Her first memories of life in the twenty-third century were hazy and inextricably bound with the sickly-sweet taste of bile. It was not wholly unfamiliar; the sheets draped over her legs were thin and comfortless, and the shiny, steel basin held beneath her gaping mouth was unmistakably a sick bowl. It smelled familiar, too, like disinfectant and cotton batting and talcum powder dusted over latex gloves.
And Christ almighty, did it feel the same. Nearly three hundred years had done nothing to ease the low ache in the small of her back or the rigid spasticity in her arms and legs. Her legs trembled and juddered convulsively when she stretched them beneath the sheets, and when nausea gripped her guts in a greasy fist, they contracted painfully toward her lopsided pelvis. She swore feebly behind her clenched teeth and spat a gobbet of watery acidic bile into the basin.
"Spasticity?" said a gruff voice at her right ear. "I have something for that."
You were supposed to fix this, she wanted to shout, but her indignation was swamped by another wave of vomit that emerged from her churning gut with a ratcheting splash. Another spasm, and another contraction that splayed her feet and curled her toes and drew her bony knees upward.
When the spasm subsided, the hand holding the sick bowl set it on her lap. "Don't let that spill," the voice admonished, though there was no heat in it, and the hand disappeared from view. The soft scuffle of footsteps was followed by the scrape and jangle of someone sifting through the contents of a drawer. The footsteps returned. Something cold and metallic touched her neck, and she recoiled. The bowl yawed wildly, and the contents threatened to slosh over the sides and spill onto the sheets.
A gloved hand shot out to steady the bowl. "Dammit, I told you not to spill that," groused the voice. Then, more softly. "It's all right. It's just a hypo." Cold metal skimmed the sensitive flesh of her pulsepoint again, and again, she retreated. Hard experience had taught her that most doctors were filthy liars when it came to the effects of their arcane arts upon her ramshackle body. They also lied like hell about how much something was going to hurt.
"No," she tried to protest, but bile and vomit had clogged her throat and rendered her tongue sticky and clumsy inside a mouth far out of practice when it came to speech, and all that emerged was a petulant, unintelligible grunt.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said the voice. The gloved hand persisted, and a moment later, the cool steel found its mark. She braced for the burning pinch of a needle, her hands upraised and fisted spasmodically on either side of her face, but it never came. Instead, there was a brief thump, as though someone had flicked her throat. She let out a ragged, hitching breath and slowly lowered her hands.
"Give that a minute," the voice instructed.
McCoy, her mind supplied helpfully. His name is Dr. McCoy.
No liar, he, the good Doctor McCoy. No sooner had he spoken than her taut muscles had gone slack. Warmth flooded her extremities, and her fingertips, perpetually cold for want of circulation, tingled and grew pink. She blinked in amazement and wiggled fingers suddenly loose and malleable as fresh clay. Her knees dropped to the bed, the buckling span of a collapsing suspension bridge, and her adductors released with an audible creak. She uttered a bark of incredulous laughter and examined her hands as though she had never seen them before.
"Huh," she said admiringly. "What the hell did you do?" She flexed her fingers and wiggled her suddenly-limber legs beneath the bedclothes.
"I gave you a mild dose of Loxtan, a muscle relaxant," came the reply. "If you start feeling loopy or disoriented, or if you start having blurred vision, let me know. It's rare, but it happens."
"I hope it doesn't, because this is amazing." She waggled her fingers again.
"I'm glad you approve," he answered drily. "Now, would you mind holding your bowl? I'm a doctor, not a vomit concierge."
Another bark of incredulous laughter, and she turned to study him. He was younger than she expected, with dark brown hair and a full mouth set in unsmiling line. Piercing brown eyes met her inquisitive gaze, and a muscle twitched in his angular jaw.
He's studying me, she thought logily as her belly gurgled with the threat of renewed mutiny. He's trying to figure out just what he's got.
In that, he was kin with his long-dead brethren in white, those doctors allegedly now moldering beneath the earth or gone to its welcoming embrace as so much dust in their funeral clothes. They had studied her, too, avid children clustered eagerly around a struggling rabbit trapped in a snare. They had poked and prodded and tested for baselines, had prescribed medications through trial and error and bid her decide the side effects with which she could best live. They had poked her with needles and pressed cold stethoscopes to her goosepimpled chest and shoved otioscopes into her ears as though the key to her twisted limbs and recalcitrant muscles lay in the wax-scummed canals of her ears. Neurologists and orthopedic specialists and physical and occupational therapists, each with their own pet theories and surefire regimens guaranteed to improve her "quality of life."
