She

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

chapter five

  MEETING QUICKLEY

  SIX DAYS HAVE gone by. Another cold, crisp, early January Canadian morning. Their small house comforts her with its warmth, protecting her from the outside. Her Palm Tungsten E had arrived in the mail the previous Friday. She’s already calling it her second brain, after spending the weekend learning how to use it, upgrading its Datebk with the latest version, adding a couple of games that she doesn’t play for more than a minute.

  One of the first items she put in Datebk was to call Mr. Quickley as Dr. Dering had told her to do. But she seems to be having trouble making a simple phone call. She had found the number in the phone book, but then Smokey wanted to play and she got hungry and she forgot all about making that call.

  She spots the phone as she passes by the desk on her way from the kitchen to upstairs. She pauses. Oops, she was supposed to call the lawyer. She sits down, picks up the phone, but can’t find the number amongst the Post-its on the desk. She sighs and pulls out the phone book again from its drawer. Flipping the pages, she finds the number, writes it down on a fresh Post-it note, and dials it.

  “Mr. Quickley’s office. How may I help you?”

  “Um, yes, Dr. Dering told me to call Mr. Quickley.”

  “Yes, we know Dr. Dering. You have Akaesman syndrome?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Dr. Dering say it was a complete version or partial?”

  “Um, I don’t know.”

  “Well, we’ll find that out from his notes,” she pauses, and the sound of paper being flipped comes over the phone. “We have an appointment available tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. for you to meet with Mr. Quickley. Will that do?”

  She scrambles to try and remember if she has anything on. She hopes not. “Yes. Tomorrow. January 11. What time?”

  “1:00 p.m.”

  “1:00 p.m.,” she says as she turns on her Palm, looks at Datebk in confusion, and quickly picks up the pen to jot the time down on the margin of a letter. Later, she painstakingly fills in the Datebk calendar event dialog box.

  “Bring all the medical papers you have and any documents you’ve received from the Shadow Court. We will also need to see your Canadian birth certificate or citizenship papers, your SIN, and your income tax filings from the last five years. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Yes. Thank you. Um …” The woman hangs up on her. She panics. Had she said 1:00 p.m.? Yes, she’s sure she did. She hopes. And then she suddenly realizes she doesn’t know where to go. She picks up the handset again and punches in the number, apologizes profusely when she hears a hello, and asks for the location and directions.

  The next day she’s standing in front of First Canadian Place, as instructed, steam rising from her mouth in fast bursts. Jim had dropped her off and zoomed off. She hugs to her chest a small box with all her papers, which the lawyer had asked her to bring in, and stares at this soaring square of white marble and glass, trying to figure out where to go in. She’s looking into the bank from the corner of King and Bay, but she’s supposed to find an elevator to go up to the forty-fourth floor. This part doesn’t look tall enough to have forty-four floors. Or more. A blast of wind pushes her, and she suddenly races to the nearest door. Pausing in the warmth, she scans for an opening to the rest of the building, but seeing nothing starts wandering past the tellers. Maybe she should’ve walked down the sidewalk to find a door directly into it. She shivers. She sees a clock. Oh-oh. She’s going to be late. She tries to hurry up, but her legs will not go faster. Eventually she finds a bank of elevators and faces a new problem: not all the elevators go to the forty-fourth floor. People click clack around her as they confidently file into elevators going halfway up the building. She feels like a log being buffeted by waves of workers. Suddenly her eyes alight on the brass numbers that encompass her floor number, and she follows their sign.

  The elevator is posh, and the speed spins her stomach into knots, her head into a whirlpool.

  Ding.

  The forty-fourth floor. In no time, she finds herself in a conference room, books on the wall, a magnificent view down King Street, sitting at a table so glossy she can see a dim outline of her face. The grey-haired, square-faced man across from her is wearing a sober grey suit with a solid navy blue tie and crisp white shirt. Cufflinks poke discreetly out from his sleeves. He asks to see her papers, and she slides her box toward him. He skims through them and then asks the same questions that have become so familiar. When, where, what, how. Never why. She’ll never be allowed to forget that morning at this rate. She answers them dutifully.

