MILTON AWOKE SWAYING in a stiff canvas hammock.
“Where am I?” he murmured in a voice like a worn gravel road. With a lurch, he pitched himself onto the gleaming linoleum floor.
“Ugh, it’s like my body is a haunted house,” Milton muttered. “Spooky and full of weird creaks.”
He sat up and tried to marshal the hodgepodge of thoughts rattling in his head. The last thing Milton remembered was being arrested by a squad of commandoes after stuffing the Affective Reasoning Machine full of nonsense.
The whole room—which was like a sterile hospital room—seemed to rock back and forth, as if it were floating on a stormy sea. Milton yanked down his weird blue plastic smock: a gown made of slick, unyielding vinyl.
“Must be some kind of prison ship,” he said.
A nurse in a crisp white dress walked into his room carrying a tray. “A ship? No, Monsieur Fauster,” she said, setting the tray down on a swinging table suspended from the ceiling. “But you’ll be ship-shape soon enough!” She covered her mouth with her gloved hand. “Oh … excusez-moi … that was almost immature. It must be contagious.”
On the tray was a carafe of pitch-black liquid and a plate of cigarette butts.
“Why is everything swaying?” Milton asked.
The woman brushed back the short gray bangs that clung tight to her face.
“Très fou,” she replied in an overly calm voice. “It is the Wobble, of course!”
“The Wobble?”
“It’s nothing to be concerned about … just the Earth shaking itself apart. The ministry assures us it’s just the planet experiencing some growing pains. Here …”
The woman handed Milton two pills: one black, one white. He stared at the pills in his trembling, liver-spotted hands.
“Your Equi-Lib pills,” she replied. “To keep you balanced. You know: they affect your inner ear to help counteract the disorientation of the Wobble.”
Milton reluctantly popped the pills into his mouth, washing them down with the bitterly strong liquid.
“Yuck!” he said with a grimace. “This stuff is awful! It’s like drinking tobacco boiled in hot bile!”
The woman shrugged. “Your Coffaux. Fake coffee. You’ve never had a problem with it before. Now eat your cigarettes like a bon garçon.…”
“Eat my cigarettes? Are you crazy?”
“No, you are,” the woman said with a pout of her surgically wrinkled lips. “Acknowledging this is the first step to recovery … that and a diet of serious, retoxifying foods.”
“Retoxifying?”
The woman sighed. “Your game is growing tiresome, Monsieur Fauster. You know how we frown on fun and games. Remember our motto here at the Hôpital pour les Malades Mentaux Criminels et Enfantin: ‘Wipe that grin right off your chin!’ ”
“Hôpital pour les Malades Mentaux Criminels et Enfantin?” Milton replied. “Doesn’t that mean something about a hospital for the criminally insane and childish?”
The woman clapped her gloved hands together. “Très bonne!” she exclaimed. “Now that is the Monsieur Fauster I know and grudgingly tolerate!”
Milton was suddenly filled with anxiety. He clutched his chest. His Pace Taker was ticking faster and faster.
“It is time for your session with Dr. Tan,” the woman said as she rolled an IV stand to Milton. She fastened the IV tube to a stent in Milton’s forearm. The bag was filled with murky black sludge.
“What is this?” Milton asked with disgust as the woman led him out of the room and into a brightly lit hallway.
“Your retox bag,” she replied, her patience as thin as a baby’s résumé. “Part of Dr. Tan’s retox program. One of her theories about the criminally infantile is that their bodies are too pure, like a child’s, and that—through the introduction of adult toxins such as nicotine, caffeine, cholesterol, and saturated fats—you can shock their systems into emotional maturity.”
They stopped outside a door with a nameplate reading DR. SHARLA TAN.
“She’ll be with you in a moment,” the woman said as she walked away down the sterile corridor, her hard white shoes clacking earnestly.
Milton leaned against the spotless white wall, exhausted.
I feel so much older today.… Maybe it’s this idiotic “retox” thing.
Milton, with a queasy yank, disconnected the IV from his arm. He wrapped the thin plastic tube around his wrist so that he still appeared to be connected. It was like wearing a wristband for the least frequented amusement park ever.
The door opened. There, staring at Milton, stood an elderly yet timelessly beautiful Asian woman. Milton was struck by a feeling of déjà vu.
The woman smiled at Milton’s odd expression—a smile so open and genuine that it burned away all doubt.
“Sara?” he murmured. “Sara Bardo?”
The woman held out the hem of her pink plastic smock and curtsied. “At your service,” she giggled.
It can’t be Sara, the girl I met in Snivel. The girl who helped me brave Arcadia’s Sense-o-Rama and thwart Nikola Tesla’s plan to steal souls from the Surface. The girl who, last I saw, nearly had her conjoined twin brother hacked off by Edgar Allan Poe’s pendulum …
Sara cocked her head at Milton like a dog at the sudden tweet of a whistle. “I’ve been here for nearly a year and this is the first time you’ve ever said anything to me … other than ‘pass the cigarette gravy.’ ”
“So you remember me?” Milton replied, still dazed. “I mean, before this place? Before we got old?”
