The hospital is across the street in the middle of a very large city where traffic never stops flowing. I keep pace with this doctor/stranger/traitor until we come to the busy corner right in front of the rear E.R. entrance used by ambulance drivers for real emergencies. Am I a real emergency? The doctor used the letters "H.I." on the telephone to describe me. I know what those letters stand for. They mean someone thinks I'm homicidal. Is this really me?
"I know what H.I. stands for," I challenge Dr. Stranger as we stride a little too quickly down the sidewalk.
"Really? Well, you must be a very smart lady then," he responds patronizingly.
Undaunted, I continue, "I know what A.H. stands for as well and S.I. Actually there are two things S.I. can stand for."
I'm onto you, Stuyvesant -- I know your damned secret code; you cannot fool me! You cannot talk over my head!
He does not respond but elects to cross against the signal. A car stops short respecting his white coat. He is Somebody. Though I am right with him, just a clip behind him, and it should be obvious we are walking together, the same car lurches forward narrowly missing me by a hair. I have no white coat. I must be Nobody.
"What are you trying to do, kill me?" I shriek at the selfish, impatient driver, a female wearing the same cold, hardened, jaded, calloused face seen everywhere on the road in this area. She is one of the teeming legions of the thoughtless whose very presence in this world is simultaneously a toxic poison and yet a sustenance. The latter only because it tends to be this type who fuel, lubricate, and even drive the wheels of commerce.
"Bitch," I add.
Dr. Stranger mutters something unintelligible though obviously meant to be calming. Something like, "Okay, okay." I cannot make out his words because he is ahead of me now, but only later does it occur to me to wonder whether he thought I was addressing him. It was, after all, his fault I nearly got hit.
The E.R. turns out to be bright and abominably noisy with angles only slightly less distorted than those of the stranger's office, but not by much. Time has been stretched to snapping limits, but it refuses to snap back. Instead it drags interminably. For the longest five minutes of my life I am left standing by the central desk, a hub of bustle with nurses, doctors, and mop-pushing janitors waltzing around one another as if choreographed. To my left are the doors through which we entered. "I'll be right back," promises the stranger/doctor as he moves around the curvature of the hub. Eyeing those triple-collapse automatic doors, I wonder to myself whether I could exit through them without being detected. Oh miss? MISS? I imagine someone calling after me, detecting the psychosis which surely haloes me like a neon aura. I imagine Dr. Stranger in pursuit, accompanied by two burly, bodyguard-sized orderlies. I imagine escaping to the subway nearby only to have the police called to catch up with me at home or worse on the subway itself halfway to freedom. I imagine a plethora of discouraging scenarios in rapid succession, but I am not in my right mind so any objectivity required to evaluate them for genuine plausibility is lacking. Thus I remain rooted to the spot eyeing the door with feral jealousy, already imprisoned without so much as lock and key - a prisoner of my condition; a prisoner of my own mind.
(* - names and places in this series are changed to preserve anonymity.)
