The waiting-room magazine
The pile on the low table is always out of date. A home magazine from two springs ago, a motoring one with the cover softened by thumbs, a puzzle book with half the puzzles done in someone else’s biro. Nobody complains about the age. If the pile were for reading, somebody would. You sit down, and within a minute most people have picked one up. Within ten, almost none of them have read anything.
They aren’t pretending. People open the magazine meaning to read it, start a paragraph, and arrive at the bottom of it having taken in nothing. They go back up and start again. The problem isn’t the magazine. It’s that the room has already given their attention a job, and the job is the door. Somewhere a person with a list is going to say a name, and you have to catch yours on the first try. So the ear stays on duty, and reading needs the same inner voice the ear is using. Every footstep in the corridor takes a line away from you. Every name that isn’t yours does too, because for the first half second it might have been.
Watch what happens at a call. Every head in the room comes up at once, the way birds lift off a wire. Then all but one go down again, back into pages nobody was reading. Those few seconds are the only time the room acts as a group, and the magazines are how it stops being one.
That is the magazine’s real job. A waiting room is a public room full of private reasons. Everybody in it is there because of something about their own body, and the rule, which nobody states, is that nobody asks. An open magazine keeps the rule for you. It gives the eyes somewhere legitimate to be that isn’t another person’s face, or their bandage, or the form on their knee. It tells the room you are fine and only waiting. It gives the hands something to do that isn’t fidgeting. A phone does all of this now, and better, which is why the pile has got older. Nobody ever asked the magazine to be current. They only asked it to be open.
Its shape suits the job. A waiting-room magazine is built from pieces you can drop: short items, captions, a recipe, a page of photographs, a quiz. Nothing in it costs anything to leave half-done, which matters, because you will leave it half-done. The call comes at a random moment and you put the magazine down mid-sentence, face-up, open at whatever page you were on, and walk away. You don’t mark the place, because you are not coming back to it. The next person picks it up at somebody else’s page.
The puzzle book shows the whole history of the pile. Each crossword is a little more than half finished, in two or three different pens. Every one of them stops where somebody’s name was called. Nobody has ever finished a waiting-room magazine, and it was made knowing that nobody would.
Thread: the read receipt