A.W.I.A, Part 7

The man who was supposed to be a doctor did not look satisfied with my answer. In a game in which he appeared to hold every single card, this was the closest I might expect to come to winning a trick. As such, I had every right to regard it as a victory, and was not sure why it didn't feel that way.

I felt the room, already small, getting smaller. I became aware of the way a beam of late afternoon sun streamed through the single high corner window and was cut off a few inches further along by the gray wall. This was what they wanted to do to me: cramp, deny, prune, truncate. Already, I had been meeting with the man who was supposed to be a doctor for over an hour, and no accommodations had been made for my comfort.

I looked at him. Already, I have told you, he was not bad-looking. He slouched a little in his chair. His sleeves were rolled up and and his bare forearms were on the the table on either side of the lined pad where his pen rested, the hands open and palm-down on the table. The arrangement of his forearms--further apart at the wrist than at the elbow--seemed sympathetic to me, if not my cause.

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