by Sarah Dreher
So whatever was wrong with her had wiped her memory cells clean, as completely as if lightning had struck a computer. Trouble was, she didn’t know the slightest thing about rebuilding the desktop in her brain.
Hermione sighed and turned off her bedside lamp. Okay, it was time to “get a grip,” as the kids said these days. Or was it “get a life?” Well, get something.
She pulled up the blankets and tucked them around her shoulders and gave herself a little pat, just as she always had, as if she were tucking herself in. An odd habit. She had no idea where it had come from. A past life, maybe.
Hermione grunted a little. People were so concerned with their past lives these days, they didn’t stop to watch where they were going in this one.
Sometimes lately she found herself wondering about dying. How it would happen, and when. And why so few souls seemed to have that information. Was it something they didn’t decide for themselves before coming into life, the way they did about the kinds of lessons and experiences they wanted? Or did they really plan ahead of time but forget?
Well, there were the ones who chose to be born just to prove something about dying. You could tell which ones they were, though. They always had that tentative, slightly appalled look about them. As if they could be contaminated by life if they weren’t careful. They didn’t engage.
Like Jesus, for example. He knew what he was here for, and he sure didn’t engage. Did a lot of good things and a lot of talking, but he never got down and dirty in a relationship. He wasn’t about to get himself involved when he knew he was leaving pretty soon.
Jesus was always doing things like that—getting himself born just for the sake of dying and making a point. Like the time he decided to be Socrates. You’d have thought he’d have gotten the picture after that. Fat chance.
He was a stubborn one, too. Once his mind was made up—and that didn’t usually take long—you might as well wind him up and watch him go. Try to argue, and he’d just say God had told him to do it, and that was it. Nobody was going to argue with that.
They even had a saying in Spirit, to describe a soul skilled in the art of persuasion. “She could convince Jesus to change his mind.”
Rambling again, and turning morbid. Maybe that was what she was going to be from now on. Morbid. Morbid as a dead shoe on the highway.
And sarcastic.
Hermione really hoped she wouldn’t end up sarcastic. She’d always hated sarcasm. Thought it was a sign of limited intelligence. Couldn’t think of anything clever to say, so you just took what was there and skewed it. Easy.
Not as easy as contemporary street language, though. You didn’t need a thesaurus to express yourself these days. Just sincerity.
Her heart was beginning to annoy her with its pounding. Thinking wasn’t making her sleepy, just stirring her up.
And when she tried not to think, she could hear that irritating high-pitched hum in her ears. It reminded her of electricity saying, “Rice.”
Turn your attention outward, she told herself firmly.
She listened in the darkness, sorting and classifying all the outside night sounds.
And made a mental note to ask Stoner to see what she could do about that tree branch that had recently started scraping the house just under her back window.
Chapter 3
He seemed like a nice young man. A nice, very young man.
She took another peek at the diplomas on his waiting room walls. According to her calculations, he’d been practicing medicine for nearly twenty years, which was impossible from the looks of him. Either he’d been a child prodigy and graduated from medical school at the age of twelve, or he was an impostor. Or Doogie Howser, M.D.
She hadn’t heard much about Doogie in quite some time, not since the show went off the air. He had shown up in a few made-for-TV movies but, judging by his behavior in those, he had certainly taken the left-hand path. The result of too much responsibility too young, no doubt.
She hoped that wouldn’t be the case with Travis Kolek.
He’d come out of his inner sanctum a few minutes ago to collect his phone messages, and had scampered away as if he didn’t see her.
The receptionist, as thin, young, and peppy as a Barbie doll, assured her, “Doctor hasn’t forgotten you. He’ll be with you in a minute.”
She hated that “Doctor this,” and “Doctor that” business. It always sounded breathy and awe-filled. Why not refer to him as “Dr. Kolek?” Or “Travis?” Or “Dr. Travis?” Or “Doogie?”
The receptionist—Hermione saw by the name plate on her desk that her name was Jill, nothing else, just Jill, nobody was anything but their first names these days, as if they lived in a sorority house instead of a society of hundreds of millions, it struck her as rude—stood and stuffed a few files into the cabinet, then approached her in a briskly efficient manner.
“Suppose we get you ready while we’re waiting.”
“Thank you,” Hermione said in a coolly dignified voice, “but I think I can get myself ready, if you’ll tell me what to do.”
Jill smiled at her a little twitchily and held open a door to an examining room. She stood aside. “You’ll find a gown there on the table. Strip completely, and put it on with the opening in the back.” She hesitated at the look of horror on Hermione’s face. “Naturally,” she added quickly, “you may keep your panties on if you prefer.”
“You’re very kind,” Hermione said as sweetly as she could. More sweetly, actually. More sweetly than anyone could. Much too sweetly.
The receptionist caught the implied threat of an imminent eruption in that sweetness. She edged toward the door, her peppiness fading fast. “If you need any help, just press that little button over there, and I’ll be right here.”
“Splendid,” Hermione said to the closing door, and went to put her purse and coat on an empty straight-backed chair.
