Unpossible Page 6

  Paula thought, what the hell’s the matter with her?

  "We’re about to eat," Steph said. "Sit down and join us."

  "No, we’d better get going," Paula said. But there was nothing back at her house. And whatever they were cooking smelled wonderful.

  "Come on," Steph said. "You always love our food." That was true. She’d eaten their meals for a month.

  "I just have a few minutes," Paula said. She followed Steph into the dining room. The long, cloth-covered table almost filled the room. Ten places set, and room for a couple more. "How many of you are there?" she said.

  "Seven of us live in the house," Steph said as she went into the adjoining kitchen.

  "Looks like you’ve got room for renters."

  Paula picked a chair and sat down, eyeing the tall green bottle in the middle of the table. "Is that wine?" Paula asked. She could use a drink.

  "You’re way ahead of me," Steph said. She came back into the room with the stems of wine glasses between her fingers, followed by an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old black girl—Tanya? Tonya?—carrying a large blue plate of rolled tortillas. Paula had met her before, pushing her toddler down the sidewalk. Outside she walked with a dragging limp, but inside it was barely discernible.

  Steph poured them all wine but then remained standing. She took a breath and held it. Still no one moved. "All right then," Steph finally said, loud enough for Merilee to hear.

  Tonya—pretty sure it was Tonya—took a roll and passed the plate. Paula carefully bit into the tortilla. She tasted sour cream, a spicy salsa, chunks of tomato. The small cubes of meat were so heavily marinated that they could have been anything: pork, chicken, tofu.

  Tonya and Steph looked at Paula, their expressions neutral, but she sensed they were expecting something. Paula dabbed a bit of sour cream from her lip. "It’s very good," she said.

  Steph smiled and raised her glass. "Welcome," she said, and Tonya echoed her. Paula returned the salute and drank. The wine tasted more like brandy, thick and too sweet. Tonya nodded at her, said something under breath. Steph said something to Merilee in that other language. Steph’s eyes, Paula noted with alarm, were wet with tears.

  "What is it?" Paula said. She put down the cup. Something had happened that she didn’t understand. She stared at the pure white tortillas, the glasses of dark wine. This wasn’t a snack, it was fucking communion.

  "Tell me what’s going on," she said coldly.

  Steph sighed, her smile bittersweet. "We’ve been worried about you. Both of you. Claire’s been spending so much time alone, and you’re obviously still grieving."

  Paula stared at her. These sanctimonious bitches. What was this, some kind of religious intervention? "My life is none of your business."

  "Claire told me that you’ve been talking about killing yourself."

  Paula scraped her chair back from the table and stood up, her heart racing. Tonya looked at her with concern. So smug. "Claire told you that?" Paula said. "And you believed her?"

  "Paula ... "

  She wheeled away from the table, heading for the living room, Steph close behind. "Claire," Paula said. Not yelling. Not yet. "We’re going."

  Claire didn’t get up. She looked at Steph, as if for permission. This infuriated Paula more than anything that had happened so far.

  She grabbed Claire by her arm, yanked her to her feet. The headphones popped from her ears, spilling tinny music. Claire didn’t even squeak.

  Steph said, "We care about you two, Paula. We had to take steps. You won’t understand that right now, but soon ... "

  Paula spun and slapped the woman hard across the mouth, turning her chin with the blow. Steph’s eyes squeezed shut in pain, but she didn’t raise her arms, didn’t step back.

  "Don’t you ever come near my daughter again," Paula said. She strode toward the front door, Claire scrambling to stay on her feet next to her. Paula yanked open the door and pushed the girl out first. Her daughter still hadn’t made a sound.

  Behind her, Steph said, "Wait." She came to the door holding out Claire’s backpack and CD player. "Some day you’ll understand," Steph said. "Jesus is coming soon."

  "You’re a Christian, aren’t you?" Esther Wynne said. "I knew from your face. You’ve got the love of Jesus in you."

  As the two women picked at their breakfast trays, Esther told Paula about her life. "A lot of people with my cancer die quick as a wink," she said. "I’ve had time to say goodbye to everyone." Her cancer was in remission but now she was here fighting a severe bladder infection. They’d hooked her to an IV full of antibiotics the day before. "How about you?" Esther said. "What’s a young thing like you doing here?"

