The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (108 page)

The difficulty was, he had two data points, his own “incidents” and the sudden rash of unscheduled doctors’ appointments, and no way to either connect or eliminate either one. If he could at least satisfy himself that Evelyn’s and Erin’s doctor visits concerned something other than mental episodes, he would be down to one data point. One was an anomaly. Two were an indicator of . . . something.

This wasn’t one of Henry’s days to have Carrie’s assistance. He pulled himself up on his walker, inched to the desk, and found the Resident Directory. Evelyn had no listings for either cell phone or email. That surprised him; you’d think such a yenta would want as many ways to bother people as possible. But some St Sebastian residents were still, after all these decades, wary of any technology they hadn’t grown up with.
Fools
, thought Henry, who had once driven 400 miles to buy one of the first, primitive, put-it-together-yourself kits for a personal computer. He noted Evelyn’s apartment number and hobbled toward the elevators.

“Why, Henry Erdmann! Come in, come in!” Evelyn cried. She looked astonished, as well she might. And – oh, God – behind her sat a circle of women, their chairs jammed in like molecules under hydraulic compression, all sewing on bright pieces of cloth.

“I don’t want to intrude on your —”

“Oh, it’s just the Christmas Elves!” Evelyn cried. “We’re getting an early start on the holiday wall hanging for the lobby. The old one is getting so shabby.”

Henry didn’t remember a holiday wall hanging in the lobby, unless she was referring to that garish lumpy blanket with Santa Claus handing out babies to guardian angels. The angels had had tight, cotton-wool hair that made them look like Q-tips. He said, “Never mind, it’s not important.”

“Oh, come on in! We were just talking about – and maybe you have more information on it! – this fabulous necklace that Anna Chernov has in the office safe, the one the tsar gave —”

“No, no, I have no information. I’ll —”

“But if you just —”

Henry said desperately, “I’ll call you later.”

To his horror, Evelyn lowered her eyes and said murmured demurely, “All right, Henry,” while the women behind her tittered. He backed away down the hall.

He was pondering how to discover Erin’s last name when she emerged from an elevator. “Excuse me!” he called the length of the corridor. “May I speak to you a moment?”

She came toward him, another book in her hand, her face curious but reserved. “Yes?”

“My name is Henry Erdmann. I’d like to ask what will, I know, sound like a very strange question. Please forgive my intrusiveness, and believe that I have a good reason for asking. You had an unscheduled appointment with Dr Felton yesterday?”

Something moved behind her eyes. “Yes.”

“Did your reason for seeing him have to do with any sort of . . . of mental experience? A small seizure, or an episode of memory aberration, perhaps?”

Erin’s ringed hand tightened on her book. He noted, numbly, that today it seemed to be a novel. She said, “Let’s talk.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mrs Bass, but it sounds like rubbish to me.”

She shrugged, a slow movement of thin shoulders under her peasant blouse. Her long printed skirt, yellow flowers on black, swirled on the floor. Her apartment looked like her: bits of cloth hanging on the walls, a curtain of beads instead of a door to the bedroom, Hindu statues and crystal pyramids and Navaho blankets. Henry disliked the clutter, the childishness of the décor, even as he felt flooded by gratitude toward Erin Bass. She had released him. Her ideas about the “incidents” were so dumb that he could easily dismiss them, along with anything he might have been thinking which resembled them.

“There’s an energy in the universe as a whole,” she’d said. “When you stop resisting the flow of life and give up the grasping of
trishna
, you awaken to that energy. In popular terms, you have an ‘out-of-body experience’, activating stored karma from past lives and fusing it into one moment of transcendent insight.”

Henry had had no transcendental insight. He knew about energy in the universe – it was called electromagnetic radiation, gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces – and none of it had karma. He didn’t believe in reincarnation, and he hadn’t been out of his body. Throughout all three “incidents”, he’d felt his body firmly encasing him. He hadn’t left; other minds had somehow seemed to come in. But it was all nonsense, an aberration of a brain whose synapses and axons, dendrites and vesicles, were simply growing old.

He grasped his walker and rose. “Thanks anyway, Mrs Bass. Goodbye.”

“Again, call me ‘Erin’. Are you sure you wouldn’t like some green tea before you go?”

“Quite sure. Take care.”

