Lucidity

by CJ Lyons

  He rolled his eyes. "A wandering Jew in the right place at the right time. How about this, then? Fall of Atlantis?"

  "Right. Santorini they call it now. A Greek Island. They uncovered houses, beautiful art work, frescoes and statues, as well as feats of engineering far advanced from anything expected. Electroplating, metal working, knowledge of medicine and mathematics, even the first known computer--all over 3,000 years ago."

  Now he beamed at her as if she were a star pupil. "Right. Santorini is Thera--or Kallista as the Minoans who lived there called it. But what's important is that they found no human bodies--only remains of a few livestock. Not a single person was left behind. They all disappeared, scattered to the four winds and beyond."

  She twisted around to sit cross-legged before him, enchanted by his tale of ancient history. He gestured with his hands as he continued, "Beads and artifacts traced back to that period and a Mediterranean origin have been found beneath the stones of Stonehenge, in ancient Mayan ruins in Belize, along the coast of France and Africa. An entire population vanished, leaving only bits and pieces behind."

  She smiled at the passion in his voice. "What do the people of Atlantis--"

  "Kallisteans."

  "Kallisteans have to do with Maeve?"

  "It is my belief," his chest puffed out as if he were preparing to ward off any word of ridicule or rebuttal, "that the Kallisteans came here to the west coast of Ireland. And Maeve found them."

  Jimmy shoved aside the remnants of Grace's memories, trying to keep his focus in the here and now. A here and now where he wasn't meant to exist at all.

  Leo pushed away from the wall, flaunting the fact that he had a body to push with, and strode toward Jimmy. "You really think you can save her, do you?" he demanded. "Has it occurred to you that maybe she can't be saved? That maybe she's here to save someone else?"

  "Like who?" Jimmy felt anger surge through him, somehow the strong emotions seemed to help him stay whole, helped to keep him from disintegrating back into the void. "What kind of games are you playing with us, old man?"

  "It's no game. It's deadly serious. And sometimes people must be sacrificed."

  "No! I won't allow it. You can bring me back from the dead, you must have it in your power to save her."

  "It's not a question of what I can or cannot do. It's all up to her. Free will. I can suggest, influence, but only she can decide what is to come next."

  Jimmy considered that. He didn't trust the Jesuit, devil, demon, or whatever Leo Augustine was in reality. But the man had knowledge, power Jimmy needed. "How do you do it?" he asked, forcing himself to sound meek, awe-struck. "Keep your body as if you were alive? Are you alive?"

  "In fact, Leonard Augustine is alive now. Alive and well and living in Los Angeles, as a matter of fact. But he's not me--not yet."

  "You're from the future?" Jimmy's head began to throb as he tried to follow Leo's explanation.

  "Listen here, my boy. Einstein had the right idea. Energy, mass, time. All tied together. When we die, we release energy. Think of all those billions of cells, powered by millions of mitochondria, tiny atomic energy plants. Most of us simply scatter, our energy drifting along the tides of time."

  "Unless," Jimmy prompted.

  "Unless you have enough energy to hold on to a bit of your consciousness. Then, if you pay attention and find a way to harness more energy, you'll find time is like ripples on a pond. It can travel either forward or back. And you can skip like a stone in either direction. If your will and focus are strong enough."

  "So you've traveled here from the future. What happens to Grace? How can I save her?"

  The monk snorted a short laugh. "Christ, you're just as stubborn as Maeve. I haven't only traveled back from the future, I've traveled all through time."

  "You met Maeve? 3500 years ago?"

  "I was the one who warned the Kallisteans and sent them on their way. I was there with Maeve--stubborn woman. Focused on her own wants instead of the greater good. Just like you. I was there on Calvary during the crucifixion, beside the Lion Heart as he destroyed Palestine in the name of that same god, comforted Joan before she burned at the stake. I've tried to warn, to influence, to guide them all--but nothing has changed. Time is catching up. Grace is my last chance."

  Jimmy felt his pulse race at the mention of the great figures of history. "You've seen so much. Why here, why now, why Grace?"

