Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Anna Chernov, St. Sebastian's most famous resident, was a ballet dancer. Everyone knew that.

  He felt stupid even thinking along these lines. What was he hypothesizing here, some sort of telepathy? No respectable scientific study had ever validated such a hypothesis. Also, during Henry's three years at St. Sebastian's—years during which Evelyn and Miss Chernov had also been in residence—he had never felt the slightest connection with, or interest in, either of them.

  He tried to go back to correcting problem sets.

  The difficulty was, he had two data points, his own “incidents” and the sudden rash of unscheduled doctors’ appointments, and no way to either connect or eliminate either one. If he could at least satisfy himself that Evelyn and Erin's doctor visits concerned something other than mental episodes, he would be down to one data point. One was an anomaly. Two were an indicator of ... something.

  This wasn't one of Henry's days to have Carrie's assistance. He pulled himself up on his walker, inched to the desk, and found the Resident Directory. Evelyn had no listings for either cell phone or email. That surprised him; you'd think such a yenta would want as many ways to bother people as possible. But some St. Sebastian's residents were still, after all these decades, wary of any technology they hadn't grown up with. Fools, thought Henry, who had once driven four hundred miles to buy one of the first, primitive, put-it-together-yourself kits for a personal computer. He noted Evelyn's apartment number and hobbled toward the elevators.

  “Why, Henry Erdmann! Come in, come in!” Evelyn cried. She looked astonished, as well she might. And—oh, God—behind her sat a circle of women, their chairs jammed in like molecules under hydraulic compression, all sewing on bright pieces of cloth.

  “I don't want to intrude on your—”

  “Oh, it's just the Christmas Elves!” Evelyn cried. “We're getting an early start on the holiday wall hanging for the lobby. The old one is getting so shabby.”

  Henry didn't remember a holiday wall hanging in the lobby, unless she was referring to that garish lumpy blanket with Santa Claus handing out babies to guardian angels. The angels had had tight, cotton-wool hair that made them look like Q-Tips. He said, “Never mind, it's not important.”

  “Oh, come on in! We were just talking about—and maybe you have more information on it!—this fabulous necklace that Anna Chernov has in the office safe, the one the czar gave—”

  “No, no, I have no information. I'll—”

  “But if you just—”

  Henry said desperately, “I'll call you later.”

  To his horror, Evelyn lowered her eyes and murmured demurely, “All right, Henry,” while the women behind her tittered. He backed away down the hall.

  He was pondering how to discover Erin's last name when she emerged from an elevator. “Excuse me!” he called the length of the corridor. “May I speak to you a moment?”

  She came toward him, another book in her hand, her face curious but reserved. “Yes?”

  “My name is Henry Erdmann. I'd like to ask what will, I know, sound like a very strange question. Please forgive my intrusiveness, and believe that I have a good reason for asking. You had an unscheduled appointment with Dr. Felton yesterday?”

  Something moved behind her eyes. “Yes.”

  “Did your reason for seeing him have to do with any sort of ... of mental experience? A small seizure, or an episode of memory aberration, perhaps?”

  Erin's ringed hand tightened on her book. He noted, numbly, that today it seemed to be a novel. She said, “Let's talk.”

  * * * *

  “I don't believe it,” he said. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Bass, but it sounds like rubbish to me.”

  She shrugged, a slow movement of thin shoulders under her peasant blouse. Her long printed skirt, yellow flowers on black, swirled on the floor. Her apartment looked like her: bits of cloth hanging on the walls, a curtain of beads instead of a door to the bedroom, Hindu statues and crystal pyramids and Navaho blankets. Henry disliked the clutter, the childishness of the decor, even as he felt flooded by gratitude toward Erin Bass. She had released him. Her ideas about the “incidents” were so dumb that he could easily dismiss them, along with anything he might have been thinking which resembled them.

  “There's an energy in the universe as a whole,” she'd said. “When you stop resisting the flow of life and give up the grasping of trishna, you awaken to that energy. In popular terms, you have an ‘out-of-body experience,’ activating stored karma from past lives and fusing it into one moment of transcendent insight.”

