Conversation in Beige

I don’t like waiting rooms.

I’d been in this waiting room for two hours, or twenty minutes, or the better part of the Bronze Age. It was difficult to tell: the clock on the wall had read 11:14 for so long it started to feel less like the time and more like the street address of whatever eternal pocket dimension I’d found myself in. It had been so long I wasn’t even sure what I was waiting for.

Nevertheless, I waited.

The room had the sort of institutional blandness that suggested nothing interesting ever happened there except the slow erosion of all hope. There were six or seven extremely beige chairs with extremely beige textures, a couple of similarly beige coffee tables that were sparsely strewn with trade magazines from proportionately beige industries, and a dehumidifier (beige-ness unclear) making the damp, throat-clearing noises of some mucus-based semiaquatic creature that regretted having survived this long. On one wall hung a framed print of a sailboat laboring nobly into an opaque couché sunset the hue of nicotine-stained kitchen wallpaper. On another, a thermostat sat imprisoned in a clear plastic lockbox.

I checked my phone for the hundredth time and stood up so I could attempt to maneuver it into a more effective position for receiving signals. Not because I thought it would make a difference, but because desperation creates ritual. I aimed it toward a window and finally toward the sailboat print.

I had no luck: my phone was devoid of bars or Wi-Fi indicators. There were no notifications or pop-ups. There wasn’t even an “Emergency Calls Only” banner, which would at least have provided me an out via 911. I was cut off from the rest of the world, with just a screen informing me what the weather had been like in the before times, back when cell service still existed.

As I stood there with my phone raised pointlessly, a woman in a green coat on the other side of the room raised her phone in the air as well, as if the additional eleven inches of altitude might somehow help. She angled it toward the ceiling, then the window and, finally and with disgust, toward the sailboat print, which offered her nothing.

She lowered her phone and sighed.

We both pretended not to have witnessed the other’s little dance of technological futility and sat down on our beige, communion wafer-thin chairs.

Silence entered the room and sat down with us. It crossed its legs.

The woman picked up a magazine, stared at the cover, and then put it back down.

I did the same with a different magazine. There were only so many times a person could flip through an issue of Tri-County Home Drainage Quarterly before accepting that all of reality had collapsed.

I wondered how one came to be an editor for one of the unnecessarily specific trade magazines that sat scattered on the tables around me. What was their circulation like? Was being published in Decorative Onion World a prestigious gig with which to pad one’s résumé? How deep a talent pool could a publication like Vinyl Siding Statement Colors Digest even have?

Out of instinct I moved to look up the answers on my phone, but then stopped myself as I remembered the futility of it.

This was ridiculous.

I was an adult that was born in 1978. I had survived thirty-four years of my life without owning a smartphone — twenty-five years without a cell phone at all — and had managed to exist in rooms with other people plenty of times. I’d waited in doctor’s offices, lobbies, car dealerships, jury pools, the hellscapes of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Administration. I had once possessed the basic mammalian skill of being bored in public without requiring a luminous rectangle to stare at.

I became aware that the woman was now standing on a chair, holding her phone near the ceiling. She lowered it when she noticed me looking.

I nodded toward her before I could stop myself. “Any luck?”

She looked at me like I’d just caught her stealing the building’s copper plumbing. “No.”

Time paused for a few hundred years while I waited for the ancient machinery of ordinary human exchange to activate.

The ancient machinery of ordinary human exchange did not activate.

Instead, the woman looked at her useless phone and I looked at the sailboat painting.

The sailboat looked smug.

I wondered where all this beige could possibly have come from. The beige chairs, the beige tables, the beige carpet… the color palette of this room looked like how it feels to step in something damp with your socks on. And who designed this corporate khaki blandness? I could imagine the furniture designer’s house, a cathedral built of particleboard and crushed dreams, every room a differently named but identical shade of taupe, the walls covered in framed stock photos of people laughing while eating salads.

He was probably a WASP-y, 60-ish-year-old guy with a faux-European accent named something like “Hollis Pembroke.” He’d be the kind of guy that would design a line of conference room furniture called The Silence Collection. He’d be someone that considered ashtrays to be décor, and would refer to chairs as “seating experiences” despite having never sat down casually even once in his life.

I snorted a little bit thinking of Hollis Pembroke diving like Scrooge McDuck into an endless sea of buff-colored carpet remnants. The woman across the room heard me and I saw her glance over. We were two people in a boring room with no outside stimuli and I had just audibly snickered. I worried that she might have thought it had been directed at her. I decided that the only way we were going to get through this was to make conversation.

