The Clinic
Please sit here on the bench, I will bring you the number for the consultation shortly, and when your turn comes, the professor will call you into the office.
Waiting can sometimes be suspended above us, tied to us with something rigid, like the toilet float. Then we wait for someone to trigger the mechanism that will drain all that waiting over our heads, trickling over our eyes, arms, and chest, inside and out, to announce that it is time to slide into the unexpected and to completely forget, in the next moment, about suspension, rigidity, and the float.
Other times, waiting is jagged, angular, and damp, you can even feel a cold wind whistling through its teeth. It takes you out of your own directly into the street, barefoot, with disheveled hair and a robe unbuttoned at all buttons. It is a waiting that always catches you off guard, it also has a slightly sour metallic taste, similar to premonition. Generally, the triggering of the unexpected comes from a look most often laden with guilt, there is something resentful in every sigh that regretfully informs you that this time, it is not good.
Finally, there is the well-tempered waiting, assumed, waiting with cufflinks, a tie matching the socks, and although often temperamental, radiating common sense, a slightly sophisticated scent, and conforming to the setting in which it occurs. It is what can be called “good waiting.”
He would have continued with the categories of waiting, as usual, cataloging the instances of the everyday, dissecting possibilities, finally resorting to all possible tricks to justify postponing the decision. Any decision, whether rational or not.
However, he had to hide his thoughts at the sound of the professor’s voice inviting him into the office. His turn had come. From somewhere behind the barely begun thoughts of waiting, the answers prepared at home especially for the professor nestled in his fingertips. Stepping among the practiced smiles towards the office, he began to put the nestlings in a logical order. He could almost hear the professor ruminating under his glasses: “logical order, you say…”
Before the first answer, with blushing cheeks, full of pimples and with a big red bow tied between the first syllable and the exclamation mark at the end, mustered the courage to enter the stage, a hairy face appeared in the office door, with tearful eyes, with a ridiculous hat ending his bewilderment, squeaking towards the professor in the back: “Can’t it be a Snadivonu or Tirpicescu instead, they have such beautiful descriptions, I almost cried with joy, you know, professor, I promise to finish the quota this time…” “My dear, the professor’s voice was heard, already signaling him to enter, we just promised to stick to the schedule, right? If we want everything to be fine… come on, see you next time.” The wet eyes under the hat drooped and with a gray-oil sigh, the hairy one disappeared behind him, seemingly taking with him the first answers nestled behind the curtain.
He felt therefore empty and clumsy at the office door. The professor smiled at him as kindly as last time and invited him to sit in the armchair. “How are we today? Do we feel like talking?” The first-person plural always left him with the taste of unchewed parsley stuck behind his Adam’s apple. Suddenly he felt closer and at the same time frighteningly connected to the hairy one before. After all, he was just the next case. As he had learned over time with the counting of failures, he left the parsley in Adam’s care and smiled grimly: “Fine, much better, yes, much better, I mean anyway, I think it’s better, we’ll see, at least I think so…” He felt that the logical order went to hell, he heard behind his eyes the red bow crying softly with sobs, it was not the first time when, cornered, he struggled to babble nonsense without interruption, like a waterfall that surpasses itself in the plunge into the abyss
He couldn’t stand the silence at the emergence of the awkward. He didn’t think it appropriate to play the diplomacy card, to wait for another fish to risk the feigned taste of the worm pickled at the end of the treacherous hook. He liked to explain, to explain himself, to show that there was a logic to why he had fallen into the trap, because, of course, the awkwardness appeared, impeccably dressed and with hair smelling of perfume, only when he was around. When he left his thick clothes, coiled in a heap over his soul, at the entrance, along with the hard boots that made his cold and thin extremities bleed. That’s why he entered less and less often, unburdened by fears, into the spacious and shiny galleries of the world that happened less and less often to pass through his life.
“Let’s see the results from the last session until now,” the professor interrupted his thoughts unceremoniously. The screens of the last part of his life stood with their backs to him, while, with a knot of parsley in his throat, he followed the lines of the professor’s expression wrinkles. He perceived the first “hmm” before the thought of the vocal cords dawned in the mind of the one reading the signs of his immediate past, and he was gripped by a dark green panic seasoned with buds of resentment sprouting at the thought that this technique had eluded him again. He had assumed it cured months ago when, at the professor’s instructions, he had stopped reading from the Treatise, had thrown away all his notes with slight regret, had taken all of Frunden’s books off the shelf and donated them with undisguised malice to the central library for archiving. He had even replaced the hours of studying Frundenian psychotherapy with long walks in the park with parallel alleys, during which he listened to the sounds of nature. With headphones. Recommended by the professor. They were nature recordings, specially selected for him, as a result of the previous sessions. With subliminal messages. Recommended by the professor. He found himself abandoning the unintelligible trill of birds and the rustle of leaves in the wind to decipher the message of the subliminal messages. He thought that subliminals were also waves that disturbed the environment and that if he managed to resonate…
Just then, the “hmm” appeared in flesh and bone between the screen and the professor. Following it, a weary sigh settled, over which the professor’s slightly drawling voice dripped pale yellow wax tears on his back: “It seems we don’t have very good news this time either. Should I understand that we can’t get rid of speculative logic in any way? Last time, I see here, we promised to completely give up the 19th century. Yet I see activity from Hantel and Kuegel, up to two hours a day, several times a week.” With a heavy gesture and pushing time back with his eyebrows, the professor took off his glasses and, raising his green-blue gaze, adjusted the delivery of the syllables to the new slowed pace of time: “Well, my dear, with outdated criticism, with artificial systems on the verge of pathology, and with deliberately pretentious interpretations of the natural, do we want to get better? I’ve said it so many times, I don’t want to repeat myself, all the recordings bear witness and you can consult them yourself, we have quite little time in a human life to waste it with speculative attempts. Surely you are no longer at the age to fit into the new training system, no one says to invest a fortune in formative credits now, no one expects you to forget everything you’ve accumulated… ballast anyway, in my opinion… and look at the result, look at the state of the analyses. To be honest, I still don’t see the point, I don’t quite understand what sense all those convoluted paths had, on which, as you saw, you got stuck so many times.
