Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Relief That Must Be Sat Through
The relief he was granted lives in a waiting-room chair, so he sits out every hour the clinic gives him to the minute, because leaving the seat cancels all of it and reissues the number.
- perspective: first
I have the rules of the chair by heart, which is just as well, because the chair is where my relief lives. That was the first thing said to me at the intake window, six years back, by a clerk with a green book and a kind tired way of not looking up: the relief is granted seated. It is in the green book still. I have looked. Nothing since has given me cause to argue with it, and I am not a man who argues with what holds him up.
The rules, as I keep them in my own notebook, in my own order, are these. Seated to begin; the relief accrues from the moment the chair takes your weight. Seated minute for relief minute, one for one, nothing rounding in your favour or against. Standing, for any cause, however small, cancels the whole; the accrued hour goes off like a light. And the queue number goes back over the desk into the re-issue box, and comes out again later — later in the day, or later in the week; the re-issue box is not obliged to say which. There is no appeal. There is no need of an appeal. A rule that exact is a kindness, if you can hold to it, and I have learned to hold to it the way railings hold to parks.
I held to it badly once, the first winter, and the once was education enough. Four hours seated, number 41, the long call moving up the boards on schedule, when a sister came down the aisle with a trolley and I stood — stood, mind, without leaving the room, stood only to let her pass. When I turned back the board had gone to 58, and my slip had gone the colour of nothing in particular, and the relief went out of me the way a bulb goes: all at once, and then I was ordinary. Ordinary is the true word, and I sat back down on it. The desk took my number again from a drawer I was not shown, and I began the four hours from nil. The arithmetic does not round. That is its dignity and my instruction.
So now I sit it through, the way you serve out a sentence you believe in. I see to my needs at home before I come, so the body has no case to plead. Sandwiches in the left coat pocket, unopened before the third hour. The umbrella laid flat along my knees, where no arm of it can tempt me upward. I do not stand when the radiator ticks. I do not stand for the fire drill, which is announced as a drill and has always been a drill and does not require the standing of anyone. I do not leave the seat. The seat knows this about me by now, the way a pew knows its family.
The long sittings run into the small hours, when the corridor chairs are all that is working. They keep a light on, enough light, and the hours between three and the half past pass differently — I will not say how differently, it differs the way weather differs, and it is not mine to describe, only to sit out. I keep my thumb on the fold of the slip and my eyes off the strip lights, and morning comes up on the far side of it, and the credit is on my side of the book again. Nothing else in this borough keeps books the way the clinic does: one for one, seated for relieved, no favours and no short weights. I have sat out a little over four hundred hours now. I can feel the owed column rising in me like water climbing a glass.
At every number called I fold my slip one fold further; eighths is as far as a slip will go; then I smooth it and begin again. It is to keep my hands down, hands being the whole of the temptation. The girl at the desk has seen the folding for six years and says nothing, and her saying nothing is part of the service, like the clock.
One Wednesday it will be my own number, properly called, mine across the room at last, and then I will have to stand. That is the part nobody has explained to me, and I have not dared to ask at the window, in case the asking sounds like leaving. So the question rides folded in the eighth crease, evening after evening, out and home with me on the bus: when my hour is called, which of the two lets go of me first, the sitting or the relief — and will the girl at the desk, watching a man stand up on his own number at last, understand that he is not leaving, he is answering?