Second Lives

by P. D. Cacek

  She nodded again. “Helen said g’bye.”

  His voice followed her into the darkness. “You mean good night.”

  Whatever.

  * * *

  When she opened her eyes again the room was different and the light was softer and more subdued, but it still smelled like a hospital and that meant it hadn’t been a dream. They really had cut her open and scarred her for the rest of her life because they made a mistake and thought she was someone named Helen.

  Her eyes began to burn, but this time the tears came quietly and her whole body felt like it was made of lead. They must have given her something to keep her quiet…so she couldn’t tell on them.

  But she would, she’d tell her parents and the police and…and…the school board because it was his fault too. If he’d only given her the part none of this would have happened.

  If he’d given her the part like he was supposed to she wouldn’t have had to follow him into the theater and wouldn’t have…have….

  She felt a tear roll down her cheek.

  She couldn’t remember falling or landing on the chairs below the balcony, and that was probably a really good thing. All she could remembered was the sensation of falling and not being able to stop herself and the tingling rollercoaster drop feeling in the pit of her stomach as she went over the edge just before she….

  My face!

  Her arm felt so heavy she could barely lift it and when she did, when her hand finally lifted off the bed someone took it and held onto it.

  It was him, again, the doctor who’d made a mistake and cut her open.

  “Hi again,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  It was like walking into Spanish class and having to answer Senorita Ripley’s question ‘Qué tal hoy?’

  “Estoy bien, gracias,” she said. “Y usted?”

  His eyes got big. “What?”

  “Eight and a half,” she said, remembering the stupid pain-by--numbers game.

  He nodded. “I can up your morphine drip, but let’s just wait a bit, okay? You had a bit of a problem after the anesthetic—”

  “Retrograde amnesia,” she said. She remembered that and the pain number game and her name and how they made a mistake, but she couldn’t remember anything after she fell from the balcony.

  “Right,” the doctor said. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Are my mom and dad here?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I want my mom and my dad’s gonna sue you.”

  He stood there looking down at her. “Why?”

  Like he didn’t know.

  “Thirsty.”

  “Sure,” he said and turned away from the bed.

  Her eyelids began to droop, they felt like they were made out of concrete, but she fought to keep them open. She needed to be awake when her parents showed up. She had to explain what happened, that she fell and she was really sorry, but that it was an accident and accidents happen all the time. That’s what her mom always said. It wasn’t like she’d planned to fall over the railing or go to a hospital where they mistook her for another patient named Helen and cut her open so she’d have a scar for the rest of her life or anything.

  It wasn’t her fault and her dad would make sure everyone knew that.

  “Here,” the doctor said and held something that looked like a little blue sponge stuck to one end of a white straw up to her lips. “We’ll give you ice chips if this upsets your stomach.”

  She sucked the water from the straw and asked for more. He dipped the sponge into the cup of water he was holding three more times before putting everything on the side table.

  “Let’s see if that stays down,” he said. “Now, can you tell me your name?”

  Jeeze, not this again. “I want to see my mom and dad. Where are they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Are they here?”

  The lead covering her body turned to ice. “Why wouldn’t they be here? Didn’t you tell them I was here?”

  No, of course they didn’t because they got me mixed up with someone named Helen.

  Her father wasn’t just going to sue the hospital but maybe even put old Dr. Doogie in jail.

  “You’d better call my parents right now and tell them I’m here!”

  He nodded and called the nurse over. “Will you call Helen’s parents—”

  “My name’s not HELEN!” She’d wanted to scream so loud his ears would bleed, but she could barely make a stage whisper.

  The doctor: “All right, then what is your name?”

  Finally. She lifted her chin the same way Vivien Leigh had as Miss Scarlett O’Hara.

  “Christine Taylor Moore.”

  His face fell. She’d read about that happening, but she’d never actually seen it until that moment. It was like his skin just came loose from his skull and…slipped. His mouth fell open, which was really gross, and his eyes got all round and cow-stupid-looking. It almost made her sick to her stomach so she looked away and noticed the name on his coat pocket.

  Stanton.

  No wonder he’d made a mistake.

  “Like son like father, huh?” Burn!

  “What?”

  “I know your son, Blankie Frankie, and this was all his fault! If he hadn’t messed up I wouldn’t have….” A new thought struck her and the ice covering her got even colder. “Is that why you tried to kill me?”

  He turned away and said something to the nurse. She nodded and left.

  “If you try anything she’ll know—” she began but stopped when he held up his hand.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “How did…do you know Frank Stanton?”

  Her eyes tried to close again. God, she was sleepy, but he wasn’t going to get away with it. Her dad would put him and his freak son in jail.

  “I go to school with him, okay? But you can tell him not to bother bringing me any homework, because when I get out of here I’m going to go to a dramatic arts high school in New York so I never have to see him again.”

  She’d hoped that would have made him run, but Frankie’s dad just sat there, white-faced and bug-eyed.

