by Judith Tarr
Nicole gritted her teeth on any number of fierce rejoinders. The nurse unhooked her from her banks of monitors, and — thank God — removed the catheter, and eased her into the wheelchair. She didn’t need that, but she put up with it. If they wanted to think her weak, let them. Hospital personnel had a way of reducing patients to dependent children in any case.
Dependent children didn’t have to sign endless consent forms. Nicole did, dutifully; taking time to skim the wording, as a good lawyer should, before she signed her name to it. She wasn’t averse to tests, not in the slightest. She was as eager as the doctor to know if somehow her brains had fried.
They ran an ultrasound. They took a series of ordinary X-rays. Dr. Feldman did a spinal tap — that hurt. It hurt rather badly, but never as badly as having her tooth pulled without anesthetic. She had to hold still, that was the hardest part. But she did it.
They ran a CAT scan, which was claustrophobic, and an MRI, which was both claustrophobic and noisy. It was much like going through a car wash, except for the water, and the hot wax afterwards.
Being silly helped. So did just being — being here, in this world and time, where pain was seldom worse than a brief discomfort, and where everything was so very clean.
It was the middle of the afternoon before she got back to her room. She was exhausted, and she was starving. It was well past the lunch hour, but Dr. Feldman was ready for that: she called Dietary, and the kitchen sent up a tuna-salad sandwich, a plate of orange heavy-duty Jell-O, and an oversized chocolate-chip cookie. The bread was soft and wonderfully free from grit, though it didn’t have a tenth the flavor of her own baking in Carnuntum — but Umma’s shoulder and elbow had ached endlessly from working the quern.
But even better than the bread was the cookie. Until she bit into what was, really, an indifferently good cookie grudgingly flecked with poor-quality chocolate, she’d forgotten just how much she missed that dark sweetness. No chocolate in Carnuntum. No food of the gods. Even knowing how much better it could be, she savored each bite. God, it was good.
When she’d eaten her lunch in blissful solitude, she hunted around for the remote and turned on the TV news. There was plenty of local crime, but there were also New York and Moscow and Angola and the Persian Gulf, right in the room with her. She could find out what was going on in any of those places more readily than she could have learned what was happening in Vindobona, twenty miles up the Danube from Carnuntum. What a wonder of a world this was!
She reined herself in before she got too giddy. She should calm down or she’d get into trouble, but it was rather wonderful to be so very much aware of all the things she’d taken for granted. It made her feel more alive; more in the world.
She was still thinking about half in Latin, till she ran into concepts that needed English. Or she thought it was Latin. If she’d hallucinated a year and a half in Carnuntum, she could just as easily have hallucinated a language to go with it. She’d been at a party once, one of Frank’s academic mill-and-swills, in which she’d overheard one of the guests telling another about a colleague who’d apparently gone around the bend: “He claims he’s been channeling one of Alexander the Great’s historians — in Greek, no less.”
“And is it real Greek?” the other had asked.
“Well,” said the first with a touch of scorn, “it is Greek — but it’s much too archaic for the place and the time.”
At the time she’d laughed, thinking how very academic that conversation was. They weren’t disturbed by the channeling, but channeling in too archaic a dialect — that was very bad form.
Now she wondered. What if..?
No. It was preposterous. And yet…
Somewhere between the international scene and the financial report, a nurse brought in a plastic bag filled with clothes. Frank hadn’t wasted any time sending them. Neither had he taken the time to come up and visit. He wasn’t that considerate.
Then again, maybe he was. They couldn’t stay in the same room without squabbling. It was a great deal easier on her nerves if he stayed in his place and she stayed in hers.
The day could have dragged, but she had the TV and the remote, and she entertained herself with relentless channel-surfing. Soap operas, game shows, movies old and almost new, kids’ programming, women’s programming, talk shows, reality shows, the entertainment report, the news, sports, Discover, PBS, the Learning Channel… She was as drunk on images as she’d once been on wine.
