Chapter 3

The surface of the chute was extremely slippery which made her accumulate speed almost immediately despite her futile attempts to grab on to any protruding parts for dear life. There was unfortunately nothing to hold on to. She swiveled down the glass surface, screaming and hyperventilating on equally spaced intervals. Had her violent fall into the dark tube not been so sudden would have allowed her the time to consider her claustrophobia and probably scream even louder. Just about the time she was beginning to hyperventilate herself out of consciousness though, the screeching and swiveling abruptly came to an end with Nina finding herself suddenly and gratefully into the light, having landed onto a jagged, moist surface, surrounded by some of the most exquisite smells she had ever encountered. The place emanated the aroma of what she imagined the laboratory of a hungry alchemist with gourmet affiliations would.

 Still she was too dizzy to properly classify the space she was in at first. For a minute she even felt inclined to lay onto whatever it was that had cushioned her fall squeezing her eyes as shut as possible in order to convince herself that all this was only being a very realistic, bad dream. Nina was never one to wallow in self-deception though. With a forceful exhale she pushed herself up slightly and opened her eyes to find herself eagle-spread onto a huge bowl of chopped potatoes.

     Her vision remained blurry. Panting and trying hard not to redecorate the sprawl underneath her with whatever was left in her stomach from this morning’s French toast she tried to make sense of her new surroundings. Several long, white hats were bobbing up and down around her and several sets of eyes were blinking quizzically towards her general direction. Nina fought back an outgoing gulp of half-digested toast, inhaled through her nose and tried to steady her vision. All the chef’s hats around her had stopped moving and were turned towards her. “Another kitchen”, she said in a low voice.                                                                           

Nina’s head had finished spinning and now she could clearly make out all the chefs in their whipped-cream-white hats, lost in fits of laughter. Some had stopped what they were doing and were holding their bellies while others were still stirring broths, chopping shallots or sizzling butter but one thing they all had in common was that they were all laughing at her.

A middle-aged woman whom Nina immediately concluded must have been the head chef on accounts of her authoritative demeanor and lack of silly hat came and stood in front of the chopped-potato bowl and proceeded to look at her in contemplation, with arms folded and an altogether mocking manner about her. The woman was lanky and very beautiful with short, red hair that was crowning a delicate face and big, intelligent, green eyes.                                                                                                                                           

“I presume one of my many competitors ‘ave zent you to spy on my recipes or poison my guests…but no matter”, she said in a thick French accent as she waved her hand and gracefully pirouetted to face the other way. “Come, come”, she motioned to Nina who had peeled herself out of the large bowl that was wobbling dangerously out of balance with the help of two chefs and was trying to clean her jeans of any stray potato bits.

Nina thanked the two chefs for their help with an awkward, apologetic smile and raced behind her. She carefully passed by a chubby cook throwing white wine into a blistering frying pan producing impressive orange flames, the warmth of which colored his face and her cheek as she rushed by. On the other side of her she had barely enough time to notice a different chef slicing a green pepper into thin strips on top of a wooden board loaded with other segmented peppers of red, orange and green. The chef pushed down the vegetable with the tips of his fingers and at the blink of an eye he moved the blade noisily back and forth, thinning it further and further, at such close contact with his digits to cause Nina to hold her breath in expectation of an accident. She imagined the tip of a finger served with some poor bloke’s ratatouille.  

When she finally reached the head chef, she found her standing in front of a gas stove peeling what seemed to be a very large, bumpy lemon. The peel quivered around the pallid flesh of the fruit in one symmetrical spiral and then was thrown theatrically into a small copper pan filled with boiling water that had been sitting on the stove, right underneath the whole operation. Nina started to phrase a haste explanation for the chef who stopped her with an abrupt gesture of her hand. She then tacitly pointed towards the peel in the pan and leaned above it while gently sniffing at the rising vapors. Nina noticed that each one of her fingernails was painted in a different color of nail polish. Cautiously, she bent over the pan as well. The yellow peel was dancing around the bubbles of the water releasing an unctuous liquid in the process, in small drops that remained on the surface for a few seconds and then lost their substance to the heat while producing an odor that was a heady mix between a pear and a lemon.          

 “Beautiful, non?” the chef said in a soothing tone, batting her eyelashes in exact imitation of a workaholic butterfly rushing to meet her appointment with a newly-blossomed carnation in mid-spring. If chaos theory was to be taken seriously, somewhere on the other side of the world a hurricane was coming to life.

“Well, yes. What kind of fruit is this?” Nina agreed with her, inquiring further on the unfamiliar fruit.

