Mr. Albers

The emergency room teemed with feral humans. One woman in particular was excessively wild. She was pacing, screaming, stealing things from other patients. She took a tall thin black mans silver bubble jacket and modeled it around her room. She wore white crocs with sparkly flowers puffy painted on them, green plaid pajama pants, a yellow shirt, and now, a silver bubble jacket. Her face wrinkled and sunken in, light brown hair stringy and oily. Everything about her exuded suffering and abandonment. Her gravity pulled you when she walked by. I could see into her room from the chair in the hallway where I sat listening to a librivox recording of Kant's Critic Of Pure Reason on my iPhone. I'd been meaning to get to it. I had time to kill before the doctor came around to see me. Why not? Mostly, I had to block out the babies crying and wheezing, the fiends conversation next to me who kept on trying to score food and more pain pills, the guy at the other end of the row of chairs taking loudly on his cellphone about something completely provincial but with unrelenting intensity, as if it were something grievous. Suddenly, the tightness in my chest and pain in my right lung when I inhaled seemed to worsen. Shrill squeals pierced the bubble I tried to create for myself. The thin tall black man tried to retrieve his coat, this really set the wild woman off. She lurched and struggled as people tried to take the jacket from her. Other people in the ER reacting to her as if she was fully cognizant of her actions. I tried to ignore it but the whole thing made me want to laugh and cry all at once. The pain in my chest persisting. Just as the dust settled and I was getting back into the rhythm of my audio book, I hear the doctor call my name "Mr. Albers" she said pointedly. "What brings you here today?" I explain my symptoms. She takes out her stethoscope and listens to me breath. "You sound fine" she said, could be the exterior muscles but just to be sure we'll run a few tests and take some x-rays. All tests were inconclusive. The pain persisted. They gave me a Motrin and prepared my release papers. "geez, what a fucking waste of time and money" I thought to myself. I felt cross with myself for being there. I told the doctor dispatching me that it felt like something was lodged in my lung. She sort of wrote me off as paranoid or high or something that felt completely demeaning. I felt empty and unresolved. I could hear the wild woman dervishing again through closed doors just behind me.