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At four o'clock in the morning, the psychiatric clinic is dark and silent and empty, like a morgue. In the middle of the cafeteria, a lone young man sits in a chair drinking cheap vodka, his emotionless face illuminated only by the moon.
I removed the striking of the clock. Psychiatric clinics aren't likely to have clocks that strike, especially at four in the morning, especially in the cafeteria.
Also, I switched from present progressive to simple present tense. That feels more engaging to me.
I'm not sure what to do with the three sentences in the middle. I can't figure out the viewpoint. It can't be omniscient, because the narrator judges too many things from a narrow perspective:
"He doesn't resemble..." The narrator holds a limited model of what a mental health professional looks like.
"... give him a teenage look." The narrator presumes that only teenage males have long hair.
"The only qualification seems to be ..." The narrator fantasizes that he can usually determine psychiatric qualifications from a person's appearance.
These judgments are wholly unreliable. So is the narrator an actual, unreliable person observing the lone young man? If so, the young man isn't alone.
Or is this an omniscient narrator telling us that we readers might judge the young man in these ways? If so, that's mighty condescending of the reader.
Not knowing what the viewpoint is, I didn't know what to do with those three sentences.
As it turns out, I think the paragraph reads delightfully without those observations and judgments. Perhaps the information about the young man's looks could be restored into the paragraph somehow. But it might be better to add it in subsequent paragraphs—either without the judgments, or after we are more clearly introduced to the narrator who is doing the judging.
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