by P. D. Cacek
Jessie looked where Millie was pointing and nodded. The girl was sitting on one of the park benches that dotted the playing field – shoulders hunched, her arms tucked into her belly, and staring down at the patch of ground at her feet.
What Jessie called ‘The Newcomer Hunch’.
She looked so small sitting there all alone…alone and scared, hiding behind the curtain of long blue-black hair that hung down her back and hid her face. If he’d had to guess, Jessie would have put her age at nine or ten, but Millie said the donor had been fifteen.
Just small for her age, Millie said. Jessie didn’t ask about how the donor died; that didn’t matter. He was supposed to help fix the person inside.
One body, one soul – Part Two.
“What’s her story?”
“Her name’s Moira Doyle,” Millie said, reading off the brand-new tablet Dr. Ellison had all but shamed her into accepting, “from Dublin, Ireland, and the last thing she remembered was running across a street in April of 1916. I checked the date and we think she died in…I’m not sure how that’s pronounced.”
Millie turned the tablet toward him and Jessie squinted at the italicized words Éirí Amach na Cásca. “Dunno.”
“Well, the history books call it ‘The Easter Rising’. Anyway, that’s Moira’s story. She’s frightened and very confused, so you’ll have to go slow and easy.”
Jessie looked at the small girl on the bench. “Well, shoot, what’s there to be confused about? I mean, so you died and woke up in a whole new body, big whoop.”
Millie gave his arm a not-so-soft swat. “You think you’re so funny, don’t you?”
“Yup. Think she’d like to see the library?”
“I think she might, why don’t you go find out. She’s expectin’ you.”
“Moira, huh?”
“That’s right,” Millie said. “Lovely accent too. G’on now.”
Jessie took a deep breath and felt the familiar sensation of the butterflies in his stomach taking flight. It’d been a couple of months since he’d become a Traveling Companion – the school’s gag-me-now name for its peer support/mentor/helper buddy system – but he was always a little apprehensive about these first meetings. He never knew how a Newcomer would react. Sometimes there’d be tears, sometimes there’d be silence so heavy and cold Jessie would feel like he was back under the ice, but he’d only been punched once, nothing personal, so the odds were still in his favor.
And Moira didn’t look like a hitter.
Jessie squared his shoulders and gave Millie a thumbs-up when he was still a few feet from the bench because he knew she’d still be standing there, watching.
The sun was low and to his back, so he let his shadow arrive first, cutting across the leaf-dotted ground in front of the girl, but she still jumped when he cleared his throat.
“Sorry.” Jessie stopped and raised his hands then quickly lowered them when the shadow looked like it was reaching for her. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She was dressed in a dark blue jumper and gray leggings and had pulled the bulky white sweater she was wearing so tight around herself it looked like a blanket. Sweater or not, she wasn’t dressed nearly warm enough for the chill in the air. Jessie stuck his hands into the fleece-lined pockets of his jacket.
“My name’s Jessie. Hi. You’re Moira, right?”
The blue-black hair shimmered like a black waterfall when she shook her head. “Ah was, ah dunno who ah am now.”
Millie was right about the accent. It was almost musical.
“Is it okay if I sit down?” The girl scooted to the far end of the bench, giving Jessie more than enough room. “I know how you feel. I wasn’t always this handsome.”
The curtain of hair shimmered again as the girl turned her head to look up. She looked like Princess Jasmine from Aladdin…only prettier. Her face was narrow and her skin the color of rose gold, which made her large blue eyes stand out all the more.
“Jessie Pathway. I’m, uh, here, ah….”
She looked away.
“Are you…?” She shook her head.
“Like you? Yeah.”
The wind circled around the bench, driving the leaves before it. She said something that was lost in the rustle. Jessie moved closer.
“What?”
“I said I dun’t understan’.”
“Nobody does.”
She nodded. “The doctors, when I…woke up said it just happens s’times. Does it…to everyone, ya think?”
“Not everyone.”
Moira pulled the sweater tighter around herself. “Do you think it coulda happened with m’brothers?”
“Maybe. We could check.”
She pushed her hair back over one ear as she turned to face Jessie. “Could we? Could we find ’em?”
“We can ask. They keep really good records, so yeah, we can look for them.”
“But they wouldn’t look the same, would they?” Jessie watched the tears well up along the ebony lashes that framed her eyes. “I don’t, they wouldn’t know me.”
“Not at first, but you’re still the same inside.”
The tear on her cheek sparkled in the last rays of sunlight as she nodded. “Yeah, I am.”
Jessie stood up and held out his hand.
“Come on, let’s go find out about your brothers. We can use one of the library computers.”
Her hand was very small and very cold, but it fit into his perfectly. “What’s a computer?”
Jessie smiled. “Magic.”
Epilogue
Barney glanced at the man on the bed through the door’s small, wire-reinforced glass window. The Traveler, according to the information already gathered, was Alois Mayerling, age eighty-four.
