece of gum.

The Officer is where the timeline starts.

The Officer keeps the time. From his place by the door, in full uniform and sunglasses, he periodically pulls a pocket watch from his belt, peering at it over his glasses. It’s the only timepiece in the room. He doesn’t let anyone else see it. The Officer controls the light switch; he controls day and night. This decision was made at some point on the far left of the line, before Cambridge. Begonia will not say who made it.

The Baby is where the timeline ends, for now, or always. We are always looking for new tick marks.

When I arrived, I represented two arrivals. I was about six months along then. Cambridge knew, right away: The Baby was a future event that would occur, a mark on the right side of the line. It would be good, for everybody. We were all Expecting. The Baby charged them with possibility; it flowed into them like an elixir whose potency I didn’t respect until after she was born, when their withdrawal set in.

Now she’s here, and the arrow still points to the right.

Continue to Part 3