“Here she is,” say the girls in a single voice. They untie the strap and prod Alicia forward toward the ancient queen.
“Child,” says the old woman in a deep, craggy raisin voice. “Here you are, and here you will stay.”
A wave of nausea sweeps through Alicia. “But my sisters…”
The woman waves her hand dismissively. “It is they who agreed to send you here in the first place.”
Alicia is stunned. “That can’t be true!” She’s certain it’s a lie. This woman is wicked.
The queen opens her arms. “Come forward, child,” she says more kindly. “You are the magical spirit we’ve awaited. This is where you will develop your skills. You belong to us now.”
Lying on her right side, Syd feels a gentle stroke on her left cheek, and opens her eyes to a bronze-skinned woman with fierce blue eyes and a riot of white hair, dressed in a red cape and a colorful skirt. She wears tourmaline, emerald, and topaz rings on three fingers of her long, worn hand.
Syd’s not sure who she is anymore—(Alicia? Syd?)—or where she is. The room is dark. Is she in the gypsy camp? Inside the tent? This woman is younger and more beautiful than the gypsy queen. More vibrant. Still, there’s a connection somehow. Perhaps this woman is a younger attendant of the queen’s? Or a sister? A daughter? Syd tries to talk, but the result is gibberish. She’s not even sure it’s English.
“Shhhh,” the woman says gently. “There now, Sydney, wake slowly from your other reality.”
So now she’s Sydney, not Alicia. She feels like both, like they are interchangeable. She searches the room for a familiar object or image to ground her. The spicy orange fragrance that titillates her sinuses doesn’t match the other hard, cold references in the room—the red laser lights, the beeping equipment, the pillows and bed. Oh, so she’s in a hospital. Again! But this time she’s somehow managed to drag a living breathing gypsy out of her dream and into the room with her. OMG! Does anyone else see the woman? Or maybe Syd’s on morphine. Is she on morphine? Is it because she’s dying?
“Where’s my mother?” she mumbles. “Where’s my aunt?”
“Shhhh,” says the gypsy. “No need to worry. They went home for a rest. They were here all night, and will return when they can.”
Syd rolls slowly onto her back and tries to push up on her elbows, but collapses. Her arms have no strength. She has no strength.
“Let me help you,” says the woman kindly.
She walks around the foot of the bed to the windows, and opens the blinds. “That’s better,” she says. “Light is what you need.” She regards Syd meaningfully, staring deeply into her being. “Light is what everyone needs.”
She returns to the bed and maneuvers the buttons to raise Syd to a seated position. She knows how to maneuver the bed; she doesn’t have to ask. Wherever she came from, she’s able to adjust to this modern setting. She pours water out of the plastic pitcher into a plastic cup, pulls a glass vial out of her skirt pocket, opens it and taps liquid into the cup. “Drink this,” she says, and hands it to Syd.
The woman is surrounded by a haze of yellow light. Maybe it’s just where she’s standing in the morning sun, but still, she’s spectral. Syd can practically see through her. Is she real? Is the drink real? “What did you put in the water?” she asks the woman.
“Just a little potion—an elixir to strengthen your vitality for the road ahead.”
Syd glares. “Why? What’s going to happen?”
The gypsy shakes her head slowly. “Nothing we can’t handle together,” she says quietly.
Syd accepts the cup, and smells the water. “It’s spicy.”
The gypsy nods. “Tell me what’s in it,” she says expectantly. “I think you’ll figure it out, Elysha. It’s within your ken.”
Syd stares at her, confused. “Why did you just call me Alicia? You called me Sydney earlier, didn’t you?”
The woman nods. “I did.”
“Then why did you just call me Alicia? That was a dream. In this place I’m called Sydney.”
The woman nods knowingly. “I will call you Sydney if you wish, but in my heart, dear child, you will always be Elysha. I named you that once.”
Syd tries harder to climb out of the dream, or make the hallucination disappear. “If I drink this, will you leave?” she says.
The woman chuckles. “No, dear, not at all. I’m here to save you. It’s a promise I made to Marguerite lifetimes ago.”