As if they had known anything of her life. They had been good and competent men all, and she had no doubt that they had been moved by a distant compassion, a desire to see her made comfortable in her incurable inferiority, but they had never known her, never cared to look beyond the clinical enumeration of diagnostic facts. She was not Rosalie Walker, daughter of Sherrilyn and George Walker, but Walker, Rosalie, female presenting with congenital moderate spastic quadriplegic Cerebral Palsy with secondary impairments, including amblyopia, myopia, hypertonia, and muscular atrophy. They had reduced her to the sum of her diagnosis and misaligned parts, and they had never peered behind her twitching, unruly limbs to discover the soul that lived within that untidy, ill-conceived frame.
Far from improving her life, they had devoured it with their incessant rounds of rehab and occupational therapy. Time she could have spent reading in the sun or rolling through Centennial Olympic Park with the sun on her back had been squandered to the whims of physiotherapists who demanded she drag her unwilling legs from one end of the parallel bars to the other and do flailing, drunken leg lifts until her muscles screamed and sweat trickled into her asscrack, and to occupational therapists who insisted she play with toddlers' toys and crayons and fat pencils meant for smaller hands than hers in order to prove her intellectual mettle. While other teenage girls perfected the art of makeup application and engaged in awkward flirting at the mall food court, she became an intimate of chunky, square blocks meant for precise holes cut in wooden pegboards and imbued her fingers with the soapy smell of Crayolas. No lipstick and rouge for her, only graphite and wax and reams of paper marred by a circle she could never get quite right, a circle that wobbled and collapsed in on itself like a failing star. And while her crayons and pencils weaved over the paper, her overseers hummed and clucked and scribbled notes in files she was never permitted to read. She tossed beanbags into buckets and the gaping, toothless mouths of grinning clowns and sorted change to the cooing encouragement of people who patted themselves on the back and told themselves that they were nobly preparing this broken, unfortunate child for the job market.
As a child, she had wanted to please them, to win their meaningless approval. As a teenager, she had despised them, begrudged them the time they wasted and the energy they pulled from her with their futile attempts to right the fundamental wrongs of her design with exercise and pills they made her slow and stupid and carried with them the unspoken risk of serious side effects. Who needed to fear kidney and liver disease from medication toxicity when your life expectancy was less than fifty years according to the wisdom of gods in white coats and green surgical scrubs that smelled of stale coffee and surreptitious cigarettes puffed in the handicapped stall? Best just to make her as presentable and inoffensive as possible until then, when she could be shut away in the family vault with due pomp and ceremony and promptly forgotten.
As an adult, she had pitied them for their smug condescension and their unwitting ignorance, and she had resented them for the inviolable sway they had held over her life long after liberty and the pursuit of happiness should have been hers. Her parents, God rest their souls, had loved her in their muddling, ineffectual way, but they had been blind devotees of the doctors, who had preened with their laurels and their walls full of accreditations and accolades, and their word was the writ of holy law. With a shake of their head or a stroke of their pen, the course of her life could be altered. Family vacations planned months in advance could be canceled in favor of another clinic visit or another round of inpatient therapy that came to nothing in the end. Save for the lost opportunity and a hefty bill, of course, the latter often arriving home before she did. Her parents spoke fondly of the Lord Jesus Christ, but her Almighty wore a surplice of medical-grade steel and spoke over her head through the muffling fabric of a surgical mask.
