The Waiting Room

On the surface, there is nothing that should tie Jasmine Elise Johnson, a cafe au lait colored sister still young enough to harbor dreams of changing lives and creating educational equity in her classroom, and Ricardo Sanchez, a 39 year old latino, desperately trying to hold on to the family business, together. Well, that is except for this waiting room, that little black book, and someone’s twenty thousand dollars.

This is an unusual setting, though if we have learned anything in the time of ‘Rona, it is that very little is as it seems, and even less is as we have come to believe. Coronavirus, and Covid-19, and masks, and social distancing, and deaths - so many dying - have revealed so much of who we are to ourselves. It is said that the virus doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t. But we do. So Black and Brown people, and the most vulnerable among us, find themselves scrambling for information, scrambling for care. They have become skilled at waiting. That is what brought Ricardo and Jasmine here, to this Howard Brown clinic on the south side of Chicago seeking the vaccine which could keep everyone’s, keep their, inevitable at bay.

Jasmine registered through the Cook County government website; she signed up through Walgreens and Walmart; she put her email in for updates through Chicago’s department of health website, but she got lucky in Howard Brown’s vaccine portal. A 11:15am Monday, February 22, 2021 appointment, which she would learn actually meant arrive at 11:00am, stand in line wrapping around the block, and wait. So Jasmine did as Ricardo had done two hours before.

They would end up in the same waiting room, almost certainly the same socially distanced seat, looking at the same paltry spread of worn and weary magazines. Except, she would see what he hadn’t: a 4” x 6” little black book sitting slightly askew atop the December 2020 Wired magazine cover, blending into the black and grey backdrop and perfectly hiding the image at its center: planet Earth with Coronavirus spikes all around it, fittingly. He had placed it there. And forgot. In the waiting? In the boredom? In the odd silence? She, hours later, would find it. An entirely full little black book, not just any little black book though, it was a Moleskine little black book, her favorite, filled with entries for almost an entire year. Each entry exactly a week apart: Monday at 9:00am, starting March 16, 2020.

The feel of the cover under her fingertips is familiar as she has caressed so many Moleskines of varying sizes over the years. This one is different though. Hers are full of starts, the beginnings of things, marking, or rather mocking, her attempts to put down on paper the stories in her head, stories she would share with her students some day. This Moleskine, however, is full cover to cover with him, with someone named Ricardo Sanchez. Literally. As Jasmine waits, patiently, and reads, Ricardo simultaneously becomes real and not with the turning of each page.

From one flip of the page to the next, Ricardo Sanchez is born. Though his name is not printed on the inside cover and though there is no contact information to be had, no handles, as Jasmine would say, anywhere, Ricardo takes shape. Or, perhaps, the character of Ricardo Sanchez begins to form. Jasmine can’t be sure. Each week’s entry is exactly the same. The exact same words, in the exact same order. Well, that is except when there are less words describing less of Ricardo, in script that seems just a bit different from one Monday at 9:00am to the next, letters once smooth are less so by book’s end. Here is the entirety of Ricardo Sanchez from entry number 1:

Ricardo Sanchez

My bones are weary. And if I am being honest the flesh and mind is weary too. But my mind, well that is nimble still even though mi familia does not know. Early Onset Dementia is shit! And though when I was still able to talk clearly and move freely I fixed my face just so for Alicia, my loving wife’s sake, and for Angel and Lucia, the twins, I am so very mad. Diagnosed at 37, just days after closing on our new house in Pilsen, I tripped over that stupid single step up from the living room to the kitchen, fell on my face, and nothing has been the same since. I had been stumbling a bit for months, but Alicia and I wrote that off as sheer exhaustion from the long long hours I was spending at the bakery. And though Coronavirus has changed everything, It was coming up on mother’s day after all and people were busy placing curbside pickup orders of sweet treats for their loves and breads for their moms. The sky was sunny and light, but my world was darkening. Soccer on Saturdays with Angel and Lucia scurrying up and down green fields with the kit just a tad too long seem so distant now because of Covid and because of my mind. I miss hanging out with my old high school buddies in one garage or another on Sundays working on old cars to drive with our partners at our sides during rallies that no longer occur but from which Alicia and I would be absent if they did. I miss my industrial kitchen. I miss the flour on my hands. I miss the smells that lingered in my pores and settled into my very being. I miss. I miss. I miss me.

Jasmine sits with this, sits with Ricardo. And wonders. Is Ricardo Sanchez the author of his own life? If so, why does he write of himself in third person? Or, is Ricardo Sanchez, his wife, his children, his life, simply the imaginings of some author capable of doing what Jasmine cannot: writing, and then writing some more.

So, perhaps in search of answers, perhaps simply hungry for words, Jasmine turns the page to entry two, to entry ten. And the words are exactly the same as the words on pages before; there are simply less of them. When she reaches the end of the last entry dated today, Monday, February 23, 2021 at 9:00am, there is so little left of Mr. Ricardo Sanchez:

Ricardo Sanchez

My bones are weary. And if I am being honest the flesh and mind is weary too. But my mind, well that is nimble still even though mi familia does not know. Early Onset Dementia is shit! And though when I was still able to talk clearly and move freely I fixed my face just so for Alicia, my loving wife’s sake, and for Angel and Lucia, the twins, I am so very mad.

Jasmine sits with all that is missing. Jasmine sits with the little that is left. She thinks about Ricardo, his wife, the twins. She wonders about the fate of the bakery. And then she notices the inconspicuous folder discreetly placed on the inside of the back cover. She reaches in in hopes of finding some information on whose little black book she holds; what she pulls out instead is a scratch-off Illinois lottery ticket. She reads the instructions for the game. She stares at the scratched off spots. A winner -- a golden ticket: someone’s twenty thousand dollars.