Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict

by Laurie Viera Rigler

  Wes’s hand patting my arm rouses me; his gray-blue eyes are gentle. Anna leans over her seat to wipe away my tears with something softer than the finest linen.

  “We’re almost there,” Paula says.

  I may be insane, I may be dead, I may have a transmigrated soul, but I shall be mistress of myself. I force a smile to prove it to my traveling companions, and their countenances show what appears to be relief.

  Paula’s car turns off the endless, inconceivably wide expanse of road onto a smaller, slower road, and then we are before an astonishingly tall and massive building with hundreds of windows.

  We come to a stop and disembark onto a vast coach-yard filled with stationary cars. “I feel better already,” says Paula, and points in the direction we are to walk.

  Suddenly I am seized with laughter, which simply bubbles out of me and shakes my frame until I am nearly bent over with it.

  Wes, Paula, and Anna’s countenances are anything but mirthful. “Oh, no,” says Anna, a fretful tone in her voice.

  “Are you all right?” Wes says.

  The laughter subsides into unladylike snorts and giggles, and finally I manage, “Oh, yes. Like Paula, I feel better already. Who would not feel better after racing a thousand cars to a destination where a thousand cars stand still? Who would not feel better after learning that everyone she knows has been dead for at least a hundred and fifty years?”

  I look around me at the field of cars, the building looming with its glittering windows. “If they are dead, then so must I be.”

  “Do you really feel dead?” says Anna, her eyes full of concern. “Because you’re not. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. I know it doesn’t feel that way right now, but it will. I promise you.”

  “I—” But I cannot finish the thought, for a pair of white butterflies are suddenly dancing in the air between Anna and me. And, as suddenly, they flutter away and are replaced by a lone orange-and-black-spotted butterfly, which promptly lands on my arm and appears to be looking up at me. I want to laugh with delight, but I dare not frighten it. I move my hand as if to touch it, but Wes gently stops my hand with his.

  “Its wings are too fragile to be touched.”

  I know those words—I remember this moment, this very moment. But how?

  And all at once the butterfly takes flight and the sun comes from behind a cloud and the tingling of my skin where the butterfly just stood and the glow of the sun on my face and the wisp of citron scent from Wes and the touch of his skin on mine are more vivid, more present, than any sensations I have ever known.

  And all at once I know that I am alive; indeed I am more alive than I have ever been before. Impossibly and undeniably alive. In this body which is not mine, with these people I do not know, in this far distant time, in this faraway place. Impossible, inexplicable, yet it is so. One moment I was riding Belle through the woods. The next moment I was here.

  I should be frightened. I should question my sanity. But I cannot.

  I smile. At Wes. At Paula. At Anna.

  Anna takes my arm and squeezes it affectionately. “I believe that each of us has the power to create heaven or hell, right here, right now.”

  Paula disengages Anna from my arm and steers me towards the building. “Anna, the last thing this girl needs is a steaming pile of your new-age crap.”

  I look round at Anna, whose cheeks are flaming, and say, “I believe I like your thought.”

  She glances at me, then glares at Paula’s back. “I happen to have read that in a book, Paula. A reputable book. Twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.”

  “Let’s get you inside,” Paula says to me, pointedly ignoring Anna.

  Anna is apparently undaunted. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  Paula rolls her eyes. “If she’s not spouting the received wisdom of some creepy guy channeling an ‘ascended master,’ then she’s showing off her MFA in theatre.”

  I give Anna an encouraging smile. “I happen to be quite fond of Shakespeare myself.”

  We reach the building, and Wes holds open an enormous door that is all glass—such a huge pane of glass I have not seen before—and I am whisked into a box of a room with doors which open and close of their own accord, but not as normal doors do; it is as if they disappear into the walls when they open.

  Paula presses one of the many numbered circles on the wall next to the strange doors, which are now closed, and the room gives a little shudder. A few moments pass, and the doors disappear into the wall again, and outside the room is a scene entirely different from the one which had previously been there.