For all her seething resentment and acts of petty rebellion, like escaping to college on a full ride, it was the doctors who won in the end. They had dangled the tantalizing hope of a future cure before her parents like a sweetmeat before a starving child, and, dazzled by visions of a daughter with wedding rice in her hair instead of dribbling down the front of her shirt, they had merrily overridden her desperate, tearful protests and consigned her to the claustrophobic, astringent womb of the cryotube. She could still see her parents' faces in the seconds before the sedative had taken effect and plunged her headlong into smothering oblivion. Her father's had been bleak and pallid and impossibly aged as he had stared at her through the bleary, finger-smudged Lexan of small window. Her mother's face had been flushed with anguish and wet with tears, but hope had burned like madness in her raw, wet eyes, and she had known there would be no last-minute reprieve, no appeal to reason. Her mother had raised a trembling hand in farewell, a tattered, soggy Kleenex protruding from her fingers like herniated tissue, but the anesthesia had robbed her of what little control she possessed, and she could not respond in kind. Air had escaped her lungs in a warm, plosive rush that had rattled inside the oxygen mask like thunder and the approach of the onrushing sea. The sedative had burned in her veins, a frigid claw that had embedded itself into her bones and turned her muscles to stones. She had opened her mouth to scream, but the cold had filled her lungs, too, and the last thought in her head before she had been dragged into the void of dreamless sleep had been of helpless terror and an eternal living death from which there would be no salvation.
They might've won, the pompous bastards, but seems to me you're the one who came out ahead in the end, observed the genteel voice of her maternal grandmother. After all, honeybunch, you're here, and they're not. Some of them might've gone to that sweet bye and bye on account of their good works, but not as many as they think, I'll wager. Most of them are probably still lost in endless dreams beneath the red clay. The unlucky ones, a fair few, I expect, are roasting in Hell, subject to the treatments they were so fond of inflicting on their helpless patients. I hope Old Nick gives those fools an extra prod or two, the sadistic, vainglorious asses.
Which one would Mama be, do you think? she asked, but her grandmother made no answer, and she let the question pass.
And which one do you think he'll be? she asked as she and Dr. McCoy studied one another over the sickbowl.
Whichever one he is, he'll never see you as anything but a diagnosis and a pet project, reminded the voice of prudence, and she smiled at the bitter truth of it.
It was a pity, though, she reflected as her hand moved to steady the bowl. He was handsomer than most of the doctors she had encountered, with neither grey in his hair nor jowls on his face. There was no thinning hair or doughy paunch, no burst capillaries across his nose to belie a long and intimate affair with the bottle. There were no nicotine-stained fingers or sweat-stained collars. Indeed, he was crisp and lean in his blue tunic and black pants; his eyes were bright and inquisitive inside his face, and his hair was thick and lustrous and sleek beneath the lights of the room. If she was truly meant for yet another go-round with the cold, impersonal machinery of medicine and healing, then at least she could take solace in the view.
Her musings were interrupted by another bout of retching. I'm going to dislocate my jaw, she thought morosely as her fingers spasmed idiotically around the rim of the bowl and her innards struggled to expel a gout of foul air and stringers of translucent bile.
"Is this ever going to stop?" she moaned as she sagged against the lone pillow.
"Like I said, it's going to be a rough night."
"Don't you have Phenargan?"
"Phenargan?" He scoffed. "That hasn't been used in more than a hundred years. I have a few anti-emetics, but none I'm willing to give you until I can figure out what I'm dealing with."
She bridled. "What you're dealing with is a human being," she retorted peevishly.
"That much I got, yeah," he returned sardonically. "I'm a doctor in case you couldn't tell."
"Oh, I could tell," she assured him coldly, and spat into the sickbowl.
McCoy scowled, but before he could reply, a man in a green tunic swept into the room.
"What've we got, Bones?" he asked briskly, and came to a stop beside the elf at the foot of her bed.
"This is Rosalie Walker, and if my math is correct and she's not lying or out of her mind, then she's been in cryogenic stasis for two hundred and thirty-five years."
That pronouncement clearly brought the man up short. He drew back, a rooster dodging the claws of a barnyard tom, and blinked. "Really?" He surveyed her with open curiosity, hands clasped behind his back. "Is there any reason to think she's crazy?"
The doctor grunted and peeled off his gloves. "Well, she exhibits symptoms of a condition that hasn't been seen since 2179, so not really."
"What?" she spluttered incredulously. "You found a cure? Then why-?"
"Miss Walker," the man interrupted with an air of suave authority, "I'm Captain James Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise."
Captain? her mind echoed, flummoxed. This has got to be a fucked-up anesthesia dream. This guy looks like a frat boy doing service hours at a costume social. Twenty-six at the oldest. Captain, my ass.
"Captain?" she repeated. "What, am I on a cruise ship?"