  “This is a straightforward case. We’ll make a statement of claim with the Shadow Court for compensation of a complete Akaesman syndrome. We’ll need expert testimony as to your injuries. Dr. Dering will supply that, but we will also arrange for you to see a neuropsychologist. We’ve used him before in these types of cases, with great success. Sharon, my clerk, will have you sign some papers. We’ll need your consent to look at your medical files and examine your income tax returns for the last five years to prove your income-loss portion of your claim. Sharon will be right in.” He slides his chair out, leaves the box on the table, and walks out. As she waits, she feels questions trying to well themselves up and wishes Jim were here. He’d know what questions to ask; he’d know if this was the right lawyer; he’d know what was happening. She suppresses a sob.

  She hears the door open, and Sharon walks by her with a large pile of papers in her hand. “Here we are. Mr. Quickley would like you to sign these blank consent forms. Some are for access to your OHIP records, some for your doctor’s records, some for income tax and other financial information, and some for any other therapists you’ve been seeing, and some just in case. We like you to sign several of them so that you don’t have to come back in when we run out and need more. We’ll fill them in with the date and other information when we need to use them.”

  This doesn’t sound too good. She hesitates in taking the pen Sharon is holding out to her.

  “It’s standard procedure.”

  She takes the pen, pulls the pile closer to her, and begins signing. It’s like an autograph session turned psycho. Soon her hand hurts, her arm becomes sore, and her formerly always neat writing, which has deteriorated since that windy day in June, worsens. She struggles to keep her signature on the line and grips her pen harder. Her signature grows larger, then shrinks, and the pile of papers seems never-ending. At last, she signs the last one, pushes it to the side, and sees wood. She leans back in her chair, exhausted.

  “That’s everything then,” Sharon chirps at her. “I’ll call you in a couple of days after I’ve filed the statement of claim. It’s a standard claim, so we won’t need anything more from you to fill it out. If we do, we can call you at this number?” And she rhymes it off.

  “Yes, that’s my number …”

  “Good then,” Sharon waits for her to stand up and to follow her out the door. They walk one after the other to the reception area, where Sharon opens up the closet where she’d hung up her coat. She reaches in, slides it off the hanger, and holds it out for her. She’s not used to having someone hold her coat so that she can easily thread her arms into the sleeves and shrug it on. It’s rather nice. It hurts much less and is faster than when she’s flailing away at that second sleeve and the coat is hanging heavy off her right shoulder. She pulls the silk scarf out of her pocket and wraps it round her neck. Sharon hands her her hat that she’d placed on the shelf in the closet, and then offers her hand. They shake, and she watches Sharon walk back down the hall as she pulls her gloves out of her other pocket and pulls them on. Through the weighty glass doors, she pushes and heads toward the elevator bank and home.

  True to her word, Sharon calls her in a couple of days. “I’ve filed the statement of claim,” she tells her.

  “Thank you. Um, so, so what happens now?”

  “The Shadow Court has twenty-one days to respond. They can file an outright acceptance of the claim. They can file a partial defence, mea
ning that they accept part of the claim, for example, the income part. Or they can file a full defence. They usually file an outright acceptance, and then we negotiate the amounts we need for medical and income loss plus pain and suffering. Or more usually they first send you to one of their registered treatment providers for a standard course of treatment while paying you a stipend. I believe though …,” she hears paper rustling. “Yes, I believe you’re already going to one of their registered providers, the Haoma Therapy Clinic. So it’ll just be a matter of them agreeing to pay for the treatment you’ve received already and future treatments. The pain and suffering portion has been capped by the Supreme Court, so we base it on the worst possible injury receiving the maximum amount and depreciate it from there. Now, this does take a bit of time, but I see here you have a small trust fund income. That should tide you over until we finalize the settlement.”

  “I see,” she chews her lip. “What if they file a fu-fu-full defence?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. They rarely do, especially with what you told us how there was no Akaesman Patrol before you entered the forest.”

  “Oh. I don’t understand.”

  “Did Dr. Dering not explain all of this to you?”

  “No.” She hears a muffled tut-tut.