She hated these first meetings with new male physicians, she thought as she settled into the only other chair in the room. They weren’t so much consultations as territorial pissing-on-the-fence-posts disputes. What are your rules, what are my rules, who makes the rules and how far can we push against them...?
The problem with male physicians was, they didn’t seem to realize there was a struggle going on. They didn’t know their patients had rules, and if they knew they didn’t care. Patients knew doctors had rules, and they themselves had rules, but they didn’t dare express them. That was how it was supposed to be played. That was the first rule.
When the patient refused to play by the rules, thereby pointing out that there were, indeed, rules, it could get very interesting.
Hermione took a book from her purse and opened it and waited. She read one chapter and started another.
When she heard his footsteps—or the flapping of Doctor’s angelic wings, Jill might say—she eased a serene smile onto her face.
Doogie popped his head in, and blushed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you weren’t ready.”
Hermione waved him inside. “Don’t be embarrassed, young man. I’m perfectly ready.”
He glanced at the unused hospital gown, then at fully clad Hermione. Then at the lack of a proper chair for himself to sit in. He said, “Uh...”
“When I was growing up,” she responded pleasantly, “I was taught to keep my clothes on in front of someone to whom I hadn’t been properly introduced. Especially a male someone.”
He struggled with his rules for a moment, and then threw back his head and laughed. “You’re absolutely right.” He held out his hand. “Travis Kolek, M.D., at your service.”
She took his hand and shook it firmly. “Hermione Moore. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Thank you,” he said, “I look forward to being pleased to make yours.” He pulled a stool from under the examining table and sat in front of her. “Now, then, what can I do for you?”
It wasn’t a terrible way to spend an afternoon, as visits to doctors’ offices go. Young Do
ctor Kolek took time to explain what he was doing. Did all the necessary but simple things—like drawing blood and taking blood pressure and pulse— himself, a rare thing these days. And seemed happy to chat.
Probably doesn’t have many patients, Hermione thought. That didn’t bode well. Still, she couldn’t help liking him.
They joked around about birth control. He said, delicately, he assumed it was no longer an issue, as she had moved on from the risky, fertile years. She told him it hadn’t been an issue in decades, that she had learned she preferred the one truly safe method. She only slept with women.
He didn’t bat an eyelash.
During the taking of blood, she diverted herself by accusing him of practicing medicine without proper training, on account of his youth. Bought his M.D., no doubt, she said.
He replied if he’d known such a thing was possible, he wouldn’t have wasted all that time and anxiety in school.
She remarked, if he had indeed earned his degree in the usual way, they were certainly making doctors young these days.
He replied he hadn’t noticed, but didn’t the police look terribly young all of a sudden.
She said just wait, the next to be young were lawyers, and then he’d get to thinking the same thing about doctors.
“And politicians,” he said as he neatly labeled another vial of her blood and propped it in a beaker. “One day you look up and think, ‘My God, those babies are making decisions about my life.’ Keep that gauze where I put it and don’t fiddle.”
“Sorry.” She bent her elbow again. “If you’re between police and politicians, you certainly must have robbed the cradle when you married.”
“Jill looks younger than most people her age.”
“Aerobics and granola?”
“It runs in her family.”
“She looks like teenager.”
“Thirty-one.” He made a note in her chart, and noticed her peering at him suspiciously. “I’m writing down the date and time I took the blood sample.” He held out the clip board. “No secrets. Want to see it?”
Hermione shook her head. “You must think I’m paranoid.”
“No,” he said, “I am. Who knows what you’ll jump on me about next.”
That pleased her. “Am I that intimidating?”
Travis smiled a little. “Just very, very particular.”
They were so easy together, they must have known each other in the past. But she had no sense of having met him before. That was sort of unusual, since she was one of the souls who liked to remember old friends and enemies. She couldn’t remember them all, of course. There must be thousands. If she remembered them all, she’d never get the grocery shopping done—stopping every two minutes to chat and reminisce, “remember the time we… where was that, Crete?… no, Alexandria, in the library, before the fire...”
And there were those she’d just as soon not recognize. Like the bleached blonde from the Barbary Coast. Little Miss Ruin Your Life and Skip Away Humming and Whistling and Pretending Nothing Happened, while you were left behind to try to put it back together again.
She supposed one of these lifetimes she’d have to work things out with that one. Not that she was sure she wanted to. But it was considered the thing to do. Not a rule, but good manners. She sensed Jesus’ hand in that. Sometimes she suspected that Jesus had incarnated as Emily Post, he could be such a fanatic about manners.
Some of the souls on the Other Side—as they called Spirit when they visited material form, because they couldn’t think of anything else to call it that most incarnates could pronounce and understand, and Spirit was too indefinite, incarnates were always wanting to define it—though once in a while a soul would come up with an exotic sounding name and plant it in some channel’s ear just to see how fast it spread. Some of the souls thought Hermione was out of her mind to want to carry around memories of past lives. And sometimes she had her doubts, too. Particularly when she ran into someone she’d loved and was so glad to see, and they didn’t remember her at all. That hurt. It was hard to keep her balance then.