  Paula laughed. She was 36. "They think I have a TLA." Esther frowned. "Three-letter acronym."

  "Oh, I’ve got a couple of those myself!"

  One of the web pages Dr. Louden gave her last night included a cartoon cross-section of a brain. Arrows pointed out interesting bits of the temporal lobe with tour guide comments like "the amygdala tags events with emotion and significance" and "the hippocampus labels inputs as internal or external." A colored text box listed a wide range of possible TLE symptoms: euphoria, a sense of personal destiny, religiosity ...

  And a sense of presence.

  Asymmetrical temporal lobe hyperactivity separates the sense of self into two—one twin in each hemisphere. The dominant (usually left) hemisphere interprets the other part of the self as an "other" lurking outside. The otherness is then colored by which hemisphere is most active.

  Paula looked up then, her chest tight. Her companion had been leaning against the wall, watching her read. At her frightened expression he dropped his head and laughed silently, his hair swinging in front of his face.

  Of course. There was nothing she could learn that could hurt her, or him.

  She tossed aside the pages. If her companion hadn’t been with her she might have worried all night about the information, but he helped her think it through. The article had it backward, confusing an effect for the cause. Of course the brain reacted when you sensed the presence of God. Neurons fired like pupils contracting against a bright light.

  "Paula?" someone said. "Paula."

  She blinked. An LPN stood by the bed with a plastic med cup. Her breakfast tray was gone. How long had she been ruminating? "Sorry, I was lost in thought there."

  The nurse handed Paula the Topamax and watched as she took them. After the required ritual—pulse, blood pressure, temperature—she finally left.

  Esther said, "So what were you thinking about?"

  Paula lay back on the pillows and let her eyes close. Her companion sat beside her on the bed, massaging the muscles of her left arm, loosening her cramped fingers. "I was thinking that when God calls you don’t worry about how he got your number," she said. "You just pick up the receiver."

  "A-men," Esther said.

  Dr. Louden appeared a few minutes later accompanied only by Dr. Gerrholtz, the epidemiologist from the CDC. Maybe the other specialists had already grown bored with her case. "We have you scheduled for another PET scan this morning," Louden said. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all last night, poor guy. "Is there anyone you’d like to call to be with you? A family member?"

  "No thank you," Paula said. "I don’t want to bother them."

  "I really think you should consider it."

  "Don’t worry, Dr. Louden." She wanted to pat his arm, but that would probably embarrass him in front of Dr. Gerrholtz. "I’m perfectly fine."

  Louden rubbed a hand across his skull. After a long moment he said, "Aren’t you curious about why we ordered a PET scan?" Dr. Gerrholtz gave him a hard look.

  Paula shrugged. "Okay, why did you?"

  Louden shook his head, disappointed again that she wasn’t more concerned. Dr. Gerrholtz said, "You’re a professional, Paula, so we’re going to be straight with you."

  "I appreciate that."

  "We’re looking for amyloid plaques. Do you know what those are?" Paula shoo
k her head and Gerrholtz said, "Some types of proteins weave into amyloid fibers, forming a plaque that kills cells. Alzheimer patients get them, but they’re also caused by another family of diseases. We think those plaques are causing your seizures, and other symptoms."

  Other symptoms. Her companion leaned against her shoulder, his hand entwined in hers. "Okay," Paula said.

  Louden stood up, obviously upset. "We’ll talk to you after the test. Dr. Gerrholtz?"

  The CDC doctor ignored him. "We’ve been going through the records, Paula, looking for people who’ve reported symptoms like yours." She said it like a warning. "In the past three months we’ve found almost a dozen—and that’s just at this hospital. We don’t know yet how many we’ll find across the city, or the country. If you have any information that will help us track down what’s happening, you need to offer it."

  "Of course," Paula said.

  Gerrholtz’ eyes narrowed. She seemed ready to say something else—accuse her, perhaps—but then shook her head and stalked from the room.

  Esther watched her go. After a minute of silence, the woman said, "Don’t you worry, honey. It’s not the doctors who are in charge here."

