Waiting Room

Jeff hates hospitals. He hates waiting rooms. He hates waiting. And
for the life of him, he can't figure out why he chose a hospital
waiting room in lieu of a rest stop to wait out the blizzard he found
himself an unwilling participant in. But there he is, seated firmly in
between a large fat man, wheezing heavily, gently making love to a
candy bar with his chocolate smile, and an elderly lady, maybe in her
fifties, sitting terse and worried, staring into the distant white
expanse of the stark white waiting room wall.

He ended up there because the snow was blinding and intimidating, and
his eyes, tired. In Jeff's world, he liked to drive 10 miles over the
speed limit, music blaring, windows down, hand drumming on the roof of
his 1976 Buick. But in a snowstorm, he had to settle for following an
18-wheel tractor trailer at 25 miles per hour, windows all the way up,
heat blasting, eyes drying out. The driving snow would have been
impressive to most people, but it bored him. He was born in a blizzard,
his mother told him, and the effort it took to get him to the hospital
was almost not worth going at all, she said. And all too often, he'd
hear her say, "Jeffrey, you came into this world more loudly than
you've managed to live in it."

He'd hear this mostly when speaking of his failures. He tried not to
think too much about this sort of thing, as it just bored him. So
instead, he entertained himself on his slow trek to the hospital
waiting room by imagining each individual flake as a person in the
world. While every snowflake is unique and beautiful up close, they're
all pale and boring from afar. He had never seen a snowflake up close,
and he certainly tried to avoid seeing people up close. He smiled with
delight as each person screamed and hurdled into oblivion in the guise
of a windshield, bodies splattering and melting into glass, and gone
with the ease of a single windshield wipe. Jeff, bemused, thought to
himself, "if only life were this entertaining."

But the joys of the destruction of humanity had long since passed. Jeff
pulled into the hospital parking lot around 11PM. After narrowly
avoiding a collision with an errant snow plow, he sloshed his way
through the quickly gathering snow. He reached the hospital entrance
and the automatic doors opened with a whoosh of air, as if entering a
vacuum.

Jeff walked into the lobby, snow falling from his boots. The
receptionist, looking perturbed and brunette, rose to speak.

"Sir. Sir. Could you please kick the snow off your boots
outside?"

Jeff either didn't hear, or acted as if, and continued to the front
desk.

"Excuse me, I'm feeling very tired."

"Tired? Sir, please, the snow?"

"Yes, the snow is terrible, isn't it?"

"No, that's not what I meant. Could you please? this is a
hospital."

"You're very correct about that."

He walked into the waiting room area, and the receptionist, in a huff,
quickly fumbled for the phone to call security.

And there we have our hero, Jeff Paulson. And he is terribly, terribly
bored. He tries to read the paltry selection of magazines, but he's
read them before, in previous lives. He tries counting. He tries
sleeping, but the fat man beside him has finished his candy bar, and is
now entering a state of sugar-induced catatonia, complete with
occasional wheezes and coughs.

So he takes a new approach. He decides to talk to someone. Anyone. And
the closest subject for that, other than the obese cocoa molester, was
the morose elderly lady. She didn't appear particularly interesting,
her hair gray, almost white, her hands wringing around a rosary.

"Fuck? she's Catholic."

Jeff hates Catholics. But he hates grotesque obesity more, so he starts
to strike up a conversation. Leaning in, he says, "Hi. What are you in
for?"

The elderly lady does not flinch. Instead, her hands work more
steadily, wrapping the beads around her fingers, leaving indentations
in her wrinkled hands.

Deciding that she simply cannot hear him, and is not instead trying to
mind her own business, he speaks more loudly. "Snow's a bitch, ain't
it?"

Her hands stop for a moment, her eyes close tightly, and she takes a
deep breath. Without turning her head, she speaks in a whisper. "Please
don't swear at me."

Jeff leans back in his chair, eyeing the woman. Usually, people had
simply ignored his brashness, as evidenced by the receptionist. He
leans back in. "So, what are you here for? I'm here to take a break
from that fuc- that awful snow. Can't see a thing."

He had problems thinking before he spoke, and if he had thought a
little, he would have realized that most people are in hospital waiting
rooms for reasons other than social coterie. Again, the lady winces,
and whispers, "They told me I have only a few weeks to live. Some
strange disease, eating away at me. I've felt no pain, but they seem to
think it's over for me."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." Jeff really is.

"No, it's quite alright. You see, I've been waiting for this my entire
life, to die. In fact, I've spent my entire life waiting, and now, it's
finally over. I can't begin to tell you the elation I feel."

"So you're okay with dying? You're not afraid at all?"

"No, not at all. In fact, I came here to die. I've lived my life so
quietly, so patiently. I just want to leave this world more loudly than
I entered it."

