Somewhere Between Grey and White

By: Malik Nusseibeh

Eggshell walls, baby powder floor, and there I am sitting on the cream colored exam table of a ghostwhite doctor’s office wearing a maroon shirt with beige pants and sneakers that are so scuffed up that they’ve lost their color. It’s a tiny eight by twelve room with a small counter underneath a line of cupboards across the wall, a couple of chairs, a scale, and all the other usual things found in a doctor’s office.

There’s a knock on the door and it swings open abruptly. An elderly man walks in with little enthusiasm. He has aging blonde hair and a pair of round spectacles just above his rosy cheeks. The sagging skin from below his chin is practically a part of his neck. He wasn’t very large but was obviously gaining some pounds on his belly. His hands are small and liver spots are beginning to show. His fingers are stubby, bare with no bands. “Hello ­ ah,” he takes a look down at his clipboard, “Alan ­ ah Lockwood. I am Dr. Ollie Possum.” He put his arm out for a handshake.

I accept his greeting and reply, “Nice to meet you.”

When he let go he looked down at his hand, “Ah, right.” He proceeds to wipe it on his snowy lab coat. He takes a good long look at his clipboard and there’s an uncomfortable silence. At one point he begins to make a swallowing sound with his mouth so loud in the reticence of the wan room that I could hear the saliva being tossed around in his arid mouth. He breaks the quiet with a question, “It says here that you’ve been getting lightheaded?” His voice wasn’t rough like most old men; it was gentle. He pronounced the words clearly and without a slur.

“Yes.”
“Could you elaborate?” He looks back down at his clipboard.
Dr. Possum looked comical. Something about him didn’t quite seem real to me as if he

was completely made up. His hair, his glasses, his aged face that looked as if he were one of those old men from the movies. Even his name Ollie Possum? Where does one even come up with such a colorful name? “I’ve just been getting really dizzy and I start to blackout a little.”

He continues looking at his clipboard taking a few notes here and there, “And you fainted? Yes?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t seem to impressed with my response and doesn’t bother looking up. He pauses briefly and then asks, “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”
“Do you drive?”
“No.”
“Use alcohol?”
“No.”
“Smoke?”
“No.” He doesn’t say anything then brings down his clipboard just enough to make

proper eye contact and remains silent. “I don’t smoke,” I reassure. He raises his clipboard back up and the silence resumes.

“Well let’s take a listen to that heart.” Dr. Possum put his stethoscope on his ears and the other end on my chest. He quietly stares into the ceiling. He moves the stethoscope around on my chest and has a dazed look on his face. “How incredibly bizarre.” He pauses, “I can’t seem to find a heart in there.” I didn’t speak I just gave him a raised eyebrow. This man’s insane. How is he a doctor? He looks down at my chest and begins to chuckle in such a way that made me jump. “Haha, what a fool I am! The hearts on the left side!” In that moment I saw him go from a single vibrant shade to a bursting rainbow.

He moves over to the left side of my chest. “There we go, I can hear it loud and clear now.” He goes back to staring at the ceiling and it’s dead quiet again. He put on the same face but this time he seems more intrigued then confused. “How exotic.”

“What is it this ­”

“Shhh,” putting up his hand to silence me. I stare at him blankly. “What a curious little heartbeat you have there.”

“My heartbeat?”

“Why yes, your heartbeat.” His face still looks rather intrigued. “Let’s move on to your blood pressure.” He adjusts the band onto my arm, puts the stethoscope underneath, and begins to pump. My arm is numb and when he releases the pressure I feel the blood run through to my hand. “A bit lower than the usual.” He writes down some numbers and takes off the band. “You said you fainted and that you’ve been feeling lightheaded. Is that right?”

“Yes, we’ve been over this already.”

“I believe so.” I stare at him blankly again waiting for him to continue or follow up with another question. There was an uncomfortable silence again as I waited for him to say something else, “Is there anything else?”

“Anything else?”

“Do you feel anything else? In your limbs? Your chest? Anything.”
“My chest?”
“Yes.”
I can’t really come up with something to say but I’d hate to disappoint him with another

‘no,’ “Well, very rarely I’ll feel chest pain if I eat too fast. But I take it that’s just heartburn?” “Right.”

“That’s it really other than like a heavy heart or something when I’m dragged with emotions, usual stuff.”

“What’s that?” He replies as he’s once again intrigued.

“You know ­ when you get exhilarated or anxious? Your heart gets heavy.” He stares at me blankly as I would at him, “Your chest tightens up?”

“How extraordinary.” His face is in absolute astonishment.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“Not a clue.”
“When you’re getting ready for something big to happen and your hearts about to pop

out of your chest.” He continues to give me a blank stare, “Like when you’re with somebody that makes you feel like the happiest person in the world, it’s like you have a stone in place of your heart and you have to carry the weight.”

He looks absolutely astounded and at the same time baffled, “And this happens often?”

“Well ­ no I guess not. It’s rare but it’s absolutely incredible.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.” He begins taking vigorous notes on his clipboard. “Isn’t this ­ normal?”
“Normal?”
“Don’t emotions come from the heart? Doesn’t love come from the heart? Isn’t that

what they say?”
He chuckles, “That’s what the p​oets say! Feelings don’t come from the heart!” He

continues to laugh.
I’m confused, a bit frightened by him, and honestly, beginning to feel a bit misled. Is he

speaking the truth? Or is he so far at sea he’s never felt a thing his entire life. “Happiness, you’ve never felt it in your heart before?”

