A.W.I.A. 21: Back

As I was saying, , or something, I don't know. I got derailed. (Take those tracks, Junie H.) But it's been long enough now that I can go on. I know some minutes are missing; some of those thoughts in the bathroom are unaccounted for, and what made me decide to leave, but I can't be worried about that now.

The main thing that you need to know was that when I left there, I headed back to the room where the man who claimed to be a doctor waited for me, and I stopped just short of the door. Behind me the hall deadended after the bathroom at a window wall. But ahead, past more doors, the hall ahead bent in an inviting way: the left wall continued about ten feet after the right wall discontinued, until it struck another wall, a perpendicular one. At the scene of this collision two chairs at right angles had cornered a ficus and guarded it like puffy orange vinyl dogcatchers with chrome legs. There was a busy kind of quiet about the place: the implied hum of the overhead fluorescents, and muffled voices just out of earshot.

I did a little thought experiment. If I was not a prisoner, I reasoned, I did not have to reenter the room with the man who claimed to be a doctor.