Natural Causes by Nina Lykke

Author:Nina Lykke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter

10

IT’S TWELVE O’CLOCK, lunch time, and on Fridays they serve a warm meal in the cafeteria. I wonder what they’ve concocted today. Tacos, pasta, Indian, they’ve even ordered sushi on occasion, and it’s important to nurture these kinds of small joys so I force myself to go out. I let go of doing what I really want to do—stay in my office, give up eating, starve myself to death—and instead I straighten my shoulders and walk to the cafeteria, I lift my feet high on every step, because everything is just fine, it’s fine. It is.

We used to be able to talk about whatever we wanted in the cafeteria. We could have suggested that marathon runners should have to pay extra due to all the injuries, as much as a tenfold increase for all of their races, suggestions to which all but the clinic’s two skinny, wrinkled marathon runners could agree. Or we might have said that anyone who was morbidly obese should have to apply for a special permit to own a car. Or that opposers of vaccines should face long prison sentences, and that any form of abuse should come with high fines. But these days we have to be wary. Any of our jokes can be filmed, recorded, they might be posted to social media by a staff member sitting there fiddling with their cell phone, as most of the staff members do during their entire lunch break, and that’s why cafeteria conversations are no longer an outlet, because we’ve got to restrain ourselves there too, as if we were still in our offices with the patients. Nowadays the cafeteria conversations are the kind of banter that can be overheared in any Norwegian workplace. Vacation plans, current events, gossip. In one ear, out the other. But lately these lunches have been my sole source of warm food all week, and this is why I keep coming, and at the same time these Friday lunches serve as a reminder for why I don’t show up to lunch the rest of the week.

The staff members sit at one table and the doctors sit at another. I sit down at the doctor table, there’s a spot open next to The Rebel. The Rebel is over seventy, with an open doctor’s jacket and gray, tangled hair, always ready to get wound up in a discussion, to jump on the chance to say the words bureaucratic red tape, reactionary, racist, sexist, words he adores and longs to use, and every time he says them, a quiver of pleasure runs through his body. If The Rebel had been one generation younger, he would have lived in Grenda, or known someone who lives there. If you’re feeling a little dizzy or tired, all that’s needed is to pop by The Rebel’s office and you’ll be prescribed a week’s sick leave. You might even be able to convince him that you’re weather-sick because it’s been raining straight for a week, and in that case you’ll

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