“Just let me talk to the doctor.”

“Sergeant Bosconovitch, listen to me…”

Ivan leaned in closer to the glass panel, resting his sweaty palms on the counter. The mix of anger and desperation in his gaze was almost cracking through the tempered glass and piercing across the unfazed, borderline automatized clerk as she stood right across him.

“I know he’s here on Wednesdays”, he continued, trying to keep his voice down. “I know you can just tell him I’m here. I just need five minutes.“

“Once again I’m gonna have to ask you to calm down.”

Ivan closed his fist and gestured toward slamming it against the wood, not quite doing so as he stopped himself soon enough. He grimaced in anger while looking sideways, turning his gaze back to the clerk before saying:

“How calm do you need me to be before I can see a fucking physician?” he whispered, although his whispering at this point was loud enough to be heard all the way across the empty hall. “Can’t you see I’m in pain?”

The morning had been off to a rough start not just for Ivan, but apparently just as much for the few people in the Reparations Office at that time. The silver light from the gray skies crept in through the tall windows of the main hall, shining across the haze of the stale air and the specks of dust drifting in it. The Weaver Parish branch of the Committee’s auxiliary offices had been adapted from a convention center built in the downtown area many decades ago, boasting the very distinct classical architecture that most public buildings had around that part of the business district. The grounded elegance of the tall ceiling, marble pillars and ornate window frames felt almost wasted on the cyclical, not the least bit glamorous nature of the bureaucratic work that was conducted inside that building every morning.

It was already past noon and there was barely anyone around, which made that sense of waste all the more jarring every time Ivan looked over his shoulder. Besides what seemed like three or four clerks on the clock, a young woman crying inside the break room right across the counter, a drowsy security guard and Ivan himself, there were probably less than ten people in what seemed like a lobby that could hold over fifty times that.

Even though there were never more than five people standing behind him at a time, more and more of them kept coming in and out of the line. At first he did try his best to ignore it, but by then he was too annoyed to keep pretending he wasn’t seeing it. He had been there for almost half an hour, while others barely stayed five minutes before leaving with whatever it was they came for. Realizing how much of a waste of time yet another trip to the Reparations Office was gonna be was already taxing enough as it was, but that small realization gave his annoyance a whole other dimension.

“Sir, I understand you’re upset, but as I already explained, there’s very little I can do for you—”

“I’m not asking for any favors, sister, from you or anyone else”, he tried to say as calmly as his body would allow him. “I’m asking to see a doctor.”

“And as I already explained, sergeant, there’s nothing I can do for you before you bring me the signed document with the stamp of approval.”

Ivan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He was about to lose his cool and he knew it. The grip was starting to give in. He slowly opened his eyes again as he thought to himself, “maybe if I just say what I’m thinking without shouting, it’ll get better instead of worse?”

“Do you have eyes inside of your skull? Can you read?” he muttered. The calm and sobriety in his voice was disconcerting even to himself. “It’s right in front of you. I just handed you the document. The signature, the stamp, it’s all there. I was told to get these over a month ago. Well, here they are. What else do you want from me?”

Standing in front of him on eye-level, the clerk just stared at Ivan in some weirdly equivalent dose of unfiltered intensity thinly disguised as neutrality.

“You already explained to me what you were told on your last visit, sir, there’s no need to repeat yourself. As there is no need for me to repeat myself either, having already explained to you that this documentation does not pertain to your meeting with the formerly appointed physician.”

“Okay”, he said, convinced he was still trying his best. “What does it pertain to, then?”

“Your meeting with the currently appointed counselor.”

Ivan was puzzled by that answer. He felt a strange jolt from the sensation of his anger giving place to a sudden state of confusion. Without breaking eye contact, he furrowed his brow slightly and calmly muttered:

“It says right here this is the authorization document for my doctor’s appointment.”

“That is correct”, the young woman said firmly, nodding once, just as invested in not averting her gaze for a single second.

“But not a physician.”

“No, sir.”

That felt like a contradiction for what seemed like it must have been barely a second. The realization came to Ivan in the form of a single sentence, as he uttered it in a searing monotone:

“You’re sending me to a shrink.”

“I’m not sending you anywhere, sergeant, I am just following protocol”, she was quick to say in her defense. “All I’m asking is that you do the same.”

Ivan could feel his body and his mind being overcome by an all-enveloping state of primal anger. The feeling was that of sinking in lukewarm seawater while lying on one’s back. His ears were filled by an increasingly loud ringing, some sort of ungodly white noise. A dog whistle from the depths of hell itself, built to be heard only by people who felt truly and utterly wronged by what fate had placed upon them.

“You goddamn people…” he snarled to himself, curling his fingers while his open palms still touched the counter.

The young woman said nothing. Her icy blue gaze was pure white hot intensity, serene while still airtight in its tactical precision. She may as well have been a machine, an idol to ward off evil spirits, a scarecrow someone left there to frighten away people with a pathological absence of the ability to take no for an answer.

