“WILL I DIE?”
Dr. Johnstone watched her from the other side of the desk and offered no response. The diplomas and awards that hung on the wall behind him had Dr. Anderson’s name on them, but if not for that, it could have been any psychiatrist’s office. Her mother had reluctantly allowed her to meet with him again, and Maria had been able, with a last-minute phone call, to stop him from returning to Iowa. He looked like a different man. His face was clean-shaven, his shirt wrinkle-free, and his hair freshly trimmed. She almost didn’t recognize him.
“Will I die?” she asked again. “When you send me back home with the hypnosis, will my parents have to bury me?”
“Yes,” he finally replied. “They will.”
“And what will you tell people about the dead girl on the couch? How will you defend yourself after two hypnosis deaths?”
“The coroner will do an autopsy and find a bleed in your brain. And then I’ll write a research paper on it. How schizophrenics with prospective hallucinations have a propensity for brain aneurysms.”
“Is that what happened to the other person you sent home? A brain aneurysm?” He nodded in response. “And you think that will happen to me, too?”
“I think so.”
It seemed like such an important question, something they would have discussed before now. Leaving loved ones to deal with the aftermath certainly raised the stakes, but she couldn’t fault Dr. Johnstone for it entirely. There must have been some part of her that already knew the answer.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
“I just assumed you’d figured it out. I thought you knew that your death here would be your ticket home.”
“So I could die in a car crash and I’d go back home?”
“Or a suicide,” he replied, nodding toward her wrist. “But why would you want to do that when I can send you home so peacefully?”
Death didn’t scare her anymore. It was strange, walking through life without the fear of death, perhaps even welcoming it. It didn’t matter to her how she died, whether it was painful or peaceful or violent. Leaving behind her parents was what haunted her now. If she had to lose her own daughter, how would she want her to go? A car accident? Suicide? Hypnosis?
“What about the other repeaters?” she said. “The ones who died before they came back? Did you ever try to send them back with hypnosis?”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Not yet, anyway. But I’m working on it. And not all of us are meant to go home. Think about some of the repeaters throughout history who have gone on to accomplish extraordinary feats with the gifts they were given. Mozart, Picasso, Bobby Fischer.”
“Then what makes me so special?” she said. “Why are you so interested in sending me back, if I’ll just die here and you’ll never see me again?”
“Because I will see you again. You’ll find me when you go back and convince whatever version of me exists that you were here and that I was the one to send you back. And we’ll start to build a network. People from different lives, all working toward the same goals.”
“How do you know I’ll do that?”
“Of course you will, Maria. Think about the implications of this. Imagine being able to send people back and forth to different lives they’ve already lived, with all the knowledge they’ve learned along the way. Look at Bobby Fischer. We call him a child prodigy because by fourteen years of age he became the youngest U.S. chess champion, and by fifteen years of age was the youngest international grandmaster in history. But what if he came back with that knowledge? What if seventy years of chess experience and world-class competition followed him back from death and took root in a ten-year-old kid from a broken home in Chicago, who then went on to become a legend?” The flurry of Dr. Johnstone’s excitement was ricocheting off the walls of the office, bringing life to the stale air around them. “And Mozart,” he continued. “He started composing music when he was five and wrote his first symphony when he was just eight years old. Can you imagine?”
“But what makes you so sure they were repeaters? They could have just been really talented kids.”
“That’s an excellent point, Maria. And you’re right. I can’t be sure they were repeaters, since they both had formal training before they became masters at such young ages. But think about the savants. The people with absolutely no training who wake up one morning able to speak a new language, or crack cyber codes, or solve complex algebraic equations. The arts are one thing. Chess and music are beautiful pursuits, of course. But think about all the other ways this could be used.”
George was right. She was a scientist. She was fascinated by the implications of time travel, but she was equally leery of it. She’d seen firsthand the cost of it and wouldn’t wish it on anyone. There was a method to the universe. There were rules. And even though Maria was trying to skirt them, she knew there would be consequences. Dr. Johnstone wasn’t just skirting the rules, though. He was trying to rewrite the rule book.
“You can’t play God,” she said. “That’s not how this works.”
“Sometimes that is how it works. You should know that better than anyone, Maria.” The air stilled as time seemed to pause between them, two doctors arguing about the line between God and science. It was a line that had never before existed for her. There was never a God, or an alternate universe, or a realm of existence that defied knowledge. There was just science. Facts that could be proven and disproven by experimentation. Theories that existed because of research that could be replicated. Illnesses that could be cured with laboratory-produced medicines. “You called me today to ask me to play God,” he said. “Didn’t you?”
“I’m not asking you to play God. I’m asking you to send me back to my family because I’m not dead. It’s different.”
“But didn’t God send you here for a purpose? Aren’t we playing God by sending you back?”
“I don’t even believe in God,” she said, flustered by his questions and frustrated with herself for not having the right answers. She was once the kind of person who had an answer for everything, but lately she’d been finding herself confused and inarticulate. It was so foreign to her. “I don’t know how I got here.”
“Something sent you here,” Dr. Johnstone replied. “God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, the universe, the wind. Call it whatever you want, but there’s a reason you’re here, and by asking me to send you back, you’re just as complicit as I am.”
“Maybe I am,” she sighed. “But I’m just one insignificant person trying to go back to her family. What you’re talking about doing is entirely different. It’s the kind of stuff that starts wars.”
“It’s also the kind of stuff that prevents wars,” he said. “It’s all in the way you choose to see it.”
She supposed he was right. Who was she to point out the dangers implicit in taking advantage of a loophole the universe had missed, when she was first in line to use it? And who would she be when she got home? How would this place have changed her? She wanted to believe she’d be a better wife and mother, the kind who spent lunch hours with her husband and cooked healthy breakfasts for her children. A better doctor to her patients. The kind who listened to their stories and didn’t throw diagnoses and labels and drugs at them. But, underneath it all, who would she really be? A wife whose guilt would never allow her to share the awful secret of this journey with her husband. A mother whose anguish would never allow her to look at her own children without seeing the bruises on the little girl she had helped to bury.
“I have a few good-bye letters to write before I can go,” Maria said, before standing and making her way toward the door. Her parents deserved something from her, some kind of explanation or apology, but she doubted there were any words in the English language that could come close to doing the job she needed them to do. And George deserved something, too, some kind of excuse for her weakness and gratitude for his strength. He’d be disappointed in her; they’d all be. “I’ll be ready tomorrow, if that works for you,” she said, and Dr. Johnstone leaned back into the chair and nodded in her direction.
“Tomorrow it is,” he said, his lips hinting at a smile. He’d gotten what he wanted, he and Maria both, and while she was confident that shame would accompany her throughout her life for the decision she was making, she was also confident that returning to her family would make it all worth it.