  “I knew a Crissy Moore a long time ago. In high school. She accused me of putting her name in the wrong place on the character list for The Crucible.”

  Her heart, the one that had stopped and he’d cut her open to start, began to pound so hard it started cracking the ice that encased her.

  “She didn’t think the part she was given was big enough and came to our teacher’s office…his name was Mr.—”

  “Byrd,” she said and he nodded.

  “Mr. Byrd…to talk to him. I don’t know what happened, or what he said to her, but after he left she followed him and she killed herself.”

  No.

  “She jumped off the balcony in the auditorium – ”

  The theater. Mr. Byrd always called it the theater. Her heart was pounding so hard.

  “ – and snapped her neck on a light cable.”

  “It was an accident.”

  He grabbed onto the bed rail. “This isn’t possible.”

  The blood was beating against the inside of her ears as she looked at him, really looked. There was a resemblance, but it could have been makeup. Blankie Frankie had put on makeup and this was all just a bad joke and—

  This isn’t real. It’s just a joke…a bad joke or a dream. Maybe I’m still dreaming.

  Please let me still be dreaming.

  “I want my mom…please get her.”

  He reached over the side rail and took her hand. The pounding of her heart was making her fingers twitch.

  “Crissy, your parents moved to Oregon twenty-two years ago…after your funeral.”

  Crissy’s heart shuddered. “But I’m not dead.”

  His hand
tightened around hers. “I... Would you like me to call your parents?”

  “What?”

  “It will be a shock for them, as you can imagine, but—”

  She felt her heart skip a beat when she dug her nails into the back of his hand.

  “No!”

  For just the flicker of a second, Crissy saw the stuttering, pimply-faced dork behind the grownup mask.

  “Crissy, it’s okay. Calm down. I just thought... Can you imagine how happy they’ll be to see you?”

  “NO! THEY WOULDN’T!” Her heart was really pounding now. “This isn’t me! I’M NOT ME!”

  “Okay, okay.” He let go of her hand and stood up to press a button on the wall behind her. “I won’t. Crissy, you have to calm down.”

  Bells started ringing out in the hall. They sounded like passing bells telling her she was going to be late to class. Years and years late. The sob caught her by surprise, but the tears didn’t.

  “Please.” She squeezed her eyes shut and felt the tears ooze down her cheek. “Please don’t tell them, they think I’m dead so let me be dead. Just let me be dead.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  August 29

  At that moment Dr. Bernard Ellison, Barney to his friends, wished he wore glasses and envied those of his medical colleagues who did. Beyond, as he always thought, giving the wearer a look of distinction, glasses provided an indispensable distraction device, much like a magician’s misdirection when he was about to pull a rabbit from a hat. If he wore glasses, he could flourish them or use them to tap thoughtfully against the four manila file folders on the table in front of him and thus divert the gaze of the four men sharing the conference room’s table with him.

  It would have been a good icebreaker.

  And given him something to do with his hands.

  He wasn’t Barney to them, not yet. Five days ago he didn’t know them and they only knew him by virtue of his title, chief of psychiatry. If any of them had had reason to call his office to ask for a consult, they wouldn’t have made the call personally or even spoken to him – that’s what administrative assistants were for.

  They knew him by reputation and he knew them through their patients, ‘The Fab Four’, as they had been labeled by the hospital grapevine – the four patients who had been declared dead by each one of the doctors sitting at the table with him, only to spontaneously revive.

  And all of whom claimed, upon regaining consciousness, to be someone other than themselves.

  The hospital’s board of directors wanted answers.

  There had been cases before of patients who had clinically died and been brought back, with or without medical assistance; but four patients who died on the same day, within hours of each other, and who, upon reviving, each exhibited a previously unidentified Cluster B personality disorder with dissociative amnesia, verged on the impossible.

  Almost before that first piece of gossip made the rounds, from the ER all the way to the extended care units and back, each of the four doctors had been questioned and every piece of hospital equipment that had been used in the cases tested, retested and replaced just to be safe.

  When nothing physical could be blamed the board called him to ask if he’d examine and evaluate the four patients and come up with a credible explanation.

  And he had.

  He spoke to them, answered their questions, and did his best to calm their fears. He showed them pictures provided by their families – their families – and told them who they were.

  But they each said no, that’s not who they were.

  They gave him names.

  They gave him places.

  They gave him lives.

  They told him who they were and he’d told the board, then offered the only explanation that fit.

  The board was less than happy, but accepted it.

  Now it was the doctors’ turn.

  Feeling their eyes move with him as he sat back, Barney took a deep breath and said a small prayer.

  “A fugue state is a psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia of one’s personal identity, including memories, personalities and other characteristics of individuality.”

  They were looking at him with unconcealed boredom. So far so good.

  “Usually a fugue state is short-lived,” he continued, “but it can last months or even years.”

  “We know what a fugue state is, Dr. Ellison,” Dr. Mendoza said. “We all did our psychiatric rotations.”

