by Gemma Files
Mom was studying me now, looking for places to press on while I was weak, to force her case and make it stick even after I’d recovered enough to rebuild my defences. But I wasn’t going to give her the chance.
Harrison leaned forward, probably unaware of any of this. “What I’d like you to consider, Lois—may I call you Lois?—is that if you’re in constant pain for a long enough period, your overall tolerance for stress and discomfort rises so high, any sense you might have had of what’s ‘normal’ gets reduced to what’s bearable. And by that point, you simply expect to hurt, so complaining about it feels inappropriate. Nobody should live like that, if they don’t want to.”
I laughed, wearily, bitterly. “Think that’s what I want, huh?”
“Of course not. But if you’re suffering yet you truly feel like you just can’t manage to put yourself out enough to do something about it, then there’s a bit of a problem, wouldn’t you say?” He sighed. “Listen, I’ve watched your mother sit vigil, off and on, for the last two days . . . her, your husband, and that friend of yours, the girl who brought you in. Going by that alone, there are people who love you, who want to see your quality of life improve—but that’s not going to happen unless you make it.”
I looked down, swallowing again. “Fact is, though, you don’t even really know what happened up in Quarry Argent. Do you?”
“No, we don’t. The episode shared some commonalities with seizures triggered by high fever, or heat-stroke.”
(The Regenmöhme, with her heat)
“And then I had another one, down here. How long did that last?”
“Less than two minutes—ninety seconds, at most. The first one went on for more than twenty, though you were only convulsing for the first five, and talking to your friend while doing it. After that you were in a trance, eyes open, unresponsive. The pattern with your second incident was very similar.”
“No idea what caused it, though, even after all these tests. Either of them.” He shook his head. “Okay, fine. Do I have to worry about it happening again?”
“If it was epileptic in nature, possibly. But there’s no way of knowing until we figure out the variables, the inciting factors.”
“Until I have another one, you mean.”
“. . . Basically, yes.”
“Excellent. Well, I’m not staying here any longer than I have to, so—what’s the out-care plan?”
Dr. Harrison glanced over at Mom, who raised her eyebrows fearsomely at him in return, perhaps attempting the international gesture of tell her she has to stay, tell her you’ll commit her, whatever it takes to make her do what we want her to. But he wasn’t dumb—none of us were—and seemed to know as well as I did that there was exactly zero point, nothing to be done in that regard. I was a legal adult with all the normal rights and privileges, perfectly free to check myself out, go home, and die on my own terms if I wanted to.
Not that I actually believed that was a possibility, then.
“Well, there’s no real migraine prevention medication, but since you’re depressed already, my instinct is to put you on a course of beta blockers known to act as anti-seizure medications and see what happens. However, I also think you need to taper off—do a sort of general system flush, preparatory to rebooting your regimen. So I’m suggesting you add Feverfew to your basic prescriptions, which may help, and I’d also recommend you continue using Melatonin as a sleep aid but commit yourself to having a full sleep clinic evaluation, sooner rather than later.”
“After this project I’m working on is done with, sure.”
“During that, if possible, which I don’t see why it wouldn’t be—just find some time, get it done, move on.” I shrugged. “And limit your exposure to seizure precursors: flickering lights, flashing patterns, TV, computers.”
“Oh wow, that’s only everything I work with. Should I wear sunglasses at night, too?”
“More often, certainly.”
“Kind of feel bound to point out, I had ’em on when this shit all happened.”
“Nonetheless.”
His frustratingly good poker face finally became enough to make me laugh again, this time for real. Tension thus dissipated, I took one more second before asking,
“Any side effects to the Feverfew, doc?”
“Well, it does tend to make you sleepy. But in your case that’s good, yes?”
An hour later, I was all processed and back up to speed, Mom pushing me down the hall toward the exit in the traditional wheelchair. “In case you’re wondering, I’m against this,” she informed me.
“Duly noted,” I replied. “Take it you probably tried to tell Clark what happened. How’d that go?”
“Not as well as I’d have liked.” She rolled the chair to a stop, right across from the sliding door onto Queen Street, and slid one arm under mine, helping me up. “He was . . . um, unresponsive, I guess. Lots of singing, lots of bouncing; zero real comprehension, so far as I could tell.” She sighed. “Probably better we didn’t try bringing him to see you, considering last time.”
“Yeah, good call,” I agreed. Remembering lying there with bandages all over my chest, watching Clark ricochet from one side of the room to the next—this tiny holding space they’d parked me in, just big enough to hold two beds separated by a curtain—while Simon chased after him, struggling to keep him away from the hall and safely out of the path of any passing medical personnel. Even in my woozy, post-anaesthetic state, it’d been obvious he didn’t get much of what was going on, but what he did get he didn’t like; he was bouncy and nuts, gamboling all over, and I found myself subconsciously cringing away from him, afraid he’d grab my wounds without meaning to. Bad sounds, bad smells, too much echo—all anathema for little autistic boys.
We were out on the street itself, turning east. “You’re very blithe about it,” Mom said.
I snorted. “Less ‘blithe’ than ‘resigned,’” I replied. “But seriously, Mom, c’mon . . . you know Clark, at least as well as I do. What did you think was going to happen?”
