Michael Kellar

“Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away.”

- William Hughes Mearns

 

Shannon remembered nothing at all of the wreck.

Her first subsequent memory was of briefly waking up while she was being lifted into the ambulance, and hearing an attendant mumble “I think we're going to lose this one!”

Strangely, her immediate reaction was a question of protocol. She wondered whether emergency technicians were actually permitted to utter such strong proclamations in the presence of a victim. This was immediately substituted with the desire for a second opinion. Then, darkness.

After a number of brief intervals of consciousness over an unknown period of time, she finally came fully awake. A police officer was standing at the foot of her hospital bed, somewhat timidly, with his hat in his hand.

“Miss, I need to ask you some questions about your accident.”

He was young and kind of cute. Or perhaps that was just a judgment from the morphine; everyone looked great right now, in a glowing and detached sort of way.

“How much do you remember about the incident?”

His question was rather hesitant. He was obviously uncomfortable, but was this due to being in a hospital or to being in the presence of a good-looking woman?

She knew herself to be quite attractive beneath the bruises.

That thought quickly prompted a frown. Some cops were turned on by exactly that combination.

No, not this one. He oozed a sense of wanting to be doing this interview correctly, to help.

“I was on my way to the beach. It was still early. I was not speeding or in a hurry, but the sunlight caught my eye and I slipped off the side of the highway.”

He glanced at his notes.

“This was near the construction site next to the Blossom Motel?”

She nodded.

“Yes. They were opening the exit adjacent to that new parking lot. The shoulder was mushy. When I dropped off the edge, I tried to correct myself with a sharp left turn, but instead of righting itself, my car just flipped.”

“Seat belt on?”

Shannon opened the top of her hospital gown enough to reveal a long red welt, which appeared as a diagonal line above the curve of her right breast.

“They told me a witness saw my car flip twice. The first time the seat belt snapped loose and did this to me. The second time I was ejected into the air through the open passenger side window. Fortunately, the car and I did not fall in the same direction.”

The kid looked puzzled. Tests had indicated that no drugs were involved. Even though speeding was not a question, and it had been a bright, clear morning, the officer issued a citation noting ‘too fast for conditions’. His apologetic tone suggested that he had felt obligated to find some offence.

“This won’t amount to anything”, he commented as he was heading out the door. “I’m sure the judge will dismiss it. Besides, I know you have enough other problems.”

That cryptic comment left her wondering what she might not have been told as yet.

As the days passed, Shannon slowly began to sort out fact from drug-induced fiction regarding her recent memories.

She recalled an endless parade of doctors and nurses, all intense and caring and calming and solicitous—probably all real. Remembered forcibly vomiting up the first bit of semi-solid food a nurse had attempted to fed her—definitely real. Then there were frequent visits by an older man she did not know and was not dressed in any kind of uniform. No one else seemed to interact with him. So, probably an illusion. Finally, a couple times a rather formal woman stopped in to discuss some type of legal matters and asked her if she understood the concept of “implied consent”. Since the consent forms with her signature on them remained on her bedside table she mentally filed that, too, under ‘Real’.

One afternoon, months later Shannon found herself sitting alone on a blanket on a nearly deserted section of the beach. She had remained in Crater Cove, partly due to liking the doctor who had been suggested to her for follow-up care, and partly because she still had no place in particular that she wanted to go.

It was late afternoon and although there was a strong wind blowing in from the ocean, it still seemed unseasonably warm to a displaced Northerner like herself. Her shade stretched nearly to the edge of the incoming tide, and she was playing a game where she had to guess what type of bird was flying overhead by first watching its shadow when a voice spoke to her.

“That group of rocks out there is all that is left of Nikola’s Island.

It was named for a medical man. It was his fortune that built the hospital that you stayed in.”

Shannon turned and saw an older man standing beside her, staring out into the Atlantic. She was mildly embarrassed that he seemed to know her, but she could not summon up his name.

“We have a rougher patch of land here than in the areas to the north or south. It really was unlikely that so many tourists latched onto it. Did you know that way back in 1682, there was a soldier who suffered a head wound, and his doctors treated him by repairing the damage to his skull with a piece of dog's bone. The operation was successful until the Church heard about the event and who threatened him with excommunication unless the dog bone was removed. Which they did. He died, but still in the Grace of God.”

She was about to excuse herself and admit that she did not remember his name when she suddenly placed him. He was the older gentleman who she thought she remembered had visited her from time to time. She turned back to address him, but he was gone.

