Alone in the waiting room. Alone I used to walk the grounds next to l’orphelinat de la Nativité, through the Catholic cemetery with its headstones of moribund marble, so many alabaster Jesuses on crucifixes, where I once saw a cortege of mourners quietly walk between two juniper bushes and away from a crypt within which they had surely discarded the recently deceased and bade their farewells, and I thought that was the one place given to us to be completely alone, but then I had you cremated, Doc, just as you wanted, but you didn’t get a place, I dispersed you all over, where are you now?
The fractious wind picked up in the alley, but the bleared windows, rickety though they were, refused to rattle, it was my time to be rattled, saddled with spooks and Iblis, the angel of the bottomless pit.
I prefer angel of light, thank you very much, Satan said, the most perfect of us all, and by the way, why do you call those fatuous statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns Jesuses and not Jesi? I am aware of his tongue and its dangers, Doc, his words lead me astray. Satan said, You’re trying to deceive these mental ill-health amateurs to check you into an institution and you think I’m the one who’s leading you off the path, I swear, I’ve worked with thick protégés before but you take the cake and the rainbow sprinkles.
The Lord God always said, It is not good that man should be alone, and the American Psychiatric Association agreed, which is why it gave the world group therapy, and a couple of men came through the clinic’s doors heading directly to the frizzy redhead receptionist behind the triple windows, I could hear their commotion but not see them, psychotics should be seen and not heard, Well, now you won’t be alone for long, Satan said.
I was always alone, Doc, solitary whether I wished to be or not, ever since I could remember I wished to be lost in another, thought that somehow I could disappear into that heart of yours, take walks within your veins, wander through the bones of you. You had friends, Satan said, you loved and were loved, you must not forget that, at least not that. But did I allow anyone in, I asked Satan, and he said, Did you, does anyone?
A man with a snippet of a mustache came into the waiting room, sat in the farthest corner, lowered himself carefully into the chair as if gauging whether someone was already sitting there, refused to raise his eyes from his untied shoelaces and the frayed hems of his khakis, looked as if he had been subsisting on meals that would leave a housefly famished.
Ask him, Satan said, ask him if he’d let you in, and I snickered. Out of his coat pocket, the man fished an orange and began to assiduously defrock it with his thick fingers, concentrating as if he were defusing a ticking bomb, and when he bit into it, a tear of juice slid languorously along the spiral peel still clinging to the white rind of the fruit and dropped onto the floor. Charming, Satan said, and I said, Only the best of us come here, the man was a cleaner facsimile of Deke, asymmetrically gelled flop of blond hair, mismatched shirt and T-shirt, and if that were not enough to signal his heterosexuality, the way he claimed all space within his vicinity by spreading his legs would have tipped the straight scale. I should make wedding arrangements, Satan said, winking at me, but I was not interested at all, whatever pheromones Blondie secreted, my receptors were not impressed.
Hey, Pantaleon, Satan said, bring back the Iraqi, this one is a no-go, and he frowned at Blondie’s outstretched legs, They just don’t teach manners the way they used to, come to think of it, who do you think instilled more decorum in you, the nuns or the whores? I told him to shut up for the umpteenth time, wished I could afford a private shrink instead of the free clinic, but I was desperate, even though I had been working for the same law firm for decades, I had no health insurance, I was hired as a temp and never made permanent, and Satan said, You are a temp in life.