After she'd childishly run out of Professor Sampson's class earlier that morning, the professor had been nice enough to allow Kallie back into his classroom to take the history exam. Now, a couple of hours later, she stood outside his office, her hand poised pre-knock over the doorframe. The door was slightly ajar. Though she couldn't see the professor from where she stood, she could hear papers shuffling and the stilted creakiness of a weighted office chair.
Though she really didn't have anything more to add to the apology she'd already given and risked further embarrassment, she felt she owed him an additional explanation for her earlier behavior. Of course, she really didn't have a viable excuse for her actions, at least not one she could accurately articulate. How could she explain having been spooked by an eerie déjà vu sensation at the exact moment of her first interaction with Seth Winters? And besides, the professor was probably too busy to hear lame explanations anyway, particularly any involving her possible mental breakdown and nonexistent love life. She dropped her hand down by her side and started to turn away.
“My door is always open, as you can see,” the professor called from inside his office. “You've come this far, you may as well trek the last mile.”
She pushed the door forward and walked into his office. Her nose was immediately appeased by a pleasant flowery odor immersed in the air, which amazingly put her at ease. The professor was partially hidden behind a huge desk populated by several plants and neat mountains of books and stacks of papers.
“Ah, Ms. Hunt,” he said when she'd stepped beyond the cover of the door, his head peeking over a virtual miniature forest. “I'm afraid I hadn't enough time to grade the exams.”
“It's not that,” she said. Her voice was soft and hesitant. “I just wanted to explain about earlier.”
He parted the blend of academia and foliage on his desktop down the middle and indicated the chair in front of his desk. “An explanation is unnecessary; but please, come have a seat.” He was wearing a pair of telephone headphones.
Kallie sat down in the offered chair. She opened her mouth to start the explanation she'd yet to completely flesh out in her mind, but was stopped by the professor's raised hand. “Just one moment please,” he said. He turned to his right and began tapping on a laptop that was atop a side extension of his desk. On the extension to the professor's left side were a small, neat stack of papers and a cup of pens and pencils. Kallie smiled inwardly. Sitting behind his u-shaped, greenery-topped wood desk, wearing headphones, and tapping away on his laptop, the professor looked like a jolly little spaceship operator.
After a few moments, he faced her again. “Sorry about that. But if I didn't complete my train of thought that letter wouldn't have gotten finished anytime soon. Now, you were about to say…”
During the brief respite, she'd decided to start with another apology. “I want to apologize again for running out of your class this morning.”
The professor smiled warmly. “As I'd told you before, there's no need to apologize.” He paused and shifted awkwardly in his seat. He looked off to the side for a moment as if struggling to recall the first few words of a previously rehearsed speech. When he faced her again, he spoke deliberately. “My mother is ninety years old and my dad is ninety-three. I'm fifty-three years old and I can't begin to imagine what it's like to lose a parent, let alone, to lose one at your age. I can only offer my heartfelt sympathy.”
“You know about my mother?” Kallie asked.
“I remembered she died from cancer. You were in my class last year when you dropped out of school to go home to care for her. After class this morning, I took the liberty of looking up the date she died and I know that tomorrow will mark a year since her death. It's understandable what you're going through.” He paused again, treading lightly. “We do have grief counselors on campus. Maybe you should talk to someone.”
Kallie nodded noncommittally although she was pleasantly surprised at the fact that he remembered she'd lost her mother and seemed genuinely concerned. For a period of five seconds, she weighed it as a benefit of attending a small private college versus a large public university. The professors evidently took the time to know their students. “Thank you, professor. But…”
He leaned forward in his chair. “That wasn't what was bothering you? Forgive me for being presumptuous.”
“No, it's not that. I mean, I don't consider you presumptuous. I appreciate your caring. It's just…” she hesitated, unsure of what she was trying, wanted, or even was willing to say.
Despite the unplanned student-teacher conference, Sampson regarded her with kind, patient eyes. “What's the matter?”
It took her another full minute, but then the words began to flow easily. With tears streaming down her face, she told him about the déjà vu sensations she'd experienced during the past few weeks and how she'd thought until the pencil-dropping incident this morning that they'd ended. She'd like to think it all was just related to grief, but she honestly believed she'd handled her mother's death well. She missed her mom, but she'd arrived at a tacit appreciation of the perils of living. Death, sickness, and heartbreak, among other things, always loitered nearby, and eventually each would have its say and day with everybody who walks the earth, and the appointments wouldn't necessarily be time oriented. No particular age group had a monopoly on bad stuff happening. If you had a fluid understanding of that, then you could enjoy and appreciate the other moments of your life when the perils were kept at bay. “No,” she reiterated, “my sensations aren't related to grief.” She paused again, this time making it the terminus point. She didn't know what else to say. She was only certain that the sensations weren't related to grief. But just what exactly they were related to was a frightening mystery to her.
