PIECES: Chapter 2

The room could have been beautiful. It could have been peaceful. It could have been a haven away from the bustle of day-to-day living, a minimalist’s answer to chaos. There was no reason for it not to be.

But it was a small room with hard walls and one cheap table in its center, and the suffocating silence existing within the room flung itself from one hard white wall onto another. The subtle sheen of the walls was easily ignored by those who didn’t search for it. The calm stillness that could have been interpreted as safe was instead a strange and heavy precursor of doom.

There were cracks in those gorgeously painted walls, and an uneasiness in that fog of silence - microscopic flaws that served to deprive everything of its innate beauty, so that even “innateness” did not exist in and of itself.

Of course, there was another reason that the room lacked an easygoing nature, a more obvious excuse for its uncomfortable air: the room was the culmination of years upon years of hard work on the part of scientific researchers who desired to discern the most beneficial atmosphere in which to conduct the psychiatric evaluations of juvenile offenders.

And, oh yes, a psychiatrist had killed herself the week before in a room down the hall - that was another reason for the uneasy tone. (But the room’s construction? That was the main cause of the room’s disconcerting mood. Its having been constructed at all was a sure sign of this.)

Angela Moreno sat in a white lounge chair, feeling altogether quite comfortable as she smoked a cigarette. She faced the door, which was constructed of wood because the board of elite professionals hired to figure out what material would be best to use in the construction of a door had decided that wood was the most comforting of building materials. Every now and again, as she awaited the voice of the doctor to arise from its dormancy, Angela Moreno uncrossed her arms, dangled whichever hand held the cigarette in whatever direction her limb chose, and tapped ash onto whatever surface would catch it. By the time the doctor had looked up from the handwritten story in his calm hands, there was a powdery, gray ring encircling the teenage girl.

“You’re a very good writer,” the doctor said, the corners of his lips rising slightly as he spoke.

Angela thought she recognized praise in the doctor’s voice but had been too far removed from emotion to be sure. Instead of attempting to decipher the feelings that permeated the doctor’s deep, brisk voice, she languidly stretched a thin, food-depraved arm to her left and used the back of the lounge chair as support for that feeble, elasticized appendage. She then spied an orderly as he stuck his round, dark head into the peephole of the wooden door. And all of a sudden, streams of consciousness filtered through her brain like a short grocery list of connected thoughts. She had seen the dark head in the porthole, then noticed the exceptional whiteness of the room, the giant slab of exit way that existed in the form of a door, the escape that was defined by that portal. . .

Unavoidably, it appeared: the small, solid gray pebble of a question that never hesitated to scream into the vastness of Angela’s brain after all other thoughts had vacated: What did she have to escape to?

The doctor noticed the shadow of emotion that had flitted away from his patient’s dull eyes as soon as it had appeared. He, too, had seen the orderly (a new one, called Philips, he thought) poke his head into the glass porthole of the white, wooden door.

He focused his attention back on Angela, and forced the corners of his lips to raise slightly. The gesture seemed mechanical. It was as if he were commanding the muscles of his face to find the exact tautness that could have been interpreted as amicable. His smile was simply that: a smile. A physical indication of happiness. An attempt at appropriateness. (As most actions are.)

“I liked your story, Angela,” the doctor offered, the corners of his mouth involuntarily rising as he spoke.

Angela nodded listlessly. She was still looking in the direction of the door, but thought she heard the doctor smile. After taking her time to light another cigarette, she nodded her head again.

Somehow, (she thought by watching too much television) Angela had arrived at the conclusion that the next doctor assigned her case would be evil. This doctor, however, was proving her wrong. He was a homely man in his late fifties with gray hair and a receding hairline. His looks and mannerisms were small and imprecise, and his clumsiness could not be mistaken as threatening. He had a habit of peppering pretentiousness into their dialogue, a definite indication that he had decided on his occupation because of some vague (and incorrect) notion that psychiatry would be exciting. Add to all that that, for whatever reason, he reminded Angela of her father. (And neither men, Angela had concluded, were evil.)