“You mean Mitsy,” Syd says. “Don’t you? You mean my mother.”
The woman looks away. “Your mother this time, yes.”
Syd doesn’t know why she knows these things. This woman’s presence is an avalanche of information hovering over Syd’s head and collapsing into her brain in piles too high to sort through or even shovel. Information for which she has no context but a dream. She inhales the woman’s pungent orange spice, redolent of a memory she can’t name. She’s been on morphine before; she knows what it does. It makes you float on ceilings and wander into portals of unseen dimensions. But somewhere in its haze lies a truth that’s hard to extract any other way.
“Frankincense,” she says, and sniffs again. “And jasmine.” She searches her limited memory of spices and fragrance to identify the missing component. The answer comes on a trail of steam from a gypsy’s tent. “And lemongrass,” she says, though she has never smelled lemongrass in her life.
The woman claps her long, bejeweled hands joyfully. “You remember!” She draws the folding chair to the bed, smoothes her colorful skirt beneath her, and sits down. “You are exquisite,” she says. Her spectacular eyes glow. “You are divine. In all these centuries your spirit remains pure and fully aligned.” A tear travels down her right cheek.
As Syd sips the liquid, the trail of heavy slumber that followed her from one world to the next dissipates and clears. Her vision sharpens, her eyes focus, but the woman remains. She takes another sip. Still here. A nurse enters the room, efficiently tends to Syd’s bedside monitors and IV. She takes Syd’s temperature and pulse, and then says, “The doctor will be here shortly to see you both.”
Both? Syd grips the sheets to keep from floating up. She has never felt less grounded. How many hallucinations can there be in a single room?
“Thank you,” says the gypsy to the nurse.
Syd swallows a lump.
When the nurse is gone, Syd says, “Who are you?”
The woman smiles, squeezes Syd’s hand and says, “My name is Pandora Madigan.”
This takes Syd a minute. “Oh,” she whispers. Pandora. Her mother’s obsession. The voice on the phone.
Before she can question further, Dr. Blanca marches into the room and fixes her gaze on Syd like a period at the end of a sentence. “Well, here we are,” she says. “Everything in its place.”
Syd looks around. “Where?” she says. “What place? What do you mean?”
Dr. Blanca tilts her head quizzically. “You don’t know?”
Syd shakes her head.
“Sydney, this woman…” She points to Pandora. “…is your donor.”
Syd looks over at Pandora, wide-eyed. “My…what?”
The doctor nods, smiling. “Your bone marrow donor. She’s an exact match.”
“But…that’s crazy.”
“At times DNA crosses ethnic boundaries,” says Dr. Blanca. “People are complex creatures from myriad places.” She folds her arms. “We are not one thing.”
“No, not that…” says Syd, trailing off. How can this be!
Pandora moves to the foot of the bed, looking down at Syd and laying her hands on Syd’s blanketed feet. “What’s mine is yours,” she says like a disembodied oracle from another realm.
Or maybe it’s the morphine.
Syd struggles for focus again. Her brain is a tangle of opposing thoughts and emotions. This is an insane coincidence. And yet, why not? Her connection to this woman is undeniable. Didn’t she just drag her out of a dream? The boundaries of reality and imagination
are so stretched and fused she can’t determine what’s really happening, if anything. Is anything happening? Maybe it’s still a dream. Maybe her entire life is a dream. Maybe everyone’s is.
“Am I on drugs?” she says.
Dr. Blanca shakes her head, smiling. “IV Methotrexate,” she says, “no opiates. The generous woman sitting beside you truly is your match. You’re not imagining it.”
Syd swallows hard. “When will the transplant…” She can’t finish the sentence. Her earlier clarity is wearing off.
“We’re not sure,” says Dr. Blanca. She shifts positions, pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her white coat. “Your blood counts…and just your core vitality…are not where we’d like just yet. We’re hoping a few days of rest and IV nutrition will restore you. As long as your system will tolerate it, we’ll continue to prep, but ongoing, that will depend on your condition.” She turns to Pandora. “And Ms. Madigan here will of course require some rest as well. She just arrived from an all night plane trip, after all.”