When it became obvious that she wasn't going to say anything more, Professor Sampson leaned back in his chair and looked off to the side. His face was contemplative. She stared at him, wishing she could read his thoughts. He'd been kind and patient with her up to this point. Maybe it was in his job description to do so or maybe it was part of his natural personality. Maybe one or both of those things were true or perhaps neither was. In any event, this wasn't his problem. It was hers. She didn't want to impose on his kindness whether it'd been initiated by his employer or his own human nature. His ‘what's the matter' was likely a recalibrated ‘how are you doing,’ where no one wanted to hear a list of grievances. A simple ‘doing well,’ whether true or not, was the expected and desired response. After a few moments, those concerns shuffled back into her mind's recess when he asked, “What kind of cancer did your mother have?”
Kallie closed her eyes for a quick moment. “Brain cancer.”
“I see. And you feel your déjà vu sensations are somehow related to the disease?”
“Well, couldn't they be?” Kallie asked.
“It's possible, I guess,” Professor Sampson said. “Of course, I'm not a doctor. However, I do know that cancer is not necessarily hereditable. Yes, you may be at a higher risk than others. But it's not a given that you'll develop cancer because your mother had it.”
“I know. I guess I should see a doctor about the déjà vu. But…” She dropped her head and didn't finish her sentence. It made perfect, logical sense to visit a doctor. But the perils of living didn't prescribe logical sense.
“Kallie,” Professor Sampson said.
She looked up.
“I have a colleague of mine who is a specialist in the area of human memory. In fact, I believe she's currently doing a study on déjà vu. I recall her saying that the sensation is most likely related to some kind of memory failure.”
“So you don't think my sensations are related to cancer?”
“Right now, I'm afraid I can't say one way or the other. But from what I understand, déjà vu is sometimes related to failed recollections of things you've experienced in the past. Of course, I'm not the expert. Why don't you go see my colleague? If this is not something related to her area, then you're only out one day on your trek to your doctor. But you'll be up one fascinating individual. Her name is Dr. Karen Frost.”
* * *
Professor Frost's lab and office were located on the bottom floor of the science building. Frost headed the Department of Psychology's Neuroscience Program. According to Sampson, Frost was a contrarian who'd requested to be in the science building because a lot of scientists continually made snide remarks about psychology being akin to junk medicine whose theories couldn't stand the rigors of scientific testing.
Kallie stood at the door to the lab and read the small sign that hung over it.
Psychology is not descriptive science, it's simply psychology
She had no idea what it meant, but she assumed it was probably a missive intended for the scientists in the building.
The lab looked like the campus' other classrooms, except that desks were replaced by rows of tables fronted by caster-fitted chairs. Atop the tables were computers with seventeen-inch monitors connected by thick black cables to space-age looking goggles. A lone man sat at one of the tables. He was wearing a set of the goggles and typing on a keyboard. Kallie walked over to him and looked over his shoulder.
Obviously feeling her presence, he held up one finger. “Just a sec.” Staring intently at the computer screen, he moved his head from side to side and up and down. As he did so, the onscreen camera zoomed about the room. It was virtual reality. It looked like the living room of a house. There was a computerized image of a couch and loveseat. He rolled the mouse on the keypad, moving from the living room, down a hall, and eventually into a kitchen. He paused on an image of a refrigerator. He tapped the keyboard, morphing the virtual house into a virtual forest. Again, he moved his head around and rolled the mouse. His virtual-self was obviously exploring the area. Computerized images of trees and overgrown plants showed onscreen. After a few moments, he paused again, this time in front of a tree. Then he clicked a couple of keystrokes, returning to the kitchen. A few moments later, he removed the goggles and swung around, facing Kallie. “How can I help you?”
Kallie had been transfixed by the onscreen images and it took her several seconds to reorient. After a quick shake of her head, she said, “I'm looking for Professor Frost.”
“She left about an hour ago,” the man said.
“Is she gone for the rest of the day?”
