I am waiting in a tiny room. I grab the smooth silver handle of the chair to get up as the nurse walks in. ‘Walker,’ she says. I sit back down. I am not Walker.
I can feel the capacity of my lungs growing smaller. It’s Spic N Span, gasoline,and cigarettes. Air isn’t stable like we think it is when we see dust floating in the lazy summer light. It flies by us at a thousand miles an hour. Today it feels like a million miles an hour.
The most tranquil paintings become the most suspenseful. An open field, a beach with a calm shoreline, a mountainside next to a large lake, all become disaster scenes once you put a human in them. The human stands there and we look at him. What will he do? He cannot stand in that field forever. Where will he go?
There is so much suspense and terror in public that it vanishes inside us; we become numb to the overwhelming perception of others.
‘Daker,’ she calls. My hands are folded on my lap. I twist my neck toward the man who had been sitting by the vestibule with the glass doors. Didn’t he get here after me? Maybe he was late.
When you are in the boy scouts they teach you how to use a compass. They stand you on top of a big hill and they have you rotate all around, looking at the landscape, the sky, the sun, and they explain how to orient yourself. From then on you always imagine a time that you will need the compass. A time when you will be lost in the woods, maybe guiding your family during a camping trip, and you will hold the compass off the string around your neck and determine exactly where you need to go. Your sons will look up to you in awe. You are their hero.
The room I am in is much colder than any of the places I think about. I think about European cafes, African safaris, pools by Jamaican resorts – places my friends have been, that white people have always gone to try to complete their lives.We made it through the ice age. This waiting room seems an unnatural state. I think they make it cold so that you will not get comfortable. One more of the subtle ways we are taught what to want.
‘Janice,’ she calls. A woman with a tall hairdo beside me gets up and walks slowly toward the hallway with the smiling nurse. I didn’t even know there was a woman here. My lungs slowly inflate and deflate. I imagine them as small as my kidneys. There’s a clock on the wall but I only stare at it without reading it. I cannot read it; it seems a Chinese character mounted on the wall. The time in the waiting room is always ‘Not yet’. That is all that matters.
There are a million things to look at and you can never tell what someone is looking at. A person could be looking at your fashion, at your vocabulary, at your posture; you never know what another person sees. A business man only sees your wallet. I do not hold this against people, for according to this definition, I am another person. I do not know what I see. I am in a waiting room; one does not look at anything in a waiting room. I am in a chair thinking of nothing. I only sense vaguely that my lungs are cramped, tightening; I feel I will die a half-perception.
‘Mr. Durther,’ the nurse says serenely. He smooths his lapels as he stands up and has a boyish smile on his old, cavernous face. What is he so happy about? I know there could be something, I just don’t know what it is. I am in a state where I must question happiness for its roots. What could be in it? The image of the woman one loved? A building one designed? The thought of a field with no one in it?
A baby is in a stroller with a cover over top of it. The woman across from me looks gently and lovingly into it. I was once a baby in a stroller. I was once a million things. Or: a man is whatever room he is in. A being in time can define themselves according to any part of it; so what are they really?
‘Mrs. Sylvan, he’ll see you now.’
I am still staring at the man in the solitary open field. There are trees on all sides of the field. He is looking slightly to his right, but is still motionless. Where will he go?
After several thoughtless moments I perceive that there is no one else in the waiting room. It is just me. I think of leaving, but I imagine the nurse calling my name a second later if I do. Yet there is no arc to waiting; there is no plot. It’s just waiting and waiting and more waiting. You could wait forever; there would never be an interesting development. And here I am, waiting.