  "Everything I've done has been in an attempt to re-balance the universe, to prevent a great evil from emerging."

  "What evil? What do you want Grace to do? How can she stop it?" Jimmy wanted to wring the answers from Leo, but could only listen, helpless.

  "Aye, there lies the rub. I can observe, suggest, influence. Free will still reigns supreme."

  Jimmy would have paced if he had feet. "But you're solid. You have mass. If you're like me--"

  "Dead."

  "Right. How did--"

  "I told you. Energy, mass, time. Enough energy and you can create mass but you lose your freedom to travel through time. Give up the mass and you can go where and when you want. It's just physics. Laws of the universe."

  "This good versus evil is no law of the universe," Jimmy argued. "Morals are imposed by men, society. Not physics."

  "We don't have time to argue philosophy. Have you never heard of the entropy effect?"

  "Everything is headed toward destruction from the moment it's created."

  "There you go. Destruction equals chaos, chaos equals evil. Lesson over. Come, my boy, if you're going to stick around, then I've got work for you."

  "No. I want to see Grace. I want to be with Grace."

  "So sorry, you've missed your chance. While you were prattling on about morals and semantics, she crossed over into the Tower. There you can not follow."

  Kat sat sideways on the couch, her head cradled by the window. One o'clock. Only five more hours before daylight again. Maybe they'd even see the sun today. Instead of grey steel clouds that swallowed all light. She dared to hope.

  She stifled a yawn, then pinched herself to keep awake. She could do five hours, piece of cake. Sleep was overrated anyway.

  Her door opened a crack, allowing light from the hallway to spill inward. Kat jumped and turned guiltily to the woman in the doorway. "I was just going to the bathroom," the words rushed out, her voice tight with fear. "I'm going right back to bed."

  "It's okay, Kat. It's me." Grace entered and joined her at the couch.

  "Grace? You shouldn't come here--not alone, not at night."

  "Why not? I was worried about you."

  Kat straightened. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine."

  Grace was silent for a moment, her gaze never leaving Kat's face. She took Kat's hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. "What's so scary that you won't go to sleep?"

  What didn't scare her? Kat thought with chagrin. She remained silent for a long moment, but the idea of someone listening, of being there in the dark with her, was too compelling to ignore. "Sometimes I'm frightened I won't wake up--or if I do, I won't be me anymore. I'll be a vegetable, drooling and peeing my pants, not able to walk or talk. Or worse, I'll still be me on the inside but no one will know."

  "You mean like in a coma?"

  "Yes, but awake on the inside."

  "It's called the locked box syndrome," Grace told her.

  "Locked box. Yeah, it feels like being buried alive in a coffin, locked in with no way out again."

  "Feels like? Kat, when did this happen to you?"

  Kat fought against the shudder the memory brought with it and lost. Grace pulled her into her arms.

  "Last week," Kat whispered. "When the Witch took me."

  "Who took you? Took you where?"

  Kat began to weep. She hated to admit it but it felt good to have a grown up care about her--not that her parents didn't, but they had too much to think about and Kat was already such a burden to them.

  Snap out of it, she told herself. Think of all those kids your age o
ut on the streets, fending for themselves, or drafted to fight wars, starving in Africa. You've got it easy, three meals a day, roof over your head, your own bathroom--just 'cause your brain doesn't work right is no reason to get all whiny and wimpy.

  "Tell me what happened," Grace said.

  Kat wiped her nose on her pajama sleeve. She kept her other hand entwined with Grace's--that wasn't being a wimp, was it? She needed the contact to give her strength to face the memory of last Thursday night.

  "My surgery was supposed to be last week," she began. "But they didn't have enough data to build the map of my brain. They need that so they don't cut out the good parts, what little's left."

  "But you sabotaged the download. Alex told me."

  "Yeah, I just wanted to wait 'til after my birthday. I know it sounds stupid, but--"

  "That's all right, I understand."

