"Dr. Violet, allow me to introduce you to the new medical doctor of Ward Z, Dr. Calvin Wintrone."
"Just call me Calvin," he said, extending his hand toward me.
I took it, feeling slightly bewildered. No one had said anything to me about a new doctor being brought in.
"Dr. Violet, is, I'm sure, thrilled for you to be here. She was very concerned when she started a few months ago, about the physical health of her patients, and of course without a medical doctor on staff, she was concerned that a mishap could come about."
Calvin nodded, an understanding smile covering his face. "I get that. It's amazing the ward has gone this long without one. I'm just glad to be here now, and that there hasn't been any serious medical issues recently."
"As are we." Christopher smiled, revealing his crooked teeth. He glanced between Calvin and I as if there was something he knew that I didn't. He cleared his throat. "I've already shown Dr. Wintrone around, but I'm sure the two of you have some things to chat about with scheduling, and such." And just like that, Christopher headed off down the hall. Richard hurried to catch up with him, leaving me with Calvin.
"It's great to be down here," Calvin said, awkwardly.
I nodded. "I'm surprised honestly. When I started a few months ago the ward had been without a medical doctor for some time. I just assumed we would never get one."
"Well, here I am." He held out his arms.
"Did you come from upstairs?"
"I did." He dropped them. "I came from Ward E, you know, where they primarily hold self-abusers."
"Ah, yes, I've heard of Ward E. I came from Ward N."
"Nice." He nodded his head quickly, too quickly. He was nervous, or maybe he was just an awkward person. I couldn't decide.
"It's hard to imagine how this place will run down here with another doctor." My voice sounded disappointed, though it wasn't because of the fact that I would be sharing my power down here, but rather because I didn't know what this would mean for me and for Aaron.
"I'm hoping I can make your life easier." We moved to walk down the hall toward my office and toward Z15. "Christopher said that you haven't taken a day off since you started, even though all of the other staff members have taken several."
It was true. But what would I do all day in the house? Aaron was here, which was where I needed to be. I chewed on the inside of my lip at the thought.
"Well, there's a lot to be done, and when the staff is small…"
"Yeah, I get it." He nodded and smiled. "My office is next to yours." He gestured at the closed door. "But I'd really like to talk with you about something I found in the OR."
I frowned. "The OR?" I'd been inside the operating room one time on my first day. The array of medical machinery scattered about the space hadn't interested me in the least – all of them foreign, mystery objects.
"Yeah, there's this machine, well, just let me show you."
I followed him inside the room at the end of the hall. I didn't look at Aaron's door like I usually did when I was close by, hoping to catch a glance. Fear bloomed inside me.
Why would they hire a medical doctor now, when they haven't had one in months?
They know what you're doing, Adeline. You can't hide.
Panic. It welled inside me again, for the second time in the last five minutes, like an ugly troll, ready to barrel out and attack everything in its path.
No, they can't know!
Calvin moved into a room off to the side of the OR. I hadn't gone into this one before.
"This machine—" Calvin flicked on the light "—is something I've only read about. I never thought I'd see one in real life."
I glanced at the big contraption in front of me. It was tube-like, where a person could lay and be moved into. "Isn't this just an MRI machine?"
"No, no, no, no, no!" Calvin clapped his hands together in excitement "It looks like that, sure, but this, this is something else entirely." He ran his hands along the smooth metal. "This is the Memory Echo Imaging machine."
I frowned. "MEI? What does it do?"
Calvin smiled and adjusted his glasses. "I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it – though it is going to change your line of work forever. Last I heard they were illegal, created in North Korea, and only used there." Calvin moved and began to type on a computer attached to one end of the machine. After a few clicks a low humming sound came out of the machine, like the power up of an industrial fan. A soft blue light illuminated the tube. "This machine has the ability to track memories."
"Memories?" A dry chuckle escaped my lips.
"Yes." Calvin wasn't looking at me, but at the computer, his fingers typing furiously. A bright royal blue filled a projector screen I hadn't noticed before, over the machine. "It's able to pick up memories from any person placed inside the machine, even repressed memories."
I frowned, but my heart escalated in my chest. "Repressed memories? And then, it just, what? Displays them on the screen?"
"Exactly." He stopped typing and frowned. "From what I can tell, this one has never been used before, unless the memory storage of previous patients has been put in a different file that I'm not seeing."
"Why is it illegal? Privacy laws?"
"Something like that." He glanced at me. "Also, it's supposedly extremely painful for the patient. The very act of digging around inside someone's mind is not a painless process, at least, not yet."
"Wow." I played with the loose piece of hair that had fallen in front of my eye. "So, I could literally access the past of patients and see it." Giddiness filled me.
"Yes, not their past as a truth, but their past as they saw it. The things they remember – and only that." He scratched his head. "Or at least that was my understanding of it, my buddy in medical school…"
Calving continued to talk, but I stopped listening. My brain immediately jumped to Aaron, where it usually spent most of its time these days. It went back to yesterday, back to before our kiss, back to her.