  “There needs to be a patrol on both sides of where Akaesman has been spotted. The Shadow Courts of North America monitor Akaesman’s movements within each Court’s territory and between their territories. They use miasma radar. It’s designed to detect Akaesman. He lurks in his own time and nothing space and is able to see everyone in all our times and space, but when he’s looking for humans, he leaks some of his self into our time and space, and the radar detects that. It was developed by a Canadian, you know. But getting back to my point, they use this radar to track when he enters North America and where he lands and waits for his next victim so …”

  “Next victim?”

  “Yes. We believe you are a victim. Remember that. Are you sure Dr. Dering didn’t tell this to you?”

  “No. I mean, yes.”

  “Well okay. You see Akaesman is a being who derives his energy from dwelling in humans. When he sees a human get close enough, or one he likes, we’re not sure which, he bursts out of his time into ours. Some believe that because the patrols report seeing him in different size when he enters Earth and because the radar can’t detect him once he’s invaded someone that maybe there’s a main body in his own nothing space from which he shoots out satellite bodies into our time, and these bodies reconnect to the main one once they’ve fed on human energy. But back to my point; he feeds off neural energy, the kind of energy created by neurons in your brain. As he feeds, they shrivel up, and the blood flow to them becomes cauterized or shut off. He also changes and grows certain parts of the brain. We’re not sure what his ultimate aim is, but he does change people permanently, especially if they don’t fight for who they really are, we know that. The Shadow Courts were set up when the governments realized that they might be open to exorbitant claims if people found out about this and decided they didn’t like these changes and that the governments could’ve done something to stop them. So these Courts serve to mitigate the damage.

  “We’re only now really finding out what he does, and we don’t really understand the full effect of Akaesman syndrome. But that’s more in Dr. Dering’s line of work. What we do here is to get you the treatments and income compensation. We also try to get you something for the pain and suffering you’re going through.”

  She doesn’t believe there’s been much pain and suffering, not like when her parents died on Highway 7. It sounds a bit bogus to her, like free money.

  “… state and each province has one, and they work together, kind of like NATO, to track him, to let local authorities know when he’s entered their area, and then to protect the public from him. The Akaesman patrols are supposed to set up roadblocks on either side of where Akaesman has settled, but sometimes he’s too quick or they’re too slow. Sometimes he eludes the miasma radar. In all those cases, Akaesman engages with people. And that’s when the Shadow Courts help his victims. They’re set up to process the statements of claim. It’s based on our shared system of common law. So you have to make a claim, but most show typical signs of the syndrome, like you, and claims aren’t a big deal. So don’t worry about it. We’ve been doing this a long time.”

  “Oh,” she whispers as she gnaws her lower lip furiously and strives to keep up. A small voice in her head says it’s all too fantastical to be true. “But, but I thought I was-s-s an, an exception.”

  “An exception? Oh, you mean because you show active signs months after the invasion? Well, it is true, but one of the things we don’t like to admit is how many people have been invaded. Most people don’t report it, we’re beginning to realize. It’s a hidden epidemic. And we know that because the number of exceptions, of people like you, is large. You are a typical exception.

  “Now, the Shadow Courts have listed the accepted treatments and which registered treatment providers may provide them. As I said, Haoma is one of them, and we’ll contact them to have them fill in and send a treatment plan to the Court. The Court will then pay them directly. Any predisposition to Akaesman or previous sickness does not obviate the Shadow Court’s responsibility to the victim.”

  “I’ve never been sick,” she says with irritation.

  “That’s good then. The Shadow Court hires a lawyer to represent them, and the government has a department that represents Akaesman. The province appoints judges to oversee those cases where the Shadow Court files a partial or full defence and to mediate between the Shadow Court and Akaesman lawyers and the claimant’s lawyers.” She stops.

  “Oh.”

  “Between Dr. Dering and Mr. Quickley, you’ll be fine in no time. You’re in good hands.”

  “Oh. Okay. Thank you.”

  “If you have any questions, you can call me.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  She hangs up and stares at the wall behind the desk. Smokey jumps up on her lap, kneading her legs, arching her back. She strokes her absently, and a purr rises up, penetrating her fog and confusion. She looks down at her grey and white striped cat kneading furiously. Her hand stills. Smokey stops kneading and takes short back-and-forth walks across her legs, arching her back to get that stroking going again, looking up at her in slant-eyed bliss. She smiles back.

  ~~~*~~~