I was forty minutes into a two-hour wait at the clinic when I noticed the man across from me had his hands in his lap and his shadow had its hands over its face.
Everybody knows a waiting room.
You sign in, you get told it’ll be a bit, and it’s always a bit longer than that. Hard chairs, a TV up in the corner playing something nobody’s watching, a stack of magazines from a year ago.
And the light, that flat bright ceiling light they use in those places, on purpose, even and shadowless-looking so you’d swear nobody in the room casts one at all until you look at the floor.
I was there for my knee. Nothing serious. You bring a knee to a place like that and you expect to lose an afternoon, so I’d settled in, phone at ten percent, watching the little number by the door tick up one name at a time.
The man across from me was maybe sixty, cardigan, a cane against the chair, a folded newspaper he wasn’t reading. Calm, waiting the way we were all waiting.
His shadow was on the wall behind him with both hands pressed over its face.
I looked at his actual hands first. They were in his lap, folded, still. Then back up to the wall, and the shadow of him had its palms flat over where its eyes would be, elbows out, the whole posture of a man who’s just gotten news he can’t take.
And it held it. It didn’t shake. It didn’t sob, because a shadow can’t. It just sat there behind a calm old man with its face in its hands.
I did what everyone in a waiting room does with something they don’t want to deal with. I looked at my phone.
When I looked up a woman two seats down from him had crossed her arms, and her shadow on the wall had its face in its hands too.
She hadn’t moved. Reading a magazine, turning a page, bored. Her shadow sat beside his in the same shape, both of them covering their faces, and I felt the afternoon go cold and slow the way it does right before you understand something you’d rather not.
I made myself count. There were nine of us in that room. I went around the wall, chair by chair, shadow by shadow, and I want to tell you I miscounted.
Seven of the nine shadows had their hands over their faces. Every one of the people sat easy, waiting, scrolling, one of them softly snoring. Seven shadows on the wall with their palms pressed to their eyes like the whole room had just been told the same thing at the same time and only their shadows had heard it.
Two of us didn’t. Mine was one. A young guy by the door was the other, earbuds in, foot tapping, and his shadow tapping its foot right along with him, ordinary, the only other ordinary shadow in the room besides mine.
I sat very still, because what do you do? You don’t stand up in a clinic and say something about the wall. They have a word for the person who does that and it isn’t a kind one.
So I sat with my ordinary shadow among all those covered faces and I waited, same as everybody, and I watched the number tick up by the door.
The young guy by the door got called first. He pulled his earbuds, got up, and his ordinary foot-tapping shadow got up with him and went through the door to the back, and then there was one ordinary shadow left in that room, and it was mine.
That’s when I felt it. Not saw. Felt, the way you feel someone’s looked at you before you catch them doing it.
I made myself look at the wall behind my own chair.
My shadow had taken its hands off its knees. It was reaching them up, slow, toward its own face, and it had them halfway there, palms turning inward, about to cover its eyes like all the rest, like it had just now heard the thing the room heard forty minutes ago, and was only now getting around to me.
They called my name. I could get up right now and walk out that door to the back and be the calm man in the chair a little longer.
But I’ve been sitting here writing this on ten percent instead, watching the wall, because I need to know what it is you’re not supposed to see in a room that bright, that seven strangers’ shadows already covered their eyes against, and that mine has finally figured out is coming for me too.