Birthdate: April 20, 1889.
Last date remembered: January 16, 1973.
Birthplace: Braunau am Inn, Austria.
Interned Auschwitz Concentration Camp: 1940-1945/# 21361A.
Immigrated to United States: 1949.
Naturalized citizen: 1954.
Family: N/A. Last residence: Brooklyn, NYC.
Last memory: N/A.
The man was asleep, recovering from the trauma suffered by the body of Zach Caine, a twenty-seven-year-old Huntington Beach surfer, after being body-slammed by rough surf and drowning.
There was a red sticky flag in the upper right corner of the file in Barney’s hand, indicating that the donor’s family had relinquished all rights and obligations to the Traveler that now inhabited their loved one’s body.
Barney studied the handsome, clean-shaven face and took a deep breath. “What makes you think so?”
“He lied.”
Barney turned toward the psychology resident and smiled. They were all so eager to make names for themselves in the new field of dysphoric identification disorder that sometimes their imaginations got away from them.
That month alone he’d had to shatter the hopes of one young doctor whose patient turned out to only be an Elvis impersonator.
“People lie, Irene.”
“Not Travelers,” she said, “not about who they are. Not when they first wake up.”
“No, but he survived Auschwitz, remember. It’s very possible that he’s still suffering from PTSD.”
The doctor shook her head. “It didn’t sound like it. He was very calm when he answered my questions, but it felt rehearsed, Barney, like he was reciting lines he’d learned. When I finished I cross-checked the ID number he gave us against the lists compiled by the Auschwitz Museum and ID # 21361A doesn’t exist. It was never issued because it’s a made-up number.”
“It was a long time ago. Maybe he forgot the number.” The minute it left his mouth Barney realized how stupid that last comment was. He’d worked with camp survivors and not one of them had forgotten or would have removed the n
umber tattooed onto their flesh. “Sorry. But what evidence do you have, besides conjecture and gut feeling, that the man in that room is Adolf Hitler?”
She smiled. “The birthday, April 20th, is the same.”
“I’m pretty sure there are about a million other people who share that same birthday.” Barney shook his head. “Not good enough.”
But she didn’t stop smiling. “The birthplace, the year, the same first name as Hitler’s father, the way he spoke, in German, when he came to. He was shouting, Barney, and it was the same voice I’ve heard in those old newsreels on the History Channel.”
“Wow, proof positive! Come on, now. A man’s voice sounds similar to one that was recorded…God, some eighty-odd years ago and you jump to the implausible and slightly hysterical conclusion that he’s Adolf Hitler.” Barney handed her back the file. “I thought I trained you better than that.”
She sighed and hugged the file to her chest. “You did, and that’s why I didn’t call you until I was sure. He was kept under sedation and monitored for the first forty-eight hours according to protocol. When I was given the go-ahead, I entered his room along with his attending and two nurses, to explain what happened. His reaction was unusual.”
“What did he do?”
“He laughed, Barney. I told him what happened and where he was and he laughed and it wasn’t hysterics. He was happy…thrilled, and I don’t remember hearing about any other Traveler that did that.”
Barney felt a cool breeze against the back of his neck and moved away from the air-conditioning vent. “Okay, that is a little unusual, but remember he suffered in a concentration camp….”
“But he didn’t die in one.” She patted the file. “He died at the age of eighty-four in Brooklyn, New York.”
Barney felt the breeze again.
“When he stopped laughing he looked at us and said something. That’s when I knew, because it was the same thing he’d said on one of the newsreels.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Wer sagt, dass ich nicht unter dem besonderen Schutz Gottes stehe?’ I have the translation if you need it.”
“I don’t.” Barney stepped closer to the door and looked through the window. The man on the bed was awake and looking at him with bright, ice-blue eyes. The man smiled.
Who says I am not under the special protection of God?
“It is him, isn’t it?”
Barney turned and began walking down the hall toward the nurses’ station. He could hear the squeak of the resident’s rubberized soles against the floor as she followed.
“How secure is this room, Irene?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, no problem. Sedate him until we can move him into an isolation ward and put on a twenty-four-hour monitored watch. No one is to see him or talk to him except the two of us.”
Her head bobbed up and down. “Okay, I’ll order the sedation and check on the room, but do we call the national committee or the FBI or who? What do we do?”
Barney stopped and looked back down the hall to the room. He knew what he’d like to do. He’d like to make him pay for the atrocities committed in his name, to shoot him between the eyes and send him back to hell.
“Adolf Hitler was supposed to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and his body burned on April 30, 1945, so what we do is find out what the hell he was doing for those next twenty-eight years.”
“And then what, Barney?” When he didn’t answer, she touched his arm. “Dr. Ellison, what do we do then?”
Barney looked at her and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Author’s Note
I want to thank Brian Howell, Uncle B. himself, for allowing me to use his name and establishment in the novel.
Uncle B.’s Bar-B-Q can now be found at 435 Bridge Street in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.
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