distance

1





'Sorry I'm late. I got lost?'
'?'

'I'm here to see? I was supposed to meet Miss F. at half past
eleven'

'Sure, can I take your name please?'

'Yeah, it's Lucille Almayer, A L M A Y E R.'

The woman behind the reception desk picked up the phone, dialed the
four digits of the internal line, and gave Lucille a warm, reassuring
smile.
Lucille smiled back. Tension making her muscles tighter than what she
expected. She was always aware of how stupid she looked with that kind
of smile on her face: she had tried them all in the mirror. This was
surely one of the worse. Not the worst though: the worst was the
painful one she would perform in the winter, when it was too cold to
even think about the sun, and her lips would be covered in deep thin
cuts, red lines like paper cuts. No matter how much Vaseline she would
put on, her lips were always sore in the winter.

'Miss Almayer is here now. Yes. Sure.'

As she turned around, the woman behind the reception desk gave another
smile, this time to the security guard who was leaning on the front
door. It was a very different smile: she was flirting.

'Fourth floor.'

'?'

'At the very end of the corridor, on the left, there are the lifts.
Miss F. will wait for you on the fourth floor.'

'Thank you'

She wasn't pretty, the woman behind the reception desk. Not pretty at
all. She had orange hair. In fact her hair was really orange, not
tangerine, but fluorescent orange. Maybe a DIY mistake. And her face
wasn't pretty either. But it was kind. Friendly.
As she walked down the corridor, Lucille noticed the brown carpeted
floor. She registered it as peculiar. 'England', she thought. 'Carpets
in the hospital. An insult to allergies and hygiene. With all the sick
people having fits and pissing on themselves or puking, or who knows
what else? But this was a mental hospital, and maybe things weren't
that extreme there. Anyway a friend of her, who worked as a wheelchair
mechanic was always telling her how he would get pissed on by his
patients; they weren't even sick, they would just go to him to get
their wheelchairs fixed, and still they would piss on him.' She
wondered whether he had carpets in his department.


In the elevator she realized she was there, in the hospital,
to see a doctor. To see a doctor for herself, someone who was supposed
to cure her. She thought about it for less than a second, the rest of
the ten seconds journey to the fourth floor was spent acknowledging her
being sweaty after pedaling all the way to the hospital, and checking
her face in the yellowish mirror.
When the doors opened, she found herself in front of a woman leaning on
the banister.

'Hi, I'm Lucille. Sorry I'm late, I got lost.'

The woman didn't smile nor say hello, she just nodded at Lucille, and
moved down another corridor. Carpeted.
Lucille followed her down the corridor and into a room. On the door, a
sign saying 'engaged'.

'You've got one hour time with me. You can use it as you like. Try and
make the most of it.'

The seconds went by, one after the other. And they felt like hours.
They fell on Lucille's eyes like heavy mercury drops. Poison to her
mind.
She was feeling lost, her eyes wondering around the room looking for
something to hold on to. Trying to think of something to say, or
rather, of anything at all. She felt like she had been trapped in the
snow, as if a big chunk of a mountain had just fallen on her leaving
her trapped in a cold, white hole. Nothing.
And Miss F. wasn't speaking. She didn't say a word. She was just
looking at Lucille with an interested yet impatient look, the look of a
scientist in front of an alembic; waiting for something to happen,
anything. Waiting for seconds or minutes. Waiting for days. Getting
more and more impatient but still waiting for it to happen.
Miss F. was there. Watching Lucille, the alembic.
Something was indeed happening though. The girl sitting in front of her
was getting more and more upset, the girl in front of her was crying.
Nothing had been said or done and the girl was crying.
She had seen it many times before, patients crying. Almost all of them
did, actually, at some point. Lucille had started crying as soon as she
sat down and raised her eyes at her. But she had been holding those
tears since the elevator doors opened: she could tell.
Now her face was contracted in what seemed to be repressed pain; a
proud being trying to hide. Hide from her. And the rest of the
world.
'Enough personal thoughts' Miss F. thought, and she switched her doctor
mind on.

Lucille was crying. 'Shame', she thought, 'I'm ridiculous.
What the hell am I doing? I'm such an idiot!'
Tears were coming one after the other like magic flowers out of a top
hat. They would then melt one into the other like mercury, and form a
puddle on the autumn of her eyes.
She would play with mercury as a child, deliberately breaking the tip
of the thermometer. Watching all the droplets fall onto the floor,
spending the next ten minutes gathering them all together into a big,
fat drop. She didn't know it was poisonous then.
She knew now.

'Sorry, I don't know what's the matter with me. I had been
anticipating this appointment for ages. Thinking of all the tons of
things I wanted to say and? .'

'?'

'You must think I'm so silly. Probably you don't, actually. Probably
you've seen this so many times.'

'?'

'I'm fine. Well I have been fine lately. My medication is working. I
haven't been crying for a long time now, well apart from now. And I
haven't been mad; I mean, I haven't done anything stupid. And I haven't
been super? angry or anything. I haven't had fights over stupid
things?'

'?'

Silence. Miss F. was still examining her live alembic, understanding
its changes, keeping mental notes of the important things. Better than
a scientist she was: scientists write everything down, or at least
that's what they're supposed to do. Psychiatrists listen and take
mental notes. Unless they're holding a notebook. In that case they
might write down some notes. But Miss F. didn't have any notebooks. On
her desk, tidy, just the bare necessities. Nothing personal there, nor
on the walls, obviously. Psychiatrists aren't supposed to be human
beings, are they? They are analyzing machines. Scientists. And patients
are alembics. Nothing more, nothing less.
Lucille was still crying. She wasn't really crying: tears were not
exactly rolling down her cheeks. They were wiped immediately by one of
Miss F. tissues. The ones on the little table next to Lucille's chair.
Tissues ready to be used. Waiting for Lucille, or for any other
patient. 'Obviously,' Lucille thought, 'people must cry all the time in
here. Stressful job for Miss F.'

'It's just that I don't know what to say. It's all blank. And I was
like, right: now I can finally see someone I can talk to and who will
really listen. Because friends don't really listen, well, they do, but
they want to talk mainly. They ask you 'how are you?' and all that, but
it's a rhetorical question, isn't it? They don't really want to know.
They want you to say 'fine thanks, and you?' so that they can start
talking about their own problems.
And the judge you anyway. They know your past and your friends and how
your mind works. Or at least they think so. So when they listen to you,
you know they're actually judging you and? Well, you probably are
judging me too. And you don't even know me, so you could think I'm a
complete idiot. I thought, because it's your job, you would be able to
really listen, but maybe you're just bored. It's your job and you do it
all the time. You've been doing it for years and people with real
problems come here and they tell you about these really challenging
problems they have. Problems that make your mind work like keys in lock
pads. And then I come along and don't have anything to say. It must be
so boring. And I don't know what to say.
Time is running out and I will go home without having said
anything.'

'I think you can try now. You can try and say what you wanted to tell
me. You have been talking for a long time and you haven't really said
anything. Maybe you should try and talk about
yourself.'

She spoke. Calmly and very professionally, like a person
talking to a very small child as if it were an adult. But not like
those parents who try and make their kids feel like grown ups. There
was nothing patronizing about the way Miss F. addressed Lucille. She
was a doctor talking calmly to her crying patient.
She had been watching and now, she thought, it was time for her to open
her mouth and let some words slip out. Some hints. A little push to a
slot car that stopped on a piece of fluff. Just something to make her
patient feel like going on talking. Nothing too direct or judgmental.
Yet.