Woman on the Edge of Time

“Connie’s worn out,” Jackrabbit said. “Strangers, every lug asking questions, holding the contact. You imagine there’s no energy drain in catching.”

Luciente put an arm around her. “You look gutted. Remember this food will not sustain.”

“Why not?” She felt thick with fatigue and the room swayed. “I can taste it.”

“As in dreams. You experience throughme … . We better go back.”

“Finish your lunch first.” The voices seemed to drift around her and her eyelids drooped.

“This exhaustion worries me. I must teach you exercises–”

“Not here. Can’t think. Too many people.”

“Come! Give me your arm. We’ll visit again. This is only a false spring, a January thaw of beginning. Back you go.”

She felt leaden, her feet wading through loose sand. As they shuffled out, Luciente looked worried. Standing at last on the stone walk, Connie mumbled, “Clothing. Must change.”

“Your body is where it was, unchanged in dress. Understand, you are not really here. If I was knocked on the head and fell unconscious, say into full nevel, you’d be back in your time instantly … .” Luciente drew her into the firm embrace with their foreheads touching. She was too spent to do more than fall into Luciente’s concentration as into a fast stream, the waters churning her under. She came to propped against the wall of the seclusion room. The tears had dried on the sleeve of her faded dress. She lay down at once on the bare, piss‑stained mattress and fell asleep.

FOUR

Spring in the violent ward was only more winter, except for a little teasing of the eyeballs when she stood at the high, heavily barred window. The radiators still pumped blasts of heat into the air that the smell of disinfectant and stale bodies turned into a foul broth. Pain and terror colored the air of Ward L‑6. Pain silvered the air; when she was lurching into drugged sleep, pain sloshed over from the other beds. Yet spring finally came to Ward L one April Wednesday.

She was sitting near the station, hoping to do some little job to cadge cigarettes. As one of the functional patients, she got on with the attendants, except for an evil redheaded racist bitch on weekends, and with one of them, Ms. Fargo, she got on well. Ms. Fargo was close to her in color and size and age, but black and free–as free as any woman making that kind of wage with six kids at home could be called free.

“I like the Ms. thing,” Fargo told her with a big gap‑toothed grin. “‘Cause I got six kids and no man steady, and that puts me ass first to how it supposed to be. Ms. do me fine.”

Fargo talked to her almost humanly. When Fargo was working, she often waited around near the glassed‑in station and sometimes Fargo would ask her to sweep the floor or take a woman to the bathroom or hold a patient for an injection or sit with a patient coming out of electroshock. Then Fargo would give her extra cigarettes.

She hated being around the shock shop. It scared her. Regularly some patients from L‑6 were wheeled out for shock. One morning there would be no breakfast for you, and then you would know. They would wheel you up the hall and inject you to knock you out and shoot you up with stuff that turned your muscles to jelly, so that even your lungs stopped. You were a hair from death. You entered your death. Then they would send voltage smashing through your brain and knock your body into convulsions. After that they’d give you oxygen and let you come back to life, somebody’s life, jumbled, weak, dribbling saliva–come back from your scorched taste of death with parts of your memory forever burned out. A little brain damage to jolt you into behaving right. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes a woman forgot what had scared her, what she had been worrying about. Sometimes a woman was finally more scared of being burned in the head again, and she went home to her family and did the dishes and cleaned the house. Then maybe in a while she would remember and rebel and then she’d be back for more barbecue of the brain. In the back wards the shock zombies lay, their brains so scarred they remembered nothing, giggling like the old lobotomized patients.