Seventeen
Monday morning, and the boy had not been heard to speak again. But his name had become a thing separate from him and with an existence of considerable adventure. It was being written and spoken aloud more than ever before in the boy’s life. Not only was the sound of the name woven liberally into the fabric of a new conversational buzzing that had fallen over Children’s Psychiatry, but its written form had spread all about as well. So it was visible on a plastic band round the boy’s left wrist, written in blue marker on a plaquet on the corridor wall beside his door, and glowing green and amber on a number of computer monitors; evidence of a growing sheaf of digital data that represented whatever information was previously known or had been collected about him since his arrival. Most all of what was known in the hospital on the subject of William Rivera had by Monday morning made its way into printed form and into a yellow folder, which itself, after suffering the through-leafings of some interested and some not-so-interested eyes, made its way into a bin below the name of Dr. A. Marelli.
As the Doctor made her way out of the elevator and down the corridor towards Children’s Psychiatry, the nurses and orderlies parted to one side against the insistence of the clicking shoes, falling into silence and narrowing their eyes as she passed. She wore that pasted-on, tensed-lip cordiality that was her only concession to socialization with the nether levels of hospital staff. And even that was a difficult concession to make. Not because she really thought she was better, but because they thought she thought she was better. Which was sufficiently the same. So after her eight months in the department, they no longer made any effort to muffle their verbal snipes, sometimes not even bothering to encode them into Spanish. But no one seemed to mind her feigned smiling obliviousness.
Atop of the stacked paperwork in her bin, the newly-placed, yellow folder glinted for attention and she took it to hand first. Behind the nurse’s station desk, a mountain of cocoa-colored flesh writhed in the confinement of a white uniform, and out of the center of the enormous head a band of pearlies emerged.
” Oh, Good mornin’ Dr. Marelli. How’s your long weekend?” Wanda ventured her ritual Monday-morning amiability, speaking with nearly convincing genuineness, and with the most delicately suggestive coloration of the word long.
“Fine Wanda. And yours?”
“Oh, I worked this weekend Doctor.”
Leafing through the folder, the Doctor entertained the verbal exchange from the minimal fringe of attentiveness.
“Is that right…anything exciting?”
“Mmmm, yeah. Little boy brought in by the po-lice. Somethin’ `bout he killed another boy, over in Co-rona.”
“Yeees. Rivera. This is it here. Well, seems I’ve got’im.”
And then after closing the folder:
“Oh, Wanda, were you here Saturday as well?”
“Mmmm.”
“What time on Saturday morning did Dr. Heimbinder see him?”
“Oh, early, I say `bout 7:30.”
“That early.”
Short is the busy day, but something, perhaps the long weekend, seemed to have shifted Dr. Marelli’s sense of routine out of alignment. The day was advancing not in a fluid gush of minutes and hours, but in spurts, with pauses in between where time seemingly stopped altogether. So far in her eight months of predictable professional life, the Doctor had come to rely on a sense of guiding pressure, like a hand against the small of her back that got her out of bed in the mornings, through whatever tolls the day exacted, then back home to bed again at night. It always came on slowly on Monday mornings, just like the radio crescendo that coaxed, never jolted you into wakefulness. It made of the work-week a string of five mediocre pearls, the next like the one before it, agreeable uniformity, comforting sameness. But today she was amiss, losing her momentum at the slightest distraction. So that already more than once that morning she had come to her senses right in the middle of some absorbing mission, with heels clicking her fervently forward, and realized she’d completely forgotten where she was going. Earlier, she had come to a complete stall in the middle of the corridor by the odd crosses that hung on the walls, as if with her sails de-winded. She suffered a moment of disorientation before the impulse returned, though slightly altered, and carried her forward again.
Presently, Dr. Marelli was standing, with her sails sagged, in front of a door. Her hand held the steel knob in an unwilling handshake. She read and re-read the printed name in blue marker on the wall plaquet. She laboured in her mind as if for some quiz-show answer; a piece of knowledge once familiar to the point of banality was now frustratingly errant, in a way that felt to her like a mischief, as if someone were teasing her with it. The silver knob, the name on the plaquet; these were on one side and she was on the other. And in between, not a great yawning chasm of uncertainty, nor some Philosophical Unknown large enough to be ignored with a shrug and walked away from, but just a thin sliver of absent information that was bordered on both sides by the known, like a strip neatly torn from the photograph of a lover; the eyes made their circuit of custom, and then there suddenly was this interruption, a Missing Little Something that made you have to start over again, and again. Back and forth, her eyes arced between the door-knob and the plaquet, reading the name, then losing the thought and falling into will-lessness. And then click or was it whoosh, and her sails billowed full once more. The void filled in, and she could get across it. It had been like a stuttering of the mind, then she finally found a finger-hole in the thought, spun it around and pushed, and finally got the damned thing out into the light. Examination. Though she remembered why she had come to be standing in front of that particular door, and the door knob now turned easily against the effort of a clarified purpose, a feeling of having been deliberately delayed plagued her, as if the pause at the door had let some temporal opportunity slip away.