Ivan, on the other hand, was plain and utter leagues out of his element and he knew it. He had to come up with something fast or risk losing the skirmish. “Understandable, you have a good rest of your day, now” wasn’t gonna cut it. But he couldn’t overextend his reach, either. He had to play this one by the book, nice and smooth, just enough to stick the landing. But also fast and lose enough to even take off in the first place.

This was it, he thought. As he slowly brought his closed fists to his sides, he straightened his back and slightly raised his chin as he stared down at the young woman and said:

“Let me talk to your supervisor.”

The answer blindsided him like the sharp blade of a rushing bayonet.

“Sergeant Bosconovitch, I am the supervisor. You said you wanted to talk to me, that’s why I’m here.”

It was over. He knew it. Or did he? The realization was so clear there was no point in even verbalizing it, out loud or inside his head. He was finished, outclassed, hung out to dry. There was no coming back from this. No shrugging it off, no walking away. That woman was the supervisor, he did inquire about her presence. Although he had already forgotten by now, mere minutes later; a telling sign of how absorbed in his own problems he was.

Defeat had set his gaze adrift. That was when his sight once again met the other young woman crying inside the break room, and he was suddenly struck by the recent memory of him shouting at her for over five minutes. Of course, that was before a second, fiercer young woman took her place, as requested by Ivan himself, something that had happened barely fifteen minutes prior and he had already forgotten all about.

The pain and the frustration were starting to deceive him, as his brain was erasing new memories as soon as it had been registering them. Thinking once again about the predicament of having to consult with a psychiatrist before being prescribed more drugs, he started wondering if maybe his condition was, after all, more serious than he previously thought.

His daydreaming about his deteriorating mental health was interrupted by a third, older woman inside the break room, this time staring back at him with a mix of disgust and annoyance, but just long enough to shut the door from the inside. Ivan’s sight now had nowhere else to go but back to the deathtrap that had become the unflinching gaze of the supervisor, who against his better judgement had not been a clerk at all up to that point. He couldn’t bring himself to keep staring at those fierce blue eyes as they corroded their way across his very being from one surface to the opposite, just waiting for him to call it quits like a vulture waiting for its prey to roll over and die.

It was getting harder and harder to properly assess if there was even anything to be salvaged from that whole interaction. Again, just leaving with whatever dignity was left wasn’t going to be enough. He had to resort to whatever was left at his disposal.

“Well, in that case, I wanna talk to your supervisor.”

“It’s me who does the supervising around here during office hours, sir. If it’s the superintendent you’re looking for, book a meeting with his secretary”, she added, betraying a slight hint of glee through a cynical smile. “But I doubt he’d have anything to say outside of what I already told you.”

That tiny woman was a giant, Ivan thought at that moment. She could have been no older than twenty five, her stature tragically just about below average, packed inside a skinny frame bordering on emaciation by the office-bound lifestyle so popular with citizens of the republic around that age.

But Ivan had always been sharp in his natural talent for getting a good read on an enemy’s chief strength, and he could tell that woman was versed in the dark arts of bureaucracy. She was young and feeble, but knew the ins and outs of the game she was picked by her government to arbitrate. At that age, she had already gamed the system, and she knew it; while Ivan, with all those years of raking up drills and confirmed kills under his belt, had done very little during that young woman’s lifespan besides being himself gamed by that very system she had wrangled into submission.

“Hey pal”, a man shouted from the line that had been forming behind Ivan, disrupting his silent contemplation of his own defeat as he looked over like a startled housecat.

He was probably in his early thirties, but more likely late twenties. Had a thin blonde moustache that almost looked glued in, and a tall trucker hat over a greasy mullet. He carried a thin manila folder that Ivan was willing to bet contained unemployment papers.

“Is this gonna take long?” he continued. “Some of us have stuff to do besides harassing other people at work.”

“Oh, fuck off”, Ivan barked like in a road rage episode. He was ready to say something rude about that moustache at the first sign of provocation, but the man just shook his head and muttered something under his breath.

Ivan noticed the handful of people at the line staring at him like he was some kind of hillbilly carnival attraction; a mix of unimpressed impatience and disgust that was starting to feel way too familiar to his liking. An old lady in particular, standing right behind him, scowled at him as soon as he cursed like he was the offspring of the Devil.

Sure enough, he was soon pulled back to his earthly prison of having to take that pointless conversation somewhere.

“Are we done here, sir?” said the young woman, his fiercest foe to date. He could feel the sense of finality in those words closing in on him.

