Miami Funhouse Protocols

Miami Funhouse Protocols

If the French Revolution taught us anything, it’s that ceremonies can be both salvation and theater. Heads roll when the crowd decides they must; allegiances form and dismantle over slogans and bread. Here, revolutions are subtler: a complaint filed in the wrong inbox becomes a verdict; a signature moves a house from one name to another. The guillotine is now a stamp, and the mob wears suits and invoices. In the waiting room, men in pressed shirts clutch coffee like rosaries and mutter about equity releases like catechisms. They speak of “due process” while someone’s life is auctioned off in fifty-page appraisal forms.

They watch what they can of my injury — the parts that show, the parts that don’t. They observe my habits as if the person were an exhibit and the diagnosis a placard. Observation means being seen without being heard, catalogued without consent. I try to laugh at the absurdity: a human checklist and somewhere a family getting a check for behaving right at the right time. The irony tastes metallic in my mouth. There’s nothing more American than turning pain into paperwork and then billing the country for it.

Outside the window, Miami is a postcard full of contradictions: palms, glass towers, and a thousand small scams nested like Russian dolls in the Art Deco shells. Inside, the funhouse mirrors warp every truth you try to hold: empathy becomes suspicion, care becomes commerce. They sanitize the language — “care team,” “protocol,” “risk mitigation” — and hide beneath it the old games: who gets a bed by the window, who gets early discharge, whose phone call is answered first. The hooker who calls herself a voice for hire on the ward’s payphone becomes both confidante and commodity. Her stories are currency. She knows that intimacy in this place comes with a price and a form to sign.

There’s a grotesque choreography here, a court of minor ceremonies — medication rounds at dawn, forms signed at noon, supervised walks at dusk. Every act is observed, recorded. In the margins, people keep their little rebellions: a folded origami airplane, a secret poem slipped under a pillow, a smile shared across a dining table when the TV plays some old movie nobody remembers. Those small insurgencies feel revolutionary because they reclaim the private from the institutional.

And yet the rot is social as well as medical. A mortgage fraud becomes a kind of social engineering: a white-gloved theft sanctioned by signatures and the comfortable silence of neighbors. Wives and children and bastards — the lineage of injury — collect settlements like talismans. The payouts keep the machine lubricated. Someone pays for the silence in a way then everyone gets to pretend nothing happened. The ward knows the pattern; the ward benefits; the ward becomes complicit.

My time here is not heroic. It is a reportage of small humiliations and comic horrors. I scratch notes on napkins, I map the absurdities like a cartographer of a city that exists between intake forms and the ocean. The clinic’s fluorescent sun never sets; midnight is a permanent state. I imagine the French mobs in powdered wigs, picket signs in one hand and legal briefs in the other, trading guillotine blades for staplers and bills — the instruments changed, the desire to clean house the same.

There is a perverse camaraderie among the observed. We become conspirators not against the system but against its capacity to make us smaller. A nurse once handed me an extra sandwich and said, “Take it; they don’t count what we give.” It was small, sacramental. A volunteer brought palm leaves and told us about a protest down by the courthouse. The world outside is messy and dangerous and sometimes complicit, but it is awake. Inside, everyone pretends the two can be separated, that observation is neutral and not political theatre.

If Miami is a funhouse at the edge of the sea, then the protocols are its house rules — scratchy, bureaucratic, sometimes cruel, always absurd. The trick is learning to move through the mirrors without forgetting who you are. You learn to keep your laughter sharp and your memory sharper. You keep a private ledger in the folds of your clothing; you turn indignation into paperwork that’s yours, not theirs.

In the end, the revolution I want is small and stubborn: a clean cup of coffee when I will it, a call returned on a Tuesday, the right to say no when consent is asked like a favor. The guillotine can remain a metaphor; the real machinery is invisible and legal and waiting in plain sight. But even the smallest insurrection — a poem read aloud in the breakroom, a truth told without permission — cuts through fluorescent light like sunlight through the blinds.

So I take my tray, fold the napkin into a plane, and throw it out the tiny window. It arcs, ridiculous and fierce, across the parking lot toward the ocean. The plane carries a single line: Miami Funhouse Protocols — keep your eyes open, hold your name close, and never let paperwork become your only witness.