  And in that moment I realize that the tiny room we are standing in has actually moved! We have actually ascended from the ground to an upper floor. Has the room literally flown upstairs? Laughter begins to bubble inside me, and I force myself to keep my countenance. How can the people around me maintain such solemn expressions when they stand inside such a conveyance? I can only assume that such wonders are daily occurrences in 2009.

  A quick walk down a checkered tile passageway, and Paula motions for us to seat ourselves in curiously shaped chairs which are orange and seem to be molded of some kind of hard substance. Paula speaks to an attendant who sits behind a windowed wall, then rejoins our party. A disheveled man of about thirty years, his complexion nearly as gray as the drab garments he wears, takes one of the chairs in the row in front of us and immediately twists round in his seat, fixing his bespectacled eyes upon me. “Are you here for the facts? Are you here for the facts? Here for the facts? Here for the facts? Are you here for the facts? Are you here for the facts?”

  He continues spewing this nonsense at me, getting more agitated with each repetition until the gray in his face turns pink, then red, and Paula is shouting at the woman behind the windowed wall to do something about him, and Wes is urging him, in gentle tones, to desist, and Anna grips my arm, her face in an attitude of fear, and the man continues to fix me with his gaze, the light winking off his black-framed spectacles.

  The light—yes, the light—another wonder. There are no candles anywhere, yet there is glowing light behind glass in the high ceiling, emanating from a lamp beside the bank of chairs, shining upon the woman behind the windowed wall.

  “Are you here for the facts? Here for the facts?”

  I stand up and gaze into the upturned face of the suffering man. “Indeed. I cannot imagine anyone more eager than I to know the facts.”

  Six

  The man halts in mid-rant, his mouth open, his eyes wide behind the spectacles. And slowly, the O of his mouth shapes itself into a broad grin. “God bless you,” he whispers. “God bless you.”

  “Miss Stone?” A lovely Chinese woman in a rose-pink bodice and matching trousers is speaking to me. Is my name supposed to be Miss Stone?

  I turn towards Anna, who is nodding her head at the Chinese woman and pointing at me.

  “Miss Stone, Dr. Menziger will see you now.” The Chinese woman’s English is perfect, though also not in the accent of my country.

  Wes rises from his seat and lightly touches my arm. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Paula fixes him with a baleful eye and takes my arm. “She needs help, you idiot.”

  An older man and a woman, he in a gray coat and trousers and a crisp white shirt, she in a relatively modest dress of dark blue that falls to her calves, make their way down the passageway in front of us. They are supporting between them a young man of no more than sixteen years, long black-brown hair falling into his face, the rest of it sticking up as if he were a child roused from slumber, his eyes half closed, stumbling between these two more capable-looking adults, their faces lined with anxious care for their charge, the young man saying, over and over, “I won’t do it again. I promise. I won’t do it again.”

  Wes sweeps his arm in a gesture that takes in the unfortunate threesome and the man who has seated himself in front of us. “You call thi
s help?”

  Paula ignores him. “Come on, Courtney.” She and I follow the Chinese woman through a door, down a checkered corridor, past white tables and chattering females, brown- and black- and white-skinned females, all uniformly clad in the same rose-pink trousers and short-sleeved bodices, and atop the tables are glowing boxes that remind me of the one in the room where I awoke but which appear to have lines of printed text on them instead of actors, and before I can make any sense of what I am seeing—as if there is sense to be made—I am inside a room without Paula and facing a large, lightly colored wooden table, behind which is a person rising out of a chair and offering a hand for me to shake.

  “Welcome, Courtney. I’m Dr. Menziger, Paula’s cousin. Call me Suzanne.”

  This sweet, feminine voice is most unexpected, for she has a bristly head of closely cropped, dark-blond hair, broad shoulders, and squarish white teeth smiling in a square face. The hand held out to me is blunt and square as well, with closely trimmed, squarish nails. Her one beauty, her eyes, are azure-blue and sparkle with diamonds, like the sun shimmering on the sea.

  Her eyes are those of an angel. I smile my approbation as I shake her hand, though it is an intimate gesture for one I have just met.

