Wendy Knows
“Call him, ask him.”
Nobody wants to check, ever, especially with someone like a doctor, so he finally started typing. “I don’t know why they don’t just use the system.”
“Yeah, well, you know what they’re like.”
Maybe that was too much. He stopped typing. “You new?”
“Temp. You know, Saturday night.”
He grunted. “It’s like this all the time.”
Everybody thinks he has the hardest job and that everyone else is a jackass. A nurse came up to the counter, so he typed faster.
Once I had the bottle, I wasn’t confused. I knew just what to do and where to go. And coming from the other direction in the corridor was a little brown guy in green scrubs, with cheap-looking glasses and Bannerjee on his badge. He was talking with another doctor about some barbecue place and his voice was surfer dude, all-American.
“’Sup doc?” I said, which wasn’t as funny as I’d imagined. I didn’t have a follow-up, and he looked up at me, confused but also like whatever. We did that thing of pretending to move without doing it, and then I stepped aside to let him by. Five seconds, I was on the sidewalk.
Write what you know, right, but that’s basically the same as saying “Go with it,” like Tony sometimes did. And people have to change for a story to be good, they have to learn something. But people never learn. That’s why they left the loading dock open, that’s why Tony took two like always, even though he hadn’t had any for days and could hardly move. That’s why I’m here.
Funny what you remember, though if you have to say something’s funny, it isn’t. On the ER walls there were kids’ creepy paintings I saw for maybe a second, cats as big as parents with paws like hands, meant I guess to be cute. They looked like the art I’ve been making here: crappy, pathetic. But I’m trying. I art, I music, I write, so I deserve a second chance, right?
“Remember what we talked about,” Wendy the therapist says then, which means she’s sure I don’t. I do, though. Some people here have trouble keeping the thread, but even if I’m not that smart I’m not one of them. “It’s not about getting things, it’s about you, about discovery.”
But if I’m writing what I know, I want to say, what is there to discover? And if it’s for me, can’t I want something from it? But I’m not going to say that. This is how things work: somebody tells you to do something and, when you do, it’s the wrong way. I know that, everyone knows that. So I say, “Whatever you say.”
But I know scams, and that’s what this is. Wendy’s in jail when she doesn’t have to be, not even getting paid to help us if we can believe her, and she’s trying to get us all to put the truth out there so that anyone can just reach over and take it. And it’s a terrible scam, the worst, because everyone ends up with less at the end.