AWAKE IS SO close. Just out of reach.
I fight hard to get to it, really I do. Can almost see the light, almost make out the words being spoken around me, but it all keeps slipping away …
At some point there’s a loud rattling in my head like out-of-control castanets. When I bite the side of my cheek and taste blood, I realize it’s my own teeth chattering, slamming into each other again and again with fever-filled abandon.
My whole body is quaking, shivering uncontrollably, and everything—my muscles, my skin, my head—feels raw.
Sometime later … or maybe no time later, I smell something sour. Feel a burning in my throat and nose. Vomit, I think. Then more voices. More hands undressing me, pulling off my soiled gray nightgown.
Someone is wiping me down with a scratchy washcloth, short, rough strokes that graze my goose bumps.
Cold air bleeds over my damp, fevered skin.
Someone cover me. Please.
My eyes refuse to speak to each other. Each has a mind of its own and I put all I’ve got into harnessing them together like a good pair of plow horses. The first thing that registers is Nurse Wallace’s pasty face, inches from mine, looking into my wandering eyes, feeling my forehead. “She’s coming around. You can get her up.”
Nurses lift me out of the bed and float me past the rows of sleeping women to another room, where they lower me onto something cold. A toilet. Cajole me to do my business. “Come on, sweetie, we don’t want to have to catheterize you…”
The next thing I know someone’s saying, “Good girl,” and the nurses are gathering me up off the porcelain, bringing me back to my bed in the slumber room and tucking me in.
Kyung said you have a purpose in 1954—locate the doctor!
You need to find a way out of the Unit!
But there is no Kyung, no purpose. Just the golden syringe, the prick of the needle, and the familiar black nothing. On and on it goes like that … rinse and repeat … time stretching like taffy between my moments of awake—
Till I feel them, the ghost bees buzzing in my feet.
“What’s wrong, why won’t she wake up? Is she fragging again?”
“No. See these needle tracks on her arm. They’re sedating her.”
“Jesus.”
“Probably better this way. We can pull the disc while she’s out and harmless. Just let me get a quick scan first.”
“Make it fast, Kyung. We don’t know how much time we have.”
“Never enough time,” I say, lift my heavy lids—and see I’m in a forest. Not a real forest, must be one of my imaginary ones. The ground is damp. Can feel slippery leaves under my fingertips. Ethan and Kyung are kneeling, hunched over my right hand. Next to Ethan I see something that looks like a black lunch box.
Above us are a trillion stars. And the tops of fir trees, swaying slowly in the moonlight, murmuring like they do when the wind weaves through them just right. “I miss the outside,” I say to my figments, before letting my eyelids slip back down where they should be—shutting out this delusion.
But then I smell rubbing alcohol and my eyes snap back open, searching for its source. A cotton ball. Ethan’s wiping down my wrist while Kyung points her little wand at it.
“Hurry it up, Kyung, she’s starting to wake up,” Ethan says.
“Just a couple more seconds,” Kyung says, then there’s a beep. “Got it.”
Ethan looks down at me, says, “You’re going to need to hold very still, Bix.”
“Not Bix … Keep telling you I’m … Never mind, the protocol will take care of all this,” I say.
Then I spot the knife in Kyung’s hand.
I try to get away from my armed figments, but my muscles are too full of Wallace’s golden liquid to move, and Ethan pins my arms while Kyung brings the blade closer. “Sorry for the grabble ’n’ snag, Bix,” she says, “but there’s no time for niceties. It needs to come out now.”
“What?”
“Your disc. We need to cut it out,” Ethan says, “sever the connection before whoever it is in ’54 who’s got your link triggers it again and you jump back there.”
The woman on the bus … the real Dorothy … she’s the one with my link … but she doesn’t really exist. None of this exists …
Kyung puts the cold blade to my skin. “We don’t want you stranded there if the Tabula Rasa—”
“Tabula Rasa?” I ask.