Dinner came on time: frozen fried chicken, frozen peas, mashed potatoes with the same gluey gravy she remembered from her high-school cafeteria, and in place of tough Jell-O in colors never seen in nature, a scoop of gelatinous tapioca pudding. The novelty was wearing off: she was starting to think that hospital cuisine left a bit to be desired. But the styrofoam cup held real coffee. How on earth had they let that through Dietary?
She didn’t care how, just that it was there. She sighed with pleasure over every lukewarm sip.
Just about two sips from the bottom of the cup, Dr. Feldman strode into the room, not quite so springily as she had in the morning. Her face wore a distinctly sour expression.
She didn’t linger long in small talk of the good-evening-how-are-you? variety. “I’ve been going over your new tests,” she said.
Nicole’s heart thudded. She was glad the monitor was disconnected: it would have brought a nurse at the run. “Yes?” she prompted when the doctor didn’t go on.
“And,” Dr. Feldman said, looking more sour still, “as far as they go, you seem to be a normal, healthy specimen. Except that normal, healthy specimens aren’t in the habit of lapsing into six-day comas. Something went wrong in there. We just can’t determine what it was.”
“But I’m all right now?” Nicole asked.
“So far as we can determine, yes. “ Dr. Feldman didn’t sound happy at all.
Nicole pounced on the important thing. “Then will you let me go home tomorrow?”
The doctor frowned. “If your insurance will cover it, I’d really like to keep you here for another day of observation. You wouldn’t want to lose consciousness again as you were driving home, would you?”
“No,” Nicole said. She wasn’t enthusiastic about going to sleep, either. She’d gone up to her bedchamber in Carnuntum every night hoping, praying, she would wake up in L.A. If she fell asleep here, would she wake up in Carnuntum again? Had that journey been real, and was this the hallucination?
She was going to go crazy unless she could get an answer to that. But this neurologist all too obviously, and all too unhappily, didn’t have one.
Best to do as she was told. If she didn’t wake up in the second century, the hospital wasn’t so bad a place. And if she didn’t wake up at all…
“My insurance will cover an extra day,” she said.
“Good,“ Dr. Feldman said. “That’s wise. And while you’re resting, I’ll see if I can come up with more tests for you. I do want to get to the bottom of this if I possibly can.”
“I understand,” Nicole said.
The doctor left, still frowning, still obviously unhappy to have no answers. Nor was Nicole about to give her any, even if she’d had one that a modern medical scientist would accept.
The evening wound down between primetime television and the ringing of the telephone. Her mother called from Bloomington, with interpolations from the elder of her two sisters and the kids. Nicole gave them an expanded version of the official story, and got the expected hammering of questions for which she had no credible answers. She might still have been fending off “But why? Why were you out like that for a week? Don’t tell me the doctor doesn’t know! So get a new doctor! ‘ right through the change of nursing shifts at eleven o’clock, and never mind what time it was in Indiana, if a nurse hadn’t come in to take her pulse and temperature and meddle generally with her arrangements.
After the nurse went to harass the next patient, Nicole took refuge in television. That was what it was, a refuge. She’d fled to it every nigh
t when she came home from the office, used it as a pacifier to wind down from the stress of the day. And yet, if you’d asked her what she thought of television, she’d have come out with a whole canned rant against it, complete with assertion that she would never, no, never, use it as a babysitter for her children.
And all the while they’d be parked in front of it while she got her head together after a hard day at the firm, and when she’d put them to bed, she’d park there herself till she fell asleep. The Emperor, she had to admit, had no clothes.
And yet, she thought, she’d met an Emperor, and he most definitely was not blind to his own faults. Quite the opposite: he’d gone in search of them so that he could get rid of them.
Of all the things she’d found in the second century, Marcus Aurelius was the one the twentieth couldn’t match. If he turned out to be a dream or a hallucination, she’d be more than sorry. The world was a better place, by a little, for that he’d been in it.
At eleven o’clock, a nurse marched in and turned off the television. “We do have to get some rest,” he said primly.
