I FEEL LIKE I’M both inside my body and watching it from some great distance …
“And Ethan, is he still here in the seclusion cell with us?” I hear Dr. Sherman ask.
Don’t tell this asshole one more goddamn thing!
The voice’s harangue rouses me from my gauzy stupor. I look around—
And find I am indeed back in my cell, Dr. Sherman crouched next to me on its padded floor.
That room with the blue-eyed shadows gone. Those squabbling lab assistants gone.
How is that possible? It was all just here! But my panicky thoughts are interrupted by Sherman, who’s acting like nothing has changed. “Maybe I could speak to Ethan,” he says, “help you sort things out. About Bix, your mission…”
Ethan. The mission. What the hell have I been telling this guy?
No doubt too much. Time to end this session.
So I force an easy smile onto my face and say with great coyness, “Mission? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, Doctor. Just gonna need you to untie the restraint, let me slip into something more comfortable.” My fake come-on has the desired effect on the easily flustered Sherman: his face turns beet red, and he jumps to his feet to put some distance between himself and my sexual advances—cutting short his inquisition. I can see little beads of sweat cropping up along his thinning hairline.
“We’ll talk more about this tomorrow, Dorothy,” he says, and goes out to speak to Lester in the hallway.
I see something peeking out from under my shoulder—the hairpin. I just manage to get it back in my mouth and slide the restraint sleeve I worked up to my shoulder back into its place before the attendant hauls me to my feet.
I’m lying, ravenous with hunger, in one of two dozen beds in A-Ward’s dormitory two. Everyone else is asleep, except Lillian, quietly talking to herself as she creeps, free range, across the floor in the dark. Not me. Though they removed the straitjacket, I’m still restrained, bound to the bed, arms and legs separated, each ankle and wrist cuffed and lashed tight. Full-on Gullivered, there’s nothing for me to do but listen to my grumbling stomach, run my tongue over the hairpin, and contemplate what just happened.
Or rather didn’t happen.
’Cause I’ve figured it out. Those people, their mysterious machine, the white roar, of course it wasn’t some doctor’s test—it was a dream. A fuzzy, fucked-up dream fueled by my concussions. Just the random misfirings of neurons in my punch-drunk brain as my subconscious was trying to make sense of this strange day.
What you experienced was real. It happened.
Nope. A dream, nothing more.
The future isn’t something you can just ignore. You heard Ethan and Kyung—you’re there to carry out a mission.
“Wild cherry Life Saver?” Georgie asks, plopping down on the edge of my bed with a pack of candy. “You look like you could use one,” she says, peeling back the wrapper.
“How did you get those? We’re not supposed to have—”
“This, my dear, is what going along to get along—and the proper bribe—can get you.” She pulls a candy from the roll, and I start salivating like Pavlov’s dog. I’ve definitely tasted wild cherry Life Savers before.
Georgie holds it in front of my mouth. “I imagine things are a bit crowded in there. Why don’t you give me the hairpin?” I hesitate. “If I was going to turn you in, I’d have done it by now.”
True. I push the piece of metal out, and Georgie gingerly takes it and places the candy on my tongue.
Such mouthwatering joy! While I take in the amazingness of the little red candy, Georgie lifts my blanket and reaches for the hem of my dress. “I could see it on your face as they marched you and Norma off. You engineered that fight in the dining hall. All to get them to put you in seclusion armed with this,” she says, holding up the hairpin. She levels her eyes at me. “I’ve a feeling you’re quite capable of finding your way out of a restraint, using this to pick a lock. Which means you were minutes from possible escape.”
She is not wrong.
Georgie slides the hairpin into my dress hem, then stares at me. “So, why scream and bring everyone running? What happened to you in that seclusion cell?”
I briefly fantasize about telling Georgie of the dream. What it would be like to unburden myself like that, to lessen my fucked-up nightmare’s frightening power in the sharing of it. But I let the temptation pass.
“Come on, faster,” Lillian urges some invisible sidekick as she creeps past us on the floor. “We’ve gotta reach the lighthouse before they search the coast!”
“Lord,” Georgie says to me, “Lillian really needs to ditch that imaginary friend she’s dragging along. Clearly they’re slowing her down.” And now I can’t help thinking about my own imaginary dream friends. Georgie notices. “Something’s got you spooked. What is it?”
Not one word.
This isn’t a slumber party where we braid each other’s hair and spill our secrets. Bad enough Dr. Sherman knows about the mission. Kyung said it’s dangerous here. Trust no one. Depend on no one.
Then again, the voice is demented enough to believe my nightmare was real, so not the best judge of this situation. Over her protests ringing through my brain, I tell Georgie about waking on the bus, the real Dorothy stealing my purse, the mystery man I remember kissing me, my wild nightmare, Ethan, Kyung—and damn, it feels good to let it all out.
“I know it was just a crazy dream brought on by a couple of blows to the head,” I say, “but there was something about it that felt so … real.”
Georgie now has that slightly constipated look of someone trying to spare you pain.
“Say it,” I tell her.
“I just think before you make your escape from Hanover, go running off into the night, you might want to take a step back, look at your state of affairs objectively.”
“My state of affairs?”
“Dreaming about being on some vital—but screwed-up—mission, for these people who call you Bex—”
“Bix.”
“Pardon me, Bix. But what if it wasn’t a dream? What if it was a hallucination your waking mind cooked up—and it’s not the first? You said things seemed ‘off’ on the bus. Surreal. Maybe the ‘real Dorothy’ stealing your purse was also a hallucination—”
“No. That was real.”
“Do you have any proof?”
“You think I’m Dorothy Frasier.”
“If you can’t prove you’re not, then shouldn’t you at least entertain the possibility? Face the truth of who you are and why you were on that bus no matter what that is?”
Bitch.
But understandable. All Georgie knows is I’m a woman who woke on a bus with no memory, wearing a schizophrenic patient’s ID tag and insisting that same patient switched identities with her before stealing her purse and disappearing into thin air. And tonight this woman, on the verge of escape, couldn’t keep herself from alerting her jailers with bloodcurdling screams. That woman sounds pretty certifiable to me.
So I shouldn’t be angry at Georgie for offering up her helpful advice. And I definitely shouldn’t act on the impulse to hurt her back—
But I do.
“And who are you, really, Georgie? Are you really just here for ‘exhaustion’? Is that all your daddy is worried about?” Georgie shoots me a look that’s equal parts hate and hurt, then heads back to her bed.
So I lie awake, watching Lillian circling the room and trying to wedge Georgie’s worrisome words into one of my mental drawers.