A strangled squawk escaped the doctor, who was tossing his gloves into a biohazard bin. The elf raised an eyebrow. For his part, the purported captain's lips twitched in amusement. "No. You are on a starship."
"Uh huh. Bullshit. What is this? Did you guys figure out that you can't fix me after taking my parents' money, so now you're pulling this ridiculous charade as some screwy consolation prize?"
"I can assure you that you are, in fact aboard a starship," the elf said.
"Says a guy dressed like a futuristic wood elf. I know you people don't have much faith in the intellectual capacity of the waist-level set, but come on. Nowhere in my extensive medical file does it say I chew crayons or shampoo with Spaghetti-Os."
"I am not a wood elf," the elf protested stiffly. "I am a Vulcan."
"Oh, would you cut the horseshi-"
"Miss Walker, you really are on a starship," Kirk interjected.
"What kind of idiot do you take me for?"
Kirk sighed and turned to the elf. "Mr. Spock, open the sickbay shutters."
Spock whirled and strode to the far wall, where he tapped a code into a numeric keypad. There was a soft chime, and then a window materialized out of a formerly solid black panel.
"Oh," she breathed, and then the breath caught in her throat. Outside the window yawned an unfathomable vastness, a blackness so complete that it hurt her eyes to look at it. It was solid, liquid sable, and she thought that if she reached out, it would skim beneath her questing fingers like ink or cold pitch, smooth and clinging and jealous of the light that escaped its depths from the stars that streaked past the window in a fleeting flare of light.
Holy fire, she thought. The ephemeral, brilliant flutter of angels' wings. Her throat constricted, and her chest cramped with terror and ecstasy and a swooning, reverential awe. She coughed and cleared her throat, and tears burned on her cheeks. "Oh, my God. It's heaven."
"It's space," the captain corrected.
She let out a shuddering breath and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. "How? When? The last time I was vaguely upright, our biggest cosmic claim to fame was the international space station we shared with the Russians. The Hubble telescope was a multibillion dollar failure because someone put the lens in backwards, and The Columbia disintegrated on re-entry because some lazy engineer couldn't be assed to inspect the O-rings. You're telling me that this braintrust managed to get us into space? And not just in some rattletrap interstellar version of a Dodge Dart?"
"That's the short version, yes." Kirk's eyes twinkled with amusement.
"Oh, God," she managed thickly. Her stomach lurched and roiled in its uneasy moorings, and she pressed her curled hand to her trembling lips to forestall the building nausea.
"it's better to get it out now," McCoy advised. "Otherwise, you'll just do it later."
So she heaved into the bowl, coughing and spluttering and trying vainly to keep the ends of her hair out of the mess. "I'm going to need a shower," she croaked when the latest wave had spent itself.
"That can be arranged once I've established that you're not a walking disease vector."
"I was up to date on my vaccinations when I went in. It was one of the requirements."
"Your records are probably so much yellow dust in some warehouse by now, so you'll have to excuse the abundance of caution. Your bloodwork should be ready within the hour."
"Bloodwork? You took my blood while I was under? What else did you do?" She narrowed her eyes at him, visions of unethical pelvic exams dancing in her head. "Isn't there such a thing as consent forms anymore?"
Oh, honey, you're not wearing but that flimsy smock they put you in at the popsicle factory, her grandmother pointed out prosaically. If he wanted an eyeful, he probably got one when they transferred you onto this bed.
McCoy drew himself up. "I was trying to save your life," he hissed. "In case you haven't noticed, we just fished you out of God knows how many quadrillion square miles of uncharted space. If we hadn't come along, you'd still be adrift in that ancient cryotube."
Somebody has a flair for the dramatic, she mused as he stared at her in wide-eyed indignation, lips pressed into a thin, furious line. She turned to the captain. "So I really am in space?"
"I'm afraid so."
McCoy huffed and stalked around her bed to a desk littered with papers and several racks of test tubes, some of which were filled with blood. Others held fluids she could not identify. He snorted in disgust and plopped into his chair. He picked up a thin, black stylus and promptly tossed it aside. He scowled at her and shook his head.
I touched a nerve, she thought with a pang of chagrin. "But if I'm in space in the twenty-third century, then why am I still like this?" She gestured at her spindly, hairy, unfeminine legs and flapped hands that sat akimbo on the ends of her wrists. "They were supposed to fix this. That was the whole reason they made me a living mummy and stuffed me into that sarcophagus."