I tried to think of something to say, some interesting or arcane piece of wisdom that I could plant and from whence a fully developed conversation could sprout, but I suddenly became aware that all of the years of experience I had interacting with fellow humans had instantaneously evaporated, as if some eldritch conversation gnome had climbed into my ear, burglarized the archive of my mind, and shredded every single folder in the “HOW TO BE A PERSON” section.

Ask her something normal, I told myself.

“So,” is what I said instead.

She looked at me. The word fell over and lay on the carpet between us like a dirty fork.

“So,” I repeated, because when deprived of internet access I apparently revert to a man recently thawed from Paleolithic ice.

“Yes,” she said.

Seasons changed as she looked at me. I could tell she wanted me to continue… not because she was interested, but because she’d made the mistake of acknowledging that I’d spoken. I cast around for a harmless subject and landed on the thermostat in the little plastic lockbox.

I nodded toward it. “Interesting setup.”

She followed my gaze and stared at the thermostat for two or three galactic years. “What?”

“The thermostat.”

“Yes.”

“It’s… in a box,” I clarified.

“Yes.”

I waited for that to become a conversation, but it had other plans.

“It is,” she added, as if helping a concussed relative cross a parking lot.

“Right.”

I leaned back in my chair and immediately regretted it. The woman reached over to the table nearest her and shuffled the magazines around a bit, but she couldn’t make a playable hand out of them and eventually folded. I stared at the clear plexiglass clipboard that was sitting, empty and dejected, on the side table next to me.

Waiting rooms are full of these little ceremonial objects that aren’t actually useful, but are there to imply that civilized authority exists nearby, just behind a closed door or somewhere equally out of reach. Clipboards without paper serving to project the feeling that lots of people must have already been here and filled out forms; fake plants whose only function is to mimic a thriving ecosystem until the dust it has collected reacts with the static charge of the Berber carpeting and manages to spawn a new novel species of eyelash mite; pens that haven’t worked since the Austro-Hungarian Empire but are still chained to the desk so nobody could steal them and add to their horde of broken eighty-nine cent ballpoints.

The most offensive artifacts are the useless instructional notices. They’re usually printed in Comic Sans on regular inkjet paper, then laminated and taped to the walls where they provide no explanation with zero context:

“PLEASE HAVE YOUR INFORMATION READY,” without any indication of what information they want.

“ALL FORMS MUST BE COMPLETED IN FULL,” when there are no forms visible.

“PLEASE INFORM STAFF IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING CHANGES.” Changes in what? Symptoms? Address? Species? Nobody knows.

“DO NOT KNOCK ON GLASS,” next to an empty reception desk in which there is no glass, but where there is a bell. A bell that nobody would ever ring because everyone understood, on some animal level, that ringing it would only make things worse.

And also because of the laminated sign taped to the desk that commanded, “DO NOT USE THIS BELL.”

Why was the bell even there? It was important enough to type, print, laminate, and then tape a notice about it to the desk, but not important enough to just remove the bell? It wasn’t attached to anything. They could have just put it in a drawer. Naturally, this made me want to ring the bell. I considered whether doing so might trigger some unforeseen consequence, like opening a trapdoor over a pit of spikes and venomous snakes.

When I looked over to see whether my temporary roommate was also curious (and might potentially be willing to die for science), she was still fighting for her life against the very concept of conversation. She was fidgeting in her chair and had clenched her jaw so tightly I thought she might metallicize hydrogen. She looked down at her hands, then at the magazines, then at the sailboat print, and then at me. I could see she was trying to convince herself to say something.

Ask him something normal, she probably thought to herself.

“Do you,” she said instead, “come to places like this often?” She flinched visibly the moment it was out.

I looked around the immediate area. “Waiting rooms?”

“Yes. Not by choice. I mean, I assume not by choice. Unless,” she added in a rush, “you enjoy them. Which… which would be fine.”

I stared at her and she stared back at me with the helpless eyes of a person being forced at gunpoint to improvise mathcore on a bassoon.

I spoke carefully. “I don’t seek them out.”

“Of course not.”

“No.”

“Why would you.”

“I don’t know.”

Neither did she, apparently.

We sat in silence for a few eons. Outside, tectonic plates shifted visibly.

She continued. “Uh, so, do you like… socks?”

I blinked. “As opposed to… no socks?”

“Yes,” she replied, and a single bead of sweat rolled down her forehead. “Or toes. Whatever people do.”

“Are you okay?”

“Absolutely not.”

I understood how she felt.

Talking to strangers is a skill and, like any skill you don’t practice, it eventually starts rusting. Talking to people used to happen organically and automatically, like a reflex, like how you’d steady yourself on the subway without consciously deciding to do so. You didn’t have to think about it and it didn’t mean anything anyway because you weren’t making a new friend or planning a life together. You were just two mammals in an uncomfortably beige terrarium, confirming for each other that they both existed and that the wait was, in fact, unreasonable.

