Inexorable
So, why don’t you explain again just what happened last week.
The man across the desk is speaking, again.
I look down. The off-white paint on the desk is cracked. I can flake it off with my fingernail, peeling off the thin veneer, exposing the raw wood, beneath. The paint chips flutter to the ground, like ash.
The buzzing won’t stop, and I take a slow breath, filling my lungs with sterile air. It’s like the air you’d breathe in a hospice ward. Crisp, all right, and disinfected, but not enough to mask the taste of the illness and death that clings to it and enters your body with every breath you take. Disturbing. Stale. Bitter.
Nothing. I just talked to my father.
I explain for what must have been the eighth time since I’d been here.
On the desk is a photograph, propped beside the man’s nameplate. Chrome finished. Dr. Freeman. In the photo, a woman holding a child stares fiercely into the camera. His wife, I imagine. The frame is heavy and ornate and seems strikingly incongruous with everything else here. I slowly reach out and lightly trace the raised pattern snaking around his family. An intricate metallic web, wound like the labyrinths of Minos. The kind you could lose yourself in, if you weren’t careful. The kind so many enter and never return from. Viperous.
Alexander, your father has been dead for seven years. I think it’s time you stop hiding behind lies and tell us what’s really going on.
The lighting is all wrong. It’s midday and there should be a cozy yellow glow from the summer outside the window. Instead, the sunlight barely filters through the Venetian blinds, blending with the fluorescents in cold, white slashes on the floor like prison bars to the ghosts in the tiles. It must be 85 degrees outside, but the building is air conditioned. It’s so cold I think my skin has peeled away from my bones and left my skeleton to freeze, unprotected.
Alexander, please. Answer the question.
The clock on the wall has a metal cage around the face like a catcher’s mask. Or a restraint for the criminally insane. It ticks a never-ending countdown, harmonizing with the buzzing of the bulbs. A tortuous death march, a slow and unyielding dirge. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? I look back down at the desk, where my fingers are busy beating time with the clock. The surface on my side is marred with nail marks. Scratches. Ditches. Marks of passage. I run my finger along the grooves. The woman in the photo sneers. Derisive. Taunting. The lights flicker.
Alexander…