Her memories weren’t complete, though. Sometimes they were nothing but an intense feeling, repulsion or attraction. Sometimes she’d meet a new person, and the knowing was so deep and clear, she wanted to pull that person aside and warn her, “You shouldn’t go around in public with no skin. They’ll kill you.” Later she’d realize it wasn’t that at all, it was because she’d known her before.
Sometimes they were quite precise. Sometimes she could almost predict what that person was going to say next, as if they’d been together not only yesterday but all the days between then and now. Assuming there was a “then” and a “now,” which only seemed to be true at a certain evolutionary level...
“Mrs. Moore?”
Hermione jolted out of her train of thought. If you could call it a train. More like a shotgun blast. “It’s happening right now. That thing with the thoughts.”
“Excellent. You can describe it?”
“I’ll try. First I was thinking about… about… something about you, I think.” She frowned with the effort.
“Relax,” Travis said. “Let your mind go slippery. It’ll come to you.”
“That’s the trouble. My mind is slippery. Like a nest of eels.” Maybe if she started at the end and worked her way back to the beginning...
Absolutely nothing came to her.
He must have noticed the look of distress on her face. “Can’t get it back?” he asked.
She shook her head.
He looked through her chart for the fifteenth time. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve given you every quick-and-dirty neurological test I can, and nothing fits a pattern.”
“Try Alzheimer’s,” she said softly.
“Nope. Far as I can see, you don’t have Alzheimer’s. Or Old Timers’, either. Do you ever find yourself sitting around longing for the good old days?”
That made her laugh out loud. If she ever got sentimental over the days gone by… well, she could come up with a lot of days gone by. “Hardly.”
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“It’s too complicated.”
He shrugged and said, “Well,” and looked at the blank back of the chart as if he might find inspiration there.
Hermione was reminded of her third grade school teacher, who would ask a question and—if anyone gazed at the ceiling while thinking—loved to say, smugly, “The answer’s not up there.”
Ah, yes, she could remember her primary school teachers, all right. She just couldn’t remember what she had for lunch.
If the problem was with her short-term memory, she ought to know what she had for lunch last month.
But she couldn’t remember last month at all.
“Are you worried about anything?” he asked. “Other than your memory?”
“My niece, a little.”
That perked him up. “Tell me what about?”
“Because she’s too worried about me. She always has been. We’ve lived together since she was sixteen. She thought I was about to die of old age then, and she still does. Though she does admit she was wrong back then.”
“Tell her I said to stop worrying. You’ll probably outlive her.”
“I probably will.”
“Her worry’s perfectly understandable, of course.”
She felt a moment of anxiety. What wasn’t he telling her? “Would you care to explain that?”
“It’s what they do,” he said. “I have an aunt who can out-think all of us, and will probably outlive us all. It’s only natural that I’d worry about her. It’s our job.”
Hermione smiled. “How old is your aunt?”
“Eighty-three and still living independently.”
“Ah. Married?”
“Never.”
“Lesbian?”
“Could be. I never thought about it.”
“That explains it, then,” Hermione said. “Men wear you down.”
“I have the feelin
g,” Travis said, “I’d better not respond to that. Are you living together now, you and your niece?”
Hermione nodded. “And with her lover, Gwen, and Marylou, her business partner. They’ve been friends for years. Stoner and Marylou. Marylou’s mother was Stoner’s therapist. It was sort of like the blind leading the blind, to tell you the truth. But they had fun.”
“Stoner and Marylou?”
“Stoner and Edith. They were a perfect pair: one with her head in the clouds, one riveted to the ground.”
“I take it the therapist…”
“Edith.”
“...was the riveted one.”
“No, my niece. She’s a Capricorn, after all. I don’t think there’s a sign for what Edith is. Probably a touch of Pisces, definitely some Gemini, and a large helping of Taurus. Good Goddess, her appetites.”
He laughed and said, “You know some interesting people.”
“I should hope so. Where I come from, the biggest sin you can commit is to be boring.” She stopped short of telling him that, being out of body, it was about the only sin you could commit.
“Would you like me to have a talk with your niece? Stoner, is it? Maybe I could reassure her.”
“How? You haven’t reassured me.”
He scratched his head. “Maybe we’ll know more when we get the test results. But, frankly, I doubt it.”
So do I, Hermione thought. Whatever’s wrong with me, I don’t think we’re ever going to find out what it is. I’ll spend the rest of my life with Creeping Uselessness until they put me away. Which, knowing Stoner, will be a long time after they should.
The worst thing she could think of would be to be kept around out of a sense of duty or guilt—or even love—until she became such a pain in the ass they forgot the person she’d been and could only remember her as pathetic and burdensome.
“Hello?” Travis said.
Hermione felt herself redden. “Sorry. I was wool-gathering again.”
“Do you often go off like that?”
She nodded. “Often. And I can’t seem to control it.”
He tapped the eraser end of his pencil against her chart. “How would you feel about a referral for a complete neurological work-up?”