reception || lina & nate
carolinacollado:
Was everything like riding a bike? Muscle memory, maybe. Steer straight and pedal. Train your entire life, maybe, before the middle passes and makes it a memory in the first place. Do you ever really forget? Fingers on a fret board, moving across strings, forming shapes and creating sound between breaths. Simultaneously reading the subtitles while watching the images span across the tv, or the laptop screen propped by pillows. Driving, like riding a bike– steering wheel, rearview mirror, windshield wipers. Maybe muscle memory only meant multi-tasking. Funny, how it worked.
It’s all she thought about, leaning forward against her desk. Like she’d lost all sense of posture, all she’d trained for in elementary school playing the violin. Multi-tasking: thinking, thinking, looking– talking. Nate.
She’d trained for this, right? How do you ever forget?
It was foreign, the way he said her name. Lina forgot what that sounded like – her name on another man’s tongue. Tried to forget it, too, and the way her words bubbled over and out around them. Nate liked waiting. When he talked, it felt heavy– weighed her shoulders down, made her shift forward to get closer. A desk and a countertop between them. Heavy, ‘cause it was slower. Visible breaths, y’know? Heavy, because his voice was deep. Too deep, like it matched the dip between his eyebrows, but not the rest of his face. Nate liked waiting, and Lina couldn’t even hold the words in.
“Are you sure?” But he was eyeing the water cooler, now, and he wouldn’t look at her. Some things were answered without an answer. Forget it. Lina was the kid that shook every present wrapped underneath the Christmas tree– guessed and guessed what it was until her mother relented. A tip: always hide the torn gift boxes at the back. Never try to one-up your abuela, a worker at a wrapping factory. Patience was near impossible when all Lina wanted was to learn, or to give, or to smile. She tried the hardest stuff first– Paganini’s Caprice No. 4 in C minor eight months into training. “I bet you’re used to waiting, though, right? Being an astronaut and all?” When exactly did she cross this line of unprofessionalism? The first time she opened his file, and tried to make out every word– or now, making small (it wasn’t small) talk? Nathan Stahl knew a lot– knew so much, Lina knew – and it must’ve been perfect to practice patience when you were only surrounded by the stars.
He sure knew something, ‘cause he liked the music. This is when Lina remembered: practically perked up, with her spine straightened against the desk chair. “It’s good, right?” The CDs were on the counter. She had to loop her fingers around a stray elastic band and pull, pull, to keep from waving a copy in his direction.
Forget composure when a sad boy makes you laugh. Wide mouth, neck stretched. Loud laughter that blocked out anything beautiful. It was good, but this was even better. “If you look hard enough, I’m pretty sure there’s a 1996 copy with Jen on the cover.” Lina peeked over the counter, hiding a smile with a pen between her teeth. “You could hawk that for some serious cash– but, let me guess, here–” like she forgot why Nate was even here in the first place. “You like Friends, but He’s Just Not That Into You is your favourite movie.” The official introduction (”Nate. Nathan. Nathan Robert Stahl”) was like an inside joke shared between people that weren’t strangers. Confidential, almost, even though Lina had already broken that trust. He wasn’t a stranger, with the way he rolled his eyes. The way Lina thumbed through his file every other Wednesday afternoon. You don’t care this much about strangers.
“Just Nate,” she tried to breathe it out slow. Really slow. “I like that.” Maybe her reminders weren’t meant to be formal phone calls– maybe this was it. This was it: just Nate, and Lina multi-tasking.
He took it with him.
The couch in Dr. Norman’s office had seven or eight throw-pillows on it, usually clustered up between two cushions when Nate came in. Today, there was a box of tissues on the side-table, overflowing like flowers in a vase too short. He tried not to think about that. The woman whose hair hid her face as she shimmied past him in the hallway, the bookshelves that barely reached his hipbones. There was the sense, leaning forward so he could tug a rose-covered pillow out from behind his back, that the room was a place where other people poured their sadness, and that the walls were buckling with the strain. Like he’d taken a deep breath out in reception and now he had to hold it ‘til his time was up.
Lina was a deep breath, too. Nate was working on remembering what it meant to be effortless, and talking to her -- almost twenty minutes, sitting out there, and he’d felt maybe five of them. Talkative people took a lot of energy; he and Mikhail didn’t say much on Skype, but they’d been pretty sparse up on the station, too, sharing headphones and watching the songs change each other’s faces. It was easier to be quiet. But out on the other couch, in reception, he wasn’t expected to take up the same amount of space as she did when she spoke. Maybe there was still effort involved, but there wasn’t any pressure.
He said that, too. “I like the receptionist,” once he got adjusted and the door was closed and he could hear the minute-hand on the clock by the desk.
“Lina?” Dr. Norman’s forehead dug lines in itself. Nate could only nod. “She’s been with us for a little while now. She’s very talented.”
There were empty spaces between all of the words. Nate’s head, emptied out and echoing.
“She said...” He dragged fingers over his palm and looked at the carpet by the floor lamp, where the light made a shadow. “She said it must’ve been... it must’ve taken a lot of patience. What I did.”
“What did you do?”
“Being an astronaut.”
Dr. Norman’s mouth gathered together in the middle of his face. “You don’t say that out loud very often, do you? Can we talk about that?”
But that’s how she’d said it. Nate replayed it for himself, her voice bouncy and light like balloons, and he tongued his lip as he listened. And listened.
“Nate?"
It was a long session. May’ve been a little under the limit, with the delay getting started, but Nate felt every minute like they were three minutes each.
By the end, he had a name for the pressure in his chest.
The music was off when he got back into the waiting room. Dr. Norman said Nate was the last session, today, and he asked Nate to close the door behind him as he walked into the hall. He didn’t have a plan for this. He didn’t think about having a plan, or making one, or coming back another time; he wanted to keep holding his breath and let all the bubbles out at the same time, and Nate’s heart stuttered with the struggle to do both.
Astronaut, she’d said. Nate would never say that.
He gave her the $20 in scattered bills, five ones and three fives he’d gathered to tip the delivery cars that made it to his porch. When she smiled, she was all teeth and laugh lines by her nose, and Nate was like a fourth-grader on stilts in a trenchcoat, nothing to see here. A school uniform his aunt had to tailor-fit. He was the first to leave, and he made quick work of his feet in the stairwell, but then -- he just wanted to go home, draw the shades at home -- but then the door didn’t close all the way behind him, because Lina caught it with her hand.
“I have FEHB,” he said. That’s what he was going to lead with? It was too late to take it back. He’d already unplugged his mouth. “That’s federal employee; my insurance is through the government. I don’t have to write NASA on anything. And I know I didn’t say it, right? I would remember that. I’m not crazy.”
A little fucked up, sure. Hostile, now, definitely -- but it was a relief to be angry, and to carry that in his voice. Even if she looked like she didn’t deserve it. She did. She did. “What did you do? Huh? Did you listen through the door? Do you and Dr. Norman talk about me? Do I have to call the medical board?” It sounded like paranoia, but he couldn’t rein it in.
