Role Reversal

by Stephen C. Spencer

Eight hours later, the two women stood in front of a nondescript and ramshackle brownstone in the East Village. The top step was badly cracked, and the rip in the superfluous screen door was big enough to admit a pterodactyl. Felicity turned to Maria.

  "Are you serious?"

  "Keeps his overhead down," Maria explained, grinning, "and he passes the savings on to you."

  Felicity made a face. "I have to pay for this? This is your daft idea, remember?"

  Maria pushed a button. "You're the one with the funny dreams. Come on."

  Somebody buzzed them in without asking who they were, and Maria led the way up four flights to apartment 5-D.

  "Ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate." Felicity's Italian was still at the beginner stage, but she recognized Dante's Inferno and read the words over the door—handwritten black letters on a strip of yellow poster board—without any trace of accent. Then she turned to Maria.

  "'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here'? I'll say this much for your doctor friend, he does a great job of keeping expectations low."

  "I never said Miklos was a doctor. I said he was a hypnotist. Last time I saw him, he was installing carpet in Brooklyn...but that was five years ago. He—"

  "Look, Rakosi. This is all—"

  Maria reached over and patted her friend's arm.

  "Relax." She pressed the bell. They heard the muffled chimes of what was supposed to be Big Ben, followed almost immediately by a shout from behind the door.

  "Wait a goddamned minute, willya? I'm coming!"

  Ten seconds later the door opened, revealing a tall thin man in his early twenties, wearing a black beret and a scraggly Van Dyke beard to match. His chinos and sandals were also black, and his white T-shirt bore a faded likeness of Lenin, surrounded by red Cyrillic lettering that translated read WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! A pack of cigarettes was rolled up in the right sleeve. When he saw Maria, his eyes widened with delight.

  "Maria, baby!" He stepped forward and wrapped her in a bear hug, the sheer force of which looked as if it would crush the life out of her. She returned the hug—though a great deal less enthusiastically—and after a few seconds managed to extricate herself.

  "Hello, Miklos," she said. Then she nodded at Felicity, who was watching the proceedings with bemusement. "It's good to see you again. This is—"

  "Felicity, of course. Who else would it be?" Miklos took her hand and bent over it, clicking his heels as he did so. It might have been a more effective gesture if he hadn't been wearing sandals. "I never forget a pretty name when there's a pretty face and body attached to it. You're every bit as gorgeous as Maria said you were. She—"

  "Rubbish. I never told you anything of the kind. And stop slobbering all over her hand, please." Then Maria switched to what Felicity guessed must be Hungarian and exchanged a few lines with her beatnik friend.

  "Sure, baby, sure," Miklos said. He turned to Felicity and leered. "Maria says you have something you need to get off your, ah, chest. Is that right?"

  "More or less." Felicity tried a cold disdainful stare on the man, but if it had any effect on him, it didn't show.

  "Cool. You came to the right place. You know the drill, right? I can't put you under unless you let me. And even then, I can't make you take off your clothes and dance naked on my desk...but if you want to, I won't stand in your way."

  "Miklos!" Maria fired off some more Hungarian at him. Felicity suspected she wouldn't have found the words in any G-rated dictionary of the language, but she was grateful for the intervention.

  Miklos raised his hands in mock surrender.

  "Okay, okay," he said. "That's the trouble with the world today. Nobody can take a joke any more. My apologies, Ms. Carter. I just wanted to make sure you knew the score."

  Felicity nodded. "Maria explained it."

  Miklos bowed again and gestured toward a hallway that led off to the right. "Good. Come with me, and we'll get you sorted out." He turned to Maria and winked. "Make yourself at home. Won't be long, baby."

  "I'll be counting the seconds."

  Maria watched until the door closed behind the two of them. Looking around the curiously pristine living room, she reached for a copy of Magyar Sakkvilág with a picture of Grandmaster Lajos Portisch on the cover. She didn't play much chess, but knew enough to follow along with the game records. Anything to occupy her mind while she waited. She sat down on the sofa and began to read.

  Thirty minutes later, the door at the end of the hall opened and Miklos appeared, alone. He closed the door behind him, glanced back over his shoulder, shook his head, and strode toward Maria. When he got close enough, she saw that the look on the young man's face was a serious one. She felt her heartbeat increase, and the skin on her bare arms prickled with sudden anticipation. She tossed the magazine aside and stood up.

  "Well?" she asked. "Did you find anything out?"

  He shook his head again—not in denial, as it turned out, but in disbelief.

  "Did I ever," he said. "She went under right away and we talked non-stop for about twenty minutes. And she did most of the talking."

  Maria laughed. "For a change."

  "You think that's funny?" He reached for his cigarettes and shook a Marlboro loose from its companions. He stuck it in a corner of his mouth, and lit the thing with a distinctly unsteady hand. Inhaling deeply, he then let the smoke trickle out through his nose and mouth. He stared at Maria through the bluish haze, their faces only inches apart.