  "The Witch--Dr. Warden--figured out that I was turning off my recorder. So she called my parents and told them not to visit because I wasn't cooperating. I only get to see them once a week anyway, so that was really unfair." Her voice tightened and she was afraid she'd start crying again. But she took a deep breath and didn't.

  "She had no right to do that," Grace said. "You're a child, alone here facing a serious illness. Of course you need your parents beside you."

  "I'm not a child!" Kat said. "I don't need my parents. Anyway, they've got too much to take care of, the farm, my brothers and sisters." She shook her head, the electrodes rattling. "I can take care of myself."

  "What else did Dr. Warden do?"

  "That night she had the nurse bring me over to the room for a treatment. She gave me that drug of hers, Lucidine, you know it?"

  Grace went rigid. "Lucidine? Are you certain?"

  When Grace had been a resident Lucidine was just entering its clinical trials. There was one study going in the ER and several upstairs in the OR. She never liked the drug--even though patients said they felt no pain during procedures. The drug spooked Grace. She'd seen several people have an adverse reaction. The feeling of being out of control, totally at someone else's mercy and yet still aware of what was happening was too much for some patients.

  Just like being buried alive.

  "Why did she give you the Lucidine?"

  "She said it would help me not to sabotage what the doctors were doing. The nurse gave it to me and suddenly it was like I was dead. I couldn't feel anything, could hardly breath, couldn't talk, couldn't see--but I could hear, smell, taste. And then--"

  "What happened? Did someone hurt you?" Grace tried to keep the fury from her voice. That Warden had so little consideration for a child's feelings much less her welfare was unconscionable. "It's all right, you can tell me."

  "When I was a kid, just seven or so, I fell off my horse and broke my arm. It really, really hurt and I was so scared, I thought I was gonna die or something. All of a sudden after they gave me the Lucidine I started feeling that same pain again, and I heard Dr. Warden's voice telling me that if I tried to turn off my recorder the pain would come back. She said it over and over and over and I kept feeling the pain, only it wasn't in my arm, it was in my head, and I wanted to scream, get her to stop, tell her I'd be good--" Kat choked down fresh tears, "but I couldn't. I couldn't get her to stop."

  Grace pulled her close. Kat's sobs wracked through her body. "It's all right. It won't happen again, I promise." She glanced out the dark window, the lights of Pittsburgh obscured by rain and mist. Can you wait for me just a little longer, Jimmy? "I won't let it happen."

  Kat's extreme reaction to the Lucidine was probably because of her underlying brain damage from the Rasmussen's. But that didn't excuse Warden's behavior. The doctor should have known better than to use a drug like Lucidine on a patient with neurologic abnormalities. And to misuse a drug to punish a child!

  Warden would pay for it, Grace promised herself. Dearly.

  "What do you want?" she asked Kat once the girl's sobs had calmed down. "Do you want me to call your parents, tell them what happened? They could report Warden."

  Kat shook her head vigorously. "No, you can't do that. They'd send me home, tell me to have the operation somewhere else and my parents can't afford that. If I stay here, they don't have to pay for anything."

  "Want me to talk to Dr. Warden?"

  Another head shake. "You'll just get her mad and she'll do something else. You don't know what she's capable of."

  Grace was certain that Kat was overreacting but then she remembered the feeling of dread that overwhelmed her every time she came close to the ECU. Maybe something more was going on here.

  "Like what? Has she done anything else to hurt you?"

  "Not me. But some of the other freaks--"

  "Don't call yourself that," Grace told her sternly. "Kat, you're a beautiful young lady, not a freak."

  "Yeah, that's me, the girl with half a brain. Anyway, the Skeleton--her real name's Angie," Kat amended when she caught Grace's look of disapproval. "She's only been here a few weeks. She used to cut and scratch herself a lot and she'd make herself throw up after she ate anything. She was crying in her room the other day and I went in, asked her what was wrong and she asked me to cut her."

  "You know, Kat, some kids do that kind of thing as a cry for help," Grace floundered. What the hell did she know about helping an eleven-almost-twelve-year-old understand these things?

