Forever After

2

“I have an appointment for twelve with Dr Khan.”

“Please take a seat.”

Michael was the only one in the waiting room. It was a fairly small room. Opposite the reception desk, to the right of the only window, four chairs were lined up against the wall. The doorway leading to the Doctors office was on Michael’s right as he took his seat.

There were a few magazines on a small coffee table shoved between his chair and the next. He glanced over and read a few of the titles with little interest. There were magazines on gardening and interior decorating, magazines whose entire customer base seemed to be dental and doctors surgeries. There were also the obligatory pamphlets on health and a picture book to keep the children entertained. Michael frowned them away and sat upright, his attention on the receptionist whose attention was on a stack of papers in her hands.

She was pretty, which was a rarity in this part of town. She also had a job, another rarity, and a sign that she probably didn’t live around here. Years ago Michael would have been all over her, but this was the eighth time he had sat opposite her and he had barely said more than a few words to her, none of which had referenced anything other than his appointment or her job.

He watched her blue eyes pore over a file, watched her thin lips unconsciously mouth the words she read, watched a smile tweak a fine wrinkle at the corner of her mouth when she read something she found amusing. She picked up the stack of papers and bounced them on her desk to align them. She yelped in discomfort as one of the papers slid against the nib of her forefinger, opening up a wound that dripped a drop of crimson onto the desk.

She glanced up at Michael, met his gaze with her beautiful eyes. Michael smiled back; she turned away. She lifted the wounded finger to her lips and opened her mouth to expose a powerful set of canines, out of place on such a small and delicate face.

Michael turned away, inwardly disgusted. He knew of course, when the angle was right, and the door was open, he could see behind the reception desk through a mirror in the doctor’s room, and she had never appeared in it. He knew it bothered him, turning some inner part of him against her, but it didn’t surprise him, no one in the surgery was alive, patients and Doctor alike.

The door to the Doctor’s room opened and Michael turned to greet whoever opened it, but there was no one there. He saw straight through into the doctor’s office; saw the folded legs of the doctor poking out from under her desk. The door closed, the handle lifting up and down as if clicked in place by an invisible hand.

Michael felt a cold air brush past him, he sensed someone in front of him and then heard that someone’s’ footsteps as they crossed his path, walked to the other end of the waiting room and then left through the main door which opened and closed in the same ghostly manner.

Michael turned to the receptionist again, the blood sucked dry from her finger; her garish teeth hidden behind beautiful lips. She was staring straight back at him with a soft smile on her soft face. She answered his quizzical expression: “The world needs a bogeyman right?”

He shrugged, “Does it?”

Before the receptionist had time to reply a buzzer sounded on her desk, followed by the static-shrouded words of the Doctor: “You can let Mr Holland in now.”

The receptionist beamed at Michael. Her true nature hidden behind an endearing smile that wouldn’t hurt a fly. “You’re up” she said happily.

In the adjoining room Michael sat down opposite the doctor, immediately withdrawing his gaze when he felt her penetrating eyes boring into his.

It was light, bright and far from inviting. He felt cold within the confines of the room, it was clinical and sterilised; he would have preferred claustrophobic and dark.

“Mr Holland,” Doctor Khan began. “How are you today?”

Michael dragged his eyes to the doctor. He could never meet her gaze for long, so he divided his attention between her eyes and an encyclopaedia of doctorates and degrees on the wall behind her.

She was an accomplished psychiatrist, she had been in the business longer than Michael had been dead and alive combined. She was the go-to woman in the district, spending her time treating a multitude of patients between four offices in the country. She was a pleasant woman, clearly very professional and certainly very sought-after, but there was something about her that Michael found intimidating. She had a constant beaming smile on her face, a smile that hid her own thoughts and exposed those of others. It put him on edge.

“I’m fine,” he said guardedly, adding: “I think.”

“If you were fine you wouldn’t be here.”

He shrugged his shoulders dolefully.

The doctor looked away, just as Michael's ill ease at her penetrating eyes began to grow to discomforting levels.