He was at the door when she said, almost casually, “Oh, Henry? When I had my own out-of-body Tuesday evening, there were others with me in the awakened state . . . Were you ever closely connected with – I know this sounds odd – a light that somehow shone more brightly than many suns?”

He turned and stared at her.

“This will take about twenty minutes,” DiBella said as Henry slid into the MRI machine. He’d had the procedure before and disliked it just as much then, the feeling of being enclosed in a tube not much larger than a coffin. Some people, he knew, couldn’t tolerate it at all. But Henry’d be damned if he let a piece of machinery defeat him, and anyway the tube didn’t enclose him completely; it was open at the bottom. So he pressed his lips together and closed his eyes and let the machine swallow his strapped-down body.

“You okay in there, Dr Erdmann?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good. Excellent. Just relax.”

To his own surprise, he did. In the tube, everything seemed very remote. He actually dozed, waking twenty minutes later when the tube slid him out again.

“Everything look normal?” he asked DiBella, and held his breath.

“Completely,” DiBella said. “Thank you, that’s a good baseline for my study. Your next one, you know, will come immediately after you view a ten-minute video. I’ve scheduled that for a week from today.”

“Fine.”
Normal
. Then his brain was okay, and this weirdness was over. Relief turned him jaunty. “I’m glad to assist your project, doctor. What is its focus, again?”

“Cerebral activation patterns in senior citizens. Did you realize, Dr Erdmann, that the over-sixty-five demographic is the fastest growing one in the world? And that globally there are now 140 million people over the age of eighty?”

Henry hadn’t realized, nor did he care. The St Sebastian aide came forward to help Henry to his feet. He was a dour young man whose name Henry hadn’t caught. DiBella said, “Where’s Carrie today?”

“It’s not her day with me.”

“Ah.” DiBella didn’t sound very interested; he was already prepping his screens for the next volunteer. Time on the MRI, he’d told Henry, was tight, having to be scheduled between hospital use.

The dour young man – Darryl? Darrin? Dustin? – drove Henry back to St Sebastian’s and left him to make his own way upstairs. In his apartment, Henry lowered himself laboriously to the sofa. Just a few minutes’ nap, that’s all he needed, even a short excursion tired him so much now – although it would be better if Carrie had been along, she always took such good care of him, such a kind and dear young woman. If he and Ida had ever had children, he’d have wanted them to be like Carrie. If that bastard Jim Peltier ever again tried to —

It shot through him like a bolt of lightning.

Henry screamed. This time the experience
hurt
, searing the inside of his skull and his spinal cord down to his tailbone. No dancing, no embroidering, no meditating – and yet others were there, not as individuals but as a collective sensation, a shared pain, making the pain worse by pooling it. He couldn’t stand it, he was going to die, this was the end of —

The pain was gone. It vanished as quickly as it came, leaving him bruised inside, throbbing as if his entire brain had undergone a root canal. His gorge rose, and just in time he twisted his aching body to the side and vomited over the side of the sofa onto the carpet.

His fingers fumbled in the pocket of his trousers for the St Sebastian panic button that Carrie insisted he wear. He found it, pressed the centre, and lost consciousness.

FIVE

Carrie went home early. Thursday afternoons were assigned to Mrs Lopez and her granddaughter had showed up unexpectedly. Carrie suspected that Vicky Lopez wanted money again since that seemed to be the only time she did turn up at St Sebastian’s, but that was not Carrie’s business. Mrs Lopez said happily that Vicky could just as easily take her shopping instead of Carrie, and Vicky agreed, looking greedy. So Carrie went home.

If she’d been fortunate enough to have a grandmother – to have any relatives besides her no-good step-brothers in California – she would treat that hypothetical grandmother better than did Vicky, she of the designer jeans and cashmere crew necks and massive credit-card debt. Although Carrie wouldn’t want her grandmother to be like Mrs Lopez, either, who treated Carrie like not-very-clean hired help.

Well, she
was
hired help, of course. The job as a St Sebastian aide was the first thing she’d seen in the Classifieds the day she finally walked out on Jim. She grabbed the job blindly, like a person going over a cliff who sees a fragile branch growing from crumbly rock. The weird thing was that after the first day, she knew she was going to stay. She liked old people (most of them, anyway). They were interesting and grateful (most of them anyway) – and safe. During that first terrified week at the YMCA, while she searched for a one-room apartment she could actually afford, St Sebastian’s was the one place she felt safe.

