Distorted Mirror
"Back again, Grey?" He was finally begining to understand her accent, after about three visits. Three visits of the waiting room with its books for small children and potted plastic plants. He was begining to get sick of it. A constant repeating cycle which he went through each day or so. One more way to go, and one way or another someone stopped him. He was getting tired.
He wasn't watching her as she entered the room, but he knew what the room and she looked like. The room was made of some brown fake-plaster substance which was rough on the edges. The chairs were covered in maroon fabric and sparsely cousioned. He could hear the small children here complaining agian and again inside his mind about their discomfort with the chairs. The fake potted plants sat in strange indents in the walls, and were reflected bright unnatural green by the florecant lighting. The check-in window was to his left. The glass there was crosshatched with wire, probobly to keep people from getting the records of patients. All this he knew not from his own eyes..but from the eyes of others. His eyes beheld only the heat spectrum of the room.
He did not like her for two reasons. Firstly she smelled objectionable, somewhat like fish. Secondly her constant attempts to pick apart the way his mind worked were begining to irk at him. She was a tall woman who dressed in brown, or perhaps that was only how people saw her. She had flabby wrinkles around her face from not smiling and her hair was dyed. Her nails were long and she wore a gold bracelet that jingled a bit when she moved. He pretended to ignore her until she crossed the waiting room and touched him on the arm. He shut his eyes and jerked his arm away, teeth clenched shut in distaste.
"Hello, Georgette." It was one of the few sentances that marked their meetings each time. Climbing to his feet, he felt the childish pricking of excitement. The Voice of another person in the waiting room...a little girl who had just figured out a magic trick described in one of the kiddie books. Shutting his eyes, he wished he had the patience to hear this girl's voice much longer.
"Well," Georgette flipped through papers, he could hear them rustling. By the amount of time it took, he knew it was his file. He winced and bit his lip as people watched them across the room. He knew his file was thicker than most. He knew she was speaking loudly without intent but none the less drew attention. The flipping stopped and she grinned- he saw it in twelve angles as the various people looked at him. He also saw himself...his wrists bandaged and arms scarred. "Shall we move this to my room?"
Grey turned away from the others in the waiting room soundlessly and moved up the corridors. They were carpeted in grey, and his shadow blended into them as he saw from behind...in Georgette's preception. The first time he had entered this hallway he had stumbled against it. It was unfamiliar and cold- the heat imprints were not deffinite enough to navigate. When he had asked her to go first, she had refused. It was against the rules of the hospital- a patient could jump the doctors from behind and run. Georgette had thought he was taking drugs at the time and made note of his inability to move down the cold hallway. But now, after countless visits, he needent even try to find his way. He knew it by heart.
His trips to the psychiatric ward were growing more frequent.
****
The room was also cold and dominateing. Although the sun managed to force its way through the protective seal on the windows, the room itself remained cold to the touch. Grey was reminded of the first time he had ever been interviewed when he lay on the bed provided and stared at the desk. The situation was not all that different. The bed itself was made of a fake brown leather, and covered in white sterile paper. As if insanity might be transmitted by germs...He disliked the bed. It made him feel cheap and cliché. He knew the way she stared at him, he could hear her thoughts. She thought he was a simple case, only stubborn. Her opinion was that there was essentially nothing wrong...simply that he was a spoiled child with aggression towards his family.
She couldn't have been more wrong. Not in a million years. But the way she looked down upon him when he lay there...It made him feel insecure to be stared at like a doll on a shelf. To be dressed up as they desired him to be. All he could do on the bed was stare ahead, stare to the side perhaps at the windows which were tinted blue by the strange sort of substance stuck on them to keep out the sun. A substance which peeled in places, letting the natural colours of the world filter in a bit. The fake plant ahead of him writhed like some sort of frozen broken snake, like a fish or other caught animal stuffed and forced to hold its desired pose. The metal shelf above and behind him had books, but they were locked behind glass. He couldn't read them anyway. Not with his eyes. But there were also other things behind the glass...little plastic games with rings and loops. He wasn't allowed to touch them either. Not since his second visit.
"Do you hurt yourself for attention, Grey?"
Ignore her...just twist the red loop into the green. A twisting little game. A mouse trying to get out of a snake's belly...
"Are you jelous of your sister, Grey? Is that it?"
His hands shook a little but he kept at the puzzle. Her constant questions were interupting his concentration.
"Does the fighting between your parents concern you?"
SNAP! Half the puzzle suddenly went limp and free. All the mice out of all the snake's stomachs. A rainbow of freedom stopping halfway, where a broken red metal ring lay looped around a yellow. He could see the colours in her eyes. Holding it up slightly with a half smile, he spoke. "I solved the brainteaser."
Now they were locked in the cabinet away from him. The broken one was there too. It haunted him each time. If perhaps he hadn't become just a little too skittish, if perhaps he had paid more careful attention to what he was doing rather than letting her comments get to him, he could maybe still pass the time twisting his fingers over the little plastic games. Solving them blind.
They entered the room now. Grey never saw the back of the door. He was always looking to the window, at the cold wall. She was always looking at him. All he saw was what she saw. But this time he didn't want to lie still. He was tired of it. He eased himself into Georgette's wheeled chair and sat awkwardly, one foot beneith him and the other bent backwards, his arm draped over the back. He felt better this way, he felt free. He wasn't a china doll on a shelf this way. Georgette stood behind him and looked down, Grey held up his hand ignoreing her and unwrapped the bandages. A railroad of vertical scars covered his wrists. Some were still pink, some were still scabbed. The newest ones were stitched shut, the metal glowing faintly orange because of its close proximity to his skin. He blinked once and slowly turned his head to regard them. As frightening as the scars were, they were a sort of beauty to him. Yes...Something to mar his perfectly white skin...
"Would you like to take your seat on the couch, Grey?" She always called it a couch. No...She thought of it that way. She thought of herself as a television psychiatrist. The type who could fix things with a single statement. Grey knew she was a fake. A sham. All this time had accomplished nothing in and of itself...
"I think I would prefer the chair today, Georgette," His voice had developed a quiet tone recently, it was no longer scratchy from misuse as the people he lived with...the people Georgette thought were his family...forced him to speak at regular intervals. He had gone silently through the time when most boys found their voices twisted by changing bodies. Only he was only nine...and they were usually thirteen. But that was the way he looked now- like a thirteen year old young human with black and silver hair, thin, dressed in black with scarred arms. He was a demon.
Georgette blinked quietly as she stood behind him, watching him as he regarded what he had apparently done to his arms. Silently, with resignition, she seated herself on the edge of the bed and opened the file again. Flip Flip flip...the papers turned quietly as Grey traced his veins silently in the cold room. "Shall we begin then?"
This is my life...And it's ending one minute at a time. Grey turned the chair around to face her, and for the first time saw the bookshelf of fake red wood hung on the far wall next to the door, the hanging plant with spidery segmented tendrils and flat waxy leaves. The first real plant he'd seen here. He was seeing her from her own prespective. It intruiged him...taking his bandaged hand he rewrapped his wrist with the already bloody gauze and smiled faintly. "Yes," He said, looking up from his wrists. "Let's begin."
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