Clinic by Julie Christman

    What happened to warm smiles, tranquil blues and water fountains? What happened to quality care? To gentle updates and soft reassurances that we are all in this together? My impatient cravings swell. I want a cigarette. I need some water. It's only been three hours; what's fifteen minutes? This is like high school, having to ask for a hall pass to go to the bathroom. I want to prop the heavy door open with my foot and listen for my name, but someone would complain about the conditioned air (and me) escaping. Outside, the sun is hot, pushing the warm nausea through my arms and legs, pooling in my stomach. Will they call over the crackling intercom, "Julie for K. K is ready." I look for darting heads, searching for an absent driver, wishing the glass windows were thin enough for some sound to trickle out. But it's only been three hours.
    I run to the supermarket for bottled water and doughnuts. Breathless, I almost forget my change.
     Back inside, a dull haze settles over the room. I try to picture what you are doing yet I can't imagine anything but waiting, waiting, with the blurry TV, hissing AC, pounding drill, and crackling intercom. A 12-year-old girl tries to play with her sister's hair, whining about having to stay so long. Her sister, only 15, is next.
    We are strangers bound together by silence. It becomes a game: try to match driver and patient, try to remember the wet and shapeless faces herded together in the agonizing sweatbox however many hours ago. Through our imagined anxiety, waiting, waiting. We keep time in this factory full of rubber-gloved, middle-aged nurses and mustard brown files with a rainbow of cellophane tabs. Montel, now on the fuzzy screen, tripping with horizontal lines of white.
      "Where is Michael? Michael? Does anyone know Michael?"
    "Oh, I think he's in the parking lot. I'll go get him. By the way, how is Jasmine doing? I'm her sister."
      "She's in the recovery room. It should be about another hour."
    Just conveyors for the assembly line that has been here and serving for over twenty years. Plastic smiles behind bulletproof glass. We are not here to question reputation. Just wait. In hard narrow chairs, the sun blinding behind the thick vertical blinds.

III.
    Late in the afternoon, the room grows barren, stale. This grueling patience evokes tears of frustration, a loud scream, laughter, something, anything to shatter the tension, to slice through the gloom, to lift the burden of responsibility. After five hours, I hear my name signaling that you are ready. I fly to my car, my heart in my throat, rolling all the windows down and pushing the passenger seat back to give you room.
    You wobble out the back blue metal door marked with an orange X, clothes in wrinkled disarray, nibbling on a graham cracker, somehow looking fresh like spring. Your dark eyes are bright. They have given you back your body.
   "I felt everything." You climb into the car in slow motion. I am at your elbow, rushing, frantic.
    "I need a cigarette. The needle hurt. The pulling tension, strange, I could feel it, but it didn't hurt."
    You fill in the holes, make me feel like I hadn't waited. Your Asian doctor tore your band-aid off slowly, tugging and yanking the hair on your arm, and then warned you that he was going to pull it off fast. What is the point, you told him, since he already got it off the hairy part and he told you that at least it wasn't your balls. We laugh. The girl who wandered out with you, the 15-year old, babbled about eating pizza after the 12-hour fast. And the girl who wanted to be out cold became hysterical before going under.
     The rest of the way home, we talk about what you want to eat.

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