Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Waiting Room (Part 9)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Waiting Room (Part 9)
There are indignities, and then there is being carried through a parking lot in a plastic tub while strangers look on.
Dex had ridden in the travel tub before, and each time he consented to it the way a visiting head of state might consent to being frisked, which is to say with visible patience and an inner ledger that was keeping very close count. The tub itself was beneath him, a shallow rectangle of speckled plastic that did nothing to convey the gravity of the dragon riding inside it, and he spent the car ride bracing his feet against its sides, counting the turns the car made (four, he noted, filing the number away purely so that someone would eventually have to answer for it), and glaring out through the little air holes at a world that insisted on jostling. By the time Mike carried him through a set of glass doors that hissed open on their own, an act of automation Dex privately filed away in the part of his mind reserved for Doors That Should Know Better, he had already decided that whatever waited inside had better be worth the indignity of the drive.
What waited inside was a waiting room, and it was, Dex determined within eleven seconds of arrival, a place with no functioning hierarchy whatsoever. Chairs lined three walls, and in those chairs sat an assortment of anxious owners holding an assortment of animals in various states of confinement, and the loudest of these by a considerable margin was a parrot in a tall wire carrier two seats down, who announced upon Dex's entrance that "THE DOCTOR IS RUNNING LATE" in a tone of such booming, put upon authority that a passing veterinary technician actually turned to check her watch. The parrot, whom Dex quickly understood to be a creature entirely unbothered by the concept of an indoor voice, spent the following several minutes narrating the room's every arrival, rating each new owner and animal with a booming verdict of "FINE, FINE, COULD DO BETTER" that seemed to apply regardless of the actual merits of the case, and Dex, who was after all a creature of his own standing, found himself grudgingly impressed by the sheer administrative nerve of it.
Closer to Dex's tub, on the lap of a woman who kept apologizing to no one in particular, sat a chinchilla wearing an expression Dex could only describe as the face of a monarch forced to ride the bus, and it was this animal, small and gray and immensely put upon, who gave Dex his first real taste of ensemble chaos. She sighed audibly every time the parrot spoke, huffed with theatrical suffering whenever a dog was so much as mentioned in the lobby, and at one point turned her entire body away from the room, presenting her flank to the assembled waiting room the way a queen might close a set of curtains on an audience she had decided not to grant, and Dex, watching this performance from behind his own air holes, filed the whole business away in the part of his mind reserved for Grievances Nursed With Real Commitment.
The room did not calm down so much as it accumulated: a low, chattering finch added its two cents to the parrot's ongoing commentary, a ferret slipped its harness entirely with the casual confidence of an animal who had clearly done this before and had to be retrieved from beneath three separate chairs while its owner apologized to the general vicinity of the ceiling, and in the far corner a cat carrier let out a single, unimpressed yowl every few minutes that Dex noted with the particular attention of someone who had complicated feelings about cats, feelings he was fairly certain did not extend to whatever was making that particular noise. Through all of it he held himself, tub and all, with the sovereign composure of a dignitary who had simply chosen, for reasons of state, to be transported today in modest packaging, and when his name was finally called and the exam itself commenced, the weighing and the prodding and the brief cool press of a stethoscope he had no polite recourse against, he endured it the way he endured most things that could not be argued with, which was to say completely, and with his chin lifted.
Afterward, back in the tub and headed for the doors, Mike glanced down at him and said, "Made some friends in there, huh," in the dry, unhurried tone of a man who had clearly clocked the parrot's whole performance and found it about as funny as Dex had, and Dex, jostling gently against the plastic wall as the glass doors hissed open onto the parking lot, found himself already wondering, in the quiet, considering way he reserved for genuinely new information, what it might mean to have a waiting room's worth of strangers to think about now, when up to this point his whole world had only ever needed to hold two.