Most Reprehensible Instrument

When Lila made the appointment for her MRI, the scheduler asked her if she was claustrophobic.
"No," Lila replied. "I'm not." In her mind's eye, she was a brave person.

Lila believed herself to be a stoic individual, someone who remained calm in a crisis, and did what she had to do in order to keep things running the way they should.

Two of her family members offered to drive her to the appointment, but she declined them both, saying that she would be fine, and that it was not a big deal.

She arrived at her appointment an hour early, anticipating paperwork. She ended up waiting for an hour and a half in the lobby, watching the clock tick the minutes off. Finally she stood up impatiently and waited by the front desk. A technician eventually came up to the window and apologized for the delay; there was apparently some kind of 'emergency' case ahead of her. Her mind raced with sudden violent thoughts not easily subdued. She was polite and said she understood, and sat back down.

A few minutes later, she was called into the back rooms, where she was instructed to strip and wear a white paper robe, and remove all of her jewelry and store it in a provided locker. The technician gave her a key, which she held onto tightly; in a moment it would be taken away from her. She started to become more concerned. There were no women here, only men with accents, and they were taking things very seriously, like something could actually be wrong. She attempted humor, but her jokes fell flat to her own ears, and the technicians smiled wanly like they had heard them all before.

They took her into an all-white room, with a photo of a clear blue sky with little white puffy clouds on the ceiling. She stared at this sky intermittently for over an hour (she knows it was over an hour because she kept her eye on the clock, going and coming), but afterward she couldn't remember exactly what it looked like, all its details being washed away by the tides inside mind.

The technician asked her if she had any questions before they started, and she couldn't think of any, off the top of her head, so he shoved earplugs in both her ears (which she hadn't expected), and started to move her into the machine, feet first.

She soon discovered the reason for the earplugs: there were noises like exploding weapons and space alien ray gun fights and earthquakes and bombs dropping all around her. Why so noisy to snap a few pictures of her insides? She didn't understand. Why the vibrations and transmutations all around her body, making her mind ache? The technicians were staying far outside the room, which was apparently toxic. She wondered how safe it was to be inside this mechanism. If she didn't have some kind of disease, surely this machine would give her one by the time she was through, or it was through with her. How many other people had been slid through this thing? How much pain and suffering had this monstrosity absorbed over the years? What if the person who was in here before her had lice? Or some kind of rare skin disease that she could catch by lying in the same spot?

Where was the technician? He hadn't checked in with her for quite some time. Had it been ten minutes? Twenty minutes? What if they had gone on a lunch break and left her here alone? What if there was some kind of emergency outside the building, like a fire or something? There had been protesters along the sidewalk when she arrived, but she blindly looked past their signs. What if this giant dome fell on her and crushed her alive? Her face was only inches away from the lid, or the top of it. She felt like she couldn't breathe, and started to hyperventilate. The technicians didn't seem to notice, even though she was supposedly wearing some kind of strap that monitored her breathing.

"Can I ask a question?" she asked, her voice sounding high-pitched and tense even to herself.

No one replied.

"Can I ask a question?" she repeated again, loudly and insistent, and this time the technician responded.

"Is there a problem?" he asked, in a blase tone.

"I need to come out of this thing for a minute!"

The technician came into the room, and pressed a button on the front of the machine, and she rolled out slowly, like something very hot being pulled out of an oven.

"My arms are falling asleep from having them over my head for so long," Lila said. "How much longer?"

"About forty-five minutes."

A ridiculously unbearable amount of time.

Lila bit her nails, and asked for a glass of water. Stalling tactics. She was strapped in. The technician brought her a Styrofoam cup with ice cold water in it, and a straw. He said he couldn't unstrap her, she needed to go back in; her doctor had wanted films of her abdomen and her pelvis, with and without contrast dye, so it was going to take a while longer. It was two days before Christmas, and she could tell he wanted to get out of there.

She resigned herself to going back inside, with a sudden heavy inescapable dread that outweighed even her fear of being crushed alive by this machine.