This makes him very uncomfortable. Gravity disturbs him. And Jeff,
despite hating to wait, couldn't grasp the notion that his entire life
has been wasted doing the very things he hates. He stares for a while
outside the window, watching the snow hit the window, melting. But he
isn't much in the mood for imagining mass destruction. He isn't really
thinking of anything at all.

"Could you be a dear and fetch me some water. I need to take my
medicine."

"Eh? Oh? sorry. I most certainly can."

Jeff walks to the water fountain and pulls a cup from the holder on the
wall. He looks over at the woman and watches her sit in the same
position she has all night, clinging to the rosary beads. He gets her
water and sits back down beside her.

"Here you go."

"Thank you, dear."

She takes out a plastic baggie with one white pill inside. She opens
it, and carefully empties the pill into her hand. She sits for a
second, looks at the pill, kisses the cross on her rosary, and places
the pill on her tongue. She washes the pill down with a drink of water,
and sits as if nothing has happened.

He is starting to get drowsy now. His chin is in his hand and his eyes
are closed. He thinks of the elderly woman and how he wished she had
been younger, how he would ask her out. Sleep creeps in now, with the
advances of a seductress. But all tranquility escapes at once at the
sound of a thud beside him.

He jumps awake and looks at the floor. There, writhing and convulsing,
making choking sounds, foam exploding from her mouth, the elderly woman
scuttled across the floor in a seizure. Her hands still clung to the
rosary, claw-like, and she pulled tightly on it. "My God, my God!
Someone get help!" Jeff had never considered God to be his before, but
if there was any time, the time was now. He rushes to the woman's side
and frantically tries to decide what to do. But there is little he can
do. Her rosary snaps, beads scatter like little beetles, and slowly,
the convulsions become little ripples in her body. A puddle of frothy
saliva gathers beneath her mouth, creeping across the floor. Her
breathing, raspy and staccato, ceases as paramedics finally reach her
side.

"What happened here?"

"I-I don't know? she took her medicine and I fell asleep for a bit,
then I woke up to this terrible, terrible scene. Oh God, this is so
terrible."

"Medicine? What kind of medicine?"

"I don't know. She didn't say."

Jeff is told to give the medics some space, so he leans up against the
waiting room wall nearest the door, but close enough to hear what is
going on. His first instinct tells him to leave, to never look back on
all of this again, but he wants to stay, to find out what happened. It
doesn't take long before they bring a gurney and wheel the elderly lady
away, her terse face covered by a taut white sheet.

A doctor approaches Jeff.

"Dr. Kingsley, here. I'm sorry we have to meet under such grave
circumstances. You were with Miss Bentley when she collapsed?"

"Yes, I was. We had spoken briefly. What happened to her, man?" Jeff's
voice cracked, porcelain dropped in a dry well.

"Well, it appears Miss Bentley? well, she seems to have taken
something."

"Something?"

"Yes. She had a reaction of some sort. We suspect it was poison."

"Poison? What kind of poison?"

"We're not sure yet, really. We have some further tests to run. What
was her state of mind when you spoke to her?"

He thinks for a moment, back to her tirade, back to her dismay. He
thinks about how he hates waiting, and how she did, too. He thinks
about what she said about living loudly, and how he hadn't even
bothered getting around to that yet. He ponders of all these things,
but only managed to forget it all again when he finally spoke.

"She seemed? very religious. She said she wanted to live loudly."

"Suffice it to say, we suspect she might have killed herself. Her
records say she only had a few more weeks. I thank you for your
time."

With that, the doctor walks away. Doctors always said pretentious shit
like "suffice it to say." Upon seeing two security guards conversing
with a pointing receptionist, Jeff decides it's about time for him to
go, too. He won't continue on to wherever he was going. He's just going
to go home and go to bed.

A few weeks pass, and Jeff is contacted by a law firm, asking him to be
a witness in a wrongful death lawsuit. The victim, a Miss Abigail
Bentley, apparently committed suicide with a cyanide capsule on account
of her knowledge that she only had a short time to live. However,
doctors later discovered that there was a mix up, and that Miss
Bentley's sheet was switched with another patient who died the same
week of Miss Bentley's incident. The family of Miss Bentley is suing
for a lot of money, and Jeff can help them all. This is his chance to
live loudly, to stop waiting for nothing and everything at once. He
thinks to himself, "bet they didn't have any trouble diagnosing her
when she was dead." And with that thought, he crumples the letter in
his hands and shoots a jump shot at the trash can which misses
badly.

The floor is covered with crumpled up pieces of paper, piles of missed
opportunities. He just plops down on his couch and turns on the TV. A
show about a hospital is on. He changes the channel to a cooking show,
and mutes the volume, takes a swig of his beer. And he smiles.

Life, it seems, is no longer boring.