Jim had changed that, of course. He’d found out the locations of her job and apartment. Cops could find anything.

She unlocked her door after making sure the dingy corridor was empty, slipped inside, shot the deadbolt, and turned on the light. The only window faced an air shaft, and the room was dark even on the brightest day. Carrie had done what she could with bright cushions and Salvation Army lamps and dried flowers, but dark was dark.

“Hello, Carrie,” Jim said.

She whirled around, stifling a scream. But the sickening thing was the rest of her reaction. Unbidden and hated – God, how hated! – but still there was the sudden thrill, the flash of excitement that energized every part of her body. “
That’s not unusual
,” her counsellor at the Battered Women’s Help Centre had said, “
because frequently an abuser and his victim are both fully engaged in the struggle to dominate each other. How triumphant do you feel when he’s in the apology-and-wooing phase of the abuse cycle? Why do you think you haven’t left before now
?”

It had taken Carrie so long to accept that. And here it was again. Here Jim was again.

“How did you get in?”

“Does it matter?”

“You got Kelsey to let you in, didn’t you?” The building super could be bribed to almost anything with a bottle of Scotch. Although maybe Jim hadn’t needed that; he had a badge. Not even the charges she’d brought against him, all of which had been dropped, had affected his job. Nobody on the outside ever realized how common domestic violence was in cops’ homes.

Jim wasn’t in uniform now. He wore jeans, boots, a sports coat she’d always liked. He held a bouquet of flowers. Not supermarket carnations, either: red roses in shining gold paper. “Carrie, I’m sorry I startled you, but I wanted so bad for us to talk. Please, just let me have ten minutes. That’s all. Ten minutes isn’t much to give me against three years of marriage.”

“We’re not married. We’re legally separated.”

“I know. I
know
. And I deserve that you left me. I know that now. But just ten minutes. Please.”

“You’re not supposed to be here at all! There’s a restraining order against you – and you’re a cop!”

“I know. I’m risking my career to talk to you for ten minutes. Doesn’t that say how much I care? Here, these are for you.”

Humbly, eyes beseeching, he held out the roses. Carrie didn’t take them.

“You blackened my eye the last time we ‘talked’, you bastard!”

“I know. If you knew how much I’ve regretted that . . . If you had any idea how many nights I laid awake hating myself for that. I was out of my mind, Carrie. I really was. But it taught me something. I’ve changed. I’m going to A.A. now, I’ve got a sponsor and everything. I’m working my program.”

“I’ve heard this all before!”

“I know. I know you have. But this time is different.” He lowered his eyes, and Carrie put her hands on her hips. Then it hit her: she had said all this before, too. She had stood in this scolding, one-up stance. He had stood in his humble stance, as well. This was the apology-and-wooing stage that the counsellor had talked about, just one more scene in their endless script. And she was eating it up as if it had never happened before, was revelling in the glow of righteous indignation fed by his grovelling. Just like the counsellor had said.

She was so sickened at herself that her knees nearly buckled.

“Get out, Jim.”

“I will. I
will
. Just tell me that you heard me, that there’s some chance for us still, even if it’s a chance I don’t deserve. Oh, Carrie —”

“Get out!” Her nauseated fury was at herself.

“If you’d just —”

“Out! Out now!”

His face changed. Humility was replaced by astonishment – this wasn’t how their script went – and then by rage. He threw the flowers at her. “You won’t even
listen
to me? I come here goddamn apologizing and you won’t even listen? What makes you so much better than me, you fucking bitch you’re nothing but a —”

Carrie whirled around and grabbed for the deadbolt. He was faster. Faster, stronger, and
that
was the old script, too, how could she forget for even a half second he —

Jim threw her to the floor. Did he have his gun? Would he – she caught a glimpse of his face, so twisted with rage that he looked like somebody else, even as she was throwing up her arms to protect her head. He kicked her in the belly. The pain was astonishing. It burned along her body she was burning she couldn’t breathe she was going to die . . . His boot drew back to kick her again and Carrie tried to scream. No breath came. This was it then no no
no
—