The memories came hard and fast, an overwhelming rush that left her dizzy and frightened. Panic fluttered in her belly and at the edges of her mind, and her heart began to triphammer inside her chest.
It smelled like an airlock, cold steel sterilized by NASA-grade Pine Sol. Like alcohol on a cotton swab. Everything was so bright, and what wasn't steel and Plexiglas was white. White floors, white walls, white men in white coats with unnaturally white teeth you couldn't see for the white surgical masks they wore. They even wore white shoes covered by white booties. Their footfalls never made a sound on that gleaming floor. They were ghosts in the catacombs, the mouthless, noseless stewards of all those bodies in those tubes, all those tanks.
They bobbed, the people in those tanks, fetuses in a transparent womb. I remember that woman with the red hair. It was so long and dark, and it undulated like tendrils of kelp. It looked like blood oozing from a wound, but I couldn't look away. It was perversely beautiful, a rose rising from the ribcage of a corpse, and who knows how long I would have sat there, gaping, if Mama hadn't pushed me away.
It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd put me in one of the tanks, if they had let me bob while my hair floated around my face like gold rising to the surface of a river. I could have spent eternity there, riding the currents until science conquered my parents' bogeyman or time conquered the steel of the tanks and rust reduced them to so many red flakes on that pristine floor. It would have been like flying, like riding the wind on the tail of a kite.
But they didn't put you in the tanks, said her younger brother, Daniel. Mom and Dad wouldn't stop at much to fix their precious little problem, but they would stop at that. The tanks ran pretty steep, and if they sprung for that, then they might not be able to vacation in Majorca or the French Riviera anymore, and they certainly wouldn't be paying for my graduate school. They'd already sacrificed so much for you-their dreams of a perfect family, of a little girl in pigtails and lace who grew up to be the belle of the debutante ball and won the heart of a councilman's son; the hope of the wedding of the season; their time, their patience, their carefree life of three vacations a year and nightly dinners at the country club; their privacy, because how the tongues did wag whenever they brought you to a function, dressed in your girly frills and slouched in your tasteful black wheelchair or your tasteful white one; their money. God, how much of that did they spend?
You cost fifty thousand dollars before the ink on your tiny, pink foot was dry. Then there were the weeks in the NICU and the cans of special formula and the consultations with neonatal specialists. When you finally came home, there was the "nanny" who was a pediatric RN. Round-the-clock care and days filled with appointments. Surgery to correct your amblyopia so you wouldn't be blind on top of crippled.
Head start programs and physical therapy before you could talk, and occupational therapy when you could. Your playmates were certified therapists who charted every twitch, and when you were home, your imaginary worlds were built on the backs of specialized toys. Your Barbies had Velcro clothes, and you had entire crops of Potato Heads. An entire wing of the house was modified just for you, and your graceless, fat-handled silverware joined the Zwiling J.A. Henckels in the utensils tray. Chairs that had been a matching foursome since Grandma bought them in 1965 suddenly became a threesome to make room for your wheelchair at the table, and heavy glasses were joined by plastic cups that clumsy, weak fingers couldn't drop and shatter.
There was private preschool and private tutors, and the summer before preschool, there were I.Q. tests administered by smiling proctors in pinstriped ties. The folks wanted to make sure there weren't more embarrassments in store, more endless needs to be met. It was bad enough that the biddies at the country club clucked and cooed over "that poor child" and her awkward, gangly limbs. Some of the older matrons even sniffed behind their champagne flutes about the wages of secret sin. If it turned out that you were touched in the head, as the old saying went, well, that would be more than a family could stand, and it might be time to talk about placement in some discreet, private school with an innocuous name, where pupils were just as much patients, and where RN and LPNs outnumbered the MAs and .
Luckily for you, what God denied you in body, He made up for in brains. Precocious, the doctors and child psychologists called you. Smart as a whip is what Grandma Lavinia called you, and she was closer to the truth. Precocious implies a coyness, an oily manipulation, a shade of minicry in your cleverness. But you were just flat smart. You might not've been able to pick up those shiny, plastic shapes those therapists loved shoving into your hands, but by God, you knew where they went. While your peers were busy learning the finer points of potty training and sampling the fine dirts on offer at Atlanta's most exclusive parks and playgrounds, you were grouping shapes by similarity and reading Little Golden Books that Grandma Lavinia bought you by the armload. Your fingers might not be able to hold the Crayons, but you were only too quick to set your aides straight on just what color Little Red Riding Hood's cloak ought to be, no please and thank you about it.