“I hoped—”
“Yeah, exactly, and that’s great—Simon and I do it too, every once in a while. Push him a little bit out of his comfort zone; gamble that maybe this time, things might turn out a little bit different. And sometimes it even pays off, believe it or not. . . .”
At the corner of Queen and Church, we stopped for the light. Mom turned to look at me, forcing me to do the same, and then simply stood there a minute, like she was thinking of what to do next. “What?” I asked, eventually.
“I can’t figure out what’s sadder,” she said. “That you think he’s genuinely incapable of caring about what happens to you, or that you won’t even try to make him care.”
“Who says I think that? I know he feels for me, enough that my pain hurts him; that’s why I keep it to myself, or try to. And as for him, he just . . .” I trailed off, stymied, before switching subjects: “Also, ‘make’ him? Like what, force him to perform some sort of—fucked-up parody of a socially acceptable emotional reaction to make myself feel better? He’s got Disney movie scripts for that and he’ll trip on them eventually, you give him enough time, but only so long as you don’t put him in a situation where he’s too over-stimulated to remember how they go.”
“And that’s good enough?”
“That’s what I’ve got. Sure, I could insist on him putting what he’s trying to say into a different language, but if I reject the echolalia completely, it just looks like I’m rejecting him.”
“All right, but you can at least give him an idea of what’s accept-able and what isn’t, try to keep him to some sort of behavioural standard. . . .”
“Yeah, and I do. And sometimes he goes along with it, at least halfway, but a lot of the time he doesn’t, and not because he won’t. Because he can’t.”
“You use that word a lot, Lois.”
“Like when it’s appropriate?”
“Yes. And even when it isn’t.”
The light had changed twice by now, but we were still standing there, me starting to waver a bit, light-headed from two days of forced bed-rest. So while what I really wanted was to yell at her—something along the lines of Jesus, can we not do this right in the middle of the sidewalk?—I didn’t. Instead, I took a calming breath and replied, “Listen, I get that you’re worried about me and that’s putting you on edge, which is why you’re trying to pick a fight, here—just like I get that telling you not to worry is . . . impractical, at best. But think back, okay? They don’t know what happened, let alone why, or if it’s even likely to happen again—”
“It happened twice. Twice is a pattern.”
“Once, then again,” I corrected her, “at, like, a third of the original intensity. That’s not a pattern, that’s an anomaly in two parts.”
That made her laugh, at last, not that she sounded super amused. “Oh, so now you know math, Little Miss Innumerate? And medicine. You’re an expert.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw the light change once more, debated just crossing rather than waiting—midday traffic was light; that car sitting at the corner had its blinkers on, wasn’t going anywhere—then decided Mom would just think I was trying to get away from her. So I stayed where I was. “Well, I do know there’s no point getting myself all knotted up over predicting the unpredictable, that’s for sure. Just like I know that no matter what happened, it had nothing to do with you telling me not to go up there in the first place.”
“How is this about me, now?”
“It’s not, I just . . . get the feeling maybe you think it is. Like you told me not to go ’cause something might happen, and I went anyway, and something did indeed happen, but the one didn’t make the other. You get that, right?”
Mom sighed once more. “I don’t know, Lois. I don’t know.”
“Me either. Neither of us do; no cure for that, though. We just have to keep going.” A beat. “I love you, by the way.”
A snort. “Oh, fine. Well . . . I love you too. Don’t ever think I don’t.”
“That much, I do know.”
As I glanced back at the parked car, sidelong, something tweaked at my memory. The vehicle itself was a dirt-streaked grey hatchback, driver barely visible—but as Mom drew me into a hug, close enough that I could feel most of the tension had left her, I relaxed just enough into to catch a clear glimpse of the hoodie-shaded face of the man behind the wheel.
“Whoa,” I heard myself say, out loud. “Is that—?”
—Chris Coulby?
My hand jerked up, sketching a truncated wave, but the driver—obviously having caught my move from the corner of his eye—seemed first to stiffen, then stepped on the gas. With barely enough time for its blinkers to click off, the car swerved, pulling a sharp turn south down Church, away from us. I stared after it, mouth open.
“What was that about?” Mom asked. “Somebody you know?”
“Yeah, I—” But here I broke off, no longer sure. A sudden wave of queasiness swept over me, strong enough I had to close my eyes and take a breath, abruptly no longer interested in anything but getting home. “I think I need to flag a cab.”
“Okay, sure—let me.” She waved one over, opened the back door and helped me in, then asked: “Want me to go with you?”
I shook my head. “Good from here, thanks. Just call me later, all right?”
“Absolutely.”
At home, Simon met me at the door, escorting me over to the couch, and went to put the kettle on. “Safie gave us your phone back,” he called, from the kitchen. “It’s charging right next to you if you want to check your mail, call anybody, find out what happened on The Walking Dead . . .”
“You know me so well.”
“Pretty well, yeah. Clark’ll be back in an hour, but don’t worry about that—just check your mail and go to bed, okay? You need sleep.”
Had two and a half days of that already, I thought, but didn’t say. Replying, instead, “Always.”