The head chef smiled at her kindly. “’Ave you never seen a quince before?” she asked. Nina moved her head to give a negative response. “’Ow very strange you are” she exclaimed. “But zat is not why you are ‘ere.  And since you ‘ave gone through the trouble of dropping by…” said the chef to loud snorts in the background, “I will try to give as best an explanation as I possibly can.”                                                                      

“An explanation to what?” Nina asked in a slightly annoyed yet fearful tone. Thoughts of immediate events kept buzzing inside her head from their sheer craziness to the fact that she was, so far, being misunderstood and somewhat abused by everyone she had met since the elevator malfunction. What was more; all these new acquaintances seemed to be two sandwiches short of a picnic. She was vacillating between making a hasty escape out of the kitchen and feigning interest in whatever explanation the head chef had to offer. Nina, being raised on good manners, decided on the latter.     

“An explanation to ze secret of my success of course!” said the chef, nonchalantly. “Alors, pay attention” she continued, while at the same time grabbing a radish and starting to carve a shape out of it. “We ‘ave been conditioned since childhood to think of life as a series of steps zat lead to a supposed final grade which we call success” she said in an onerous tone. Nina blinked at her twice and gave a faint smile.  She was guessing that her participation was not required. “Success, of course, translating to money, a lot of money, non? Enjoyment is thought of as bad because it is not productive you see. Zey allow you to enjoy only what you buy because it comes from strife of earning money which is what must be your goal in life. Therefore, enjoyment becomes something artificial you must be given permission for and work ‘ard towards. Hence, people ‘ave very little energy and even less taste for pleasure” she continued handing the radish that had now turned into the shape of a rose to Nina. She mechanically looked at the transformed radish and then at the chef again. She was genuinely interested now.                                                                                        

The head chef started gutting a trout that was lying open-mouthed in the sink next  to the two of them and continued with her ratiocination more warmly now.                                                                                                                                                        “I love what I do. It is anything but a chore and I couldn’t care less about success or ‘ow much money I make. Frankly, I don’t even care about whether my creations will be edible. I ‘ave little interest in the result you see, I simply enjoy the process.” The chef now turned to face Nina, hands dripping with trout-gut. “I love ze smell of fish. I adore ze curdling of ze cream, ze zing of ze lemon and ze snap of ze pea. Zere are no secrets recipes and no magic ingredients” she exclaimed loudly, creating imaginary circles and exclamation points with her open palms in the air, with bits of trout-intestine acquainting themselves with the kitchen environment and the chefs working behind her . “And zat is zat” she concluded as she stomped her foot and washed her hands noisily at the aluminum sink, swiftly strolling to yet another part of the kitchen.                                                                                                                         

Nina stood frozen next to the violated fish and took in her surroundings once more; the dancing chefs in their white uniforms, the rows of jars that covered the shelves, the mountains of fruits and vegetables and the symphony of shiny, metal instruments hanging around her. All over her the walls and ceilings were painted in black. Recipes were scribbled in white chalk all over them and on every other available surface around her as well.

Nina felt strangely exhilarated by it all, but mostly by what the lady had said and she wanted to hear more. She moved over to where the head chef was leaning next to a tall, blond pastry-cook with a red nose that was arranging multicolored macaroons on an oval, sky-blue tray and beamed a large, friendly smile at her to encourage any more mental ponderings she might have to offer.

The head chef seemingly oblivious to Nina’s intentions turned and offered her a fluffy, brown macaroon with green swirls all around it. Nina accepted the offering swiftly to avoid any kind of belligerency and munched on it carefully. The warm, nutty flavor of sweetened cocoa and butter disintegrated in her mouth with a following of something verdant and lush that exploded forcefully on top of her taste buds and tickled her nose. “Chocolate?” Nina said squinting “and, um… wasabi?”                                    

“Very good!” replied the head chef, grabbing an orange one so fast as to make Nina wonder whether the thing was actually alive and she had to stop it from getting away. The chef began taking small bites out of it with obvious pleasure. “Saffron, my favorite” she said matter-of-factly.                            

“I need to say though” Nina offered sweetly while swallowing the last bit of her macaroon, “you are very fortunate. What you are describing, professionally, is the ideal not to mention very beautiful but not exactly realistic for the vast majority of people.”

To that remark the head chef banged both her hands on the counter in front of her causing Nina to jump back in surprise and began laughing a big, hearty laugh that forced her small chest to heave rhythmically up and down. She was so enthralled in laughter she was almost choking on her saffron macaroon though there was nothing contemptuous about her manner. She simply appeared to be highly amused by what Nina had said. When she finally settled down again though, her expression turned a little severe as she turned to face her once more.                                                                                         

“What complete nonsense” she exclaimed. “I know you seldom realize and are never allowed to zink of ze fact that ze things you have to force yourself to do are zings you should not be doing. It is not natural! Everyzing in nature simply follows its course, it flows…” the chef continued grabbing some boiled spaghetti out of a pan and waving it around. “Even ze parts of nature people regard as abhorrent simply because zey scare zem happen naturally and without force. What I am suggesting is very realistic. What you are suggesting is unnatural, unrealistic and in some circles, sheer madness” she said, throwing the wobbly spaghetti behind her. “For example, what did you want to be, as zey say, when you were growing up? Surely not a culinary spy?” the chef asked, knitting her eyebrows together.