“I’m fine,” says Pandora.
“And I trust someone is caring for your cat?” inquires Dr. Blanca.
“A cat?” says Syd.
Pandora smiles serenely. “Guru,” she says.
“Guru is the best name ever,” Syd says with effort. “Guru should meet Godiva.”
“Perhaps he has,” says Pandora. “He went home with your mother and aunt about an hour ago. They don’t take cats at the hotel.”
Dr. Blanca points her pen at Pandora. “We’ll run some more tests on you now, Ms. Madigan,” she says, “if you don’t mind. Afterwards we’ll send you off to the hotel for some sleep.” She extends her hand. “Meet you again around 4?”
Pandora shakes the doctor’s hand.
“You’re staying at a hotel?” Syd asks wearily. “You should stay at the farm. It’s….bet…ter.” Her words trail off.
“Your mother offered,” says Pandora. “But I’m…”
“No. Stay there,” says Syd, yawning. “Please? Stay in my room if you want.”
“But your aunt…”
Syd blinks. She remembers Hannah’s position on Pandora which seems like ancient history, since less than a week ago Pandora was just a phone psychic to them. But now she’s not. Now she’s…a donor? Syd still can’t get this through her head. If Dr. Blanca weren’t right here in the same room with them, she’d think it was a scam.
“Aunt Hannah will adjust,” says Syd. “She’s just protective. She has to get…to… know…you.”
“I don’t know,” Pandora says, shaking her head.
Dr. Blanca says, “Come with me, Ms. Madigan?”
Pandora holds up a finger. “Be there in a minute,” she says.
When the doctor leaves, Pandora tells Syd, “Before I go, there’s something I must give you.” She places her hands on Syd’s belly. “I’m going to place it right there, okay? No matter what, don’t let it go. Don’t give it to anyone, anyone at all. Whenever you close your eyes, you’ll see it. When you open them, you’ll imagine it. It’s imperative that you hold onto it without exception.”
Syd’s eyes are rolling back in her head. It’s impossible to keep them open. “In my dreams, you mean?” she mumbles.
“Anywhere,” says Pandora. She turns to the window, raises her hands, closes her eyes, and gathers the streaming light. Syd can see it like she can see the window and the door and the black TV on the wall behind Pandora’s wild white hair. It’s happening. It’s real. Like Merlin, she collects the light and forms it into a dense orb, top to bottom, side to side, and around. She shapes it, condenses it, rotates it, and smoothes the borders between her palms until it’s a perfect radiant sphere. When she’s satisfied, she places it in Syd’s belly. Just like that.
Before she’s finished, Syd is asleep, but the orb burns within her, warming her. She is warm…finally. Whether it’s a dream or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is that this crazy woman cared enough to do it. She formed an orb from the streaming light, and gave it to Syd for safekeeping. People have done loving things for her before—her parents, the doctors, the nurses, Zelda and Dane, and especially Aunt Hannah. But no one has created an orb out of streaming light and placed it in her belly, ever. The light is vibrant, nourishing, and deeply familiar. Its presence recharges her, ignites her. How long will it last?
Almost without transition, she is Alicia standing in front of the gypsy queen on her cypress throne, commanded to drop the red scarf and open her singed gray robe. Threatened, she complies.
The queen smiles with satisfaction, beckoning. “There it is, the light, just as I thought. Bring it to me, dear. You will be highly rewarded.”
Alicia shakes her head. “No,” she says.
Affronted, the queen says, “You must!”
“No.”
“I can take it if I wish,” says the queen. “But it’s preferable that you surrender so it won’t be damaged. If you force me to seize it, you will suffer unduly, as will your light.”
Alicia closes her robe and ties the red silk scarf around her waist to bind it. “The light is mine,” she says. “Surely you have your own.”
The raisin-faced woman stands and glowers at her. “No one has it but you,” she spits. “And you don’t even know what to do with it!” She walks unsteadily toward Alicia. “Well, of course there are others, but very few, and none in the western territory, save you. Enlightened beings are rare.”
“You cannot have my light,” says Alicia. “I’ve been warned to keep it at all costs.”