There was no reason for Angela to find a connection between the doctor and her father. They shared no similar interests or habits. They did not have the same manner of speech or wear the same cologne. They did not have the same body type or facial structure. Yet Angela could tell that the same qualities were definitely present in both men. And not necessarily the small eccentricities of personality that they shared in common (like leering at the snot they picked out of their noses while stuck in rush-hour traffic). Nor their familiar lack of fashion sense (as displayed by each man's tired wardrobe, circa 1997). Not even the biological make-ups of their average male human bodies (you know: breathing, pissing, farting). What they shared was that indefinable, elusive string that binds all characteristics of a person, making them whole and keeping their personalities and bodies and selves and souls intact so that they are them.

As silence continued to permeate the room, it dawned on Angela that similarities between this particular doctor and her father had been the reason that the former had been assigned her case. But that couldn’t be right. Because if the doctor’s close resemblance to Angela’s father had truly been the reason for their pairing, he would have been the first doctor assigned her case, and this was simply not true. He was the second doctor (another specialist in the field of child psychiatry, no doubt), who would get paid for listening to Angela Moreno speak.

(This, to the patient, was another sign of humanity’s incompetence: it was she who should have been paid for allowing people to listen to her speak.)

“You know,” the doctor began, his white lab coat fading into the white walls, the white chair in which he sat, the short, white carpeting that swallowed the entire floor, “this only works if you cooperate.” He paused in expectation of a response, but the patient only continued to suck on her cigarette and make perfect smoke rings which floated above her head, so he took down some notes.

Angela shifted her weight in the lounge chair. With a deep inhalation of cigarette smoke, she eyed the immaculate mahogany finish of the lounge chair’s backing and dug the short stub hanging perilously from her left hand into that beautiful crisscross pattern of natural wood that the experts had deemed necessary in order to create an atmosphere suitable for the likes of herself. She flung her legs to the left so that she faced the doctor. Her elbows rested on her knees and her back hung like that of a hoodlum. She considered the course of events that could follow from her conversation with the doctor, and decided that it would do no harm to humor him.

“So my last doc killed herself, huh?”, she laughed, her raspy voice scratching the inside of her throat. “That sucks.”

The doctor nodded his head unaffectedly. “Something like that.”

“Did you know her?”, she asked slowly.

He shook his head.

“She was nice.”

“That’s good to know,” the doctor answered, his round, pale face wrinkling as he forced himself to smile. “We like to think of ourselves as accommodating.”

Angela chuckled at the thought of a dozen men in white lab coats, standing in a circle and deciding on the best decorum of the hospital staff. “I’m sure you do.”
The doctor jotted down a few more notes in his notepad, and the patient grew impatient. She tilted her head, and as she did so her chin was raised, as were her eyebrows. The shallow pattern of her breath hinted at the constancy of her smoking, and her eyes opened up as if she were in need of someone to pick an eyelash out of it. All of this, along with her rigid spine and crossed arms, betrayed a frustrated boredom.

She swallowed in the doctor's behavior like it was cod-liver oil: The way his head bent over his notepad as he diligently scribbled, the lack of attention he lavished on the patient, the slackness of his posture even as he hoped to convey a subtle air of authority. A deep inhalation of carcinogenic smoke sunk Angela's moodiness into her practically non-existent gut, so that when she spoke the only emotion conveyed was a shadow of synthetic haughtiness.

"So?"

“So, what?”, the doctor asked as he raised his head.

“Am I getting out of here any time soon?”, Angela asked simply.

The doctor winced. “You’re a smart girl, Angela,” he said sluggishly as he watched the patient roll her eyes. “Your I.Q. is off the charts. I don’t know why you play these cat and mouse games when you know that I know what you’re capable of.”

Angela threw her head back and laughed. “ ‘When you know that I know what you’re capable of,’ ” she repeated. Her small stomach rose slightly and revealed its hardened tone and structure. “Do you realize how funny that is?”, she asked, her catlike eyes twinkling as she casually stretched her limber limbs. “It’s like that episode of Friends when all the characters go around saying, ‘He doesn’t know that I know that he knows.’ ”

The doctor smiled meekly. “Okay.”