  "Oh I’m not worried," Paula said. And she wasn’t. Gerrholtz obviously distrusted her—maybe even suspected the nature of Paula’s mission—but what could that matter? Everything was part of the plan, even Dr. Gerrholtz.

  By noon they still hadn’t come to get her for the scan. Paula drifted in and out of sleep. Twice she awoke with a start, sure that her companion had left the room. But each time he appeared after a few seconds, stepping out from a corner of her vision.

  The orderly came by just as the lunch trays arrived, but that was okay, Paula wasn’t hungry. She got into the wheelchair and the orderly rolled her down the hall to the elevators. Her companion walked just behind them, his dusty feet scuffing along.

  The orderly parked her in the hall outside radiology, next to three other abandoned patients: a gray-faced old man asleep in his chair; a Hispanic teenager with a cast on her leg playing some electronic game; and a round-faced white boy who was maybe twenty or twenty-one.

  The boy gazed up at the ceiling tiles, a soft smile on his face. After a few minutes, Paula saw his lips moving.

  "Excuse me," Paula said to him. It took several tries to get his attention. "Have you ever visited a yellow house?" The young man looked at her quizzically. "A house that was all yellow, inside and out."

  He shook his head. "Sorry."

  None of the women still at the yellow house would have tried to save a man, but she had to ask. The boy had to be one of the converts, someone Paula’s mission had saved.

  "Can I ask you one more question?" Paula said, dropping her voice slightly. The old man slept on, and the girl still seemed engrossed in her game. "Who is it that you’re talking to?"

  The boy glanced up, laughed quietly. "Oh, nobody," he said.

  "You can tell me," Paula said. She leaned closer. "I have a companion of my own."

  His eyes widened. "You have a ghost following you too?"

  "Ghost? No, it’s not a—"

  "My mother died giving birth to me," he said. "But now she’s here."

  Paula touched the boy’s arm. "You don’t understand what’s happened to you, do you?" He hadn’t come by way of the yellow house, hadn’t met any of the sisters, hadn’t received any instruction. Of course he’d tried to make sense of his companion any way he could. "You’re not seeing a ghost. You’re seeing Jesus himself."

  The boy laughed loudly, and the teenage girl looked up from her game. "I think I’d know the difference between Jesus and my own mother," the young man said.

  "Maybe that’s why he took this form for you," Paula said. "He appears differently for each person. For you, your mother is a figure of unconditional love. A person who sacrificed for you."

  "Okay," the young man said. He tilted his head, indicating an empty space to Paula’s right. "So what does yours look like?"

  God came through the windshield on a shotgun blast of light. Blinded, Paula cried out and jammed on the brakes. The little Nissan SUV bucked and fishtailed, sending the CDs piled on the seat next to her clattering onto the floorboards.

  White. She could see nothing but white.

  She’d stopped in heavy traffic on a four-lane road, the shopping center just ahead on her right. She’d been heading for the dumpsters behind the Wal-Mart to dispose with those CDs once and for all.

  Brakes shrieked behind her. Paula ducked automatically, clenched against the pending impact, eyes screwed shut. (Still: Light. Light.) A thunderclap of metal on metal and the SUV rocked forward. She jerked in her seatbelt.

  Paula opened her eyes and light scraped her retinas. Hot tears coursed down her cheeks.

  She clawed blindly at her seatbelt buckle, hands shaking, and finally found the button and yanked the straps away. She scrambled over the shifter to the passenger seat, the plastic CD cases snapping and sliding under her knees and palms.

  She’d found them deep in Claire’s closet. The girl was away at her father’s for the mandated 50% of the month, and Paula had found the CDs stacked hidden under a pile of blankets and stuffed animals. Many of the cases were cracked and warped by heat and most CDs had no cases at all. The day after the bonfire, Paula had caught the girl poking through the mound of plastic and damp ashes and told her not to touch them. Claire had deliberately disobeyed, sneaking out to rescue them sometime before the garbage men took the pile away. The deception had gone on for months. All the time Paula thought Claire was listening to her own music—crap by bubble-gum pop stars and American Idols—her headphones were full of her father’s music: Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, Pearl Jam, Nirvana.