Nina, ignoring the last remark, answered as truthfully as she could. “I wanted to be a pirate. But that would be impossible. Real pirates do not exist anymore.”                                                        

“Whatever you can imagine in some plane of reality actually exists” said the head chef. Nina gave her a mocking grimace.                                                                                            

“I will prove it to you” she continued. “Can you zink of a new color?” she asked fixing her gaze at her. Nina did not know whether she was supposed to answer her or not so she remained silent. “But of course not! It does not exist. And zat is why you cannot imagine it.”                                                                                                                                 

“Fine”, replied Nina, dissimilating defeat. “But I don’t think I want to be a pirate, nevertheless.”                                                                                                                              

 “I see”, the chef said rubbing her chin. “So, what is it zat you enjoy doing?” she purred with the word enjoy melting in her mouth like the molten core of a hot, chocolate soufflé.                                                                                                                                                

Nina looked at her dejectedly. In the span of her 25 year life she had performed various functions, collectively called ‘jobs’, in which she had been clad in black uniforms and comfortable shoes in order to serve people with food and drink of minimum nutritional value, assisted customers in buying products they did not actually need or sat in front of computer screens performing tasks which required very little imagination and absolutely no decision making on her part. All of these jobs were at worse frustrating and at best abysmally boring. Nina concentrated hard to identify the moments that she had felt any kind of lasting enjoyment during her time as an official adult and in identifying them it became abundantly clear how very few and far in between these moments actually were.

And how about her desires? Had she been true to them? Slightly, almost, maybe. Even her love life followed the same pattern. Usually in relationships one hears of how magically they start and how difficult it is for those involved in them to make compromises as they unfold in time. Nina would always start off with the compromise and then patiently wait for the magic to drop by unannounced. Needless to say she always got stood up my magic and what she was left with was someone expecting her to make more compromises on top of the ones she had made at the start of the relationship which after all he was not at all aware had been made to begin with. She suddenly felt cheated. She had been sabotaging herself with momentous precision. She even had momentary images of her inner self performing acts of sabotage inside her brain. A little Nina bouncing around amongst folds of grey matter planting booby-traps. The way she pictured it her inner Nina was running around wild wearing a pirate outfit. At least someone is having fun, she thought.

She had been sitting transfixed by these realizations for a few minutes before the head chef started to gently shove her towards the back exit.

“Well, you should go off and discover what it is you enjoy zen, instead of crashing into peoples’ kitchens trying to steal zeir recipes” she said opening the large metal door.

“You don’t understand!” Nina protested snapping out of her reverie. “I never intended on sliding down the glass chute or stealing any of your recipes. I was pushed down beyond my will!”                                                                                                                                               

“Zat, mon cherie, is your problem, not mine” the chef said pushing her through the exit door and snapping it closed behind her.

Click.

Chapter 2

Dr. Stingworth’s secretary sitting on his desk opposite the couch where Nina and another patient were assembled in waiting was wearing a very serious look, the look of someone completing a very important task. Nina was suspecting that he was not actually working on anything at that moment and was surfing the internet instead. A moment ago though he had been cleaning the crevices in-between the buttons of his keyboard with compressed air. He looked like one of those people she would, perhaps cruelly, characterize as ‘simple’. Being ‘simple’ in her book though, did not require a weak knowledge of chemistry and physics. On the contrary, for all Nina knew, Dr. S’s secretary could have been the valedictorian of his high-school class. It did require little or no sense of humor however as well as a severe lack of original ideas and decisions that had not been pre-improved by the social and family panel. Nevertheless, she did not want to be harsh on anyone since she understood that the world does not loom as such a friendly place to most people and that life at times can turn out to be somewhat scary and uncontrollable, especially if you watch television.                                                 

The other patient next to Nina, a small guy in his mid-forties with a shaved oblong head and a beer-belly got himself irresolutely out of the sofa and switched off one of the three art-deco lamps lining the corridor that led to the waiting area. He made a small speech about how it would help save the planet as he shuffled back to the sofa with his grey, chord trousers folding and rubbing against each other in-between his thighs in a perpetual cotton-fraying ballet. As she observed him take his place back on his seat, Nina thought that this guy must definitely be watching a lot of television.

For some reason she was never able to enjoy T.V as much as the majority of other people seemed to. In fact, most days she failed to see the meaning behind the preponderance of things that she did or was supposed to do. She had a theory that maybe governments should publish handbooks to be distributed among people underlining the meaning behind most repetitive-strain-injury activities modern-day humans sleepwalk into.