Then waiting room TVs, laptops, handheld games, smartphones, tablets, and any number of other distractions arrived. Talking to strangers suddenly became one of many options. Given sufficient time and sufficiently engaging alternatives, optional things tend to become things you don’t do, and eventually things that you’ve forgotten you ever did.

Then one day you find yourself inside a tan rectangle with no cell coverage, no Wi-Fi, and the best opening line your brain can produce is a conjunction followed by a question about socks.

I looked back at the bell.

“I keep almost ringing that,” I told her.

She looked at the bell and then at me. “Okay.”

That wasn’t the response I had anticipated.

“It’s just… it’s there,” I clarified, in case it helped. “And the sign says not to use it.”

“I read the sign.”

“Right. I wasn’t implying you hadn’t.”

“I know.”

“I just thought it was funny. The sign.”

She looked at the sign again with fresh, critical eyes. “Is it?”

“It’s just that they took the time to make a sign,” I began, and then looked at the sign again. It was a laminated piece of paper taped to a desk, in Comic Sans, about a bell. “Okay. Maybe it’s not funny.”

“No,” she confirmed, in what felt to me like unnecessary thoroughness.

We sat silently in the wreckage of that exchange for a few zettaseconds. Civilizations rose and fell while the constellations rearranged themselves in the sky. The dehumidifier made a sound like an accordion that wasn’t angry at us, just very disappointed.

“I’m Amelia,” she said eventually, in the tone of someone that had just lost a serious bet with themselves.

“AJ.”

She nodded. I nodded. We had exchanged names. That felt like it should be significant, but it wasn’t. This was like two people in a fender bender exchanging insurance information and then never interacting again.

“Is that short for something?” she asked.

“Yes, it is,” I failed to elaborate, having momentarily forgotten what my name was.

“Oh,” she appeared to file this away somewhere. “Mine isn’t.”

I hadn’t asked. “Right,” I said. “Amelia isn’t usually—”

“It’s just Amelia.”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

More time passed. Back in the real world, children were being born, growing up, building homes, starting families, and passing away quietly of old age, surrounded by their loved ones.

Inside the waiting room, it was still 11:14.

After some more time, she said, “Is a social security card okay as a second form of ID?”

I looked around at the laminated signs, none of which addressed this query. “I don’t know. I hope so. I only brought my license with me.”

Something passed across her face. “That,” she said slowly, “is very responsible.”

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

I looked at her. She looked back at me with the expression of someone who had just accidentally called their teacher “Mom” in front of the entire class.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“It’s fine.”

It was fine. It was also not fine. Both things were equally true, which felt like a succinct summary of this entire ordeal.

I wondered at what point waiting rooms had stopped just being boring places and started feeling like a horreum of personal failings. It was as if being in a room and not having anything to do was fundamentally wrong on a cultural level, like laying down on an escalator, looking directly at the sun, or wearing brown shoes with a black belt.

Waiting rooms used to be areas in which you waited for whatever you needed to wait for. You could sit or you could stare at the floor. If you were really lucky and the waiting room had one, you could amuse yourself with the child-snot-encrusted bead maze. In a pinch, you could even think about nothing in particular. Doing any of that now, though, feels like wasting time, and wasting time has become a moral failing. We’ve built a system that assumes productivity as the norm, that time must always be filled, and that attention must always be captured. Waiting rooms violate all of that.

Maybe that explains why they feel so awkward now, because when nothing is asking anything of us, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. The discomfort of that has become so unfamiliar that we’ve started mistaking it for a problem to be solved. We look up “wild haggis” on our phones because we heard it used in a reel three days ago, we stare at trade magazines debating the optimal content of linseed oil in linoleum, eventually someone asks a weird question. We’ll do almost anything to avoid sitting quietly inside the unremarkable fact that we’re simply here, forever, in a room, waiting… which is sometimes all that life actually requires of—

“Mister Heller?”

A smartly-dressed woman was standing in a doorway, holding a clipboard with actual paper clipped to it. I gathered my things. Across the room, Amelia was being called by a different smartly-dressed woman. She gave me a small nod — the acknowledging nod of a fellow survivor — and stood up to leave. I stood up as well and, as I turned to go, heard the unmistakable DING of Amelia loudly ringing the bell on her way out.

I smiled and followed the smartly-dressed woman into whatever was next. It smelled vaguely like coffee and printer paper, and required no additional thought. The door closed behind me.

On a wall in an empty beige waiting room, with no one around to notice it, the clock finally rolled over to 11:15.

AJH