What was she like – the woman he loved? Was she out there waiting for him, biding her time until he could be free?
"They have no future outside these walls." Richard's words came back to me. A twist of happiness flooded me, like a squeezed lemon into crisp, clean water. She could wait forever. He wasn't getting out.
The happiness faded almost as soon as it emerged. He still thought about her. She was still a part of him. If she wasn't, he would talk about her. He would have told me the terrible things she had done to break his heart, so I could fix it, so I could put him back together.
"She is a part of me, not you."
I squeezed my hands into fists. How dare he.
"Can you remove memories?"
"I'm sorry?" Calvin glanced over the computer screen with a frown.
"Can you change them?" I tapped my fingers on the metal hull. "Can you change them with the machine?"
Calvin scratched his head. "Uh, I don't know. I don't think so. I think it only has the technology to read them." He paused. "Why would you want to change someone's memories?"
A smile spread across my lips. "I could erase her."
"I'm sorry, what?"
I coughed into my hand and met his gaze. "If I could erase memories, or change them, then I could potentially remove the trauma that possibly added to a patient's mental illness." I sounded so professional, so thoughtful and caring about my work. But instead I was a ball of jealousy inside, determined to destroy every last memory of the mystery woman in Aaron's head.
"Oh, yes, that would be something." Calvin smiled. "Spoken like a good doctor, always wanting to help her patients." He paused and frowned. "Oh, come look at this." He turned the screen toward me. There was a list of different emotions filling the screen. "I didn't know the machine could do this, but apparently you can choose the type of memories you want to target." He shook his head. "It makes sense though, since the machine is supposed to be physically painful, and you wanted to do multiple sessions, then you wouldn't want to watch the same
memories over and over, or all the memories of a person's life." A small smile spread across his lips. "Genius."
"So this would allow us to target only memories that sparked a certain emotion, like happiness?"
"Sure, but it even allows you to be more specific. Happiness spawned from feelings of love, or even anger spawned from feelings of love. There is an option for just love in general, or happiness in general. Wow, that's so remarkable. I wonder how deeply one could go, if someone could be so specific in their qualifications for a memory that they could materialize just one specific memory from someone?" He turned the screen back to him. I watched as he continued clicking, my mind racing. A few minutes later he powered the MEI machine down.
"It's too bad, though, really, that the machine can't erase memories purely for the benefit of patients. I don't know if any such thing exists. The ability to watch the memories, especially those repressed is impressive enough and the be specific about the kind of memories summoned, but to change them?" He came and stood next to me, we both gazed at the machine. "That would be some serious real world-changing shit."
I glanced at him, surprised to hear him say the word shit. I'd known him for less than twenty minutes, yet he seemed like the kind of doctor who was endlessly professional. "How so?" I asked.
"Think of what someone could do if that type of machine got into the wrong hands. Hell, even this is something else – the ability to watch someone's memories in HD on a screen, like a movie – to witness their trauma, their tragedies, their triumphs. It's mind-blowing."
Calvin left then, mentioning something about Ryan the orderly and paperwork, before leaving me alone with the machine.
I ran my hand along the hull and tapped my fingers against the metal. It made a hollow sound. Empty.
I knew what I needed to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY
"Mr. Whitman, I'm just going to take some blood to run some preliminary tests so we can move forward," Calvin said.
I watched as the blood filled the little vial, so red.
"Move forward?" Aaron asked Calvin, but his gaze was on me. It was always on me. That twitchy, intelligent gaze somewhere between black and gray. Things had been different this last week, since our bloody kiss, since I found out about her. It seemed as though that kiss should have erased what I knew about her – that she existed. She shouldn't have mattered. She wasn't here. I was here.
But she did matter.
Now every time I visited Aaron, she was all I could see.
Ridiculous, right?
I didn't know who she was, what she looked like. She was faceless, an empty frame on a wall of colorful photos. She blanketed everything, until she was all I could think about while I was with Aaron, and while I was at home. I couldn't watch him anymore in the evenings. I tried after our bloody kiss, but something was lost. Something that had burned so brightly before had become charred ash.
"With the procedure," Calvin supplied while he filled a second tube.
"I'm having a procedure?"
I nodded, not speaking. It had been decided since the moment I understood what the machine did. I had to know about them, about their lives, about her. She was everything, and I needed to know what that meant.
"What procedure, Violet?" There was anger in Aaron's gaze, volatile. His fingers tapped.
"Just a standard procedure, nothing to worry about." Calvin chimed in, capping off the last vial of blood. "I'll go run these tests to make sure everything comes back okay. Shouldn't take long."
Calvin left, leaving me alone with Aaron. "What is the procedure, Violet?"
A pale, flesh-colored bandage covered the little wound on Aaron's arm. It wasn't quite as pale as his skin. It covered up dark words etched into the white.
"Violet!"
I flinched, meeting his gaze again.
"Tell me what's going on," he demanded. A muscle ticked in his cheek.
I frowned. "What happened to your hand?" His right hand was swollen, the knuckles scabbed over.