  "Oh, I know," Kat said in an off handed manner. "One of the girls in my class used to do it--she was nuts. Anyway, Angie said she couldn't do it herself, anytime she tried her body went numb. Not only couldn't she use her hand to cut herself, but even if she could manage to scrape herself on something like the radiator she couldn't feel it anymore, not since her treatments. And she was scared. 'Cause she said the pain she felt when she cut herself let her know she was alive and if she was alive then there was still some hope, but if she couldn't feel anything, then what was the point of living?"

  "What did you do?"

  "I pinched her real hard and she yelled. And I told her not to give up 'cause she was definitely still alive."

  Grace looked down on the girl-almost-woman before her and couldn't suppress a tear of her own. She wished she had someone like Kat around when she'd been fighting her own battle between suicide and hope.

  Then she remembered Brother Leo sitting at her bedside in the ICU. And after she went home, she'd found Ingrid. Guess she was lucky after all.

  "Is Angie all right now?"

  Kat shrugged. "She doesn't cry anymore, but she doesn't smile either. And she won't talk to me. Says this is something she has to work on alone--whatever that means."

  "I think it means the same thing as when you tell your parents not to come more often because you're just fine," Grace said gently.

  Kat looked down. "Oh. I didn't think of it that way."

  "I know you and Alex think that delaying your surgery won't be a problem. But the sooner you get it over with, the sooner you get to go home."

  Kat jerked her head up at that and Grace saw the panic in her eyes. Sabotaging her surgery had nothing to do with her parents or her birthday, she realized. It had everything to do with fear.

  "Has anyone talked to you about what happens after your operation?"

  Kat shook her head and wouldn't meet Grace's eyes. "Half my brain will be gone. What if it's the half that the kids at school like? Or the part that can whistle even better than my dad can? What if I forget my parents and brothers and sisters--even my dog and my horse? What if," her voice dropped to a whisper, "I don't wake up at all? Not dead but not alive either--what's in between?"

  Grace lifted Kat's chin, directing the girl's gaze back toward her. "Kat, I promise it won't be like that. Did you know that you only use a portion of your brain to start with? So that leaves a whole lot left over that you weren't even using. After the operation you'll have trouble using one side of your body, maybe some trouble talking and chewing--but you're young and they'll help you get stronger. Things won't be the same a
s before, but if you don't have the surgery, the seizures will kill you."

  Kat nodded gravely. "Will I remember everything? I won't be a retard, will I?"

  "No, you won't. But you might forget a few things. It's hard for me to predict without knowing what parts of your brain have been affected by the Rasmussen's."

  "So you don't know either," Kat said, a hint of bitter disappointment in her voice.

  "Not right now. But if I can get to your chart, maybe I can find out more. Would that help?" Kat nodded. "How about we make a deal? You and Alex stop sabotaging your recording, and I'll try to figure out a way to sneak a look at your chart. Deal?"

  Kat took Grace's outstretched hand and shook it. "Deal. But don't come over here at night anymore. That's when they let the Beast out."

  "Don't worry about me. How about if you get some sleep? It's late."

  Kat left the couch and crawled into her bed. Grace sat beside her and held her hand until she drifted off to sleep.

  It was three in the morning when Grace left Kat's side. The ECU was quiet, the lights dimmed. All over the hospital, all over the city, people slept, closer to death at this hour than at any other.

  It was a time of night that Grace was well acquainted with. The time when nightmares hit, the time when dawn seemed too far out of reach, the new day it brought as hopeless as the last. A time when souls wandered, slipping the barriers between what was real and what was not.

  Grace usually never allowed herself to sleep at this time of night--too risky in so many ways.

  No, three in the morning wasn't a time for slumber, not in Grace's world. It was the time to fortify oneself with strong coffee and buckle down, get the work that kept a roof over her head done. Then, finally, when the sun dared to show its face again, then she could think of going to bed, take a chance on a few hours of vulnerability.

  She left Kat's room and crept down the thickly carpeted hall toward the rear of the nurses' station where the patient charts were kept. Now would be the best time to keep her promise to Kat. Then she'd be free to leave in the morning, free to go home where she belonged.