“Don’t you watch TV?”, Angela asked, as she tucked a soft tuft of jet black hair behind her ear.

“No,” the doctor replied quietly, “I don’t.”

“A man after my own heart!”

The doctor narrowed his gaze, blinked as if lemon juice had been squirted into his eyes, and cleared his throat. “You do know that Dr.-”

“I know her name.”

“Is there a problem with saying her name out loud?”

“Sure there is,” Angela replied, smiling. “But then, if I explained what the problem with that is, I’d have to explain the problem with everything else.”

“ ‘The problem with everything else?’ ”, he repeated lifelessly.

The psychiatric patient nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” she whispered confidentially, “but there are a lot of crazy people out there.”

The doctor raised an eyebrow at the suggestion. “I see.”

After a moment of deliberation, the doctor said, sternly, “Angela, your case is under review. If I say so, you could be put in jail for an extended period of time.”

“Yes,” Angela replied curtly, “I know.”

“And you also know that I’m talking about jail, right? As in, an actual cell?”

“I know what jail is.”

“Then why aren’t you even attempting to use that intellect of yours to come up with more than some mundane remarks about nothing at all?”

The patient shrugged. “In the end, everything we say is a mundane remark about nothing at all.” She paused to laugh, then, noticing her cigarette to have burnt out, lit another. “Go on and say it,” she dared the doctor, puffing on her cigarette as she did so.

“ ‘Go on and say it’ ?”

“Stop repeating every fucking word I say!”, Angela demanded, pounding her fists onto the overstuffed arm of a chair. “There! I’ve said it! I’ve said ‘fuck’. Now the gloves are off. Now say it!”

“Excuse me?”

“People tiptoe through life when they should be jumping in it,” Angela dully remarked as she stretched out her thin arms. “After I told you that everything we say is a mundane remark about nothing at all, you wanted to say, if only to sound conversational, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’. But you didn’t say a goddamn thing.”

Obviously amused, the doctor furrowed his eyebrows. “And how do you know what I was thinking?”, he chuckled. “Are you a psychic?”

“No,” Angela said confidently, “I’m God.”

She began to laugh, but the certainty in her voice stifled her laughter, so that all that was left was awkward silence.

The doctor, who was very much perturbed with the turn of events, broke the silence with acidic thoughts. “Do you realize that you’ve committed a murder?”, he asked.

All emotion evaporated from Angela’s face.

“Yeah,” she managed to answer through lips that were suddenly chapped, “I’ve realized that.”

“Do you realize that you’ve spent the last year in a government-run psychiatric ward?”

“Yeah,” Angela replied, feeling suddenly naked even though she wore pajamas. “That one’s kind of hard to escape.”

“And the fact that you’ve murdered someone?”, the doctor interjected, grimly. “That isn’t hard to escape?”

For the first time since Angela had been led into the white room, she was uncomfortable. Her assured countenance fell, and she closed her eyes.

“Angela,” the doctor said as soothingly as possible, “you’re a smart girl, I know that you know exactly what to say in order to get out of here.”

“You’re just wondering why I’m not saying any of it?”

The doctor nodded.

“Maybe I know that I’m not rehabilitated?”, she offered, before taking a drag from her cigarette.

The cool air being funneled into the room seemed to roar.

“Is that what you think?”

“Isn’t that what my previous doctor thought?”

The doctor sighed. “Does that matter?”, he asked, resignedly.

“Doesn’t it?”

And then their session was over before it began because Angela was no longer talkative. She had realized early on that this doctor was not like the last, but to what extent this was true, she hadn’t been certain. Now everything was clear, and she didn’t know what to make of it. Her mind was full of information and yet she knew that none of it was useful.

It was as if Angela were being suspended in thin air by a thin cord of sanity. There was nothing for her to do but let gravity do its job.