The Waiting Room ...

The Waiting Room ... In the waiting room, the fluorescent light was so bright that it melted away the shadows of the crowded room and created an almost one-dimensional world, something like a late-night reflection of life trapped in a flat pane of glass. And yet, there were shadows, shadows of a different sort. Dark and deep hollows creased the gloomy faces all around me, faces with greying skin and furtive eyes that were closed or indifferent to the comings and goings of one patient after another, eyes waiting, eyes that flicker away to hide what is behind them, what is inside the man or the woman or the child — discomfort, discord, disease. I looked at them all, one by one. I remember none of them now. This waiting room was new to me. Its taupe-coloured walls, its two-tone abstract paintings, its smell of sour disinfectant — all were new to me. "Uncharted waters," Marlow said to me in the back of my mind. "Such experiences have always been, for myself, an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, mixed with the darkness of an impenetrable night. You'll remember it forever, I suspect. " "It's just a room," I grumbled silently back to the overly dramatic storyteller. "A room of fear," Marlow hissed. "A room without a compass, maybe. Not much more. I feel more lost than afraid." "Du calme," Marlow offered from somewhere in my memory. "You have been through worse, for all you say. It is always hard to find a decent helmsman, one who will not jump ship in a swell. Still, steady as she goes, hold fast to your courage, and do not give into the wilderness, whatever you do. I admit, that was my mistake. My failing, completely." Then another voice, more high-pitched, like the voice of a parrot holding court in a small pet store. You hear it, you almost understand it, and then your brain gives up on translating it into meaning. "Pardon me?" I said aloud. "I said that you'll need to fill in this form before seeing the doctor, and I'll need your referral note from your family doctor," the voice commanded as it drifted up from the seated receptionist behind a short counter. She was a woman with a sour expression, hidden partially under the veil of her downcast eyes and almost alien in appearance, with bright red blush on her cheeks and pencil-drawn eyebrows, angular and as thin as a razor's edge. Her hair was spiked, the tips frosted an almost obscene white. Meeting her anywhere but here might have caused me to pause, perhaps even to admire her as more a fashion revolutionary than bizarre harlequin, but here she heralded the way to life or death, and in such circumstances, I suppose I expected a more conservative custodian ushering the way in and the way out. "Oh, sorry, of course," I assured her, as I passed her the note from my own doctor, nothing but a scrap of paper really, and yet the backstage pass that allowed me to be here, in the waiting room of a doctor known to be one of Toronto's leading cancer specialists. "See?" Marlow all but bellowed. "This is going to be fine, just fine. Everything is falling into place. That mole? Just a mole. Nothing unusual about it at all." I silently croaked back at him, "If there were nothing unusual about it, then I don't suppose I'd be here, would I?" "Yes, well, it's grown a bit, that's all. Perfectly normal." "Grown? That's an understatement. In only a few months, it's grown from a pin prick to the size of a quarter." "Not quite a quarter," Marlow said assuredly. "More like a nickel." "I'm not sure this is the time or place for funny." "Perhaps you're right," Marlow grumbled contritely, "I sometimes let my thoughts run away ..." "It's fine," I interrupted, "but please, let me concentrate on this form. I'm really not sure why you're here at all. Really, why you?" "Your choice, I suppose," Marlow threw back quickly. "Who better? Would you want some drunken Hemingway character foreshadowing your inevitable demise? Or perhaps one of Frost's weary, sick-of-life travellers? Frankly, I think you made a sound selection. I know you think me a coward, but you're wrong about that. I do not fear the consequences of my actions. And neither should you. I am here because you fear the worst and somehow I embody someone who confronted the worst and lived to tell about it. If you did not fear the worst, then I suspect Jay Gatsby and all his idiotic revisionism would be here calling you 'old sport,' and helping you to make believe that you did not smoke for over thirty years, that you ate properly your entire life, that you exercised daily, even that, heaven forbid, you avoided all those years in the sun." The door to the waiting room opened, and yet another patient stepped into the room. I looked up, but saw only a cool, grey fog rushing through the doorway and billowing into small clouds. I shuddered involuntarily. "I do not fear anything," I whispered. "Then, accept a death sentence, if that is what you get here today." "I will. It is not death that troubles me" I assured Marlow. "It is all the preparations for death that are so troublesome." What Marlow said next was lost in the fog, now quickly filling the room. I hurried to complete the form, and I returned it to the receptionist. She glanced at it briefly, then asked me to please have a seat and wait for my name to be called. I found my way to a stiff chair close to the door, and I waited. Copyright © Kennedy James, 2009. All rights reserved.