“Happiness is just an increase of dopamine and serotonin transmission in the brain. The b​rain.​The heart has nothing to do with it.”

“How have you never felt this before?”
“Listen Aaron ­”
“Alan.”
“Emotions come from the brain.” He points at his head. “You’ve had to have felt this before?”

“I spent nine years in medical school ­”
“People always say love comes from the heart.”
“And the last thirty­eight years as a doctor.”
“Isn’t that why our hearts beat faster?”
“And what I’ve learned is that you can feel however you want whenever you want.”
“I can’t be the only one.”
“Because it’s all inside of your little head. You see? If you want to be happy you can be

happy.”
“Mr. Potato, please.”

“If you want to be sad you can be sad. Put all that teenage angst aside and feel what you want because at the end of the day all your feelings come from your head. You don’t have to waste time feeling sad or upset if you don’t want to. Your heart’s not telling you to do anything. It simply keeps you alive!” There is a silence. A long silence. I can hear the reticence of the room again. His mouth is still moving. He may have well still been talking but I heard nothing but the stillness of the room. “You said you wanted to be an English professor?”

“Excuse me?” I have no memory of such a conversation, at least not with him.

“Shame. You’d make a wonderful teacher.” He looks back at his clipboard and writes down a few more things. I stare blankly into the milky light of the room. “Let’s go find your mum and have a chat with her, yes?”

“Are you saying … I have broken heart?”
“You could call it that, yes.”
There’s another silence but it was unlike any of the others. I’ve been stuck in the

translucent, alabastrine light of the room until it’s suddenly clouded and I’m choking in it. I’m surrounded by it and it’s strangling my throat. It’s dusty and drab like ash. It’s grey.

“Well then how do you fix a broken heart?.” “That depends. Literally or figuratively?”

I sit there a moment and when I look at him he grins and gives me a nod. I return it and I get up off the exam table and walk with him to the waiting room where my mother has been patiently sitting.

As she sees us walking near she gets up and puts an arm around me. “A word Ms. Lockwood?” Dr. Ollie Possum pulls her over to a side and they chat while I sit down where my mother had been waiting.

There’s a man sitting across from me. He looks somewhere in his mid­twenties. He has long dark brown hair with the sides of his head buzzed. It looks as if he shaved this morning but was already growing quite a shadow on his face. His jawline was define. There’s a sleeve of tattoos on his right arm. He’s leaning out of his seat with his hands on his head. He looks nervous. Was he waiting for somebody? Or was there bad news awaiting his ears? It almost looks as if he were getting himself together to get up on a stage in front of thousands of people.

He looks up at me and our eyes meet. I stare straight into them and he stares right back into mine. He’s reading my mind, and his eyes, they’re tender, lush and sprouting into the season. Fresh, grassy, and juvenile. Like emeralds. In them I see anguish, and guilt, and despair, as if he were ready to cry. And although it only lasts a moment it, I’m convinced that I’m looking into my own two eyes in a reflection of myself.

“You’re sick.” He whispers as neither a question nor a fact. “Or that’s what they told you. Something’s wrong with you. That something’s not quite right about you.” I don’t reply but neither does he expect me to. “Well that’s just what the doctors say,” he says with a gentle smirk, but it doesn’t last. “That you must be sick or something cause you came to them. Right? And even when you’re perfectly fine they’ll convince you otherwise. So when you go home and wake up the next morning you can feel all better and think that they fixed you when there was never anything wrong.” He pauses but continues to look me in the eyes. I imagine he see’s the same in my eyes that I see in his. “Don’t listen to whatever they’re telling you. You’re sad. That’s ok, because when you see the colors again they’ll only gleam brighter than they did before. Listen to your heart, cause there’ll come a day where it’s empty inside and you’ll be a lost puppy.”

He pauses and I take a second to take in what he’s saying. “But isn’t that just what the poets say?”

A smile broke out on his face again, “Just because it’s what the poets say doesn’t make it any less real than what you’re feeling right now.”

Then I feel it. That feeling in my heart that I couldn’t explain. That feeling of a boulder in my chest. The one that feels like my heart’s going to pop. The one that the doctor said wasn’t right. The one he couldn’t understand. The one he couldn’t feel. And then I realize, I’m not the one with the broken heart, he is.

I try to collect my thoughts to say something but a woman walks into the waiting room, “Michael Borne.” We both immediately look over at her. The man, Michael, looks back at me and as he stands up ready to walk away, he points at me.

“It’s in the heart.” Those were the last words I’d heard from him and I try to get one last glimpse of those eyes. He follows the lady down a hall and I focus on the imagine of him walking away. A blue button up denim t­shirt that was quite tight. Some long black pants folded at the ankle and a pair of those dress shoe like boots that were becoming more common. I wonder what had happened to him. What did the doctor say to him? Was he sick? He had to be, right? He was going to them. So he has to be sick.

I remain in the waiting room while my mother continues talking to Dr. Possum. The set’s of turquoise chairs are mostly empty between the eggshell walls on the baby powder floor of the clinic. There’s about twelve of them, chairs that is. And there I am in a maroon shirt, beige pants, and a pair of sneakers so scuffed up that the laces are no longer white.