Maybe there is no actual meaning to our collective behavior and that’s just fine, except it isn’t, she would hypothesize in frustration. I’m missing the warm and fuzzy feeling of ‘purpose’. Call me crazy but ‘purpose’ puts the spice in the carrot cake of life. But what is the essence of ‘purpose’ one would crave for? How does it taste, smell or feel? Does it squeal when you pinch it? Societies in the past had this problem somewhat resolved. One could choose between dying for a greater cause, speculating on the meaning of life or love, creating a great artistic masterpiece, instigating a socio-political revolution or becoming someone’s muse and inspiring them to instigate, speculate, create or die. No matter how hard I try I cannot inspire my television set into projecting something worth watching.                                                                                                                                                              

                    Unfortunately, pondering on the meaning of such things does not usually provide one with quantifiable answers to the major problems in life such as dealing with being raised by parents that would never pass the psychological evaluation had they ever wished to adopt or whether the avoidance of pain on an everyday basis would actually have catastrophic results in the shaping of one’s personality, a hypothesis she was being called to put to the test at that moment since Dr. Stingworth’s secretary was now motioning her towards a small, white door behind which she could distinctly smell the odors of which nightmares are made of.                                           

Nina fumbled a bit with the antique, brass door-handle which was embarrassingly starting to slip from her sweaty hands and after a moment of semi-private quiet desperation pushed it down and entered Dr. Stingworth’s torture chamber. She smiled feebly at the stout, dark man in the white robe and introduced herself while immediately proceeding to stagger all the way to the leather dentist’s chair and positioning herself onto it, mustering all the strength she possessed to appear normal while doing so.

If someone were to ask her now she honestly would not remember much of what had happened in the next fifteen minutes of her lying with her mouth wide open and Dr. Stingworth probing around it with calm yet steady interest. She would vividly remember though that the doctor had very bushy eyebrows, smelled of cloves and after the fifteen minutes of mouth-examination concluded that she was in no need of any obtrusive operation and just had to be patient enough to allow her wisdom tooth to make its way into the world without her interference. He also prescribed some painkillers though at the time she was in such a state of elevated joyousness that she probably did not even need them.                                                                                               

As she glided out of the office and down the corridor to the elevator, Nina had already started thinking of the best names one could give their pet parrot were they to be the captain of a pirate ship. She had only gone as far as “Stevie” as a potential pet-parrot name when two things simultaneously happened. The elevator buzzed to a halt and “pinged” its way open while a huge man wearing a black, velvet top hat waddled his way down the corridor and right next to her much faster than she would have ever thought possible from a man his size. As soon as the elevator doors were fully open, the top hat man had already positioned himself squarely in the middle of it and had reached out with an impossibly long, round arm to push all the buttons that the elevator had to offer.  

The whole scene had immobilized Nina to the outside of the elevator doors, staring at the whole thing with complete lack of self-consciousness and total forgetfulness of the fact that up to a moment ago she had been trying to put as much distance between herself and her dentist as possible. The lethargic zooming of the doors as they started to close snapped her out of her trance and she jumped into the cubicle with an impressive yet slightly awkward vault.                                  

Nina’s demeanor seemed to entertain the giant gentleman who after giggling girlishly for a few seconds, turned around to the front left corner of the elevator where she had perched herself for lack of breathing space and beamed a large friendly smile. The folds of fat on the man’s cheeks pushed back to reveal a dazzling set of white teeth and folded all the way up to a pair of friendly, mischievous black eyes. He loomed even bigger up close than he did at first glance with nothing about his attire appearing to be out of the ordinary, the sheer volume of it aside, besides the top-hat and the pockets of his coat which were bulging and full to the brim with something that she could not perceive but made a scraping noise every time the man moved. Nina smiled back at him as casually yet friendly as she possibly could and then proceeded to stare intently at her shoes. She continued to stare at her sneakers, mentally arranging to replace one of the cord laces which had been worn to roughly a snapping point, up until the elevator stopped moving and the doors opened again to another lively ‘ping’. Nina decided to prolong her shoe-staring so as to not insult the robust man by awkwardly watching him exit the elevator so she froze into her position.

The seconds passed on with the man having departed, allowing the square elevator cubicle to bounce up a few centimeters yet with no sign of it springing to life again. Nina cast a side-glance around to determine that she was alone and pushed the button that would get her to the ground floor. The knob refused to light up and maintained its stance even after she had forcefully pushed it another five or six times. She pressed and flicked all the other available buttons and switches as well but they seemed to have sided with the first button and refused to cooperate also.                                                    

“Technology is not my friend today. Well the stairs never let me down” she murmured and made for the exit though she didn’t go far. Nowhere in her immediate surroundings were there any sets of stairs or anything resembling Dr. Stingworth’s building whatsoever. Nina was glued to the edge of the cabin with palms that were beginning to sweat again. In front of her unfolded a long, spiraling corridor brightly lit by small, crystal chandeliers hanging off the ceiling every few meters and covered with thick, wall to wall carpeting that her feet slightly sank into as she carefully started to walk on it. The corridor spiraled to the right and continued for another fifty meters onto a small opening that led to what seemed to be a set of steps, the sight of which sent a jolt of relief to Nina’s adrenaline glands which up to that point had been working overtime and made her almost run towards it.