The woman stomps her foot. “Very well then, your sisters will die.”
“No!”
“You give me no choice.”
The moment the queen grabs her elbow, Syd separates from Alicia. They are two creatures in parallel spheres. She watches helplessly from afar as the queen summons her guards to restrain the girl. As Alicia squirms with discomfort, the queen waves her hands over the girl’s belly teasing out the light, lumen by lumen, with some kind of chant. The light is pulled toward the queen in spite of its substantial resistance. The process is excruciating. Even from afar, Syd feels the burning pain as if it were her own.
“You see that I will have what I want whether you like it or not,” the queen tells Alicia. “But this way, the light will be compromised, and that is a travesty you will pay for with your sisters’ lives.”
Alicia says, “Then take it. Take the light. Spare my sisters!”
“That’s better, dear,” the queen says.
The gypsy tickles her fingers over Alicia’s belly and the light is tendered forth in its fullness. Devoid of it, Alicia collapses. “Bring me to my sisters,” she whispers. “You have what you want.”
A tall, strong woman, much younger, appears in the tent. She points accusingly at the orb in the queen’s possession. “What have you done?” she demands.
“I’ve accepted a gift,” the queen says piously, then hands the orb to her guards.
The younger woman, also dark, approaches. The queen points her twisted wooden scepter threateningly in the woman’s direction. “What’s mine is mine!” she says. But the younger gypsy overpowers the queen and casts her to the ground. As the queen struggles to rise, the woman lifts Alicia in her arms, and carries her off.
“Bring her back, Dorenia!” the queen commands. “The orb is worthless without the girl!”
From her cosmic perch, Syd gasps. She weeps! Whose destiny plays out here? Hers? Her family’s?
Sensing the emotional involvement from beyond, the queen turns her head up and to her right in a penetrating stare, her eyes magnifying with each dimension, until they are bulbous, hideously large, and all Syd can see of her.
“You!” she says, waving her fist directly at Syd. “I will get you, yet!” She reaches greedily through the continuum with both arms until every feature of her physical body is distorted with warp.
She certainly has power, Syd thinks. Or anyway, force. Can she capture Syd as she’d captured Alici
a? Can she move through time? Syd is moving through time; so why not the queen?
Syd closes her eyes to reconfirm the presence of light in her belly—the orb Pandora created earlier. It remains. The queen has something, but she doesn’t have this. Relieved, she darts upward and out and as far from the camp as she can get. What the queen has done to her sisters she may never know.
Pandora
Pandora stands in the parking lot in the shadow of the oncology wing, smoking. Just in case Mitsy or Hannah or a random tobacco nazi happens by to thwart her efforts, she steps behind the dumpster. She chokes, coughing wildly, not because of the smoke, but because the dumpster reeks of acrid waste.
This might be her last cigarette, or next to last or the one after that. In any case, this is definitely her last pack. She would stop right now, but wants to assuage her dependent nervous system so she doesn’t pass anxious DNA along to Sydney. After all, who wants DNA in a state of withdrawal? First do no harm. And anyway, even though Pandora knows there are many reasons for her presence here, she stubbornly believes that her physical DNA isn’t one of them.
She sighs just thinking about the girl, her child by any name. Her presence reignites everything—joy, love, jealousy, passion, grief, transcendence—every human emotion and more. It’s too much. More than Pandora can name; more than she ever knew was there. Lifetime upon lifetime pile upon her, layers of emotional sediment, memories she can barely absorb. It’s clear she caused the child harm at least once, perhaps many times, but it was never intentional. Was it? She loved the girl. Still loves her! The girl is a placid and noble spirit, a balm. All she’s ever been missing is the light the gypsy stole.
She throws the cigarette butt on the ground and squashes it with her boot. That precise light—the girl’s original light—can’t be duplicated. It must be found and restored. The absence of that light is the reason for the child’s sustained vulnerability through lifetimes. The things people don’t know about illness! The things they aren’t ready to hear! Yet in spite of the absence of that light, the child has gone on through so many lifetimes. How has she done it? The strength she must possess to reincarnate again and again in search of that light!
The Anesthesia Game Page 27