  Henry had had no transcendental insight. He knew about energy in the universe—it was called electromagnetic radiation, gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces— and none of it had karma. He didn't believe in reincarnation, and he hadn't been out of his body. Throughout all three “incidents,” he'd felt his body firmly encasing him. He hadn't left; other minds had somehow seemed to come in. But it was all nonsense, an aberration of a brain whose synapses and axons, dendrites and vesicles, were simply growing old.

  He grasped his walker and rose. “Thanks anyway, Mrs. Bass. Good-bye.”

  “Again, call me ‘Erin.’ Are you sure you wouldn't like some green tea before you go?”

  “Quite sure. Take care.”

  He was at the door when she said, almost casually, “Oh, Henry? When I had my own out-of-body Tuesday evening, there were others with me in the awakened state.... Were you ever closely connected with—I know this sounds odd—a light that somehow shone more brightly than many suns?”

  He turned and stared at her.

  * * * *

  “This will take about twenty minutes,” DiBella said as Henry slid into the MRI machine. He'd had the procedure before and disliked it just as much then, the feeling of being enclosed in a tube not much larger than a coffin. Some people, he knew, couldn't tolerate it at all. But Henry'd be damned if he let a piece of machinery defeat him, and anyway the tube didn't enclose him completely; it was open at the bottom. So he pressed his lips together and closed his eyes and let the machine swallow his strapped-down body.

  “You okay in there, Dr. Erdmann?”

  “I'm fine.”

  “Good. Excellent. Just relax.”

  To his own surprise, he did. In the tube, everything seemed very remote. He actually dozed, waking twenty minutes later when the tube slid him out again.

  “Everything look normal?” he asked DiBella, and held his breath.

  “Completely,” DiBella said. “Thank you, that's a good baseline for my study. Your next one, you know, will come immediately after you view a ten-minute video. I've scheduled that for a week from today.”

  “Fine.” Normal. Then his brain was okay, and this weirdness was over. Relief turned him jaunty. “I'm glad to assist your project, doctor. What is its focus, again?”

  “Cerebral activation patterns in senior citizens. Did you realize, Dr. Erdmann, that the over-sixty-five demographic is the fastest-growing one in the world? And that globally there are now 140 million people over the age of eighty?”

  Henry hadn't realized, nor did he care. The St. Sebastian's aide came forward to help Henry to his feet. He was a dour young man whose name Henry hadn't caught. DiBella said, “Where's Carrie today?”

  “It's not her day with me.”

  “Ah.” DiBella didn't sound very interested; he was already prepping his screens for the next volunteer. Time on the MRI, he'd told Henry, was tight, having to be scheduled between hospital use.

  The dour young man—Darryl? Darrin? Dustin?—drove Henry back to St. Sebastian's and left him to make his own way upstairs. In his apartment, Henry lowered himself laboriously to the sofa. Just a few minutes’ nap, that's all he needed, even a short excursion tired him so much now—although it would be better if Carrie had been along, she always took such good care of him, such a kind and dear young woman. If he and Ida had ever had children, he'd have wanted them to be like Carrie. If that bastard Jim Peltier ever again tried to—

&
nbsp; It shot through him like a bolt of lightning.

  Henry screamed. This time the experience hurt, searing the inside of his skull and his spinal cord down to his tailbone. No dancing, no embroidering, no meditating—and yet others were there, not as individuals but as a collective sensation, a shared pain, making the pain worse by pooling it. He couldn't stand it, he was going to die, this was the end of—

  The pain was gone. It vanished as quickly as it came, leaving him bruised inside, throbbing as if his entire brain had undergone a root canal. His gorge rose, and just in time he twisted his aching body to the side and vomited over the side of the sofa onto the carpet.

  His fingers fumbled in the pocket of his trousers for the St. Sebastian's panic button that Carrie insisted he wear. He found it, pressed the center, and lost consciousness.

  * * * *

  FIVE

  Carrie went home early. Thursday afternoons were assigned to Mrs. Lopez, and her granddaughter had showed up unexpectedly. Carrie suspected that Vicky Lopez wanted money again, since that seemed to be the only time she did turn up at St. Sebastian's, but that was not Carrie's business. Mrs. Lopez said happily that Vicky could just as easily take her shopping instead of Carrie, and Vicky agreed, looking greedy. So Carrie went home.