Though just staying where I sat was definitely tempting, given my complete lack of energy. I nevertheless decided to unplug and take the phone into our bedroom instead, where I could do a couple of things at once then get straight into bed afterwards. Opening my laptop, I signed on and clicked through—there was a message from Safie at the top, telling me how once I was safely on the medevac copter she’d gone back to Quarry Argent, making sure to grab everything we’d been promised at the museum before driving home, and that she’d already started to sort through the footage. After which I spent a few minutes deleting at will (spam of all types, much of it from media liaisons who thought I still needed to be kept informed about upcoming movie screenings), then moved on to Facebook, where I sat staring at the update box for a long moment, debating whether or not to tell anyone what’d happened, however obliquely. Could frame it as a migraine episode, I supposed, even make it sound mordantly funny in retrospect. But what if Jan Mattheuis saw it, and got worried? How would that affect the project, or my continued participation in it?
Social media’s a goddamn curse, I’d just began to muse, when I heard the IM tone. I clicked on the icon and watched a box open at the bottom of the screen: hope ur feeling better hospitals r never much fun. And underneath that, like I couldn’t possibly have guessed who it came from—
wrob.
“The fuckitty fuck,” I said, out loud.
“You okay?” Simon asked, from behind me. I jumped then half-turned to find him standing there, a mug of tea in either hand—one of which was obviously for me. I took it, shaking my head, explaining, “Just . . . some random message from Wrob Barney, that creepy asshole. Strength in my hour of trial, or some shit.”
He frowned. “How’d he even know where you were in the first place?”
“Exactly. You didn’t . . .”
But the IM tone interrupted again, just as Simon asked, “Didn’t what?” In the open box, fresh typing appeared, quick and relevant—almost as though Wrob could hear what we were saying—
vinegar house = sick nviroment f/sure
stay away from now on i was u
nobody gonna want t work w/u they think ur
unreliable
Simon and I exchanged a look, Simon’s mouth opening—and at that very moment, on the bed beside me, my phone rang. Simon tilted his head to read the ID. “NFA—Jan Mattheuis,” he said.
“Motherfucker,” I exclaimed, slamming the laptop’s lid shut.
Short story short, it was indeed Jan, and he knew everything.
“I don’t know what you’ve been told, but I’m fine, really,” I found myself saying for what felt like the tenth time that day. “The trip was everything we hoped, got a ton of research done, before and after. Granted, things turned a little crazy near the end, so it’s good we live in the twenty-first century; modern medicine’s an amazing thing. End of story.”
“I’m so glad. You do understand why I had to call, though—right, Lois?”
“Absolutely. You needed assurances my health wasn’t going to impact things negatively, and it’s not—got released today, clean bill of health, no complications. You want more details, I can give you my doctor’s number.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
Thank Christ. “Great,” I replied. “So—back on the horse.”
“When can I see what you gathered?”
“I’m seeing Safie tomorrow. We can probably get something presentable together for Thursday.”
“Make it Friday.”
“Perfect.” I hung up then blew out, shakily. “Jesus Christ, that was . . . did a fuckin’ memo go out? Seriously, who did you tell?”
“Nobody,” Simon maintained. “My parents, that’s it. I mean, maybe Lee might’ve told her friends—”
>
“Wrob Barney doesn’t know my mother’s friends, man.”
“Well, um . . . he could’ve gotten it from the Web, I guess. Like, the news.”
“What, ’cause I’m so famous? Please. Former Film Critic Lois Cairns Falls Down in Assfuck Nowhere, Ontario, a.k.a. slowest news day ever.” I shook my head. “Roger Ebert was the last name-brand movie reviewer, Simon. And he’s dead.”
“How’d Mattheuis know, then?”
I shrugged. “Wrob told him, I assume. Or Chris Coulby.”
“Why would Chris—”
“Because Wrob paid him to? I already saw him out on the street today, following me around. Mom was there, she’ll tell you . . . tell you she saw me see him, anyhow . . .” I stopped, sighing. “Okay, maybe don’t ask her; probably thinks that was just me being crazy, actually. Considering she also thinks I should still be in hospital.”
Simon shot me a concerned look. “Lo, you really do look wiped—just go to bed, okay? Like we said. It’ll all look different tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I said. Not necessarily agreeing.
Sleep was blessedly dreamless. I woke gradually, already feeling “better” just for being home, if not in much less physical discomfort. I had no idea what time it was, but it felt late; the apartment was dark, blinds drawn, and I could feel Simon all pressed up against me in that permanent dip in the mattress’s centre, a sort of second bed, sheets tangled and hot as an oven. My arm was already under his neck, slightly numb from the weight; I used it as a pivot to hug him closer and kissed down his sweaty face, forehead, nose, lips. “Hey,” I whispered. “You awake?”
“Am now.”
“Forgot to ask whether or not they gave you shit at work, when the long weekend got longer.”
“No, I said you were sick, and they were fine with it. They’re good people.” A beat. “Plus, it’s not quarter-end yet, so there’s that—something goes wrong with the system, they can afford to let it set a day. Best thing for it, sometimes.”
“Switch it off, wait thirty seconds, switch it back on?”