PIECES: Chapter 1

It was nearly midnight, and yet the doctor was still in her office. Shadows were draped over every lampshade, every file cabinet, every inch of her cherry wood desk that had not already been covered by a patient’s file or a ceramic picture frame holding a photograph of one of her children. The strange, sterile scent of hospitals - something like petroleum jelly and overly-starched linen - hung in the air. The only sound within the space in which the doctor sat by herself was the steady tick-tick-tock of a grandfather clock, its long, lean white body an elegant silhouette against the gray of night.

The doctor took no notice of the fact that the grandfather clock’s glass face had been shattered by her own fist the previous day. She did not check her reflection in a mirror, even as she could have easily opened a powder compact and taken note of her fine, even complexion and unwrinkled skin. She did not notice the fact that every thought hiding within the rafters of her mind was directed towards keeping busy, not allowing herself any time to think.

Thinking, she knew subconsciously, was dangerous. In a single moment, she could discover something that had been carefully hidden from her attention and her carefully crafted view of the world could be changed.

A loud thud resounded in the middle of the doctor’s spine, and she was forced to stop writing. Her hunched back suddenly straightened, her spidery frame immediately shuddered. There was a problem. A big problem: she had slipped. She had thought.

“FUCK”, she screamed.

Even then! Even there! After midnight! Within her beautiful office with its pale blue walls and plush wall-to-wall carpeting! Problems, she realized with a violent shake of her head, were bound to find her no matter where she went or what time it was!

Fuck, indeed.

The doctor, her lithe frame diminutive in comparison to the grandfather clock that stood in the middle of the wall, put a shaky hand over her heart. Sporadic tugging at her short, limp hair produced oily clumps of unwashed mahogany brown strands within her fists.

Yes, she conceded with a sigh and a nod, problems would always find her. This was indeed inevitable. Problems have a way of finding every one - no matter how many soccer practices they attend (because mothers are expected to take time out of their busy, non soap opera-watching schedules to watch their ungrateful brats kick a ball in the grass); no matter how many donations they give to the church (because that slut their husband left them for donates two-hundred dollars every Sunday and one can’t very well succumb to defeat twice by the same whore); no matter how many hours they spend volunteering at homeless shelters (because they feel like shit and understand that watching others feel even shittier is a useful pastime).

The doctor was no exception to this rule. For even as she sat in her comfortable, reclining ergonomic chair with its leather backing and luxuriously soft cushion, her soon-to-be-ex-husband was on the phone with his lawyer, talking over the assumptions people could make of a man who received alimony from his ex-wife. Right at that very moment, as the doctor studied a patient’s medical charts, her thirteen-year old son was achieving orgasm as he watched lesbian porn and imagined his father’s anorexic-looking mistress stroking his minuscule cock. And right after, at the same time that the doctor’s white lab coat was happily flittering around her ankles and she filed medical charts away, her own growing (stomach and) suspicion of pregnancy was being confirmed by her own doctor, who had decided on working late to avoid his wife.

But none of that matters.

For right at 12:19 a.m., as the doctor sank into the buttery softness that was her black leather recliner, scanned the room wearily, and felt the need to pee, she spied from the corner of her eye a chart she wished she had filed away without noticing.

Yes, amidst the clutter of floor lamps and file cabinets, shards of glass that fit perfectly into a grandfather clock’s face, long white lab coats that energetically flittered along ankles as a sure sign of happiness, there was room for a stray manila file. There was always room for a stray manila file. Or a homeless kitten. Or a wandering toddler in a mini-mart.

“FUCK!”, the doctor screamed in agony, her attention undiverted. “Fuck me hard!”

Of course, no one heard the doctor’s rhetorical request. And even if someone had, it wouldn’t have mattered.

It was too late.

The doctor had already thought, and she continued to do so. Fucking, kids, her fucking kids, that bastard she used to be married to, the late nights spent waitressing to pay for that bastard’s dentistry degree, going to med school because there was nothing better to do with a Mensa I.Q., deciding it would be “interesting” to treat “kiddie psychos” - it all whizzed past her in a whirl of confusion.

As soon as her mind found a particular tiny crease in her brain (one called Angela Moreno), it stopped working. The doctor closed her eyes and diverted her attention long enough to think of the simple things, the things that used to matter - or perhaps, she conceded, the things that had never mattered before, but on which she had foolishly placed a great deal of importance.

This is what she came up with: her pantyhose was torn, her sixteen-year old daughter always answered the telephone with a bad attitude, the interest rate on her mortgage was too high, Nordstrom’s was having a sale in a week, the embryo growing within her womb would only suffer a similar fate: paying taxes, thinking, dying.

At 5:02 in the morning, with her head hurting from having thought too much, the doctor was at ease. She had run through all of her thoughts. Like a faucet whose waterline had been shut off, she inevitably had nothing else to give, nothing more to push through her vessel. Everything had been used up.

For the first time in her life, she had no questions. That damn kid was right… Everything made sense. When she said that… Nothing could bother her. The mind treats its own ailments. And she hated it.

So she hung herself.