What do you mean, we? Nicole refrained from saying. She was wide awake and in fine shape. And she did not want to sleep. She did not want to wake in that tavern in Carnuntum.
The nurse couldn’t know that, nor would he have cared if he had. He turned out the light in the room and laid the bed down flat. His air of superior virtue made Nicole want to kick him.
She lay in the not-quite-dark, dim-lit by the lights in the hallway and the flicker of the heart monitor that the nurse had hooked up again — Making sure I don’t sit up and turn the TV back on, she thought sourly. The mattress was not what she’d have called comfortable, and yet it was thicker and softer than the one she’d slept on above the tavern.
They’d told her she’d been asleep six days. It was sleep, the doctors had admitted grudgingly, though right on the edge of true coma. No dreams. She’d asked. She’d stayed in the deepest level of sleep throughout. “As if there was nobody home,” one of the nurses had said between tests. Dr. Feldman had said the same thing.
So she didn’t need more sleep now, did she? And she’d had coffee with dinner. She would stay awake. She would. Even if she yawned. Even if..
Nicole’s dreams were muddy, confused. Sometimes she was in Carnuntum, but no one could see or hear her; she ran here and there, trying to get Julia to listen, then Gaius Calidius Severus, then — and by this she knew it was a dream — Titus Calidius Severus. He smiled at her and said, “Welcome back among the dead, Umma.”
Then she was in West Hills, trying to get a much younger Justin to eat his prunes, but Kimberley kept tugging at her to go and feed the “other baby,” except it wasn’t a baby, it was Lucius in a blue bunny bib and a toga.
She woke with a start, suddenly and fully aware, and grimly determined not to open her eyes. There was light beyond her eyelids, she couldn’t escape that. And — she breathed deep. Nothing. No complex reek of Roman city.
Her eyes opened. She was in West Hills Medical Center, in the bed in which she’d fallen asleep. Had anyone ever been so happy to wake up in a hospital?
Reality came crashing in as soon as she sat up and set the heart monitor off again. There was breakfast, sponge-bath — though she could perfectly well have bathed herself, they weren’t letting her — and, when she was cleaner, even by this sketchy method, than she had been in a year and a half in Carnuntum, a nurse with the stack of paperwork. The deductibles were going to strain her to the limit, but just then she didn’t care. She’d manage. And Frank, she thought with a slow smile, was going to help. It was time he paid up.
After paperwork came more tests, and more frustration for Dr. Feldman. There wasn’t one anomalous thing anywhere, no matter how often she repeated her tests, or how many variations she tried. At last she flung up her hands and sent Nicole back to her room. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” she said as the nurse settled Nicole in the obligatory and unnecessary wheelchair, “even now we have much less knowledge of the brain and its functions than I wish we did.”
What about the functions of the brain under the influence of two Roman gods? Nicole thought. But she nodded, and held her tongue.
That afternoon, faced with a wasteland of TV soap operas, Nicole determined to give herself a gift she’d yearned for since the day she arrived in Carnuntum. After consulting with Dr. Feldman, the nurses let her get away with it.
She took a long, hot, wonderful shower. With soap. And shampoo. And towels that, while not exactly luxurious, were thick enough and soft enough to be a pleasure on her clean skin. It was an almost orgasmic delight to be so clean. Her body still felt strange, as if it didn’t quite fit. Its skin was too pale, its middle too thick and soft. And yet there wasn’t a louse or a fleabite on it. For that alone she loved it.
Then, when she’d showered, she rummaged in the bag Frank had sent and found the little blow dryer she’d bought a long time ago for traveling — and a small makeup kit that had to be Dawn’s contribution; she couldn’t imagine Frank thinking of such a thing.
It was a brand-new Nicole Gunther-Perrin who came out of the steamy bathroom and settled again in the bed. She was more than ready for her dinner. And when, after the tray had been taken away, Dr. Feldman appeared in the doorway, Nicole greeted her almost happily.
The doctor’s expression was as sour as ever. She wasn’t at all pleased to say, “I can’t see any valid medical reason for keeping you here past tomorrow morning. You are, as far as any test can determine, perfectly normal and healthy. I wish I could tell you if your syndrome will recur, but I can’t.”