  "Laugh this one off, baby," Miklos said. "For the last fifteen minutes, your cute English friend and I did our talking in Hungarian."

  Maria shivered. Again she felt the goose bumps, but kept herself from looking to see whether they were visible. She took a long, slow, deep breath.

  "Felicity doesn't speak Hungarian," she said.

  "Couldn't agree with you more. But whoever I was talking to sure did. Classic Budapest accent, too. Sounded home grown to me."

  "What did she tell you?"

  Miklos took another long drag from his cigarette. Though he had smoked it less than halfway down, he then dropped the remainder into an open can of Mountain Dew standing on the coffee table. Maria heard the sizzle as the Marlboro hit the liquid, but her eyes never left Miklos.

  "I don't know if I should say," he said. "I haven't—"

  "Don't hand me that crap," Maria snapped. "Or are you invoking the sanctity of the carpet installer-patient relationship?"

  "I don't do that shtick any more. I'm—"

  "Miklos!"

  "Okay, okay," he conceded. "If you want to deny me even my smallest pleasures, then fine. You were half right."

  "About what?"

  "About her getting messages from...beyond the grave." Miklos put a hokey Count Dracula accent on the last few words as he raised his hands and wiggled his fingers at Maria to indicate that this was going to be spooky. Maria lifted her eyes skyward in exasperation, then focused them on the beatnik.

  "Now listen to me, te vézna rohadék, because I have never been more serious in my life. Either you tell me what you're talking about within three seconds, or I will tie your arms in a knot behind your back and kick you down four flights of stairs. One. Two. Th—"

  Miklos backed away.

  "Okay," he said quickly. "It's not her relatives she's hearing from. It's yours."

  This time the goose bumps didn't stop at Maria's arms. This time, they crawled all over her.

  "What?"

  "The way your friend tells it, you had an ancestor on the Titanic. He worked in one of the boiler rooms—number 5, I think she said. Apparently he and some of his mates had just finished pumping out the compartment—after they hit the iceberg, you know—and his superior sent him topside to inform the bridge of their progress. Two minutes later, the forward bulkhead gave way and flooded the room in seconds, instantly killing the three men who were still on watch there. The messenger—apart from being one of the black gang, it's not clear who he was—survived, but no one's heard of him since that night. Apparently
he wanted to come back and...explain things."

  Of course. Now Maria knew...everything. With the last obstacle to her understanding removed, she could see the scene in Boiler Room 5 as clearly as if she were watching it on television. She even knew the man's name and his relation to her, though before that instant, she had been ignorant of his existence. She saw the anguish on his face when, only seconds clear of the area, he heard and felt the bulkhead give way below him, dooming his comrades and the ship. She saw him as later, still in shock, he climbed into a lifeboat—one of the last to be lowered into the icy water of the North Atlantic.

  The young woman saw the aftermath, too, as on the man's return to England, he drifted into deeper and deeper obscurity and depression, crushed under the weight of survivor's guilt that stayed with him to his dying day. Most clearly of all, she saw that dying day, and the self-inflicted pistol shot that literally blew out his brains in a cheap Portsmouth hotel room in April of 1913...one year to the day—to the hour—from the time of the Titanic's sinking.

  Maria's eyes filled with tears. She turned away and tried to blink them back; when that failed, she squeezed her eyes shut—so tightly that it hurt. She kept them that way for a very long time; but when she turned back to Miklos, she was once again in control.

  "May I have a cigarette, please?"

  He handed over the pack without a word. She took one and put it between her lips, then leaned forward to get a light. Felicity would have something to say about her smoking, but she would deal with that when it happened.

  "Was that all there was to it?" she asked.

  "You mean, why are your dead relatives bothering her instead of you? Because she picked off the message before it could reach you. You've heard of getting into someone's head? Looks like that's what Felicity did...literally. Even if she didn't know she was doing it."

  "Why?"

  "That's what the dreaming was about. She was trying—subconsciously, anyway—to break the news before you found out for yourself—as you undoubtedly would have done when you got close to the, ah, crash site. Trouble was, she couldn't figure out how to make herself remember things once she woke up." He shrugged. "I guess she was trying to protect you somehow. Damned impressive, if you ask me."

  Maria gestured down the hall.

  "And how much of this is she going to remember?"

  Miklos shrugged again.

  "She said it was up to you."

  At sea

  41° 46' North, 50° 14' West

  "We therefore commit their bodies to the deep, looking for the general Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.”

  With those words, the memorial service for those lost in the Titanic disaster ended. The crowd of perhaps three or four hundred stood silent for a few moments, then slowly, in small groups, turned and walked away. Felicity and Maria, identically and beautifully attired in black mid-calf dresses, lifted their heads and looked at each other.

  Felicity took a deep breath. "I'm glad we came," she said, "but I'm glad it's over."

  "Me too," Maria replied, linking arms with her friend. "Let's go up to the lounge, and I'll buy you a drink."

  "Sounds good. You read my mind."

  "That's more like it," said Maria.

  -30-