She didn’t think that she had been lost in thought all that long. Then she considered it odd that, unlike the birds she had been observing, his approach had not been preceded by his shadow.

 

Shortly after the last of the tourists left at the end of the season, Shannon finally decided that it was time to move on. She had not made any friends during her time here—since her accident there seemed to be a difference in the way that felt about or interacted with others. It was as though they were different - or perhaps she was - either way they somehow seemed less real to her now, almost as though she were watching them on a television show.

Two years of high school French had led to a long-held desire to visit Paris, so she did. Of course seeing the Eiffel Tower was first on her agenda, followed by a visit to Notre Dame Cathedral and the Palace of Versailles. She was most surprised to discover, however, that there was a Disneyland in Paris - Euro Disney. She spent the day there and found it a touch surrealistic, although she had to admit that hearing Donald Duck sputtering in French seemed somehow quite appropriate.

Early in the afternoon Shannon found herself feeling vaguely out of sorts. Disneyland may have triggered a bout of homesickness, but it seemed more than that. Lately she had noticed tiring easily, and not having much of an appetite, but now she was also nauseous and was experiencing a pain in her side.

Food poisoning was her next thought, but it was not until she returned to her hotel room and looked into the bathroom mirror that the truth came to her. Her eyes and skin had taken on yellowish jaundiced color and she remembered the warning signs she had been told to watch for upon her exit from the hospital.

Some of these symptoms had been around for much of the past week, but could her liver suddenly be failing that quickly? Her last coherent thought was that she should go to the emergency room, but instead she vomited and fell asleep across her bed.

When she opened her eyes a few hours later, the first thing she noticed was an oddness to the light. Sunlight streamed in through the window, but somehow she had a sense of twilight.

She sat up on the bed, upset at the state of her soiled sundress – which she had not taken off since Disneyland – but relieved to discover that she no longer felt any pain or discomfort.

“I assume that you will have many questions.”

This came from a voice to the left of her bed.

“And, no, I am not ‘an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, or a fragment of underdone potato’”.

Seated in an armchair was the strange half-remembered little old man who had visited her on the beach and had been classified as morphine-induced dreams at the hospital.

“You are not real,” she stated uncertainly.

“Oh, I most certainly am real. I merely am no longer alive.”

Shannon was surprised that this was not as unnatural an experience as it might have been imagined. But even more disturbing was her growing apprehension concerning the fact she was no longer feeling any pain. Nor anything else, come to think about it.

“Am I…?”

Her visitor nodded.

“But why are you here? Why have you been following me?’

“Because we are two of a kind, my dear.”

She looked puzzled and he took that as license to continue.

“Have you ever heard of a chimera?”

This question briefly evoked a picture from a fairy tale book Shannon had owned as a little girl.

“Wasn’t that some sort of monster that had a goat’s head and a lion’s body?”

“Yes, that is the creature from mythology. But in modern genetics it has a different meaning. The term is used to refer to an organism which has tissue or organs inside it that originally belonged to a different species.”

She wasn’t sure where this was going.

“Some years ago I suffered a massive heart attack and was taken to the same emergency room in Compass Cove that treated you. No viable organs were available, yet I survived.”

“But, how…?”

I lived for an additional eight months with the heart of a baboon beating in my chest. Ultimately, however, that noble animal’s organ was rejected by my body. The science still has a long way to go.”

“But what has that to do with me?”

“Compass Cove is an isolated town, and has a core that the temporary rush of beach visitors never see. Its founder was quite rich and very much was interested in medical experimentation. That legacy continued, although not always openly or even entirely legally. It is a community that very much believes that the end justifies the means. In their defense, they have been responsible for many advances which both added to the advancement of science as well as to the wealth of the town.”

He paused.

“They were not entirely truthful with you about the source of your liver. In reality it was lab-grown and is composed of a mixture of bovine and human cells.”

Shannon was somewhat shocked, but didn’t understand how that was relevant to the situation in which she now found herself.

“So what happens next? Do I go on to a better place now like they always told me?”

“That seems to be the issue here. It appears the church was right. Since we are no longer entirely human, we are not fit for heaven, and yet we did nothing to cause our souls – or what remains of them – to be damned. So we appear to just be here. I have no idea what happens next.”

Shannon shook her head in disbelief.

“You know, I never really ever believed in ghosts. I never thought they really existed.”

“That is the really interesting aspect to all of this. From what I have experienced, there are still only a few others like us.

He sighed and finished.

“Ghosts didn’t really used to exist. But thanks to science, they do now.”

 

 

X is for Xenotransplantation