The steps seemed to be extending to quite a long way down and were made of unfinished concrete which gave them quite a stark contrast to the previous lush, carpeted corridors. She was jumping down the steps as fast as she could at first and with diminished force the closer she got the landing which, frustratingly, led not to the ground floor of her dentist’s building as she had hoped for but to a new equally unfamiliar corridor. The entryway of this new corridor was almost completely dark and she could feel a reverberating hardness and coolness about the area. Her small footsteps resounded with dry thumps on the floor. To her right was yet another flight of stairs made of what appeared to be a darker shade of concrete illuminated by a grey light that seemed to be coming from quite a way up.

Nina climbed expectantly up to a hallway and then, more nervously than expectantly, immediately more stairs. She was beginning to think at that point that the situation was getting beyond ridiculous when she spotted the source that the light was coming from. A heavy, smooth, metal door with a round light-fixture directly on the ceiling above it was sending waves of light that reflected into a dull, milky hue off the shiny grey surface. There was obviously nowhere to go but through the metal door. Nina was never happy to be faced with ultimatums but admittedly she was left with little else to do. Her sense of dread had also been replaced with an itching curiosity. What are the chances there is a dentist’s practice behind that door anyway? , she thought to herself with a smirk and pushed the weighty door open.

She was immediately faced with a swirling dance of chaos.                                                                                                          

Inside the space she had just entered which appeared to be a large office were “ten” she counted “no, nine” identically dressed in what seemed to be waiter outfits young men and women running around frantic and carrying large, square metal trays. The room was expansive and outfitted with all kinds of office equipment and oddly enough various paraphernalia one would expect to find in a kitchen. Besides the lack of coherence in the type of equipment the room held there was one immediately identifiable unifying theme about the place and that was the color grey. Everything Nina could see was finished in metal or plastic and jointly made up a sea of clean, polished grey. In fact everything about the place was immaculate and in stark contrast to the floor that was strewn with banana peels and milk cartons. The waiters were all dressed in grey as well and were of various shapes and sizes. Despite that fact they all had the same “sucking on a lemon” pout and a frantic, crazy-cow look in their eyes while displaying the exact same pattern of behavior, running about shoving pieces of food on their trays with sloshes of liquid and crumbs of bread flying all around them. Whichever edible item they could no longer fit onto their serving tray they would shove inside one of the pockets in the front of their aprons, an apron just like the very one a tall, thin waiter with curly  hair  and puce, under-eye circles was tying around Nina’s waist.                         

Nina turned around to face the crazy eyes of the man who had crossed so far into her personal space and started to forcefully protest only to be faced with such a pleading look of agony that she immediately felt a surge of real pity and refrained from punching him in the gut as was her initial intention. The waiter quickly introduced himself as ‘Three’ and sensing Nina’s resurging agitation started to phrase -or rather anxiously scream and spit- an explanation for her.

“Seven fell into the cayenne pepper soup. He has locked himself in the bathroom with a sneezing fit and there is absolutely no way for him to be ready by serving time. That leaves nine of us, NINE” he said, his voice rising an octave with the last word. “With you, we make ten again, hopefully he will not notice and even so anything is better than us missing one because we all know what happened the last time we had a situation like this” he continued with an unmistakable tinge of hysteria in his voice while shoving random pieces of what Nina identified as components of breakfast on a tray and handing it to her. Nina was trying to hold on to the tray that was being violently laden with accumulating edible items at a hasty pace while her brain screamed out emergency signals exhorting her to make a run for it as fast as possible. Instead of following her immediate instincts she decided on doing the grown up thing and demanding further information.

“Why is it so important to be ten of you serving breakfast? No one can possibly eat this much! And who is this obsessive-compulsive person you are preparing all this for anyway?” she asked raising her voice to be heard over the ding of cutlery and china. Three turned around to face her looking surprised and slightly repulsed.

 “Barabbas Barley is a very important man. He likes things to be symmetrical and his favorite number is the number ten” he said in such a manner as if he was explaining the principle behind a complex mathematical form while throwing some blueberry muffins on top of a plate of sausages on Nina’s tray and continued. “Mr. Barley is in charge of choosing the color of the television program backdrop, daily. We all bring him his breakfast every morning and he chooses the one he likes the best”, he continued in a wave of pride colored with light psychosis.

