The waiting room of the county health clinic smelled like old linoleum and seventy years of lemon floor wax that had finally given up. I sat there on the orange plastic chair for forty-two minutes staring at a poster about washing your hands before I finally heard my name called down the hall. Nurse Brenda didn’t even look up from her clipboard when she waved me through to exam room four.
The air in that tiny room felt heavy and stale, like it had been breathed in by a dozen sick people since sunrise.
I sat on the paper table and tried to roll my shoulders back to ease the knot that had been sitting there since Tuesday morning. Doctor Hayes walked in five minutes later carrying a metal tray with three wooden tongue depressors and a blue plastic pen. He didn’t smile, which was unusual because he usually asked about my brother’s flooring business before he touched my throat.
He shined a tiny penlight right into my left pupil and held it there for three seconds too long. Then he clicked it off and laid his clipboard flat against the counter by the sink. I could hear the second hand on the wall clock ticking away like a little metal hammer.
Doctor, give it to me straight. What’s wrong with me? I asked.
He let out a long breath through his nose and crossed his arms over his white lab coat. I’m afraid you have a highly contagious, extremely dangerous virus. We’re putting you in strict isolation.
My throat went dry instantly and I had to swallow twice just to get my tongue to move. Oh my god. What happens now? I asked.
He looked down at the floor tile for a second before he met my eyes again. You’ll be locked in a sealed room and placed on a strict diet of pancakes and personal pan pizzas.
I stared at him because my brain kind of stopped working for a beat or two. Wait, will all those carbs help cure my virus? I asked.
No, but it’s the only food flat enough to slide under the door.
Before I could ask him if he was making some kind of sick joke, the heavy steel door swung shut with a thick hydraulic click. The deadbolt turned from the outside with a loud, mechanical thud that rattled the little wire-reinforced glass window.
I stood up off the paper table and took two fast steps toward the knob, but it spun completely loose in my hand.
The room measured maybe ten feet by eight feet with nothing inside except a narrow metal cot and a plastic chair. There wasn’t even a sink, just a white floor drain in the corner and a tiny vent up near the ceiling blowing cold air. I pressed my palm against the glass and saw Doctor Hayes walking away down the hallway with his clipboard tucked under his arm.
Nobody came back for nearly three hours while I sat on that metal cot staring at my boots. My cell phone had been left out on the intake desk in the main lobby, so I didn’t even have a way to call home and tell my wife where I was. The silence in the hallway was thick and heavy, broken only by the low hum of the ventilation system overhead.
Around 5:15 in the evening, I heard a faint scraping sound coming from the base of the heavy steel door. I got down on my knees and pressed my face right against the bottom crack to see what was happening out there. A gloved hand slid a greasy cardboard box across the linoleum, followed by a flat paper plate with three cold pancakes on it.
I reached my fingers under the gap and dragged the box toward me like an animal in a cage. The cardboard was stamped with the logo from Mario’s Pizza down on 4th Street, greasy and stained around the corners. I opened the lid and found a personal pan pepperoni pizza cut into four awkward squares sitting right next to the syrup-soaked pancakes.
It didn’t make any sense, but I was starving enough that I didn’t care about the weird combination. I sat there on the floor eating a cold pepperoni slice and wondering how long the county health department planned on keeping me locked in this box. The grease left an orange stain on my thumb that wouldn’t rub off on my jeans no matter how hard I tried.
Ten minutes later, I heard footsteps stopping right outside my door again. A piece of folded white printer paper slid under the crack just like the pizza box had. I picked it up and unfolded it, squinting in the dim light of the overhead fluorescent bulb.
The note was written in blue ballpoint pen in Doctor Hayes’s messy, looping handwriting. It didn’t mention the virus or any kind of treatment plan for whatever bug I was supposed to have caught. It just said the laboratory results from my morning blood draw had gotten mixed up with someone else’s file from the county fairgrounds.
The real patient with the contagious strain had left two hours ago on bus number twelve heading toward Springfield. They had locked me up because my paperwork had dropped behind the filing cabinet and Brenda didn’t want to admit she lost it. I sat there on the floor with half a personal pan pizza in my lap and stared at the ink on that paper.
The deadbolt finally turned back the other way at 6:30 when a young orderly named Tim pulled the door open with an embarrassed grin. He didn’t say anything about the pancakes or the pizza box sitting on the floor between my boots. He just handed me my car keys and pointed down the hall toward the exit sign.
I walked out through the empty waiting room without looking at the front desk or stopping to talk to Brenda. The evening air outside the clinic was cool and smelled like damp grass and exhaust from the highway. I got into my truck, turned the key, and drove straight home to eat a proper dinner at the kitchen table.