“It’s a cult,” Ethan says, “and they … well—”
“We’ll explain everything once the disc is out, Bix,” Kyung says, cutting him off as she presses her cold knife to my skin.
“It was never going to be easy for you to reach the doctor, get their help,” Ethan says. “Now it’s virtually impossible—”
“But the doctor is helping…” I say.
Kyung pulls back her knife. “Wait. You two have spoken?”
I nod. “Dr. Sherman’s helping me get rid of you … this fake future … the voice in my head … All of it. That’s why I agreed to come down here to his pit…”
“Dr. Sherman?” Kyung asks, and grabs my wrist, looks at my ID band. “Ethan, this says she’s now a patient in the Unit! We can’t pull her, not when she’s so close—”
But the rest of her words are lost in the white roar as it hauls me away from my figments.
And drops me back in my bed. I look at the scar on my wrist, where Kyung almost cut me open in my fictional future forest.
It wasn’t a delusion. They said the doctor with the viral sample is close. That means he’s in the hospital. Maybe he’s the one with the coal-dark eyes you saw in the Unit hallway. You need to find a way to get to him.
Don’t you dare go to sleep!
But I ignore the voice, let the deep breaths of the sleeping women pull me back down with them.
I rub my aching jaw with the palms of my hands, then lay them back down on my chair’s big wooden armrests and return to gazing at the painting of the wintry barn in front of me … Snowflakes falling in thick white swirls—
I’m awake.
How long was I not awake?
How long have I been sitting here like this, watching the shitty swirls of snow? I try to remember how I came to be in this chair. The time before this moment.
But there’s just a big, blank nothing before this moment.
The lamp above me flickers and there’s a buzzzz coming from below. Something, maybe a mouse, has chewed a hole in the lamp’s ancient cloth cord near my feet. Can see some of its silvery live wires peeking out like whiskers.
I’m not alone. There are three of us tucked under gray blankets, gathered around the bright and shitty snow painting, like moths by a porch light.
I remember the moth to my right—the woman with the pointy glasses I defended in the dining hall against Norma. Glasses looks up from her newspaper at me, eyes huge behind those lenses. She seems a helluva lot more with-it than she was in the dining hall that night I saved her from Norma.
Or was Glasses always with-it, but the voice warped my perception of her?
I wait for some menacing retort from the voice, but there is none, and in the blessed silence I turn to get a better look at the moth to the right of Glasses. She’s asleep, head lolled to the side, face covered by a chunk of gray hair no one’s bothered to tuck out of the way.
A couple nurses guide a dazed patient to a seat near me. It’s Betsy, the squirrelly girl from the transport bus, the one so convinced her brother had inserted a transmitter into her head. I wouldn’t want whatever treatment they’re giving Betsy. Her hands are balled up in tight little fists that tremble in her lap like scared kittens.
And her speech—something’s drained all the chirpiness out of it, left her syllables all stretched out and flattened, words all slurred. It’s a horror show: “Whyyy wooon somonnne geddih transmehhhtterrr outtah my hehhhd?” she shouts at the nurses, who ignore her paranoid transmitter accusations.
After the nurses leave, Glasses nods to the now-sleeping Betsy. “Betsy’s treatment doesn’t seem to be agreeing with her.” No shit. “It happens with some patients. Their emotions become too big to control.”
Unlike Betsy, Glasses’s speech is clear and calm, with just the slightest modulation to it. Like a metronome … the kind that sat on a piano so you could keep a steady beat … Whoa, my mind drifted off there for a moment. Might need a little more rest.
I’m about to close my eyes when I see my wedding ring. Someone’s placed it on my finger.
I pull it off and toss it. Hear the satisfying clink followed by the sound of it rolling and settling somewhere in the shadows beyond our circle. “I’ll decide when I’m ready to wear it, not them,” I say to Glasses.
“I know, silly. You’ve told me. Three times.”