  I take one of two chairs which face her, and I find my attention seized by a most astonishing picture which sits in a frame atop a light-colored wooden cabinet behind Dr. Menziger. The rendering of a brown-haired woman with a confident smile is as lifelike as the picture in the calendar on the wall of the rooms in which I awakened. I have never seen any artist’s efforts create such likenesses; they are so true they could be mistaken for the original.

  Dr. Menziger’s voice recalls my attention from the picture. “Is there anything in particular that interests you about that photo?”

  “Photo . . . I have never seen anything so lifelike. It is as if she were in the room with us.”

  “That’s my partner, and I’m sure she would be pleased to hear that. She took the picture herself.”

  “Indeed.” I cannot begin to imagine why Dr. Menziger would choose to display a portrait of her business partner, let alone why a fellow physician would also be such an accomplished artist. And a lady. But they are both ladies. Lady physicians. What a novel idea.

  “Is something amusing you?” Dr. Menziger asks, her expression kind.

  “Not at all,” I say, hoping my face does not betray my thoughts. After all, why should women not be physicians? Is it not they who nurse the sick, who nurture babies, who attend to the unwell and unfortunate of the parish?

  “Tell me why your friends brought you to see me,” she says, folding her square hands before her and gazing at me, her blue eyes twinkling with the hint of a smile on her lips. “And please understand that whatever you say to me in this room is strictly confidential.”

  “All well and good, but will it land me in an asylum?”

  “Interesting choice of words, ‘asylum.’ ” She scribbles into a book of ruled paper with what appears to be a pen, though it has no quill. “We are not so antiquated as all that, though if you mean asylum in terms of a safe place, a sanctuary that keeps away harm, then yes, we offer asylum.”

  I think of the poor creature outside ranting about “the facts” and that young man practically carried through the corridor by, presumably, his parents, who paid no heed to his pleadings. “Pretty words, but I have no wish to be locked away.”

  “It would not be in my interest, or in yours, to keep you anywhere against your will. I’d like to help you.”

  “If that means draining me of offensive humors, as my mother’s favorite medical man likes to say, then I respectfully decline your offer.”

  “I am not so dogmatic about comedy as all that.”

  A hint of a smile plays about Dr. Menziger’s mouth. It takes me a moment to understand her witticism, and I laugh.

  She scribbles into her book. Odd; there is no inkpot anywhere to be seen, yet ink continues to issue from her pen.

  “So,” she says. “Why do you think your friends brought you here?”

  “They think I am Courtney—Stone, is it? But I am not.”

  Dr. Menziger says not a word, just gazes at me with her sparkling blue eyes and nods slightly.

  “I am Miss Mansfield. Jane is my Christian name. I neither look nor sound like this. When last I went to sleep I was in my own bed, on my father’s estate, in Somerset, and it was the year thirteen. 1813. Not”—and there it is, on her desk, a leather-bound book open to the frontispiece, a calendar topped by the numbers 2009. “It was not 2009. I am not ill, Dr. Menziger. I am simply lost.”

  She nods. “How does that make you feel?”

  “How would it make anyone feel? Confused. Frightened sometimes. Curious . . . how, for example, does that lamp on your table emit light without candles?”

  She nods kindly. “I understand you were treated last night for an injury to your head.” She indicates some papers on her desk. “Your thoughts and feelings could be simply the result of your concussion, and in that case will likely pass soon enough. Memory loss is another not uncommon result, usually temporary. And Paula did mention that you recently broke off an engagement, which would certainly contribute to your emotional state.”

  She poises her writing instrument atop her paper. “Do you have any history of mental illness? How about in your family?”

  What an impertinent question. As if any family would reveal such information. “Indeed not.”

  “Have you any thoughts of hurting yourself? Any suicidal thoughts?”

  “Of course not. Are you a magistrate as well?”

  “I would like to keep you here for a few days, give you some medication, observe your progress, although—”

  My stomach drops. “I am perfectly well, I assure you.”

  “There is an alternative, of course. . . .”

  “Yes, yes, whatever it is.”

