I am walking down this corridor, its walls grey, not white, but grey, grey with mould and whispering and stolen looks. From time to time I can see scratches in the plaster, like squeaks that cut the silence in two. Clients are passing me by, some quickly, in a nervous hastiness, others slowly, in their thoughtful steps, dragging their bodies like a useless sack of matter and liquid. There is no end to the corridor and they must reach the end before they... before they forget or before they don't reach it because reaching it is the only purpose here. Here and anywhere else just the same.
From time to time there are windows in the walls, like eyes or mouths or ears, and they are believed to see and shout and hear, and really – there are so many sounds behind them. There are colours and shapes and words and raindrops, but there is really no sense in sensing them. Clients are clients here, the customers, they await the service, they pay for it, though not in cash, they order and they eat, they dry their mouths and crack their fingers, they receive the bill. Just like in any other retail premises they don't pay much attention to other customers, only if the situation requests so, and that doesn't happen very often. I would say it seldom happens since the service is mostly exquisite. Exquisite as to what the clients need, and what certain others need them to need.
As it would seem from my description, the clients are not homogeneous. They might look the same to an amateur eye but they cannot deceive me, not me, no, I've seen them before and I know what to search for in their posture, the movements, the tilt of their heads. Each of them is specific, and had I been a more educated expert, I would've even known what kind of service each of them needs and receives. But being a simple self-studied little nothing I can only tell one type of a customer from another. I wasn't even sure which type I sympathesized with more – the quick ones or the slow ones. But it didn't matter. We are all trying to reach the end of the corridor. Here and anywhere else just the same.
A few tiny or medium-sized pictures on the walls, walls that fade in the distance, walls that fade and seem to fall on me as I'm walking down the corridor. Slowly, silently, serenely. Pictures printed and painted, happy and sad and good and bad, the four corners of a picture frame. The four corners of an eventual, half opened door on the wall oposite the one with the windows. A dimmed room, rather spacious but constricted. A weak smell of dusty books and semen in the showers, detergent and lunch. A glimpse of heads bobbing in distrust and unease, confused about what's inside and all the other things, too.
