Trang (33 page)
Authors: Mary Sisson
“Fuck, Trang, you look like shit.”
“Gee, thanks,” Philippe replied
peevishly, stepping into Shanti’s office.
“No, I’m serious—you look like
you’re sick or something,” she said. “Are you feeling all right? You’ve been
kinda squirreling yourself away in your office lately.”
Philippe sighed. People had been
saying this a lot to him lately, and it was beginning to annoy him.
I’d
engage more with people if they were less irritating,
he thought.
He said, “I’m a little tired.”
“Do you want a stimulant patch?”
Shanti asked, opening a drawer in her desk.
“No, no, I’ve got one on,” Philippe
said. He showed her his right forearm, with its one patch surrounded by a pink
rash. He didn’t pull up his sleeve further and show her the three other patches
and their rashes.
“All right then,” she said, closing
the drawer. “You know, if you ever need something with more kick, George has
some of the super-duper kind that can wire you up for, like, a week.”
“Really?” Philippe perked up,
interested.
“Yeah, I mean, they’re like
restricted and everything—you can’t have a lot, and you have to be examined
before and after. But if the shit hits the fan, they’re there.”
“Oh,” said Philippe. That sounded
like it would involve too many questions.
“Anyway,” Shanti continued. “Did
you want something?”
“Yeah, I— I—” Philippe was drawing
a complete blank. “I wanted something, something important. Damn it! I can’t
remember what it is. Damn! I can’t believe it! I can’t
think
anymore!”
“Hey, hey, don’t get upset,” said
Shanti. “It’ll come back to you, whatever it is.”
But it never did.
It was more than a week since Philippe had split open the
knuckles on his left hand, and they hadn’t even begun to heal. Between the pain
and the shaking, it was hard even to type. His head hurt all the time now, and
at this point it was just a regular thing to be woken up several times each
night by nightmares and to never get a restful night of sleep. He had itchy
rashes all along both arms, presumably from all the patches—they looked so
nasty that he had taken to wearing his gloves whenever he left his bedroom. And
he had developed the same rash on his chest despite the fact that he hadn’t put
any patches there.
But Philippe felt good about
himself. He had decided to do it.
I’ve been feeling like crap,
he thought,
because I haven’t been doing my job. If I do my job better, I’ll
feel better.
If he did his job better, his
subconscious would stop torturing him every night with visions of Guantánamo.
And then he’d actually get more than 30 minutes’ sleep in a stretch. And then
he wouldn’t have to be hopped-up on stimulants all the time. And then his
headaches would go away.
Everything would be better, once he
set things right.
He was going to go over to the
Hosts’ living area and volunteer for a medical examination. He was going to
make
them examine him. And then he was going to have a long chat with either Max or
Moritz—ideally both—about the need for the two of them to put aside their
religious differences and get along. Whatever prophecies they’d been taught,
whatever they believed, the three of them had jobs, important jobs, and they
needed to do them well.
They were diplomats: They had to
work together.
So he walked out into the common
area with Mo and Bi Zui in tow (they called escort duty “Tranging” now),
crossed the floor, and waited for the elevator. When it came, the glowing Host
from his dreams stepped off it and walked away. Philippe ignored him.
They rode the elevator to the
Hosts’ floor, and Philippe walked to their living area. He saw the glowing Host
twice among the café crowd, and when he entered the living area and stopped a
passing Host to ask where Max and Moritz were, he was met by the glowing,
golden face of the dream Host.
“I’m sorry, never mind,” he said,
and turned around.
He walked back, looking down at the
floor the whole time. Despite this measure, he spotted a glowing Host foot with
his peripheral vision during the elevator ride.
He walked into the no man’s zone,
waited for the doors to open, and walked straight back into the infirmary,
making sure the door was closed behind him.
“Hello, George,” he said to the
doctor. “I think I’ve lost my mind.”
Chapter 14
George looked at him for a moment, clearly unsure if
Philippe was kidding or serious. “So, it’s been a good day for you, I take it?”
he finally said.
“Is there a camera on?” Philippe
asked, looking around. “There was a camera in here when I was recovering from
my attack.”
George shook his head. “That’s on
only when I need to monitor someone. Don’t worry: If you need a medical
consultation, it’s confidential. Trang, what’s wrong?”
Philippe took a long, deep breath.
“I’m losing my sanity,” he said.
“Something’s happened to me—I think maybe that attack did something bad.”
“Well,” said George, gesturing for
Philippe to sit on a bed as he pulled up a chair. “Let’s sit down and have a
talk. I’ve been noticing that you’ve been looking very tired and stressed out
lately. You’ve stopped working out with Baby and me.”
“I haven’t had the energy,” said
Philippe, defensively.
George nodded. He clearly wasn’t
taking it personally.
“Have you been sleeping?” he asked.
“Oh, God, not at
all,
” said Philippe.
It felt so good to finally be able to talk to someone about it—he told George
all about the nightmares, the headaches, the rashes, the knuckle wound that
wouldn’t heal.
“And I’m—” Philippe stopped and
took a deep breath. This was the hairy bit. “I’m seeing things.”
George did not, as Philippe had
feared he might, immediately drop his scroll, seize him by the jacket, and toss
him into a padded cell. Instead, George nodded his head, as though seeing
things that weren’t there was a totally normal, totally healthy occurrence.
“What sort of things?” he asked.