It was time to go for the big swing. He took another deep breath, like a return to form, resting both palms over the counter and slightly leaning over while staring back at the woman in his most sincere state of serenity. Low and smooth, he could hear his own voice say:

“Miss, let me try to explain this to you just so we’re on the same page. I understand if I come across as a bit brash, maybe even a little standoffish, so to speak, to the untrained eye. I want you to understand, it’s not personal. I’m not choosing to behave like this. In fact, the sole reason I behave like this is because I was left with no other choice.”

The icy gaze of the young woman didn’t budge an inch. He continued.

“I’m a man in pain, lady. I was hurt in ways I never managed to fully recover from, both physically and mentally, and this has taken a toll on me. I can’t sleep, I can’t stay awake either, I need my medicine to be able to function as a human being. I need to change prescriptions almost once a month, and in order to do that I need to talk to my appointed physician.”

“And you will”, the woman was quick to clap back. “as soon as you get the required signatures after attending the required consultation.”

“Lady. Please. Don’t make me go to a shrink. This is gonna take forever. I need my medication now. I know the physician is here on Wednesdays, I just need to talk to him. Everything is gonna sort itself out if you just let me do it.”

She just stared at him in complete silence. After a second or two, he leaned in even closer to the glass.

“Please”, he added. “I gave much to help build what we have standing here today. Surely you can do this much for me.”

He looked her square in the eye, trying to fish for a single reaction. Without breaking eye contact, the young woman leaned over the counter and pressed a button as she moved her mouth closer to a microphone and firmly said:

“Security.”

Ivan promptly slammed his palm against the tempered glass, nearly shattering it as the resounding echo, loud as a gong, startled everyone within earshot. The young woman, however, didn’t even flinch.

“YOU FUCKING CUNT.”

“Adult male in his forties, white complexion, green jacket.”

“LET ME TALK TO THE DOCTOR RIGHT NOW.”

Without even looking at him, she just turned around and calmly walked toward the opposite end of the room, disappearing into an unsuspecting door, never to be seen again.

“Come back here, you stuck-up bitch”, Ivan kept shouting, banging his closed fist against the glass like it was a malfunctioning appliance. “You send the doctor over right this fucking minute before I come back here with a gun, do you hear me?”

Visibly nervous and trying to feign incisiveness, the chinless, mouth-breathing twenty-something security guard approached Ivan with one hand on his holster.

“Sir, I think it’s time for you to leave.”

“I’m not leaving this building without my pills, do you hear me?” said Ivan, ignoring the guard as he kept shouting to no one in particular over the counter, almost leaning his head over the glass pane. “I fucking shot civilians for democracy, you can’t do this me.”

“Sir…” said the guard, tapping Ivan on his shoulder and having his hand promptly slapped away like a noisy bug.

“Get your fucking hands off of me, rent-a-cop”, Ivan cussed at him, straightening his jacket as he took a step back. “Fucking mall security brats.”

“I think it’s time for you to leave”, the young man said again, almost like a pre-recorded message.

“Fuck off”, Ivan said as he scoffed at him, squaring him up from head to toe with a look of disgust. “Go defend a post if you wanna play with pea shooters so bad, you chickenshit fucking muppet.”

The young man said nothing, but kept his hand on his holster. Ivan wasn’t having it anymore, he just smacked the counter to grab his papers and left. As he stormed out across the large marble hall, clerks and people in line just stared at him like a beast of burden ran amok. Before leaving, he turned around one last time and proclaimed:

“You people should be living under fucking socialism right now, you bunch of ungrateful fucks”, he said, the bile almost crawling out of his mouth with every word. “Collecting food stamps, and… Go fuck yourselves.”

He turned around and stepped outside, almost embarrassed by the realization that halfway into that sentence he had forgotten other examples of things people do under communist regimes other than collecting food stamps. None of that mattered, of course, as nothing he could say would help make him less angry.

The day outside had gotten grayer and windier, and it was clear it was about to rain again. He stomped across the parking lot toward his truck, which was parked almost at the other end. At this moment he realized he was waist-deep in one of his episodes of anger-induced adrenaline rushes that numbed him from his pain; not enough to make it go away, but still enough to make him slightly more functional. Apparently that was all the medicine he was getting from that trip to the doctor.

As he sat down at the wheel and slammed the door shut, he was about to start the engine when he noticed a voice right outside his open window.

“Hey, chief.”

He looked over and noticed a somewhat familiar figure. An old homeless man that always roamed that parking lot in the early hours of the day, and had already approached Ivan for money on prior occasions.

“Can you help a fella down on his luck?”

Ivan didn’t quite know what he felt at that moment, but it wasn’t anger anymore. It was a strange feeling, somber and unfamiliar. It didn’t last long, and his bitterness was quick to set in again.

“If you find someone who can, let me know”, he said, starting up the engine and pulling out of the parking lot.

The engine roared and the tires screeched, and he was off into the gray maze of the financial district’s narrow streets. The old man just stared at the truck as it drove away, unsure if he had heard right whatever it was that Ivan said.