 This whole scene, as unusual and impossible given the circumstances as it was, reminded Nina of the time she was not so happily employed as an office-worker herself. More specifically, it brought her back to the daily, half-hour lunch break during which the few people in her office that actually went through the trouble of cooking a meal or had someone cooking it for them congregated to a small, basement kitchenette in order to microwave and eat their lunch. She happened to be one of those people, mostly due to her aversion to take-out and cold meals. The lunch break topics of conversation unfortunately were always the same and revolved around the misfortunes of adult life or marriage. Since Nina was neither married nor felt in any way misfortunate had usually nothing to say and concentrated on eating her casserole or pasta without getting tomato sauce on her dress.                                                                   

Most people, she had noticed, with the majority of her co-workers included, had a rather specific way of making conversation. Each person would state their own opinion on the matter at hand completely disregarding what anyone else had to say or whether they were talking at the same time as them. The winner would be the one who got to speak for the greatest length of time and there would be extra points awarded for loudness and obtrusive sarcasm. Sometimes, and mostly just at the point when the conversation would start to heat up, their boss would honor them with a surprise visit, strolling in to take his place at the center of the lunch-table and then something that never failed to amaze Nina would happen; discussion would immediately stop and all of those seated at the table would patiently wait for him to bring up a topic of his liking which he would then of course thoroughly analyze for educational purposes. She still remembered the twenty minutes of escalating verbal diarrhea she had once endured on the topic of religious fasting that her boss at the time had been undergoing and the strength of character it apparently required. She in fact most vividly remembered how he had delivered his speech with great conviction while constantly eyeing her spaghetti Bolognese with lustful intentions.

The image of those steady-employment days flashed quickly by Nina’s mind as she shivered and shook it off into oblivion again. She looked around once more at the nine frantic waiters running around her with a surge of understanding and pity, deciding that the situation she had mysteriously and inexplicably stumbled upon was one that she needed to remove herself from swiftly and not entirely due to its lack of link to everything she had known possible in her everyday life, or world, before. It was also bringing back some annoying memories.

The only obvious way out of the room was up the concrete stairs directly to her left where all the rest of her fellow grey-apron-wearers were now congregating to and arranging themselves in files of two. She took her position at the back of the procession, tray in hand, trying to look as professional as the situation dictated and slowly started to make her way up the stairs. She turned and glanced sympathetically at the mousy waitress filing in the back right next to her who was shaking so badly that the flower-embossed teacups on her tray were dancing the flamenco with the sugar bowl and the silver teaspoons. The girl appeared to be completely oblivious to Nina’s addition to the group and far too preoccupied with not fainting or throwing up. In fact, everyone around her was looking exceptionally paler and on the verge of collapse by the second with the distinctive scent of fear floating profusely around as soon as they reached the floor above them.

The whole of upstairs was in the form of a spacious, square office lit by several dozen spotlights perched on the high ceiling above. To the left was the only window in the room, expanding from one side to the other in a way that made the entire wall appear constructed entirely out of glass which was also the material of choice for the large desk in the middle of the room as well as a series of tubes sticking out of the floor at a 45 degree angle from which slim, flat objects were zooming out. At a more careful inspection, Nina identified the objects as mail, and coming out of the larger of the tubes were parcels of various sizes. What few objects in the room were not made out of glass were clad in the familiar metallic or plastic grey with the exception of a stack of ten, glossy, black television sets sitting behind the expansive glass desk all tuned to showing snow. The effect the room had on Nina was the visual equivalent of nails scratching down a blackboard.

Sitting in front of the desk talking on a miniature, gray telephone and appearing to dominate the scene was, Nina immediately guessed, the employer and general organizer of the whole charade, a bald, middle aged man dressed in a grey turtleneck and trousers. The man was amazingly long-limbed and gangly with the exception of his midriff which was gargantuan in its expanse and spreading like a ring of compact satellite planets around him. His face looked furthermore elongated like a giant sucker had pulled on the opposite poles of his head and his rubber-like skin had ever since sat obediently onto that position. The only parts of him that were not disproportionately large to normal human standards were his mouth and eyes that looked as if they were drawn inwards.  The man was sporting a severe look on his face which Nina assumed was brought on by the conversation he was having at the time which she also hypothesized would be the reason why he was appearing to be completely oblivious to the clicking trays and muffled heart-attacks about him.

At the far end of the room, a massive woman with wild bleach-blonde hair and huge, droopy breasts was seated on a grey leather sofa, dressed to match the poor cushions underneath her which were bulking out of shape under her weight and looking at them reproachfully. The man’s voice came out harsh and garbled so Nina had to pay extra attention to make out what was being said while looking out of the window in a desperate attempt to identify her location. All she could see stretching below them was a commotion of trees with a thin river spiraling through them, spilling into a circular lake punctuated by a black, rocky scrap of land precisely at the heart of it.  The office was evidently situated fairly far above the ground therefore allowing for a full view below it. A view of exactly what though, Nina, to her distress, could not actually attest to. Right above the trees and the serene halo of water the atmosphere was still retaining its pure, imposing blue only now a small cloud was trying to sneak into view and take center stage. The sky seemed completely unfazed by the attempt.                                                                            

“Today’s transmission will be the color grey” the man said unblinking to the musical accompaniment of clicking silverware and abrupt intakes of breath. “I’m aware of the fact that grey is my dominant color of choice though I have on occasion chosen to go with charcoal and I distinctly remember working with black for a whole week two years ago. So you see there is nothing left for us to talk about” he continued hanging the phone up in a disinterested manner. His voice carried on even though it did not seem to be addressing anyone in particular. “Simple truth of the matter is that I know best and my favorite color happens to be grey”, he hissed while the surrounding rhythm upped in tempo, with frantic heartbeats doubling as percussion and the paper ruffling of the zooming mail holding the beat. The mousy waitress on Nina’s right was attempting an impressive cover of the ‘Cucaracha’ with the help of two butter-knives and a cheese platter.

