No Psychophobia
’AIRPORT STAFF ANNOUNCEMENT:
Please direct all defunct personnel to area 3’
The dim, faulty lights of the airport office flickered. The administrators had left the ceiling unfinished, and empty pipes still protruded from above. Inside, there was an even dimmer room: a cubicle for two people to make small talk. A room within a room. Walls behind walls. Only a red LED text light-up stood out of the dull background, a spike of color in a plain of grey concrete. Although it shrieked, the lighted text still stood no chance against the rigid concrete walls. With a low-tuned buzz, it showed only one message.
STAND BY
“Doesn’t it seem a bit off?”
“What do you mean by ‘off’?”
“I mean, these fellas just got through their first, I guess unfortunate, screening. Isn’t it a tad bit hesitate to call them ‘defuncts’ at this moment?”
The protestor spoke, puzzled. Fixing the still stiff collar of his uniform coat, he turned towards his associate. His face was clear and plump, a bit too young but a tad bit old. He seemed even younger with his orderly combed short, blond hair. Although he felt fine with his trusty morning coffee at his side, his eyes were equivalent to that of a miserable middle-aged man — tired of life. ‘The air around here is just too dry’, he thought.
“Well, most of them fail all them following screenings too. Barely saw any of these initial screenings picking a commoner, so maybe it’s fine for the ‘early categorization’.”
“I’m just not feeling it Smith. It doesn’t feel right.”
“What can we do? It’s those higher-ups who make these calls anyway.”
“So, you don’t care?”
“Not my business.”
As Smith pulled out a plastic lighter from the left pocket of his worn-out trousers, he lifted his hand, palm up, towards his protesting colleague. His hands were dry, and small pieces of skin were attempting to escape the arid surface. His coat held wrinkles, too damaged by perpetual laundry cycles; his residential neighborhood had no dry-cleaning, or at least, no affordable services. Like a war veteran, the coat had scars and stains encompassing the wool.
The wearer of such amusing fashion bore multiple similarities with it. Smith Hicks, the senior evaluator of the post, also carried a myriad of scars and stains on the surface of his desert skin and stale heart: battle scars, by his own words. His hair was gray, not white, old streaks of hair but worn out clumps of that were once colored black. His eyes were covered by the shadow of his brow that crumpled into a permanent expression of dismay a few years ago, never to recover its former relaxed position again.
“You should get to know that phrase, by the way. Hand me a smoke? I’m all out.”
Letting out a brief but deep sigh, the protestor reached into his own coat and scavenged the warm interior of his uniform coat for a cigarette, two, in fact. With his well-moisturized right hand, he put one on the pending hand while saving one for himself. Two brief sparks of light added a puny flash to the dim room, only to be shrouded by a cloud of smoke. Soon, only the red glow of ‘STAND BY’ pierced through the smoke.
“You know, I used to think just like you when I was new here, ’bout five years before you rolled in.”
“Oh really? Same topic?”
“Worse topic. We used to call the ‘defuncts’ ‘defects’ before we moved onto the term ‘rejected’ you’re used to.”
“Isn’t ‘defect’ practically…”
“The same thing with ‘defunct’, yes. But, ‘defunct’ implies that they used to be fine but just no longer so. ‘defect’ had a connotation that they were some kind of traitors.”
“Wow, that’s a bit… confusing.”
“Well, it was a confusing time. The public knew of the pandemic just a few months prior. We didn’t know much of the disease. Not much on what to do with it.”
“…”
A faint fiasco of footsteps echoed through the corridor.
“…”
“Desperate terminology for desperate times, I see.”
“Desperate times with a damned disease, indeed. No way of detection, like a stealth bomber. You’d just fall dead in the middle of a crosswalk without even knowing that you were infected before. No symptoms other than death, or so we thought until…”
“Until we found out about the crazy thing. I just vaguely heard about what happened.”
“Yeah, the crazy thing. Some smarties at WHO noticed it. You’d catch the damn virus, get a bit psychotic with that thing stirring up your head, and just… die.
