There was a window in the room. She was almost positive. But she made it go away, at least that was what she wanted to believe. She willed its disappearance. And the only source of light in the room is the incandescent light above, which she also willed to transfer from the much gentler white light so typical of offices, especially where serious business such as the present is conducted. She preferred yellow light, which made the room so much smaller, cozier, and of course, yellower. The mahogany desk that divided her from the serious man in the suit and glasses felt almost like the trunk of a big cannon, that she would have to exert inordinate force to turn it so the turret would point to the enemy. Who was the enemy? Not just the pawn in front of her, looking particularly stressed, each minute more so, while perusing endlessly her documents. Perhaps she could turn the cannon to her past. To her circumstances. To her environment. Or to herself.
She remembered reading about the Mutiny in India during the latter days of the British Empire. The Brits rounded up the rebels, tired them to the end of the cannon and made their comrades, who were next to take their place, light the cannon and see red screen that would inevitably form after the explosion.
How easy a death would that be. Brutal as it may seem, and histrionic too, as its purpose was, it was probably more humane than any death people have to go through these days in the hands of the authority. She was no authority. She has come to be told how bad her finances were, exacerbated by the disappearance of her husband with whatever liquidity they had shared. The four-eye creature ensconced before her, on the other side of the cold cannon body, never really stopped shaking his head and muttering the mantras of bad news. If only he could just disappear into a red smoke in equally painless ways. But it would be of no use; he was simply the messenger she had paid to deliver her news from the depths of hell.
Hell was here. It was yellow. It was not hot, well conditioned, the air. She could hear the humming of the air from above, but that wasn't the the vent of the air conditioning system, but the sorrows from other busy bodies in this hell murmuring about their own plights. A butterfly, actually two, but she was sure, came fluttering down and landed on her lap. It was really just one butterfly, but the wings seemed complex, the shadows it cast, the tricks they played on her eyes, made her think there were two butterflies. There were too many tricks. Her heart started racing, and she quickly grabbed the butterfly with her right palm and squeezed this entity. She was shocked to feel pain, as if she were squeezing the thorns of a rose, but before she could reopen her hand to see what was happening, she heard an abrupt sound.
The window returned. The room was white washed again. The AC was humming and gently releasing air into the office of not some imp but her accountant, who had just shut the books in a big sound, not to wake her from her stupor, but to reassert his authority as a messenger of hell. It was as if they had taken the elevator back to earth and that was why everything seemed normal and familiar again.
"It's unfortunate that this is happening at this time of the economic crisis, Dr. Lynch."
She could not, for some reason, really see his eyes. He was looking straight at her, without the slightest embarrassment of being the one to unleash all that bad news.
"The ongoing investigation into the clinic you and your husband ran...."
He must have done this before, though she couldn't imagine he would have more than one or two clients in her state. He probably had another job, moonlighting as an actor, or worse, a hitman. The kind that could point a gun to a little girl and pull the trigger without a flinch, could keep looking at the victim from the moment the intention to raise the gun to the moment she fell on the ground, blood squirting in the air, and even later, watching the the last breath fade away.
She noticed that his necktie was a little loose. He had been fretting too. He wasn't made of stone but he wanted to appear so. He wouldn't get in trouble, but he was somehow affected by the enormity of the problem before him, perhaps even excited. He might make it to the news. His face might appear in a two-second clip of the court scene, even better if it was drawn by some artist that conflates the emotions of the individuals sitting on the stand. To be able to shine amidst infamy but not be part of the consequences.
As his lips moved and clear words were enunciated out between his coffee-stained teeth, Dr. Lynch saw that the floor started shaking. They were on the 32nd floor of one of the tallest buildings in Midtown Manhanttan. She was surrounded by glass buildings, as viewed from that one huge window, and some of the buildings were reflecting the waning sun. There was a giant pot hosting an even more gigantic palm tree in the corner left of the demon whose lips were moving and whose messages were coming out of between his teeth. She could see the words, spelled out in Courier font, in a two-dimensional belt weaved from inside his throat and spewing out like smoke out of a chimney that dissipates before it gets anywhere, so she could see the words but didn't really hear them. To his right was a fountain, some sort of oriental fountain, big, bigger than the one they had confiscated from her house. The running water sound it was making had somehow gradually become louder and louder, especially as the floor started shaking. And as the smoke of the words that were woven from the four-eye creature in front of her thickened the air, the window once again disappeared, eaten away by the yellow wall. The sound of the oriental waterfall became white noise by now, almost as if the strange dragon-looking creature at the bottom of the waterfall was hissing steam out very loudly. The palm tree had grown rapidly, its leaves spanning the entire ceiling but yellowing at the same time, nearly camouflaged. Under this jaundice canopy, the creature continued to talk about how the numbers were crunched and the results he had found, and the government inevitably would too.
By the time he started talking about recommendations, the floor had stopped shaking. She noticed that the chair she was sitting on was very comfortable. Some poor member of an unidentifiable species had died so she could sit on its leather. But she felt no remorse. The creature was standing beside her, skinless, of course, but standing in an apologetic manner. She looked at it, and it was a big creature, size of a cow, clownish as it stood like a human, as if a cow character from "Far Side". But she wasn't sure if it was a cow. It was too bloodied, too disfigured. It was this unpleasant comportment that made her think it was the creature that was remorseful, not her. The chair was comfortable, good for her back. She was in a cool state. She wasn't sweating, though the AC in hell was functioning perfectly. She even leaned back a little, forcing the skinless creature to move back a pace to give room.
"Just two flights down is the best attorney we can recommend for this. Though I have to figure out how you can pay for him...."