The voice moved surprisingly closer to Nina now. “And what might your favorite color be?” he added in a sweet, mocking manner. She looked up to see him swaying malevolently over her like a snake over a baby bird that had just fallen off its nest. In the style of a knee-jerk reaction she blurred out “Purple”. The ‘Cucaracha’ halted abruptly in the middle of the chorus and no one requested and encore.

The man’s face turned severe again. His demeanor, it seemed, was not influenced by the previous conversation but it looked as if it was set that way indefinitely, hence the panic attacks she was surrounded with. “Judging from your attire, I would have guessed that it was red” he said with derision, obviously referring to her sweater.

“Just because my favorite color is purple does not mean that I don’t like all the rest”, she said semi-fiercely, semi-apologetically.  As soon as she said that the room went even quieter than before. The clicking and heavy breathing came to a complete still.

Nina was starting to get upset with the whole situation. She hadn’t asked to be clad in an apron or be employed in the service of a man of questionable professional usefulness and in clear need of medical attention. In fact she could distinctly remember evading a dental procedure she had been wishing herself out of just an hour ago. She was now wishing herself out of this new environment as well however she was surely envisioning more traditional means of vacating the premises than the ones that she was met with directly after stating her democratic views on tint and shade.

What happened was that the blonde woman on the sofa, at a quick nod from Mr. Barley pushed herself out of the folds of leather and balancing her weight in the vertical position started to walk towards them. With breasts bouncing up and down her blouse and the chunky heels of her pumps thudding fiercely on the floor she advanced directly towards Nina who was instantaneously left to stand alone in the middle of the room, abandoned by her fellow apron-wearers. She was not given the time to bask in a renewed sense of self-importance having found herself in the spotlight so unexpectedly since the huge woman immediately scooped her up, oblivious to her loud protests and with one swift movement directed her right into the glass parcel-chute. What kind of craziness had she stumbled into? Nina trashed about in terror though no release was to be found from the big-bosomed woman’s iron grip.

The chute was barely large enough to fit a small person like Nina who in exact parcel-shipping fashion was being pushed decidedly, feet-first into the round, dark opening. As the unnaturally strong lady raised her arm to give her one last shove, Nina had barely enough time to scream out “Grey is a fine color too!”, before disappearing through the dark opening.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Chapter 1

     Nina woke up to a sharp, stabbing pain in the back of her jaw spiraling all the way up to the left side of her face. It looked as if her left wisdom tooth was telling her “good morning”. She was not in the mood for niceties, especially from that particular incisor, considered to be the guilty party in her book as it was responsible for her having to go to the dentist first thing in the morning, a medical practitioner she had been avoiding throughout her life with particular zeal and almost immaculate results. Well, until now.                                                                                                                   

Nina’s wisdom tooth had decided to grow out of her gum in a lopsided manner. Altogether it was reaching for the left cheek while pushing any adjacent teeth out of the way in the process. There she was all this time feeding the ungrateful tooth with all the calcium and fluoride it might have needed and to repay her it had gone and picked a fight with the rest of her mouth. The damage was so unavoidable that had left her with no alternative; dentist-visiting, mouth-probing and nerve-shattering tooth-grinding was on the menu and she was almost certainly having all of the courses though retaining a modest glimmer of hope that the tooth-grinding would not present itself  to be necessary at this stage of her torture.

Her unwillingness to face what lay ahead for the day made her take extra time to get ready. She vigilantly brushed her teeth on the old, porcelain sink next to her bed while staring back at her sleepy, brown eyes on the square mirror on top of it. The reflective surface was old with speckled, black areas and an asymmetrical crack running down the middle of it that was cutting the image of her face in two pieces.

Nina studied herself in the mirror reproachfully. She couldn’t quite decide whether she had the kind of looks that were worthy of a beauty pageant ribbon or resembling something that had crawled out of the earth and would scare small children away. She looked, for lack of a better word, torn. Her antithetic appearance had mostly to do with the fact that though her skin and facial features had the proportions and texture akin to a porcelain doll, her demeanor and expression was either that of constant bewilderment, annoyance or at best withdrawal and absent-mindedness. It was enough to make a pretty face look out of place and under certain lighting even grotesque. She hadn’t always looked like that though. Nina had time and again studied pictures of herself from the time period ranging from babyhood to early adolescence and she had come to the conclusion that she had looked decidedly pretty in a definitely not antithetic, in fact emphatic, way. Entering adolescence though, the suspicion of something weird and irritating started seeping into her content and happy-go-lucky visage. And it grew and grew until it took over her harmonious facial proportions and twisted them a few millimeters to the side of ‘what the..?’ Despite that, she did not look ugly in the least and that was perhaps the most discomforting element about her because what she looked like did not have a name and could not be categorized into something familiar and appeasable. She looked unfamiliarly disconcerted. It was enough to drive an onlooker into callous distress.