“Only knew about the high-ups hiring psychology majors; my sister actually tried to apply, but they didn’t allow her. Apparently, her literature major proved her ‘too vulnerable for objectivity’.”
“They said that?”
“Yeah, I actually—”
The red ‘STAND BY’ suddenly disappeared with a whoosh; with the blinding monotone conquering the room once again, a blare of a dozen panicked alarms, delicately designed to scrape up as much tension as they can, soon replaced the newborn vacuum and repelled the ambitious greyness. The two men stiffened their bodies; they dunked their cigarette buns in the ashtray in mechanical unison as if the alarms had activated two robots. Bizarre and awkward uniformity.
“Stations?” Smith noted with a deep, aged, professional voice.
“Yes sir.”
The procedure was simple: two evaluators would get their standard issued tablets and enter a small confined booth with an interrogation table, one would sit on one of the two chairs and the other would stand in front of the wall opposite two where the partner sat; Smith took the chair this time.
A steel door to Smith’s right fidgeted and opened with a disturbingly high-pitched creak. In came a child. As their target of evaluation treaded towards the remaining chair, Smith and his colleague took quick alternating scans of the visitor and the profile that their tablets introduced.
‘Girl, age 13.’
‘Half Hispanic (father) and half Irish (mother); peculiar…’
‘Family records seem normal; little margins of error expected for that.’
The two scanners even analyzed and deduced in unison, reaching the same conclusion observing the same material (although from different positions). Meanwhile, the young girl sat on the metal chair. She sweated heavily while her eyes struggled to find where to look. The dry atmosphere expressed disapproval to the girl’s sweat droplets and hissed at her for producing them. Her eyes awaited her brain’s permission to let loose a flood of tears, but the brain was too busy chewing through the words of her mother.
‘Don’t let them stab you in there. If they do, just think of mama and go through.’
Terrible advice to give to a nervous thirteen-year-old.
The next procedure for the two men, a carefully conducted interview (or interrogation, as some activists put it), was the most stressful one — for the questioned, of course. The men in uniformed were very much worn out by perpetual hours work to be concerned of a few lines of questions; they quickly and disturbingly comfortably continued with doing what they were paid to do: question, evaluate, categorize, and quarantine. Their engines were well lubricated with morning coffee.
Click… Click… Click…
Like a recorder, accounting every answer, every irregular heartbeat, every rough breath.
They were on a hunt, a quest to find the slightest speck of insanity within their suspect. Any innocence too naïve. Any courage too bold. Any belief too absurd. The girl’s mind was a perilous place, much like any other human being: a vast expanse of bright, innocent colors all smeared together, making any line obsolete. But peril is the trait of the minds of all men and women. Although the question at hand demanded a dichotomy, the resources at hand did not cooperate.
So, it was the job of the evaluator to draw new lines; it was their job to implement that right upon themselves no matter how arbitrary it might seem. In the end, it wasn’t the people nor God who made the verdict:
Is she insane?
Is she infected?
And is she a defect?
…
“Did you reach a conclusion?”
“Definitely. Mentally unstable, paranoid, and a whole spectrum of cognitive pitfalls.”
“So, she’s infected?”
“I would say so.”
…
“Something on your mind?”
“No, it’s just… She’s just a kid.”
“Young, old, feeble, strong, they’re all hazards if they have the virus.”
“Didn’t it ever bother you?”
“No use in being sentimental. You’ll get used to it soon, too.”
…
“MAMA!”
…
The doors clanked once again. For another time for the two men, and for the last for the little girl. The tablets blinked into darkness, showing nothing but black. Within the black, reflected a red light.
STAND BY
The airport office, just now clear of cigarette smoke, filled itself with pending bureaucrats. At once, they lifted their cigarettes, following the same procedure as they did about an hour prior.
“Smith?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think that… just maybe… some of the people we quarantined weren’t, in fact, infected?”
“…”
“Is there… a possibility that they got infected in quarantine?”
…
“Definitely.”