“Ordinarily,” he said. He nodded at a cell phone on a neighboring tabletop. “She'll be back, but I'm afraid she's not going to be in a good mood. She's very time-conscious. She probably hadn't factored into her schedule having to come back here to retrieve that.”
Kallie shrugged her shoulders. “Mind if I wait for her?”
“Suit yourself.” He turned back to the monitor, putting the goggles back on.
“Are you playing a game?” Kallie asked, looking at the computer screen.
“No, this is part of our research. We use this to help recreate déjà vu sensations in our test subjects. The onscreen images are replicates of real life images, of real life places. When you put on these goggles, you're immersed into another time and place. We expose our test subjects to the scenes on the computer screen, and afterwards, we'll hypnotize them, making them forget that they'd ever seen the scenes. Later, we'll take them to a real world recreation of a particular scene. Using this technique, we've found that we've been able to recreate déjà vu-like sensations in many of the subjects.”
“Why would you want to create déjà vu?” Kallie asked.
“So that we can study the sensation. Since it's so fleeting when it occurs naturally, we haven't been able to interview someone who's right in the middle of one or even right at the end of one. When we do talk to them, they can remember very little about the sensation, mostly only about how weird they'd felt during it.” He took off the goggles and lifted them up to her. “Want to try?”
She took the goggles and sat down at the computer. She looked at the goggles for a moment before slowly putting them on. They fit like the ones she used for swimming.
“Looking around works the same way in virtual reality as it does in reality. You simply move your head. But to walk or move around, you need to use the mouse,” he told her.
She nodded her head and instantly saw what he meant. The effect was negligible, no different from if she'd nodded her head in real life. Nothing in the room itself moved. But moving her head enabled her to look around the room. Before, when she'd stood over him, the images in the room had looked computerized, appearing to grow larger and smaller as he moved his head. But with the goggles on, everything took on a realistic quality. She was in an actual house! Still in the kitchen and standing by the refrigerator, she continued looking around. There was a stove, above which was a microwave oven. The countertops were granite and there was a butcher's table in the middle of the room. Weirdly, it was a kitchen not too dissimilar from one she'd often fantasized about having in her own home one day. Anxious to see more of the house, she rolled the mouse, moving her virtual-self out of the kitchen and over to a set of stairs.
The first room she entered upstairs was a nursery. The room was done in lovely shades of blue. A crib with a light blue quilt hanging over its railing was catty-cornered against the back walls. Next to it was a rocking chair with an oversized stuffed teddy bear sporting a huge welcoming grin sitting in it. Kallie moved to the center of the room, standing there for a few moments. In an odd way, she felt as if she was peeking into a version of her future. Closing her eyes, she could almost picture her future husband. She couldn't make out any of his facial features, but she sensed love for her in his heart. She smiled as she imagined him putting the crib together in anticipation of their first born. After another moment, she slowly inhaled and reopened her eyes, looking around the room nostalgically, although it wasn't decorated exactly the way she'd have done it. Instead of blue, she'd probably paint the walls in pastel pinks if they were having a girl or deep reds if they were having a boy. She'd hang red-framed pictures of smiling and happy animals on the walls. I'm being silly, she thought; marriage and family are years away, if ever. She'd first have to find a man. She moved the mouse again, walking her virtual-self out of the room.
The next room was the master suite. A king-sized four-poster bed stood boldly in the center of the room. As her virtual-self approached it, her real-self, for whatever reason, felt anger start to boil within. Totally immersed in the virtual room, she looked off to the side of the bed and saw his and hers walk-in closets. She turned her head to the other side and saw a dresser that was almost as long as the wall itself. She spotted a framed picture atop the dresser. From where she was standing, she could tell it was a picture of a family—a husband, wife, and three children. But she couldn't make out any of their faces. Moving the mouse, she walked over to it and picked it up. Her real-self was holding her hands up to her face. In the picture, all the members of the family remained faceless, except that of the man. She stared long and hard at his face. It was the face of her father. Her real-self squeezed her fists together as her virtual-self squeezed the framed picture, breaking the glass before slamming the frame down on the dresser top. Meanwhile, her real-self pounded the desktop, rattling the mouse, almost knocking it to the floor. Angrily, she removed the goggles, violently shifting herself back to the present.
The man gingerly took the goggles from her trembling grasp. His voice was strained. “What's wrong? What happened?”
Before she could answer, a tense female voice called out from the doorway of the lab. “What in the dickens is going on in here?”