Nina splashed some water on her face and observed her dichotomized image on the mirror once more. Drops of water were running down her features, some splashing onto the porcelain, some resting on top of her freckles and eyebrows, stinging icily as they started to evaporate. She rested her clear, plastic toothbrush back in the coffee mug on the top of the sink along with the still wet painting brushes that she had washed clean of any residual oil paint late, last night. The coffee mug had a picture of a sad clown holding a nearly-deflated, red balloon on it the sight of which had an oddly uplifting effect on Nina, who following her modest beauty routine resentfully made to get dressed by grabbing on to the most comfortable, worn-in pair of trousers in her possession in an attempt to try and minimize her discomfort for the day as greatly as humanly possible. She treated the old pair of jeans with unprecedented kindness as she slid them slowly and carefully across each leg and smoothed them out around the ankles; an action that she found altogether unnecessary yet oddly soothing. Having done that, she found momentary solace in the comfort of choosing a top that would best reflect her inner longings and aspirations while complementing her eye-color and pale complexion. Having failed to find one, she settled for a simple red sweater.

Breakfast that day seemed like a much more complicated affair though. The feeling that her teeth squashing together at the expense of nerve and oral soft-tissue had been producing was prohibiting of any kind of crunchy or sticky material entering her mouth any time soon. All the better, she thought, having had some extra time she would make her favorite; French toast, which I rarely ever have, she decided. Why is it that pain in any form, as long as it is quite noticeable, makes us actually pay attention to the things that we want?, she asked herself rhetorically.

With an intense smell of cinnamon flooding the room Nina sat on her little, mint-green kitchen table and picked slow bites around her French toast staring out at the vibrant blue sky. There was not a cloud in sight that morning. The undiluted blue was almost spilling on top of the roof tops and tree branches below it. She stopped eating for a minute to take in the color and even closed her eyes in order to allow it to wash over her undisturbed. When she opened them again in pursuit of another bite of her toast she realized with glee that she had pecked the shape of what seemed to be a chicken out of it. In order to admire the figure better she lifted her plate up as vertically as she could and turned it against the light. Yes, she concluded, definitely a chicken.

Just as she was about to leave the plate down and resume her eating though the French toast-chicken overcame what little friction was holding it onto the porcelain and quite suddenly spilled out of the plate and onto Nina’s linoleum floor with a low, wet thump. Nina slouched down assiduously to look at it once more. “Yep, a chicken, for sure” she exclaimed.

Since Dr. Stingworth’s office, Dr. Stingworth being her - through no actual fault of his own – odious new dentist, was in the center of the city and not too far from Nina’s apartment, she decided to walk there. Walking was her transportation method of choice and she never passed up on an opportunity to go somewhere on foot other than using any different means of delivering her to a destination. It is not that she had anything against cars or busses but the simple fact that walking helped her think.

True to form she was now thinking of excuses not to attend her appointment all the way to it.  Poisonous breakfast has left me with crippling diarrhea. There’s been a sudden death in the family.  My dog Fluffy is choking on his rubber toy and has to be rushed to the hospital. One grim scenario after another played out inside her head with escalating hilarity until the moment she brought herself right in front of the building specified in the address she had written down on a torn piece of newspaper while taking directions from Dr. Stingworth’s secretary, which was now sitting crumpled and smudged from sweat in her hand.                                                                                                                                                                                     

Nina inhaled and exhaled a few times, trying to think happy thoughts and expel the negative energy that was weighing her down like an anchor to the side of the pavement.

“This boat needs to blow its horn and sail to merrier harbors. I’m getting a horrible feeling in my stomach, but fortunately it’s nothing a little pillaging and a lot of rum won’t fix” she said out loud. Referring to herself as a boat or a pirate was something she frequently did in times of extreme stress or intoxicated euphoria. This was mainly due to her early childhood aspiration of becoming a pirate which had always been her first choice of vocation ever since she had become aware of the concept of work and the specialized resolutions that it entailed. Becoming a pirate and sailing the seas was irrevocably, one might say, her childhood dream up until the moment she was informed of the current evolution of that particular profession in modern times which altogether excluded the exploration of the seas wearing a sword, a glass eye and a matching parrot in pursuit of treasure with the occasional raping and pillaging thrown in for good measure. Having failed, due to unsurpassable technical difficulties, to adopt such a lifestyle however did not rob her of the desire for sailing or loosing an eye in a sword-fight and subsequently replacing it with a glass equivalent.

 “Oh, don’t be such a coward,” she muttered to herself glumly. “This will be a learning experience.