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.