  If she'd been fortunate enough to have a grandmother—to have any relatives besides her no-good step-brothers in California—she would treat that hypothetical grandmother better than did Vicky, she of the designer jeans and cashmere crew necks and massive credit-card debt. Although Carrie wouldn't want her grandmother to be like Mrs. Lopez, either, who treated Carrie like not-very-clean hired help.

  Well, she was hired help, of course. The job as a St. Sebastian's aide was the first thing she'd seen in the Classifieds the day she finally walked out on Jim. She grabbed the job blindly, like a person going over a cliff who sees a fragile branch growing from crumbly rock. The weird thing was that after the first day, she knew she was going to stay. She liked old people (most of them, anyway). They were interesting and grateful (most of them, anyway)—and safe. During that first terrified week at the YMCA, while she searched for a one-room apartment she could actually afford, St. Sebastian's was the one place she felt safe.

  Jim had changed that, of course. He'd found out the locations of her job and apartment. Cops could find anything.

  She unlocked her door after making sure the dingy corridor was empty, slipped inside, shot the deadbolt, and turned on the light. The only window faced an air shaft, and the room was dark even on the brightest day. Carrie had done what she could with bright cushions and Salvation Army lamps and dried flowers, but dark was dark.

  “Hello, Carrie,” Jim said.

  She whirled around, stifling a scream. But the sickening thing was the rest of her reaction. Unbidden and hated—God, how hated!—but still there was the sudden thrill, the flash of excitement that energized every part of her body. “That's not unusual,” her counselor at the Battered Women's Help Center had said, “because frequently an abuser and his victim are both fully engaged in the struggle to dominate each other. How triumphant do you feel when he's in the apology-and-wooing phase of the abuse cycle? Why do you think you haven't left before now?"

  It had taken Carrie so long to accept that. And here it was again. Here Jim was again.

  “How did you get in?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You got Kelsey to let you in, didn't you?” The building super could be bribed to almost anything with a bottle of Scotch. Although maybe Jim hadn't needed that; he had a badge. Not even the charges she'd brought against him, all of which had been dropped, had affected his job. Nobody on the outside ever realized how common domestic violence was in cops’ homes.

  Jim wasn't in uniform now. He wore jeans, boots, a sports coat she'd always liked. He held a bouquet of flowers. Not supermarket carnations, either: red roses in shining gold paper. “Carrie, I'm sorry I startled you, but I wanted so bad for us to talk. Please, just let me have ten minutes. That's all. Ten minutes isn't much to give me against three years of marriage.”

  “We're not married. We're legally separated.”

  “I know. I know. And I deserve that you left me. I know that now. But just ten minutes. Please.”

  “You're not supposed to be here at all! There's a restraining order against you—and you're a cop!”

  “I know. I'm risking my career to talk to you for ten minutes. Doesn't that say how much I care? Here, these are for you.”

  Humbly, eyes beseeching, he held out the roses. Carrie didn't take them.

  “You blackened my eye the last time we ‘talked,’ you bastard!”

  “I know. If you knew how much I've regretted that.... If you had any idea how many nights I laid awake hating myself for that. I was out of my mind, Carrie. I really was. But it taught me something. I've changed. I'm going to A.A. now, I've got a sponsor and everything. I'm working my program.”

  “I've heard this all before!”

  “I know. I know you have. But this time is different.” He lowered his eyes, and Carrie put her hands on her hips. Then it hit her: She had said all this before, too. She had stood in this scolding, one-up stance. He had stood in his humble stance, as well. This was the apology-and-wooing stage that the counselor had talked about, just one more scene in their endless script. And she was eating it up as if it had never happened before, was reveling in the glow of righteous indignation fed by his groveling. Just like the counselor had said.

  She was so sickened at herself that her knees nearly buckled.

  “Get out, Jim.”