Sara grinned suspiciously, like she had been told a joke that she knew had to be funny but didn’t quite get the punch line.
“Monsieur Fauster,” a voice called out from the room, bursting Milton’s confused reverie like a pin to a balloon. “Don’t keep me waiting. You’re almost seven seconds late.”
A middle-aged Filipino woman with gray-streaked hair motioned toward an unwelcoming gray metal chair.
Milton stared at Sara as she disappeared down the hall. He sighed and sat down as the woman, Dr. Sharla Tan, eased her skinny, rigid self into her padded black recliner.
“So, how are—”
“How did I get here?” Milton blurted.
Dr. Tan gazed at Milton with disconcerted surprise as if he were a bag of just-microwaved popcorn that still had one unexpected “pop” left in it. She clasped her tiny hands together.
“Très intéressant. Amnesia. We’ll just lower your Equi-Lib dosage,” the doctor said as the ground shuddered. “You came here ten years ago after your judgment.”
“Judgment?”
“After your unforgivable crimes against the state, it seemed inevitable that you would be having a swift date with the electric guillotine,” the doctor said, settling back into her chair. “But your sister, Minister Fauster, ruled most uncharacteristically and spared you, declaring you légalement fou, which is why you’ve been here for”—Dr. Tan glanced down at the “year” hand of her Pace Taker and arched her dyed-gray eyebrow—“exactly ten years … for a crime committed exactly twenty years ago!” she said with subdued excitement.
“Twenty years?”
“If ours was a culture that believed in coincidence, I’d think this ‘anniversary’ quite remarkable. But we’re not, so I don’t.”
So I’ve not been me for twenty years? Why?
Dr. Tan leaned forward, her varicose vein-stockinged knees pressed together. “I don’t see it,” she said. “Apart from … well, this discussion right now, you’ve exhibited no overtly fou behavior. If it were up to me—and it would be if you stepped out of line for any reason—I’d send you straight to Hekla.”
“Heck?” Milton gulped.
Dr. Tan rolled her pitch-black eyes. “Hekla … Iceland. The empire’s military base in the Hekla volcano. Where no one is allowed except top military officials and, of course, the worst enemies of the state.”
Dr. Tan quickly checked her Pace Taker, which now seemed to be ticking faster than before.
“So, before today’s session concludes, do you have anything you’d care to discuss?”
Other than the fact that I’m a seventy-one-year-old eleven-year-old who has no idea why I’m in this terrible world or how I got here or what I’m supposed to do before I die of unnaturally natural causes by the end of the week?!
“Well, I am feeling—” Milton said before Dr. Tan rushed to her feet.
“Feelings are like rickety old bridges,” she replied, ushering Milton out into the hall. “You just have to get over them as quickly as possible. Bonjour.”
Milton shambled into the ward’s common area in his plastic sandals and smock. Fifteen or so of his fellow patients milled about the room in bored circuits. Sara looked over at Milton and, noting his defeated expression, gave him a smile that cut through the somber atmosphere of the room like a lighthouse beam through fog.
“You look like you’ve either just pooped a porcupine,” she said, “or had a session with Dr. Tan. I’m not sure which is worse.…”
Milton studied Sara. She had the restless energy and unflappable optimism of a little girl, only trapped in an old woman’s body. It occurred to Milton that she was flying solo, meaning she wasn’t attached to her surly conjoined twin, Sam.
“So,” Milton asked, feeling shy despite the fact that he was seven decades old. “Why are you here?”
Sara’s smile dimmed a few watts. She rubbed her side absentmindedly, with sad sweeps of her hand.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” she said in a faraway voice. “It’s boring. Besides … there are so many more interesting people here … like Glasco, for instance.” She pointed at a large, bald, beet-faced man in the corner.
“Glasco?” Milton replied. “What makes him so interesting?”
“Wow … we are different today,” she replied playfully. “Okay, I’ll bite. Well—as if you didn’t know—Glasco thinks he’s a vending machine, one that produces the worst candy imaginable.”
Milton looked across the room at a middle-aged blond woman holding a pocket mirror. “What’s her deal? Is she really obsessed with her looks?”
“That’s Katrice,” Sara explained. “She’s afraid to look at anyone directly in the eye. Only uses her mirror. She thinks she has a lethal gaze. I’m not quite sure why. See, we don’t talk much … just can’t seem to see eye to eye on things. Get it?”
Milton snickered. “Yup, I get it.”
“And then there’s Claire over there,” Sara said, pointing to the far wall. “She thinks she’s invisible.”
“Really?” Milton said. “Where is she? I don’t see anyone.”
“Wow, she’s worse off than I thought!” Sara said before Milton burst out laughing. The sound erupted throughout the room like a scream. Sara studied Milton with unexpected delight, as if she had just found a hundred franc bill in her sock drawer. Two orderlies dressed in stiff white uniforms stormed into the room.