Breathing pause. The sigh nodded lazily. Time caught up, returned to its dragging but precise rhythm, the professor let his gaze fall back on the screen, and while his spine, barely holding his vertebrae together, embalmed itself with wax reproaches, the professor continued: “The sports credits were not used properly either. That’s not good, especially since it was so hard to find sponsorship. Imagine if you had to pay for them. With what, my dear, your life’s work wouldn’t have been enough even for these, let alone the future? Let’s not forget, the score was marginal. At the evaluation, barely… well, what can we say, here we have no excuse. It was about effort at the limit, what’s so hard about that? You know everything is monitored, nothing bad can happen. Plus, effort releases type 3 residual thinking, remember how we discussed the categories last time, I saw it’s one of your favorite subjects, just use it sparingly when necessary and… well, you have all the instructions in the course, right?”
Inspiration pause. The professor’s knowing smile revealed the wick at the top of his spine. He barely restrained himself from letting his mind wander again, a mind that was already crumpling as the wax around his spine made its weight felt. He let his heavy shoulders drop and under the burden of advice sent his thought about the fourth waiting, hastily named “the one-ended waiting,” back somewhere between his esophagus and the captive spine.
“My dear, I must confess that I didn’t expect that even after the last measures taken… and you know well yourself how difficult it was to extirpate all the trinkets left by cardboard romanticism, those endless versifications you adored at parties, how exactly is the scientific term called again… let’s see… ah yes… relational mechanism for combating self-pity or MRCA for short… such a quantitative and qualitative waste of time, my dear, no one, absolutely no one today values interhuman relationships of crying from one shoulder to another… we have so many programs for absolutely all situations, we can’t let ourselves be carried away by residuals. Well, I understand you didn’t catch all aspects of training; residual burns are taught in level I formative course, but as I said, it’s too late for you. Anyway, there’s no point in wasting our time with rhymes about dragons, girls with braided hair, petals of who knows what on water and all that… I even wrote a paper on this topic about the uselessness and danger of rhyme in child formation and development. Look, I’ll add it here in the container for next time.”
Pause of pause. One of the answers lined up behind the curtain and meticulously prepared to enter the stage before today’s session was actually a question. Rhetorical. Under no circumstances should he let that word slip out. Rhetoric had been completely extirpated along with the Greek world at one of the first sessions; back then they were done in groups; he was just starting out; they would laugh heartily at the naiveties of stoics, at all those simpletons obsessed with some chemical element, at gatherings of naked and alcoholic barbarians who contradicted each other all the time only to have a reason to sleep together later. The turn of classics came much later… Finally, the question instead of an answer would have been addressed to the professor and referred to his opinion on replacing so many systems—of course perfectible—with a single system: technological, demographic; true preemptive not corrective; based on criteria so sophisticated that no human being could decipher its algorithm, logic or finality…
“I would like for next time to truly escape,” and here the professor pressed each syllable of the word “truly” so hard that he felt the wax on his back slightly cracking at the level of his lungs, “from the entire 19th century, you will have a lot to catch up on anyway, the bibliography is piling up, my dear, and you must understand that we are now at the big hurdle, once we get past this cursed century, you won’t even feel the 20th century, it will be a breeze!” From the professor’s ears emerged some smiles with multi-coloured wings, small playful sprites from which sparks shot in all directions, in an instant they metamorphosed into laughter that scattered throughout the office, clinking against the table, sofa, and lit windows, then settled quietly and blushing from all the frolicking on the armchair, close to him. Watching them for a long time, he eventually realized that the professor had made a joke. Surely a century cannot disappear just like that, as if it never existed. And even more so, the 20th century.
With all the instructions and new program loaded into his memory, accessible at will, he found himself led to the exit and now stood with his eyes closed in the midday sun. Finally, he could say that nothing was crossing his mind. Maybe the professor was right somewhere. A squeaky rustle nearby made him open his eyes. In front of him, a beard with greenish-glassy eyes hissed from under a dirty cap: “Don’t you have any Snadivonu or Tirpicescu at home, hidden somewhere? I have Astrotinel’s Ethics hidden in a Ficus pot. Or do you want some fine cigarettes? Unique, from old times.” The squeaky bearded man grinned with honey-coloured teeth. Long after that he couldn’t understand where his reply had come from: “I don’t have classics; I’m reformed, but I’d take a cigarette if possible…” From under the cap appeared a greasy pack; bronze fingers pulled out a cigarette and a lighter illuminated the beard for a moment. He took a deep drag into his chest; it felt like it was the first time he had breathed since entering the clinic. He was going to walk in the park with parallel alleys; he was going to congratulate himself for resisting the temptation of the cap. What if it was an informant from the clinic set to test him? Goodbye credits. And then for them to think he was so stupid as to burn his volumes of Astrotinel.
With a sour mutter, the cap moved away slowly. After a few steps, it turned its gaze back. He thought that skinny guy might have some verses hidden; surely he didn’t give him a cigarette for nothing. His surprise was great when instead of the skinny guy he saw a lit candle moving away until it disappeared towards the park with parallel alleys.
