Bunny is on her second cup of coffee when that aide who took her shoes comes to escort her downstairs.
“Downstairs where?” Bunny asks, “For what?”
Patricia—Bunny remembers her name—Patricia folds her arms and taps her foot. Because she is wearing sneakers for shoes, the tapping makes more of a patting sound; aggression that whispers forces Bunny to strain to take it in.
The ninth floor, the psych ward, has its own private elevator, which is, metaphorically speaking, no different than hiding the crazy people in the attic.
There is no gift shop on the ninth floor.
The elevator stops on the seventh floor, where Bunny follows Patricia out and then through a frosted glass door, which opens onto a deserted waiting room. Patricia points to one of the avocado-green pleather armchairs and tells Bunny to sit down. “Don’t move,” she says, and in the lackadaisical way that people walk when they have no destination in mind, Patricia moseys on over to the reception desk.
Bunny takes a magazine from the coffee table. People magazine; not a current issue, but a recent one. She doesn’t read the magazine. She doesn’t even glance at the pictures, but she turns the pages by rote, as if turning the pages were muscle memory, something she does, although she doesn’t know why. When she gets to the end of the magazine, she starts again at the beginning, but she doesn’t get very far into it before Patricia is back. “We got to wait.” Patricia drops into a chair seemingly exhausted, as if she could not mosey one more step.
“Wait for what?” Bunny asks, but Patricia doesn’t bother to answer.
What Bunny wants, right now, wants more than anything, is to keep from crying. A box of tissues is nowhere in sight, and unlike everyone else who works on the psych ward, Patricia does not carry a packet of tissues in her pocket. Bunny tears a page from the People magazine and blows her nose into Jennifer Aniston’s hair. Because a trash can is nowhere in sight, she crumples the glossy page into a ball and holds it in her fist.
After about a half hour, Bunny’s name is called, and Patricia says, “You make sure you come back here when you’re done.”
Bunny lets go of the crumpled magazine page of snot, and it falls at Patricia’s feet.
The first stop is a closet-sized room where a technician ties a tourniquet around Bunny’s arm. “You’ll feel a pinch,” she says, “but that’s all.”
As Bunny watches her blood run through the tubing and into the vial, she ideates: the bathtub, the warm water, and the vodka and cigarettes and the box-cutter and her blood draining out and her skin growing pale and how safe it seems until Jeffery comes in and ruins everything, which is the same moment when the technician says, “All done,” and she puts a Band-Aid over the puncture wound.
The examining room is unremarkable. There’s the black padded examining table covered with a fresh sheet of white paper, a black and steel scale for measuring weight and height, and a stainless steel sink. Only the medicine cabinet is dissimilar. Contrary to the medicine cabinets otherwise found in doctor’s offices, this medicine cabinet is without scissors, syringes, and stockpiled free samples from pharmaceutical salesmen. Other than a dusty box of gauze pads and a roll of adhesive tape, this cabinet is empty.
Presumably, this doctor is an intern or a resident. He’s too young to deliver bad news. However, the computer on his desk is old, very old, pre-wireless. The cables are twisted and tangled, and the keyboard has yellowed. “Please, have a seat.” He gestures to the chair set perpendicular to his chair. It is a friendly arrangement. He tells Bunny his name, which she promptly forgets. Then, he asks how she is feeling. Because his smile is kind, and surely he didn’t mean to ask a stupid question, Bunny says, “Okay, I guess. You know, considering.”
“Right, considering.” Then, as if he were asking her to do something like dance, he says, “Let’s step on the scale, shall we?”
He fiddles with the weights until the scale balances. “You could stand to put on a few pounds,” the boy doctor says. “If I prescribed a daily protein shake, would you drink it?”
“I don’t know,” Bunny says. “What does it taste like?”
“Chalk.” He’s honest. “It tastes like chalk. Forget I mentioned it.”
Bunny is five feet and four and a half inches tall. Only in this way, has she not diminished.
With her legs dangling over the side of the examination table, Bunny shifts to get comfortable. The white paper crinkles. The doctor wraps the blood pressure cuff around her arm, and Bunny says, “They did this already this morning. My temperature, too.”
He nods. He knows. He says, “They don’t tell me anything,” and he squeezes the pump. The cuff inflates. “One-ten over seventy,” he says. “Gorgeous. Your pressure is gorgeous,” and almost demurely Bunny says, “Thank you,” as if to be complimented on her blood pressure were the same as being complimented on her eyelashes. Next, he listens to her heart and her lungs. With a flashlight specifically designed for the purpose, he looks in her ears. He asks her to follow his finger with her eyes to the limit of her peripheral vision. Then, he taps her knee with a rubber hammer, and her foot jumps.
“Other than being shy of your ideal weight, you’ll be happy to know that you’re in excellent health,” the doctor says, and Bunny says, “Not really.”