The waiting room is bright, harsh, and sterile. There are eight rows of black plastic chairs, lined up neatly by twos so that the backs face each other. Even more border the walls. Dozens of people shuffle their feet on the cream-colored linoleum tiles, which gleam with the reflection of the bleached white fluorescent lights.

We’re all loosely packed here, like squirming bugs in the air-conditioned haven. Every so often the drone of a mechanical male voice will bleat flatly from the ceiling like that of a disembodied ghost, reading off a tedious string of numbers and letters which are supposed to correspond to the tickets in our hands. Except I’m positive that something’s gone wrong because my ticket has not been called for two hours; its digits and characters float in my breathing space,
waiting to be summoned by the voice of the god hidden in the ceiling, only, since he never calls, I end up inhaling them and choking.

The landscape of people around me is a constant ebb and flow. For the first fifteen minutes, I sat behind a woman in her thirties with light coffee skin who kept rocking back against my seat. For twenty minutes, a Hispanic family took up half the chairs of the row across from me, conversing in rapid Spanish. At one point a Chinese couple sat to my left with packets of files gripped in their hands, and just a moment ago an Arab man wearing a turban and a backpack was to my right. In the corner of the room, pressed up against the wall, a blond college student who has been here longer than I have has his forehead pressed to his arms, which are crossed at his knees as though he has curled inwards with his suffering.

Those who have been called and have finished their business walk out towards the exit with an air of exaltation as all the rest watch in wretched jealousy. We sigh. Our knees bounce impatiently. Legs cross and uncross. Phones die from overuse. Tickets are rustled in the staleness of the dead anticipation that hovers over all of us like an unwanted corpse.

Yet it is only in this instance that I sit on the fifth row of this austere room, four chairs down from the center aisle.

In another instance, or, perhaps, in a hypothetical world, I am not wasting away in a waiting room but living (whatever that means), and I sit on the front porch of the house I bought from a crazy old woman because that’s always been my favorite place to be.

The ancient, gnarled oak tree encompassing the front yard has been there even before the old lady, and I even heard that a boy, the son of one of the previous owners, once plunged from its branches and died.

He probably fell on a day like today, with cicadas chirping madly in the thick heat of the afternoon sun. Maybe he was content for a while up on the boughs of the oak before he died, as I am now.

Content but not happy. Never happy. Happiness runs in another world too far from this one or the one before for me to conceive of it, and so it remains the most extreme of alternate realities.

But at least here I am alone. At least here I don’t tremble beneath the weight of subtle condescension laced through the gaps of my brother’s casually tossed words like sharp streams of poison to pick me apart. In this reality I have never held a gun, have never known the taste of bitter pills; here the walls harbor no grotesque shadows, and what I see is what is there and nothing else. Here I am picked clean to the bone and something like hate is an untouched island far from the reach of my barren shores.

I like this sort of place the best, except I start crying (contently, of course), and then I ruin everything—the equanimity and not-quite-happiness—because I don’t know how not to, and because of things half remembered which did not actually occur, only they hang suspended like paper ghosts on string.

But then, in another instance, I am not living, but hypothetically suffocating across from my father as we eat at the dining room table.

His eyes are heavy-lidded, the skin around them wrinkled. His dark hair is peppered with insidious strands of white and the pockmarks on the sides of his face stand out more starkly than usual under the glimmering lights of the chandelier. My father appears to carry himself delicately, and he moves slowly with creaking bones.

I observe his old age with quiet surprise, unable to recall when this transformation happened or how I had missed these glaring changes, for my father doesn’t look like my father anymore. I can be dining with a stranger and not be able to tell.

The man seated at the table looks at me earnestly, asking abruptly, in an innocuous manner, as my father often did when I was little, if I am happy; if his daughter, his dear girl, is happy.

But I don’t know—I never knew—quite how to answer him, even as a child. I smile thinly, tight and contrived. The corners of my lips barely curve. I nod. And he is satisfied.

My father turns his attention back to his food and spears a piece of shrimp with his fork. I watch him chew, swallow, all the while thinking I hate you I hate you I hate you, the words circling the tracks of my mind in a ceaseless litany.

I hate the way he eats: loudly and quickly with his mouth always full; I hate the way he takes long, unnecessary pauses when he talks, as though he’s waiting for his memory to catch up with the present; I especially hate this newfound old age, the sudden unfamiliarity slathered like a distasteful paste over his features. And more than anything else, I hate him for not knowing why I could ever hate him in the first place, for not being able to imagine or begin to apprehend this enmity. Yet perhaps right now I prefer it better this way, clutching this secret hate.

In a rather different hypothetical instance, however, I am not suffocating but playing god with anthill in the park.

The small dirt mound is located at the base of a tree, off to the left of the path. I crouch beside it and watch the ants swarm in and out in a mad frenzy as I drip water on the soft peak of the hill with my water bottle, dampening the dirt until it turns a soggy dark brown. The colony seems to sink and collapse on itself as the liquid spreads, deflating into a lumpy sodden mass.