"Don't try to change the subject, Violet. Tell me what's going!" His hair stood in its normal fashion as if he had been running his fingers through it over and over. Had she run her fingers through it? Had she caressed the strands with her hands? Over and over and over and over and over?
"No!" I turned away from him. I couldn't stand it. These fucking images that ripped at me inside. "Fuck. Just fuck!"
"What's wrong with you, Violet? You haven't been watching me at night." His voice was quieter, his fingers tapping.
"How do you know?" I turned back to him.
A sad smile covered his face, stretching his tattoos. "I just know."
"Pity for you, then, isn't it?"
His brow creased into a frown, but his lips continued to smile. It was unnerving. A smiling, frowning face. The image of confusion itself. "Of course it is, Violet. You're the air I breathe, and when you take away my air, I suffocate." He licked his lips. "It just makes me all the more desperate to get it back."
"Desperate for me?"
"Have you been spending time with him, with Richard?"
Richard, standing with me out in the cold this morning flashed into my head. The swirling, dancing images on the page. I pushed the images away. My lips opened to say what I said earlier in the week, that Richard was co-worker and nothing more. But instead something else came out. "Maybe." It wasn't a lie, even though Richard and I were completely platonic, I didn't include that information.
Aaron's chest rose and fell rapidly with jerky breaths. "Maybe, Violet? Maybe? Maybe you've been spending time with your co-worker instead of spending time with me? Is that what's happening, Violet?"
He's jealous.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I stopped worrying about you, when I knew you were thinking about her." I'd tried to find out who she was. There was nothing in his file about a woman in his life outside of his mother and even that information was sparse.
"Her?" he repeated.
"The one you love, Aaron."
He started to chuckle, the sound grated from inside his chest, his twitchy gaze on me. His mouth was half open revealing his shiny teeth. The sound grew louder, his eyes squinted in the corners. "That's what this is all about?" He spoke the words in between rumbles of laughter. "You wanting to know about my past."
"Not about your past, Aaron. I want to know about the woman you're in love with. You brought it up the other day." It was something I'd noticed later. He was the one who brought up love and past relationships. He was the one that led us to the conversation, to her. "You wanted me to ask about her." My words were accusatory. I pointed my finger at him from across the table. I wasn't sitting. I couldn't sit. I couldn't bear it, not right now.
"Don't you think there's a difference?" His laughter had quieted.
"A difference about what, Aaron? You can't just change the subject."
"A difference between loving and being loved."
"Are you kidding me?" I raised my voice.
"Is all love equal?"
"What kind of question is that? Of course, there's a damn difference. The words themselves are different. It doesn't even merit question, Aaron. You're just trying to waste time, to distract me with your riddles of love and its equality so you don't have to talk about what's really important." I slammed my fist down on the table.
"What's really important? It's funny that you would deem my past romantic life as something that would merit importance, here and now."
"Past?" I clung to the word. "She was your past romantic life?"
His gaze darkened, the tapping stopped as he dug his nails into the table. "Some things are forced to dwell there, in the past. There is no other refuge for them."
"What is that even supposed to mean? Quit talking around everything, quit making me guess!" I yanked on the ends of my hair until my scalp burned like it did that night a few weeks ago when my hair had been wrapped around his fist. The pain felt good, it made me feel present, alive and in control.
"You are in
love with me, Violet. Look at yourself. Yanking on the ends of your hair. Angry. Upset that I have a past outside these white walls. But not the fact that my past is smeared with the blood of innocents, as some would call them." He chuckled. "I wouldn't call them that though, no one is innocent. However," his fingers tapped quickly, "You're upset because my past includes the love of another woman. Someone who is not you."
"Me, love you?" I scoffed, but I could feel it. The lie. The most blatant lie I could remember ever telling.
"You don't want to think about the fact that I've been inside another woman's body, that I loved every minute of it, and that I loved her with every breath inside my chest, with every beat of my heart. It makes you sick, doesn't it?"
"Stop it." The words ripped from my chest like a pathetic cry. "I can't take it."
"Because you love me. You need me." His words were soft, matter of fact. "You're in love with me, my one letter away." He smiled and there was something genuine about it, something that made me want to reach out and touch his face and feel all the crinkles in his skin, to memorize them with my hands so I could never forget.
"You don't know anything," I whispered.
"I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do." Over and over he said the words. "Because I'm in love with you, too." The words seemed to seep into the white walls that surrounded us, into everything, into me. "Richard can't have you, because you're mine." He slammed his fist down on the table, it made a rattling sound. "No one gets to have what is mine!" He shouted the words, but somehow they were quieter than those before them.
"I only want you." The words were in the air between us before I realized I'd said them.
"Good," he said. "Come here."
I was halfway to him when the door to Aaron's room opened. "Dr. Violet, the tests came back good. I've prepared the MEI machine, is everything ready on your end?"
The procedure. I'd almost forgotten about it. Aaron told me loved me. The procedure didn't matter anymore. Did it?
But it did.
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