  Paula pushed open the passenger door and half fell out the door, into the icy March wind. She got her feet under her, stumbled away from the light, into the light. Her shins struck something—the guard rail?—and she put out a hand to stop from pitching over. Cold metal bit her palms. Far to her right, someone shouted angrily. The blare and roar of traffic surrounded her.

  Paula dropped to her knees and slush instantly soaked her jeans. She covered her head with both arms. The light struck her neck and curved back like a rain of sharpened stones.

  The light would destroy her. Exactly as she deserved.

  Something touched the top of her head, and she shuddered in fear and shame and a rising ecstasy that had nothing to do with sex. She began to shake, to weep.

  I’m sorry, she said, perhaps out loud. I’m sorry.

  Someone stood beside her. She turned her head, and he appeared out of the light. No—in the light, of the light. A fire in the shape of a man.

  She didn’t know him, but she recognized him.

  He looked down at her, electric blue eyes through white bangs, his shy smile for her only. He looked like Kurt Cobain.

  "I’m not taking the meds anymore," Paula said. She tried to keep her voice steady. Louden stood beside the bed, Gerrholtz behind him holding a portfolio in her hands as big as the Ten Commandments. They’d walked past Esther without saying a word.

  Her companion lay on the floor beside her bed, curled into a ball. He seemed to be dissolving at the edges, dissipating into fog. He’d lain there all morning, barely moving, not even looking at her.

  "That’s not a good idea," Dr. Louden said. He pulled a chair next to the bed, scraping through her companion as if he wasn’t there. Paula grimaced, the old rage flaring up. She closed her eyes and concentrated.

  "I’m telling you to stop the drugs," she said. "Unless I’m a prisoner here you can’t give me medicine that I refuse."

  Louden exhaled tiredly. "This isn’t like you, Paula," he said.

  "Then you don’t know me very well."

  He leaned forward, resting elbows on knees, and pressed the fingers of one hand into his forehead. More TLE patients were rolling in every day. The nurses murmured about epidemics. Poor Dr. Adequate had been drafted into a war he didn’t understand and w
asn’t prepared for.

  "Help me then," he said without looking up. "Tell me what you’re experiencing."

  Paula stared at the TV hanging from the ceiling. She left it on all the time now, sound off. The images distracted her, kept her from thinking of him on the floor beside her, fading.

  Gerrholtz said, "Why don’t I take a guess? You’re having trouble seeing your imaginary friend."

  Paula snapped her head toward the woman. You bitch. She almost said it aloud.

  Gerrholtz regarded her coolly. "A woman died two days ago in a hospital not far from here," she said. "Her name was Stephanie Wozniak. I’m told she was a neighbor of yours."

  Steph is dead? She couldn’t process the thought.

  Gerrholtz took the sheets from her portfolio and laid them on Paula’s lap. "I want you to look at these."

  Paula picked them up automatically. The photographs looked like microscope slides from her old bio-chem classes, a field of cells tinged brown by some preserving chemical. Spidery black asterisks pock-marked the cells.

  "Those clumps of black are bundles of prions," Gerrholtz said. "Regular old proteins, with one difference—they’re the wrong shape."

  Paula didn’t look up. She flipped the printouts one by one, her hand moving on its own. Some of the pictures consisted almost entirely of sprawling nests of black threads. Steph deserved better than this. She’d waited her whole life for a Fore funeral. Instead the doctors cut her up and photographed the remains.

  "I need you to concentrate, Paula. One protein bent or looped in the wrong way isn’t a problem. But once they’re in the brain, you get a conformational cascade—a snowball effect."

  Paula’s hands continued to move but she’d stopped seeing them. Gerrholtz rattled on and on about nucleation and crystallization. She kept using the word spongiform as if it would frighten her.

  Paula already knew all this, and more. She let the doctor talk. Above Gerrholtz’ head the TV showed a concerned young woman with a microphone, police cars and ambulances in the background.

  "Paula!"

  Dr. Gerrholtz’ face was rigid with anger. Paula wondered if that’s what she used to look like when she fought with Richard or screamed at Claire.