“So, what’s bothering you?” she asked, pretending to look over a few notes on her lap.

“Do I really need to tell you?”

She made eye contact again, briefly this time -- her eyes doing all the smiling for her face. “No, but I prefer it that way.”

Michael wasn’t going for it. “It would save a lot of time if you just did your thing,” he told her.

“Because the art of psychiatry is about building a relationship.”

“I mean why do you even bother communicating with your--” Michael paused, hesitated and then frowned. His eyebrows narrowed disapprovingly at the grinning psychiatrist.

Unprompted the doctor said: “no, but I wanted to prove a point.”

“Did you have to do--” again Michael stopped himself, this time he wasn’t frowning. He shifted agitatedly on his chair, glanced this way and that around the spaciously isolated room and then finally relaxed, albeit with feigned comfort.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll do it the normal way. No mind reading. It’s off-putting.”

The doctor seemed pleased. She made a few notes. Michael stared absently at the nib of her pen as it scrawled its shorthanded squiggles.

“So,” she said, slowly lowering the pen and Michaels’ eyes. “How are things at work?”

He raised his eyes to meet her. “A nightmare,” he explained with a reflective nod of his lethargic head. “I’m still on the bottom rung, working with the worst; the scum of society.”

“Aren’t all people equal?” she wondered. “You deal with death all the time; you should know that better than anyone.”

Michael shrugged his shoulders apathetically. “Dead, everyone is the same. It’s their life that depresses me. Some of them have so little to lose that they see death as a minor distraction.” He slumped back, lowered his gaze. “Last week I picked up a drunk driver, he drove straight into a wall and died on impact, when I found him he was so f*cking cheery that I wanted to kill him again.” He sighed heavily and wrapped his arms across his chest.

“Isn’t it good to see that?” Doctor Khan wondered. “Doesn’t it make a nice change?

Michael shook his head for a few seconds before answering. “You come to expect a certain something from the dead. A mix of anger, fear and loss. It’s a happy ritual that they all abide by. It’s the only part of the job I feel comfortable with, as disturbing as that may sound.”

“Is this man the reason for your visit?”

He shook his head, unfolded his arms and leant forward listlessly. “I want to know what I’m doing here. That’s why I’m here; I want you to tell me. I should be dead.”

The doctor didn’t flinch, didn’t lower eye contact. Michael had hoped for a note of sympathy, something different from the norm, but he got the answer he had been expecting: “You chose to work. You chose to live on.”

He sagged back in his seat. “Fine.”

“Immortality not good enough for you?”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “At the time it sounded like a good idea,” he explained. “But I expected a little, I don’t know, just...more. I guess.”

“More?”

“Naked virgins and free whiskey on tap,” Michael explained with a wry grin. “A constant state of euphoria, a body that never feels pain or disease.”

“It didn’t live up to your expectations then?”

“No. I’m on the breadline. I live in filth. Last week I had the biggest haemorrhoids I’ve ever seen. It was like a grape vine growing out of my arse,” he shook his head disconsolately. “How the hell do dead people get f*cking piles?”

“It is a complicated world.”

“Too complicated. None of it makes any sense and every time I ask about something, every time I complain; you know what they tell me?

The doctor nodded. She had said the same thing to him before.

“In time you will learn,” she recited.

“Exactly,” Michael spat distastefully.

“And they are right,” Doctor Khan told him. “This world has to be experienced to be understood. You may think thirty years is a long time, but in the scheme of things, here, it isn’t.”

“So they keep saying.”

“It’s true. I’ve been around a long time and I’m still learning.”

Michael deflated in the chair. He hadn’t gotten what he wanted and once again he was going to leave just as clueless as he was when he arrived.

The doctor continued. “My advice to you Michael, is to relax. Stop wondering, stop asking questions and just let it be.”

“Fine,” Michael said with the stubborn and unconvincing tone of someone who certainly wasn’t going to relax and definitely was going to ask more questions.

He stood up, straightened his jacket, smiled appreciatively and turned to leave.

Doctor Khan called to him before he exited the room: “And lay off the dope.”