Whiskey Island 67“The Waiting Room,” which appears in Whiskey Island issue 67, is the last of my second-person nonfiction narratives, for now at least. Most of these narratives focus on neuroses and my working through them, and “The Waiting Room” is no exception—the focus here being hypochondria. I got the idea for this piece while reading an issue of Ploughshares. The Ploughshare’s story that inspired me was “M is Not Dead” by Kafah Bachari, a standout in a strong issue and a piece I admired greatly, though looking at that and “The Waiting Room” side-by-side, I doubt you would see the connection. Bachari’s piece focuses on M, a dictatorial colonel hiding out in an underground bunker after being ousted. There is also a second story going on that makes the colonel’s servant a primary character in the footnotes. I often use literary journals for inspiration. In literary journals, writers are trying new things, experimenting with techniques, and when I see someone doing something I find exciting and an idea pops into my head, I’ll run with it, even if the place I run is a world envisioned only by me, quite removed from the original story. In fact, this is the way inspiration works for me. It’s amorphous, all about feeling and flights of fancy rather than a one-to-one, oh they did that, I want to do it that way too. In any case, if you ever come across Bachari’s story, I recommend it.

I liked the way it’s structured, and with “The Waiting Room,” what I culled was the sense of two alternating story lines that shared the same root, one in the main text and the other in the footnotes. I started to think I could use this device to alternate between the exteriority and mundanity of a waiting room and interiority and questions of great importance going on inside the person waiting (i.e., me). I had, of course, recently read Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, and while I admired this structurally, I found it a tedious read, focused as it was on minutiae without relating the observation of minutiae to anything of greater importance (or what Cormac McCarthy would call matters of life and death; in a sense channeling the concerns of Tolstoy in something like The Death of Ivan Ilyich or Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru).

The basics of the piece are this: I was catching faint whiffs of what smelled like gasoline at odd moments over the course of a few weeks. I decided to go to the doctor to ask about it. I started to think about what I would do if it turned out it was a tumor. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. But I guess that’s not a spoiler alert because I don’t reveal that in the piece. The piece, in fact, ends when the nurse calls me out of the waiting room and into the office. In any case, it’s not all dour. I did recognize, to an extent, the absurdity in presuming I might have a tumor without having it checked out first. But I ponder these types of things even when I’m not in the waiting room. What would I do if I only had six months left. I suppose it’s a way of questioning, Am I living the life I want to lead? Am I doing the things I want to do? The answer is partially. I’m doing some of the things I want to do. And the things I don’t want to do are necessities that help support what I want to do financially. Short of being independently wealthy, are we ever entirely free of that compromise?

In closing, I’d like to say the cover art for Whiskey Island 67, done by Stephen Mackey, is stunning. I’d like to thank Amber Taliancich Allen, Whiskey Island editor, for including my piece in the issue. She was a joy to work with.

Now a brief excerpt:

You’re dying and you know it. You don’t need tests to confirm it, but you’ve made this appointment, and now you’re sitting in the waiting room, flipping through a book you can’t keep your focus on. I should have brought something simpler, you think. But then, you’ve never had much interest in magazines. The table before you is littered with them: National Geographic, The Economist. But if you can’t concentrate on your book, you won’t be able to fix your attention on op-eds decrying the dangers of GMOs or the plight of the vanishing honey bee. Of course, you feel bad for the bees, but it’s hard to conjure much interest when soon enough you’ll be disappearing yourself.

How advanced is it now that you’re smelling gasoline everywhere you go? For that’s what it is. Not burnt toast or oranges, but gasoline. An olfactory hallucination. You’ve looked up the possible causes—a virus or sinus infection, a blow to the head. But you’ve suffered from none of these in the past few weeks. Then, there it was, plain as day—tumor. And it felt right. Not the good kind of right, but the ominous one. Like you’ve known since the moment you caught that first faint whiff of odor that this is it. The fact that this smell has followed you for fifteen days and doesn’t emanate from any particulate matter only confirms your self-diagnosis, though naturally you play it down, holding onto the hope you’re wrong. Still, you also wish to steel yourself in case of bad news.