She stopped thinking recently. All her life she had to think. She had to think about grades, about school, about what that cute boy wanted, decipher how he really felt, then the same process for the man she actually got, then lost, then another one, and then the even more exhausting than medical school and residence was trying to cater to all these men, men in power, men with access, men in her life, then the latest man, called her husband. It felt like all her life she was thinking about how to do what these people wanted.
That cannon was in front of her again. One wasn't, however, enough to process through all these people, all these men, and some women.
But she somehow stopped thinking, a few weeks ago, after a lot of crying and screaming and medication. That night she looked out one of the windows looking out Madison Avenue, only three blocks from the hospital where she started working after her residency. She looked out into a small park from the height of ten stories. It was dark, so she could only imagine what was there.
Not really much imagination since she had walked past and sometimes into the park. At that time of the year the trees were still carrying some leaves, also ready to dive into the ground soon to be frozen by another harsh winter. She could imagine one leaf dangling, inevitably would fall but still, somehow, in the mind of a human being who anthropomorphizes everything, clang to life for just a few more seconds even though what it really wanted was to jump head first to whence it had come. She imagined that leaf.
But memory took her somewhere farther, to a distant place and time. It was cold. She was a small child, about 5 years old. Her father, another Dr. Lynch, was sitting next to her small body, frail. He didn't care about her age or her sex, just her brain. He had placed an arithmetic workbook in front of her. His beard wasn't graying yet, she remembered, but it was prickling her soft cheeks as he looked over her shoulders to see how she was doing. She couldn't do something. Was it a division? She couldn't have been so stupid at the age of 5 to not do addition and subtraction. Multiplication should have been a cinch. But her expectations of herself had always been behind her father's, at least far enough behind that she always felt alone in his presence. He was bristling with increasing anger and frustration. She could feel his breath, but what really irritated her was his prickly beard.
Could his beard have been the reason she would never date, let alone, marry a Jew, at least not an orthodox Jew? She wasn't thinking about that a few weeks ago. Watching the imagined leaf hanging on the branch far from the ground, wanting at once clinging to safety and diving into death, she remembered the sound, louder than the one made by the creature before her when he closed the books. It was the sound of the man in the beard slamming his palm on the table, perhaps a mahogany table, on which the workbook rested. She had frowned and scratched her cheek that was being irritated by his beard, and his first reaction to this little girl's unruly behavior was bringing his big, calloused hand onto the table. The thunderous noise jolted her, and before her tears could come out, she felt her body wrung to the side so that her still dry eyes could face the wrath of God. Before her was this familiar face in the mask of ire. Or maybe the familiar face had always been the mask and the ire the real person. Her tears were postponed.
"Get out! Get out there and maybe the cold can sober you up and wipe away that insolence of yours."
Did he really say "insolence"? A five-year old girl, however smart (though not as smart as her Dad had ever wanted), could not have learned that word. How much of this memory was real?
But she was outside, in the cold, much like this late autumn night when she had her right leg dangling out the window, ten stories above that playground. Maybe it was the medication that was putting the word "insolence" in her memory. But she was outside. It was cold. She wasn't allowed a jacket. Her father didn't believe that cold could make you sick, but it could bring back some work ethics in insolent sloths. She was cold. She was shivering. Her tears still hadn't arrived. They were, unbeknownst to her then, was taking the bedtime train. She felt the dark garden where she would spend her twenty-minute exile was all blue, dark blue. (She knew it was twenty minutes because her father made her write down the time before she had left and then upon return a subtraction exercise was done.) Like the park she was looking down as an adult a few weeks ago, her family garden was familiar. She knew where everything was. But that night, the first time in her life, she chose to pretend something else. She saw a lanky farmer where the cypress tree grew from a seed taken from Jerusalem usually was. The farmer looked at her with his bluish face and smiled. She smiled back. He went back to hoeing the garden. There were fireflies, dancing with their yellow lanterns in this blue darkness. She looked up and saw her breath rising up to the full, yellow moon that cast the blue light onto them. The breath kept rising and embraced the yellow disk.
She heard a noise and turned to look in its direction. Two cats, one was theirs, the other was a strayed one, were sitting in a far corner. They were talking, smoking hookah at the same time. They looked like the characters in the illustrated versions of the Torah her aunt had given her, with much quiet disapproval from her father. The cats called out to her, asking her to join them. She shook her head and told them that it was her punishment to stand in the middle of the garden and let the cold help her regain her desire to work. The cats shrugged and resumed their discussion. When the sky and the earth both became so blue and dark, there was, in her heart, no more difference. She could caress the moon the way she caressed that cat that was getting very loud with the other one. She could pick the stars off the heavens.
But she was a good girl. She would spend the rest of her life thinking because, as her father had told her since she could start understanding English, that thinking was the only way to salvation for her people.
When she remembered that night, those twenty minutes, feeling her goosebumps and shaking mad while letting her imagination go wild, she gave out a sigh. She dragged her right leg back into the warm apartment. She stood to close the window, looking down once more at the pavement ten stories down, imagining her body falling, watching her body falling, hearing the cracking of her bones, her skull, on the insensitive pavement of this senseless city, and then she closed the window, closing herself in from the outside world. After that she simply cried herself to sleep and she stopped thinking.
She had come here, in this yellow room, only because the man in front of her called her later and established an appointment. Here she sat at the appointed time, has been sitting since the appointed time. She felt a hand, or something, touching her right shoulder as she watched those lips continued moving a little more and the smoke of words make its final run. The skinless creature showed its sympathies for her with this touch. And tears in her eyes came out again, only the first time since that night when she was reminded of those twenty minutes three decades ago. The tears distorted everything and a different room started to form around her.
