Regan

Las Meninas (after Velasquez)
It has been like this for too long, waiting for you to arrive. It’s June, for Godsake. We once found it amusing that people would doubt us. We are, after all, scientists. We don’t rely on faith nor simply hope for the best. We go out and find answers, or at least enough facts to inspire in us reason to prepare for a future that seems simultaneously limited and inevitable. Maybe what is inevitable is our limited future. In any case, I miss you every day. Months pass, and sometimes on the street if the sky opens – even briefly – I swear I see you in a stranger’s face. At the next block, coat and haircut disappear down a side street. Even if I run, I can’t catch up.

I went to a doctor at the free clinic, where they train residents on the road to healing others. At the intake exam, a pathetic stripe of a girl sat across from me and very near her mentor, a frowning woman severely lacking in bedside manner. They took my vitals, measuring my pulse with their damp hands and staring into my palate as I stretched out my tongue. They grunted and spoke in strange Eastern proverbs about my diet and stress level. Only then did they ask why I was there. I told them nothing at first. It’s easy to feel hesitant in front of clinicians. They weren’t the warm maternal figures I prefer in confidants, but then neither were you. You ran hot and cold, your yin out of balance with your yang.

“My friend has changed,” I offered. They motioned that I go on. “She had a nervous breakdown and has stopped speaking to me.”

“How long since the last communication?” The phrasing brought to mind one’s daily evacuation.

“Nine months.”

“Oh.”

“We share the same house, and it’s difficult.” I paused, feeling self-conscious.

“This isn’t normal, is it?”

“We’re not here to diagnose your friend. We’re here to help you.”

“I’m not the one with the problem. I’m not the one who broke down.”

The one in charge adjusted her posture, which had a puppetry effect upon her consort, who slouched, her cleavage sheltering her nametag. “But you are the one with the problem. You came to us for help. It’s too much for you to handle alone.”

“It is.” I began sobbing, then quickly recovered. The woman examined me with her speculum gaze. “It reminds me of other times when people have shut me off or run away, except my friend is still there. In the house. Where I sleep. There’s an eerie silence in the night, as if I’m going deaf.”

The hunchback was instructed to conduct a rudimentary check of my ears. In these moments of consultation, I felt myself retreat into the walls, which were empty and beige, neutrality expedient in the identification of blood accidentally emitted during a procedure. They spoke only to themselves, as if I was under anesthetic or the age of eight. They spoke about me like I was absent, like you are, even now. They smirked when jotting down whatever chicken scratch passes as medical analysis. The one in charge asked me to go on. It was important, she said, to get it all out.

I began the slow surgery of my soul. It lasted twelve minutes, uninterrupted. As I spoke, I multi-tasked on a level nearly administrative, and just as trivial. I made mental notes, amusing myself with observations about the younger one’s dress and fathoming during my diatribe on the cruelty of relationships that the two women likely (and rightly) felt as devoid of their bodies as I did while quietly inspected by their shiny metallic tools, christened in a liter of blue chemicals sitting on the sink. I also provided commentary on my words as they spilled forth: how hypocritical I sounded, how careful I was not to share all valid and valuable details, how I glossed over those which were the most shocking and wallowed in those most petty yet painful. The smallest infractions often arrest in me the most rage.

Once an appropriate gap in my oratory had commenced, the one in charge suggested, “Maybe this is your fault. Have you considered that? Maybe you provoke in those closest to you an incredible sense of fear that you will judge them, that you are judging them, that you honestly think what you say. Maybe they shut you off physically and emotionally because you do not show any restraint. Have you entertained the idea that you are a piece of work?” I may be remembering her comments differently than they were, but I mean to convey what she communicated, and so much of that is the clothing that naked language wears.

They stood and gave me an assurance that they -- unlike you -- would return. They were gone for only twenty minutes, as I watched the clock, its reflective surface showing me myself as in a fish-eye lens, but those were the twenty longest minutes of my life, longer even than those nine months with nary of word from you. I remember coming home each day and anticipating everything would be back to normal, that you would have emerged from the hole in which you had fallen. You were, at that time, doing all sorts of crazy things: covering mirrors and other reflective surfaces – the television shrouded in a blanket, doorknobs covered with masking tape – to prevent the ghosts from reaching you or your soul from escaping your body. That was the winter that lasted ten months in darkness. The news told us that there was no such thing as global warming. It was as nonsensical as the Holocaust. Our mayor had installed a giant prism on the coastline to reflect sunshine on the sea to us in the city. Everyone was depressed and on drugs for it, or so they claimed.

That time alone in that room felt so long because of the one-way mirror set into a recessed wall. It was both transparent, in that the patient knew from its existence that others might be watching, and opaque like a movie screen before the curtain opens. They had obviously never been on the other side of the dark glass, because their conversation was completely, disturbingly audible. I listened without gawking at the shadowy portal as what sounded like ten voices laughed and joked about my predicament. I was clearly the unstable one, they said, wondering aloud if this friend of whom I spoke in fact existed, and if so, the silent treatment was easy to imagine and understand. Someone argued in meager defense of my sanity, but she was shot down quickly as naïve and sympathetic. Her heart called into question her professionalism.

I left the room abruptly and charged down the hallway, bypassing a clerk. The gaggling troupe followed close behind, but I exited through an emergency-only staff door, which was unlocked and unalarmed. Their footsteps echoed down four flights in the steel-lined corridor, smelling of the brewery block which it had been prior to renovation, before it housed an acupuncturist, a modern design store, a Whole Foods, a consignment shop, and a pharmacy for the seasonally disaffected. I tried to open my car door with the mailbox key and escaped at last into the interior of my vehicle before they assaulted my windshield like a flock of low-flying, climate-deranged sea birds. Their beaks threatened my wiper blades as their enormous wings brutalized by side mirrors. I drove off without paying.

You have not been seen as long as the sun. I send signals on the beach with a Cover Girl compact and pat my face with a disposable powder puff when you do not reply. There is a store that sells affordable b.b. guns, and I have taken up skeet shooting scavengers on the shoreline. I go there after work, when we would have made dinner together and poured each other glass after glass of embarrassingly potent white table wine. We drank it in the summer – do you remember? -- or anytime when life seemed that season, bright and open with possibility, the sun rotating above us like a timid disco ball, slowly and effortlessly coming closer each day to destroy us.