  She reaches into a drawer and pulls out a thin, rectangular object which is flat and shiny silver on one side; its reverse side is topped by evenly spaced, elliptical bumps. “If you take this pill,” she says, jabbing a thumbnail into the flat side and extracting a pink oval from one of the bumps, “and faithfully take one every day, I will see you in a week and we’ll see how you’re doing.” She scribbles on two pieces of paper and hands both to me, then fills a cup from a white, rectangular object topped by a transparent tank full of water.

  She hands me the pill and the cup, which is made of paper. “I believe this will make you feel like yourself again. Isn’t that what you want?”

  I cannot argue with that point, and so I swallow the pill.

  “Have my receptionist make an appointment for you for next week, okay?” She stands up and offers me her hand again to shake. “And have one of your friends spend the night with you, just in case you need looking after. You should not be alone with a concussion anyway.”

  “I am much obliged to you,” I say, and slip out the door. As I make my way past the rose-pink-clad women to where I assume my escorts await me, I say a silent prayer of thanks for my escape. If this pill is anything like the physic that Mr. Jones peddles, then it will do no more than make me sleepy—and, fortunately, this one went down without the usual offensive flavor—or do nothing at all.

  As for making an appointment to see Dr. Menziger again, well, that is something I shall forget. She may have the eyes of an angel, but she was as crafty as an I-don’t-know-what in nearly turning me into an inmate of this place.

  As I near the bank of orange chairs—the ranting man is, thankfully, gone—Paula, Anna, and Wes rise to meet me. Paula reaches me first and snatches the papers from my hand.

  She examines them, mumbling something about stopping to “fill this right away”; Wes peers over her shoulder and groans.

  Anna takes me by the hand; Wes grabs the other paper away from Paula and addresses me. “It says here you’re not to stay alone; I’ll watch over you tonight.”

  “Give it a rest, Sir Galahad
,” Paula says. “Your kind of protection she doesn’t need.”

  “Then why did she have them call me from the emergency room, huh?”

  “She had a blow to the head, remember?”

  “Could you two stop fighting already?” Anna says. “It’s not exactly helpful.”

  “Fine,” says Paula, “but he’s not going home with her.”

  “Why don’t we ask Courtney what she wants,” Wes says.

  “Indeed,” I say, wondering why my tongue is so thick and unwieldy that I can barely form an intelligible word, “why don’t we ask Courtney, whosoever she may be.” How have we progressed from the room with the orange chairs to the sea of cars without my noting any of my surroundings until this moment?

  “Are you okay?” Paula says, gripping my arm tighter. “Help me, she’s starting to fall . . . fall . . . fall.” Paula’s words echo in a most diverting manner. Even more amusing is the fact that I am now looking up at the faces of Paula, Anna, and Wes, who are looking down at me. Pink and blue strands of hair dangle towards me, like thick strands of yarn. Their gay colors are so unlike the stern expression on Paula’s face. My giggles echo.

  “Don’t just stand there. Help me get her off the ground . . . ground . . . ground. . . .”

  Leaning against side-glass in car. Blur of clouds, buildings, machines, trees. Wes’s shoulder serves as my pillow; his arm round my shoulder; what a forward little baggage I am. She is. Not my body. Not my conduct. Silly goose. I should sit up. Anna’s white face frowning. So very tired. Paula’s eyes in the mirror. Need water. Sleep first.

  Somehow back in the bedchamber; Paula and Anna tugging silky garment over my head, trousers to match. What happened to other clothes? Wes not in the room, thankfully. What am I thinking? “Water . . .” My voice is a croak. Throat terribly dry.

  Paula holds a glass to my lips. Oh blessed water so parched so parched I can barely swallow. Oh dear it has wet the front of this garment oh why am I so awkward as if I have drunk a bottle of Constantia wine, except that the wine gladdened my heart before it sent me to my slumbers but this is dull, dull, everything is so dull. I am gray inside. Gray. My heart is gray my throat is dry gray dust there are ashes in my mouth so thirsty I cannot swallow cannot stay awake but cannot sleep I do not want to fall into this gray abyss I will not I will not oh how heavy my eyes are and behind them only gray. . . .