“No. That’s not possible.”
“Don’t worry. Lots of things get forgotten in the Unit,” she says, holding out her hand. “Alice Wechsler, pleased to meet you. Again.”
“Dorothy Frasier,” I say, shaking her hand as I trot out my newly embraced name like I’ve known it forever. “How long have I been here?”
“Since the last meal.”
“No, I mean how long have I been here, in the Unit? What’s today’s date?”
“Oh, I really shouldn’t say.” Then she leans over and whispers, “But I do happen to know. They’re easing me back into things, now that I’m doing so well in my recovery. Like reading the paper.” Alice holds the newspaper up, practically bursting with gratitude and pride. “Don’t tell anyone I told you, but it’s November twenty-ninth.”
“Bullshit!”
“Language!” Alice shakes her head and tsks. “The doctor’s certainly got his work cut out with you.”
“They brought me down here the eighteenth. That can’t have been more than a day ago, two tops.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Wallace giving me a shot.”
“Oh, you’ve had scads of those. Look at your arms.”
I pull up my gray sleeve and see an upper arm littered with bruises and needle marks. “Christ.”
“Dr. Sherman explained the protocol to me during our talk sessions. It calls for at least a week of continuous sedation and sensory deprivation in the narcosis room to disorient the patient. No daylight or clocks, nothing to hold you to where—or when—you are. You’re woken just long enough to eat and use the bathroom.”
Murky memories of vomit, sponge baths, and cold porcelain briefly bubble to the surface. Narcotic-induced sleep in the dark—that’s Dr. Sherman’s miracle treatment, what was going to vanquish the voice and the visions?
There will be no cure.
The disappointment hits with almost physical force, and I’m shocked by how much I’d allowed myself to believe the protocol would work.
At least I’ll still get my freedom. “Now that the protocol’s done, how soon can I leave—”
“No, silly.” She laughs. Her chuckle is low and polished, like a Bing Crosby version of a laugh. “You’re not done. The sedation was just phase one. You’re well into phase two.”
“Phase two?”
She nods. “Regression. They start it while you’re still sedated so you stay calm, don’t fight the process. Once you’re far enough along and more agreeable, the doctor lifts the drugs. You’ve been awake for days.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You’re just forgetting ’cause you’re already partially there.”
“‘There’?”
“Regressed, silly.” Alice returns to her newspaper, and I try to wrap my head around having been conscious for days. What the hell have I been doing? Thinking?
I put my hand down on the newspaper, blocking her reading. “Tell me about regression.”
She sighs. “It’s how Dr. Sherman addresses the diseased brain pathways in a patient. Those causing all the paranoid thoughts, delusions, and what he calls ‘antisocial tendencies’ that limit our trust and distance us from the real world.”
“How?”
“With ECT. Electroshock—but not the old-fashioned kind of shock sessions, twice a week, one charge a session. Dr. Sherman’s ECT is state-of-the-art: two treatment sessions a day, consisting of three shocks each. Except Sunday, of course.”
Christ.
But Alice nods knowingly, like she’s just shared the location of a prime hunting spot or stash of choice canned goods. “He starts you out low, then gradually raises the voltage and number of charges a session till you’re at the very best dose for getting you where you need to be. ‘Ramping up,’ they call it.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” I say.
“Memory loss, an unfortunate side effect of the shocks.”
I remember Georgie saying how ECT would make agitated patients forget what they were even upset about. Like my memory’s not broken enough already.
“It’s unpredictable,” Alice continues. “You never quite know which memories you’ll lose and which you’ll hold on to. Often whole chunks of time will disappear and suddenly it’s hours—even days—later … Which is really for the best, though, makes the time go by faster.”
Just about the shittiest pep talk ever.
I rub my throbbing temples. “This is all a lot to process…”
“Confusion, another side effect,” she says. “Right after a treatment is when you’ll feel the foggiest. But then things become clearer. Don’t you feel better than when you first woke up?”