“What’s that awful ruckus?” shouted a thick-necked man with a bushy mustache glued above his lip.
“A ruckus?” Sara repeated with a look of mock confusion on her face. “Did you hear a ruckus, Monsieur Fauster?”
“I don’t believe I heard a ruckus,” Milton said, scratching his head. “But we’ll be sure to let you know if we do.”
The orderly glared at Milton, the vein on his neck bulging with anger, before he and his associate stomped out of the room.
“Blancs,” Sara said. “Fun spoilers supreme.”
“Blancs?”
“You know, blanc: French for ‘white.’ Because of the uniforms.”
Milton surveyed the room full of dazed men and women. “What’s everyone doing just standing around?” he asked.
“Waiting for Jell-O’clock,” Sara replied. “I hear today’s batch is extra seaweedy.”
Milton saw an overflowing metal tub next to a brick wall painted blue. He walked over to it and started sifting through the collection of junk.
“What’s all this stuff?” he asked as Sara joined him.
The old woman shrugged. “Just random things they couldn’t find space for,” Sara replied. “It’s not like anyone here is even curious enough to notice it, really.”
“What’s this?” Milton asked, holding up a couple of metal paddles.
“Cardiac paddles, for when people have heart attacks. Must be broken.”
“Why is there duct tape on this?” Milton said, tearing the sticky tape off a small rubber ball.
“Sometimes a patient really loses it,” she replied sadly, “just starts screaming, so they tape that over their mouth.”
Sara shrugged. “It tastes better than the food does.”
Milton pulled out someone’s discarded pantyhose. He stared across the room at an empty table. “Let’s liven things up around here,” he said with an impish grin.
“It’s called Ping-Pong,” Milton said as he bounced the ball on the table. He had taken two plastic spoons and duct-taped them to the sides of the table, and stretched the pantyhose across like a net. “You hit the ball over to the other side of the table, like this.…”
Milton batted the ball to Glasco, who held the other paddle and watched the ball bounce away. Milton bounded after it, snatched it up, and returned to his side of the makeshift Ping-Pong table.
“Now next time, Glasco, you hit it back with your paddle,” Milton said slowly.
The large bald man nodded and Milton gently served the ball. Glasco swatted it back to Milton.
“Good job!” Milton said as he and the man hit the ball back and forth. The other patients began to crowd around the table, at first following the ball’s trajectory with confusion, then, slowly, smiles stretching across their faces. A dark-skinned man with frizzy gray hair started to clap with delight.
The two orderlies strode urgently back into the room with Dr. Tan close behind.
“What is going on?” the thick-necked orderly barked, his stormy gray eyes bulging out of his head.
“Game over,” Sara muttered, covering her smile with her wrinkled hand. Glasco quickly swallowed the ball.
Dr. Tan clapped her hands together.
“Well, then, patients … it sure has been a busy day,” she said in a condescending tone, as if talking to a room full of paste-eating toddlers. “How about some fresh air?”
The patients were led outside into a small grim courtyard. It was encircled by three lofty guard towers, connected to one another by lengths of tall chain-link fence with coils of barbed wire on top. The grass, so bright green that it was obviously fake, was dusted with patches of thick, dark-gray ash that fluttered down to the ground like dirty snow. Milton looked up at the Widow’s Veil. The thick black mantle of soot looked like the lid of an enormous coffin, with the world laid to eternal rest beneath. A band of cloud cover seemed to “ripple,” but in a flash, the sky sealed back up like a small cut.
Milton’s eyes watered. His throat and lungs burned. All around him, his fellow patients coughed and wheezed.
“Bien, that’s enough fresh air!” a nurse said through her gauze mask. “Back inside for lunch! I hear the chef has created a seriously unhealthy meal for you all today!”
As Milton turned to follow the shambling patients back into the facility, he heard something thud to the ground. There on the AstroTurf was an empty wine bottle. Milton looked quickly from side to side, but no one was around. He snatched the bottle. Inside was a curled-up sheet of paper, actual paper, with FROM THE DESK OF ALBERT EINSTEIN stamped on the top. Below, written in Milton’s own carefully composed handwriting—not the sloppy scrawl of his alter ego—was a note.
Escape tonight, just before midnight. Requisition as much baking soda for Hekla as possible.
—Milton Fauster (You, later)
“A note … from me?” Milton murmured. “The real me? But how?”
Milton looked up at the sky. A rippling scar appeared across the Widow’s Veil. He could see the bottom of some craft tacking across the sky, followed by what looked like—
Milton quickly rubbed his eyes.
Must be the soot, he thought.
But there it was again: the glimmering silhouette of an angel, streaking across the Widow’s Veil, leaving a rainbow in its wake as it followed the craft above. The charcoal-black cloud cover sealed itself shut.
Milton stared at the note in his hand.
I wanted a sign and I got one: a big, blinking neon sign at that. I mean, angels and rainbows. It doesn’t get much more hopeful than that. It’s like I have a divine stamp of approval for … what, exactly, I have no clue.…