"No card. Ms. please take a number and sit down," says "Greta." Her make-up isn’t doing its job -- features melt into the pale powder and blue eye shadow. A circular, beige haze with the blue eyes on my health card. It’s too early for smiles. I might not even see her smile in the haze if some sort of a glow from white teeth doesn’t permeate, but "Greta" doesn’t have teeth for me.
I’m holding out my health card. It’s red and white, the old kind without the required headshot. I’ve had this faceless, red and white card all my life, all sixteen years, but it looks about fifty. The numbers are now simply embossed, in white plastic, like braille, previously popping in black. The plastic film on the edge is fraying too. Then again, I don’t really remember what it looked like perfectly new. I was one.
"Greta" is directing me to take a paper number out of the red, plastic "Urnext" number distributor. It’s shaped like an ear. I break off a blacked and bolded, "12" on white paper corrugated into a U and take a blue plastic chair beside a man in his 50s – arms cross, blue windbreaker, jeans, sneakers, balding, grey, smelling of body grease and mulled wine.
In this room everything is plastic. Above "Greta," on the wall, red lights on a black square tell me the lab is "now serving 3." Only open for half an hour, it’s 8:30am, and the waiting room, lined with all these blue plastic chairs, is rammed. Everyone is this waiting room is older than I am. Significantly actually. I’d say, if I had to guess an average age, it would be about 60.
Older bodies in new chairs. The chairs smelling of nothing, letting the bodies emit the smell of their houses, seeped in their spices from: cooking, wet towel must, or linens tumbling in a dryer, wet feathers or fur, a palm or a cedar plant, roses, or dying dahlias, empty fridge’s with baking powder and beer, green broccoli or a fresh bowl of pasta salad in Greek dressing. The space you live in, living in your skin. I wonder if they can smell that I’m 16. Or maybe they can’t, because my skin is too shallow now.
Some of them lean on canes and listen for the nurse to call their name, others hold plastic bags, others have their blood papers ready, listening for the nurse to call their name, so they can show their blood papers.