She’s right. “Yes.”
“See.” She smiles. “Because the shocks affect the muscles and nerves a bit, meddle with one’s coordination and such, I’ve found one will generally look worse off to others than one feels on the inside. Of course, when you’re far enough along, heading toward full regression, you’ll be foggy all the time, inside and out, mind hopscotching between awake and asleep. But that’s good. It means you’ve reached the point where you’re most open to change. Soon you’ll start to feel yourself transforming, getting better.”
Transforming? What the hell? As the panic starts to rise in me, I squeeze my Latin medal tight, like it’s a totem that will somehow shield me from what I’m hearing. “Your memories, did they come back?” I ask her.
She nods. “Bits and pieces. Started returning once they stopped the shocks. Not all. But those that didn’t, well, they couldn’t have been very important, right?”
Pretty sure that’s not right.
“I wouldn’t worry, hun,” Alice says dreamily. “It truly is for the best. By the time you’re ready for phase three, you’ll feel so much younger, unburdened. Honestly, it’s been a godsend—”
“Phase three?”
“The repatterning. That’s where the doctor can really make a difference—by reintroducing healthier, happier habits of thinking and acting in the patient,” Alice says, sounding scarily like Sherman. “That’s how he helps you become the best version of yourself. I’m almost done with my repatterning, just about fully recovered. So I’ll be going home soon with Bill, that’s my husband…”
The best fucking version of me?
I try to focus on the fact that Alice seems to have come through the protocol intact. But that fact fails to calm me, and I can no longer just sit here, mothlike. I pull my blanket off, stand up—and oh, the head rush. When the purple spots subside, I wander past Alice to get a better look at the sleeping woman with the hair in her face. Pull it away—and see she’s Mary Droesch.
And she’s not sleeping.
“Mary?” I say, but her sharp, vigilant eyes of three weeks ago now just stare vacantly into space. I snap my fingers by them. Not a flicker of response. “What happened to her?” I ask Alice.
“Not entirely sure. Medical progress is never a smooth road,” she says. “The doctor’s bound to run into a bump every now and then. It’s all part of the process.”
“What kind of bump hit Mary Droesch?”
“I heard she got a little too much treatment. Had a seizure. These things happen from time to time.”
“Sure, if you continually electrocute a person, I imagine things do happen.”
“But they’re still hopeful she’ll recover,” Alice continues. “Sometimes they give her special treatments in room three to try and wake her.”
Alice disappears behind her newspaper—and I spot a headline on its back page: “Ernest Hemingway Bags Leopard in Uganda.” Underneath is a photo of the bearded author of few words crouching by the late, unlucky beast.
“I remember this,” I say, grabbing the newspaper.
“Ernest Hemingway on safari? He’s apparently quite the marksman. Bill told me he—”
“Uganda 1954. I think that’s when he was in that plane crash … Then another plane crash the next day.”
“What are you talking about, silly?”
“Sounds far-fetched but it’s true. The guy was in two plane crashes in two days and survived both. Communication in the bush was spotty and everyone thought Hemingway had been killed in the first crash … Or was it the second?… Newspapers even published his obituary. But days later he miraculously showed up in Entebbe, alive and well and—”
It’s happened again: me drifting away from serious worries about the doctor’s brain-damaging protocol, only to end up chattering on, this time about Hemingway. Must be another side effect of the ECT.
“Dorothy.” Wallace. She somehow snuck up on me. She takes the newspaper from me and gives it back to Alice. “Come, it’s time for your next treatment.”
“I’m not going anywhere till I talk to Sherman!” I shout, and my words wake the voice:
Sherman and his staff are the problem, not the solution.
And you know what to do with problems—
Find something sharp. Get creative.
Wallace interrupts the voice’s latest threats. “Then by all means, let’s go see the doctor,” she says, and nods to someone behind me.
I turn to find a ready and waiting Lester and Gus.