Nicole bit her tongue. She could guarantee a longer stay by telling the doctor exactly what, as far as she could tell, had happened to her during those six days. For that matter, she could talk herself right into a nice long stay in a padded cell.
No, thank you. “We’ll just have to hope it was a one-time thing, won’t we?” she said.
“Hope is just about as much as we’ve got,” Dr. Feldman said. “I’d like to see you in my office next week — it’s right across the street.” She handed Nicole a business card. “Call and make an appointment, and I’ll see you then.”
“I’ll do that,” Nicole said. She meant it. If, as she was increasingly convinced, she really had traveled in time by the offices of a pair of antique gods, it wasn’t bloody likely she’d ever do it again. But if it kept the doctor happy, and if it made her look like a normal, baffled, honestly concerned victim of an unknown syndrome, then she’d do it and welcome it.
“Please do come and see me,” the doctor said. “Just because I can’t find anything now doesn’t mean nothing happened. People don’t lose consciousness for six days for no reason at all.”
“Yes,” Nicole said. “I understand. It’s like when the car is acting up, and you take it to the mechanic and it’s working just fine.”
“Just like that,” Dr. Feldman said with the flicker of a smile.
They parted on good terms, all things considered. Nicole settled down in front of the TV feeling surprisingly unsettled. She was sure — but she wasn’t. Before she went home, she decided, she was going to make a stop. If she turned out to be wrong… If she turned out to be wrong, she’d need that appointment with the neurologist. And she’d be just as eager as Dr. Feldman to get to the bottom of whatever had happened.
22
Nicole got her walking papers with a breakfast of scrambled powdered eggs, rubbery toast, and canned fruit cocktail. She was allowed to take another shower, just as delicious as the first, and to put on the clothes that had come in the bag: bra, panties, white Reeboks, a pink top she seldom wore because she hated the color, and pink socks, both of which went well with faded jeans.
Dawn must have done the packing. The pink top gave it away. So did the coordinated colors. Frank paid as little attention to his own clothes as he could get away with, and even less to anyone else’s. Unless it was a woman, and she wasn’t wearing enough of them. That, he noticed.
Dressed, if casually, and ready to face the world, Nicole called Frank to let him know she was coming. She got the machine, which was fine with her. She wasn’t in the mood to talk to him; when she got home would be more than soon enough.
The nurse who wheeled her downstairs and the staffer who signed her out both looked at her somewhat oddly. As she claimed her purse from the safe, she realized what it was. Sympathy. They thought she minded that she was checking out alone, with no family to help her, and no one to drive her home. It was a rather Roman attitude, when she stopped to think. But she was profoundly modern. She was glad she was alone. She needed time to sort things out — and she certainly wouldn’t get that once she’d gone back to being Kimberley and Justin’s mommy again.
Her purse came from the safe in its own good time. There was a note taped to it: Car is in section D-4. over by the California Tumor building. The words were scribbled in Frank’s angular handwriting. No best wishes, no nothing — only what needed saying, and that handled with as much dispatch as possible. Very much in character for Frank.
They wheeled her out to the door, and no farther. Beyond that, she was on her own. She stood in front of the medical center, with its glass and steel and concrete behind her, and the expanse of asphalt in front of her. It was awash in sunlight, drenched with it. She blinked and squinted and, after a long, dazzled moment, remembered to rummage in her purse for her sunglasses. They cut the force of the light, made it bearable — but even with them it was brighter than it had ever been on the banks of the Danube.
When she could see again, and when her lungs had accustomed themselves to the sharp dusty smell of a California street, with its undertone of auto exhaust and its eye-stinging hint of smog, she made her way toward the building with the horrible name. The oncology group that inhabited it had obviously never heard of PR.
By the time she’d taken three steps into the lot, she was sweating. The day would be well up in the nineties, maybe triple digits. She hadn’t felt — she didn’t think she’d felt — weather like that for a long time.