  Barney nodded. Mendoza’s patient was James Cooper, Jr., who now called himself Aryeh Rosenberg and preferred speaking Yiddish because he told Barney, “When I try to talk American ‘er macht a tel fun dem’ I ruin it.’”

  “After recovering from a fugue state,” Barney continued, as if there’d been no interruption, “a person’s memories usually return intact.”

  Mendoza slumped back in his chair. “So we are dealing with a fugue state, here? For all four of them?”

  “No,” Barney said and waited for the exasperated grumblings to stop. “As I just quantified, a fugue state implies that a person is suffering from a psychiatric disorder….”

  “That is characterized by reversible amnesia of their personal identity. Yes, we know.” This was from Cross, Henry Rollins’ primary care physician. Henry Rollins, the Alzheimer’s patient who now called himself Timothy Patrick O’Neal and wanted to name his new baby sister – if it was a girl because his mommy didn’t know yet – Princess Summerfall Winterspring O’Neal.

  Barney smiled. “I know and I apologize, but I wanted to say for the record – ” he nodded toward the small recording camera mounted in one corner of the ceiling, “ – that what we’re dealing with is not a contagious fugue state.”

  The atmosphere of the room changed as three – but only three – men exhaled in relief. Barney noted the exception: Frank Stanton, whose patient had died a forty-two-year-old woman and ‘woken up’ as a sixteen-year-old girl named Crissy.

  “So….” Cross again. “If it’s not a fugue state, then what is it?”

  Barney interlocked his fingers and lifted his hands to his face, pressing his chin against the linked index and middle fingers. It was the same thing he’d seen his grandfather do when the old man had been asked a question he didn’t know the answer to.

  The only trouble was that Barney had an answer.

  “I’ll come to that in a minute,” he said without lowering his hands, “but first I need to tell you that aside from their obvious anxiety and confusion, all four patients are rational and not suffering from any psychosis—”

  “Whoa!” This came from Palmer, the OB/GYN who’d delivered a baby from a comatose and clinically brain dead Sara Cortland only to have her wake up as a repressed and angst-ridden spinster named Elisabeth Wyman. “Forgive me for this, but are you joking? Isn’t psychosis typically characterized by radical changes in someone’s personality?”

  Barney nodded, rubbing his chin against his knuckles.

  “Well, I’ve known Sara Cortland for years and believe me when I tell you that her personality has changed.”

  It took some effort, but Barney lowered his hands to the tabletop.

  “No, it hasn’t, Dr. Palmer. Sara Cortland died on August 24th when you took her off life support.” When Palmer started to argue, Barney lifted one hand and silenced him. “Henry Rollins died on the same day from recurrent aspiration pneumonia in end-stage dementia. James Cooper, Jr., committed suicide by drowning, August 24th, and on that same day Helen Harmon died of an acute myocardial infarction on the operating table. Each one of your patients died.”

  Barney waited for the shouting to stop. It was still only three of the doctors who were loudly reminding him that their patients had not died but regained consciousness. The fourth, Dr. Stanton, sat looking down at the table and said nothing.

  “You will le
t me know when you’re done,” Barney said when they stopped to take a breath. “Won’t you?”

  The doctors looked at each other and sat back.

  “Then I may continue?” It was a low shot, but Barney had never been against using them when it mattered. “Thank you. Now, as I was saying, your patients died—”

  When the buzz started again, Stanton finally opened his mouth.

  “Let him talk.”

  The other three doctors looked at him, then at each other.

  “Seriously, Frank?” Mendoza said, getting to his feet. “Look, I don’t know what kind of psychobabble Dr. Ellison is going to try and feed us, but our patients are alive.”

  Barney saw Stanton shake his head, but it was so slight a movement even he wasn’t sure it had actually happened.

  “Sit down, Chas,” Stanton said, “and let him talk.”

  “Look, Frank, I—”

  Stanton slammed his open hand down on the table. “Let him talk!”

  Mendoza sat down.

  “Just let him talk.”

  The three doctors nodded.

  “Go on, Dr. Ellison.”

  “Thank you,” Barney said. “But first, let me put any fears about your careers to rest. What happened to your patients had nothing whatsoever to do with anything you did. That much I’m sure of and said as much to the board.”

  A collective sigh filled the room.

  “I have an idea as to what happened,” Barney continued, “but why?” He raised his hands in a shrug. “I can tell you that after speaking to the patients I contacted a friend of mine who is with the World Health Organization and asked if there had been any similar cases reported.”

  “An epidemic?” Stanton asked and the others straightened in their chairs.

  “No,” Barney said. “There’s no contagion, no pathogen involved. This is not a physical disease.”

  “Then it’s a neurological virus?” Cross asked.

  Barney shook his head. “It’s not a disease at all.”

  “But there have been more cases reported?” Palmer asked.

  “Yes,” Barney said, “but not officially.”

  “How many?” Palmer asked.