“In my nightmares, I see a Host who
glows. And I’ve been seeing him when I’m awake, too, in other Hosts—they glow,
too.”
George nodded again. “So when you
look at the Hosts, they’re glowing.”
“Yes,” said Philippe. “They glow
with a golden light. And they’re more yellow than they usually are.” He put his
face in his hands. “Doesn’t that sound
crazy?
”
Philippe looked up at George, who
still looked not the least bit shocked.
“Is that all the time, or only
every now and then?” he asked, in a calm, conversational tone of voice.
“Every now and then,” Philippe
replied.
George cocked an eyebrow. He
looked—
confident,
Philippe realized.
“The glow that surrounds them—does
it shimmer?”
“Shimmer?” Philippe echoed.
He had been expecting to be asked
questions more along the lines of
Do you want me to notify your family that
you’ll be living in an asylum from now on?
He also hadn’t really carefully
observed the glow—it hadn’t occurred to him that the type of glow might make a
difference—so he had to think back on it a bit.
“I guess they shimmer,” he said
after a moment. “A little bit.”
“Let me ask you,” George continued,
“do you have a headache right now?”
Philippe nodded. “I’ve had a
headache all week,” he said. “All month, really.”
“And analgesics aren’t helping.”
“Right.”
George adjusted his posture. “How
would you describe the headaches?”
What kind of stupid question is
that?
Philippe wondered, beginning to feel downright irritated by George’s
calm. “My head aches—there’s pain, whatever. You know, I seem to be going
crazy. I think that may be more medically significant than how my headache
feels.”
“Not necessarily,” said George,
with a small smile. “Would you describe it as a throbbing pain?”
“Kind of,” Philippe said,
irritably.
“Hmm,” said George. “Any nausea?”
“Sometimes,” Philippe replied
George went “hmm” again. “Aside
from the glowing, have you noticed other visual distortions? Blind spots or
zigzagged lines?”
“Zigzagged lines?” said Philippe. “No,
nothing like that.”
“No rainbows? No other
hallucinations?”
“Are you pulling my leg?” asked
Philippe. “No, nothing like that, just the glow around the Hosts—isn’t that
enough? And they’re a different color, a yellow-gold color. Like the guy in my
nightmares, that’s what they look like.”
George nodded. “You say you’ve had
problems sleeping. Have the headaches you’ve been having been bad enough to
wake you up?”
Philippe nodded. “Well, the
nightmares
are what wake me up—the Host shrieks like those Swimmer drones did when I
was attacked. But, it’s true, a lot of the time when I wake up from the
nightmares, the headaches are pretty bad.”
“How much caffeine do you usually
consume?”
“Um, usually not so much,” Philippe
replied, aware that he was evading the question. “Lately, however, I’ve been
taking a lot more, you know, because I haven’t been sleeping so well. The
extra-caffeine bars.”
“Just for breakfast?” asked George.
“Breakfast and lunch,” said
Philippe. “And sometimes dinner.”
“What about stimulant patches?”
George asked, his expression becoming, if anything, even more bland, even less
judgmental. “Are you wearing a patch right now?”
“Um, yes,” said Philippe.
“Just one?” George continued. “Or
more than one?”
“More than one,” Philippe replied,
feeling a little guilty.
“How many?”
“Five.”
George made a note on his scroll.
“And that’s pretty typical? In this past month or so?”
“Just lately,” said Philippe,
defensively. “Before, I didn’t need it—I could sleep.”
“You don’t have any hardware up
here, do you?” said George, tapping his head with his stylus.
“No,” said Philippe. “Do you think
I’m going to have to get some?”
The doctor shrugged.
“I doubt it. I can give you a scan
if you really want,” he said, his expression making it clear that he would
consider that a colossal waste of time and effort. “But it sounds to me like
there are two things going on, and they’re probably making each other worse.
The first thing is post-traumatic stress disorder, also called PTSD. That, as
you may know, can emerge well after a traumatic event, and it can be triggered
by a new trauma, such as—and I’m reaching for an example here—being
electrocuted in an unprovoked attack by a hostile alien. PTSD can cause
insomnia, nightmares, and heightened anxiety.
“The other thing is migraines,
which can cause visual hallucinations like the kind you have described—glowing
halos around objects—as well as many other kinds of hallucinations. And of
course, they cause pain. Migraines can be triggered by not getting enough
sleep, too much caffeine, and stress.”
Philippe stared at George, stunned.
Could it be that simple?
he wondered.
“Not like you’ve experienced any of
those things,” George continued, dryly.
Philippe started laughing.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh, thank
God. I really thought I was losing my mind.”
“Not just yet,” said the doctor.
“God, that’s just—that’s such a
relief!
Migraines!
They can do all that?”
“And more,” said George, smiling.
“You forget, Trang, that I talk to you every day. You’re not disassociated from
reality. You’re not crazy. Tense, yes. Crazy, no.”
Philippe flopped back on the bed,
his body limp with relief. “Oh, that’s really good to hear,” he said to the
white ceiling.
After a moment, he sat back up. “So,”
he said, “since I’m not crazy, what do you think I should do for this other
stuff?”
“Well, there are a number of
treatment options,” said George. “But I think the first things you should try
are cutting down on your caffeine and stimulants, and reducing your stress.
Don’t stop the caffeine cold turkey—that will make the headaches worse. I’ll
give you a schedule for tapering off. As for the stress—well, you’ve been stuck
here for three months. Have you considered taking some leave?”