I cap the lid on the bottle, my eyes fervently following the path of the minute creatures as they scramble away in a bewildered daze, knocking their little round heads up against the soles of my white sneakers.

I smile. Laugh a little even. My stomach twists with malicious amusement at the chaos and at my show of meager power. I can change their lives on a fleeting whim and break down the foundations of their livelihood with ease, just a tip of the hand, so achingly similar to the slight pressure of a finger against the trigger of pistol, and just as profound. To the ants, anyway.

People can become gods in simple ways, for a few minutes or a few seconds, like a costume you borrow that’s quick to slip on and quick to shed. It’s much more uncomplicated to play with other’s lives since I can’t easily play with my own. Other gods do that for me, like my father used to. My brother, as well, for a while.

But then I stare at the ruined mess at my feet and picture the tiny bodies drowned in tiny holes, which just now held tiny lives. I picture an invisible god pouring a tidal wave of water all over the top of my apartment building (my flat, unfortunately, being on the first floor, will thereby be the first to perish), drowning my own tiny life in its tiny hole of a room, leaving a pale bloated body after the water has ebbed.

I quickly sober up as if I’d been drunk before. I stand solemnly, suddenly a bit regretful, and whisper a silent apology to the ants in my head. Gripping my water bottle more tightly now, my mind wanders anxiously to my apartment as I continue down the path, vainly wondering if there is any way I could get god insurance.

But in another instance, instead of playing god, I am dreaming of a profusion of hypothetical windmills dotting either side of a desolate stretch of railroad tracks.

The windmills are sleek and beautiful, full of sparse elegance. Their three sails slice through the air in a sweeping clockwise motion like stolid waving giants with slender toothpick arms. They remind me of twirling white birds. Fields of them are scattered across the grassy plains, and they give me the impression of flying, as if they might rise from the ground at any moment and swoop into the sky.

A train comes gliding down the tracks among the windmills. It stops only sometimes to pick up passengers, though they are not the type to wait on the platforms of train stations. They are dead, lost, shapeless drifters who climb aboard the train, as blank as white paper, to ride for an eternity tucked within the soft charcoal folds of the shadows draped across the interior compartments.

The windowpanes rattle gently as the train skates through miles of rural land, skirting the margins of cities and towns, darting through fields of wildflowers as they whiten in the dawning night, ducking under the gaze of the full, heavy moon hung like a dewdrop fixed in the firmament.

Inside the locomotive there is a faint musty scent, akin to the smell of cigarette smoke. The passengers are dull and drowsy from the lull of travel, but they never sleep.

Outside the scenery shifts and flickers, sometimes catching on makeshift cemeteries stuck at the foot of small hills spotted with rounded grey grave markers. If any of the travelers manage to scrounge up a modicum of conscious thought, they might wonder if their body lies beneath one of those unnamed tombstones; but their minds coolly glide away like figure skaters and they sink back into their weariness once more.

I can’t tell if I am among them, but it’s only plausible that I must be dead in one of these situations; it wouldn’t make sense otherwise. Instances of death run much closer to me than I’d like. They sidle up beside me with loud, flaunting possibilities. But who can really tell?

Perhaps it is actually in another world where I am dead from one thing or another, for there are so many deaths to keep track of, too many causes and cases of nonexistence. After all, it’s a lot easier to die than to live.

But if I am dead, then I hope I’m not buried in a roadside grave, or any grave really. I’d prefer to be cremated; I think I would like it best that way.

At the moment, though, I am sitting in a waiting room. It is bright, harsh, and sterile. There are eight rows of black plastic chairs lined up by twos with the backs facing each other. More are trailed along the plaster walls.

The monotone mechanical voice calls up trails of letters and numbers, bunches of garbled gibberish. Someone in the room coughs. Another person sneezes. Arms are crossed over chests. And I know something is wrong.

I sit on the fourth row, five chairs down from the center aisle. The ticket is crumpled in my fist, and I have forgotten what I was waiting for. Was I looking for the intonation of a special combination of numbers and letters? Was I waiting for my turn to stride out the building with an air of supremacy? Or maybe I was waiting for the actual doing that occurs after the ticket is called and before I can freely walk away, except I can’t recall what that was to begin with.

I might be waiting for something else entirely—something beyond the scope of this tiny room. Something out of reach, shut up behind glass panes. Like the long stretch of worlds running together, trembling threads pulled taut, the strings of a guitar. They are roughly parallel, only at times one or two are knotted up together, crisscrossed or intersected, so I guess it isn’t parallel in the strictest sense.

Yet only in this instance I am in this waiting room. I smooth out my ticket and brush off my discontent. Undulating waves of people come and settle and shuffle and go. We clasp our hands tight. Prick our ears to the droning of the ceiling god’s voice. And we wait.