  “I will. I will. Just tell me that you heard me, that there's some chance for us still, even if it's a chance I don't deserve. Oh, Carrie—”

  “Get out!” Her nauseated fury was at herself.

  “If you'd just—”

  “Out! Out now!”

  His face changed. Humility was replaced by astonishment—this wasn't how their script went—and then by rage. He threw the flowers at her. “You won't even listen to me? I come here goddamn apologizing and you won't even listen? What makes you so much better than me, you fucking bitch you're nothing but a—”

  Carrie whirled around and grabbed for the deadbolt. He was faster. Faster, stronger, and that was the old script, too, how could she forget for even a half second he—

  Jim threw her to the floor. Did he have his gun? Would he—she caught a glimpse of his face, so twisted with rage that he looked like somebody else, even as she was throwing up her arms to protect her head. He kicked her in the belly. The pain was astonishing. It burned along her body she was burning she couldn't breathe she was going to die.... His boot drew back to kick her again and Carrie tried to scream. No breath came. This was it then no no no—

  Jim crumpled to the floor.

  Between her sheltering arms, she caught sight of his face as he went down. Astonishment gaped open the mouth, widened the eyes. The image clapped onto her brain. His body fell heavily on top of hers, and didn't move.

  When she could breathe again, she crawled out from under him, whimpering with short guttural sounds: uh uh uh. Yet a part of her brain worked clearly, coldly. She felt for a pulse, held her fingers over his mouth to find a breath, put her ear to his chest. He was dead.

  She staggered to the phone and called 911.

  * * * *

  Cops. Carrie didn't know them; this wasn't Jim's precinct. First uniforms and then detectives. An ambulance. A forensic team. Photographs, fingerprints, a search of the one-room apartment, with her consent. You have the right to remain silent. She didn't remain silent, didn't need a lawyer, told what she knew as Jim's body was replaced by a chalked outline and neighbors gathered in the hall. And when it was finally, finally over and she was told that her apartment was a crime scene until the autopsy was performed and where could she go, she said, “St. Sebastian's. I work there.”

  “Maybe you should call in sick for this night's shift, ma'am, it's—”

  “I'm going to
St. Sebastian's!”

  She did, her hands shaky on the steering wheel. She went straight to Dr. Erdmann's door and knocked hard. His walker inche across the floor, inside. Inside, where it was safe.

  “Carrie! What on Earth—”

  “Can I come in? Please? The police—”

  “Police?” he said sharply. “What police?” Peering around her as if he expected to see blue uniforms filling the hall. “Where's your coat? It's fifty degrees out!”

  She had forgotten a coat. Nobody had mentioned a coat. Pack a bag, they said, but nobody had mentioned a coat. Dr. Erdmann always knew the temperature and barometer reading, he kept track of such things. Belatedly, and for the first time, she burst into tears.

  He drew her in, made her sit on the sofa. Carrie noticed, with the cold clear part of her mind that still seemed to be functioning, that there was a very wet spot on the carpet and a strong odor, as if someone had scrubbed with disinfectant. “Could I ... could I have a drink?” She hadn't known she was going to say that until the words were out. She seldom drank. Too much like Jim.

  Jim...

  The sherry steadied her. Sherry seemed so civilized, and so did the miniature glass he offered it in. She breathed easier, and told him her story. He listened without saying a word.

  “I think I'm a suspect,” Carrie said. “Well, of course I am. He just dropped dead when we were fighting ... but I never so much as laid a hand on him. I was just trying to protect my head and ... Dr. Erdmann, what is it? You're white as snow! I shouldn't have come, I'm sorry, I—”

  “Of course you should have come!” he snapped, so harshly that she was startled. A moment later he tried to smile. “Of course you should have come. What are friends for?”

  Friends. But she had other friends, younger friends. Joanne and Connie and Jennifer ... not that she had seen any of them much in the last three months. It had been Dr. Erdmann she'd thought of, first and immediately. And now he looked so...

  “You're not well,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. I ate something bad at lunch, in the dining room. Half the building started vomiting a few hours later. Evelyn Krenchnoted and Gina Martinelli and Erin Bass and Bob Donovan and Al Cosmano and Anna Chernov. More.”