Bellevue

The room is small, and is not meant to be a room for interviews. There's a coffee machine and files on a round tables against the wall covered with sheets of paper, blue and yellow.

She says she's sorry. She says the room is all she could find for the interview. We sit down at the table and she starts asking me questions. That's when I realize I didn't prepare anything. And also that maybe I should have. It's the first time I speak to a shrink since I'm a grown up. It's a strange experience. Since I haven't prepared anything I start talking in a million directions at once, making funny parenthesis here and there because the interviewer is about my age and female and sort of cute and I can tell she likes to laugh. In the middle of two sentences she writes something the sheet of paper she holds close to her chest so that I can't read what she's writing, and then I think about A CONTORTIONIST'S HANDBOOK and I freeze. I think about the stupid stuff I said and the thousands more about to come out of my mouth; about the way I sit and how my legs are crossed and what the fuck I'm doing with my hands.

The reason I'm here for is an ad Sara sent me. Bellevue Hospital is looking for volunteer translators for their Survivors of Torture program. I thought why not. I sent an email with my resume. Didn't hear back from Bellevue, which is usually what happens after I sent my resume somewhere. So far so good. And then they replied and here I am. She says that they have a debriefing program for translators. They want to make sure that working for them isn't going to make even more crazies that their fellow shrinks outside of the hospital will have to cure.