You're the one who taught me to read, in fact, eight years old and holding me on your lap in a spastic grip while you read from the Wonderful World of Richard Scary and kissed the top of my fuzzy, toddler's head. Damned if friends and relatives didn't all but wet themselves at the sight, as though you were a unicorn on a unicycle and not a little girl doing what you could to be a good big sister.
You blew up the skirts of the doctors, too. You'd have thought that crippled and intelligent were mutually exclusive states of being the way they clustered around you on the exam table and marveled at your test scores. You reveled in it when you were little. It made you feel like the princess you always wanted to be, Cinderella in No. 2 slippers. And the folks were only too happy to have proof of your finest quality, evidence that you were more than the living embodiment of God's wrath. They framed the results of your tests and hung them in the living room and in your room opposite your bed. There were half a dozen by the time you started kindergarten. By the time you left for UGA in the fall of 2009, the proofs of your brilliance had covered every square inch above the mantel and turned the beige walls of your bedroom into a glittering wonderland of framed certificates and elegant shadowboxes. The brassy, golden men of my sports and karate trophies could never hope to compete with the blizzard of white, shunted into the corners of the study bookshelves and confined to a display case alongside Hummel angels and crystal koala bears who looked upon the world with pinprick onyx eyes.
Your glass slippers turned out to be your ticket to freedom, and you seized it with both hands. The folks enrolled you in Montessori schools and baccalaureate programs, and when they turned out to be inaccessible, they offered to pay for the necessary renovations. If the school turned up its nose in the name of tradition and the greater good of the other students, then they invoked the specter of lawyers and depositions and discrimination lawsuits. Most of the time that did the trick, and on the rare occasion that it didn't, they never hesitated to pull you out and drop a parting phone call to the local papers.
They hired PCAs to accompany you to school. They took notes and held open doors and took you to the bathroom just after lunch. They carried your tray in the cafeteria and opened your carton of milk or bottled water and sawed at your mystery meat with knife and fork. They straightened your clothes and combed your hair, and when you got to high school, they seconded you at meetings of the Spanish Club and the forensics league meetings. They chaperoned you to meets for the latter, and they were your amanuenses when you went to Prague your junior year and Barcelona and Berlin your senior, the arms and legs and straining backs that muscled you over curbs without cuts and wrestled you into bathrooms never meant to accommodate wheelchairs.
They were your faithful shadows in starched whites and sensible shoes, and they cost a pretty penny. Just how much, you never knew never bothered to ask. Their presence was just the way of it, had been for as long as you could remember, as ordinary and expected as the escritoire in Daddy's study and the big-screen in the den.
You certainly never asked what was sacrificed to the rapacious maw of your best interests. Not until it was too late, until you came looking for an ally against our folks and their plan to free themselves from the smothering crush of you and found only relief in my expression.
They spent and spent, rivers of green, and in the end, your ticket to freedom didn't get you very far. You were the salutatorian of your graduating class and the teacher's pet of damn near every professor and two-bit TA you ever had, but you weren't the belle of any balls, and invitations to parties didn't come pouring in. Most nights, you stayed in the private dorm room Mama and Daddy paid for and read or watched television. On the good nights, you watched a movie with the night PCA and told yourself that partying wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Most of the time, you believed it, but sometimes... Oh, sometimes.
You weren't without friends. You attracted a few during your undergrad years and a few more during your master's. They were fellow dreamers and overachievers, nerds with their eyes fixed on some distant prize. There was Archie, the mathematics whiz who saw the world as a series of equations, right down to the interpersonal relationships; Quinn, the perky Okie who dreamed of teaching a roomful of tots the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic; there was Soon Jung, who found her purpose in the echoing whispers of men long dead or locked away in their ivory towers. You often pitted your love of history against her philosopher's aspirations in rousing debates that drew in others, and when you had reasoned your way to a grudging stalemate, Archie would wade in, armed with the holy writ of theorems and formulae and postulates bolstered by the immutable, unshakeable bulwark of numbers. It was a merry maelstrom then, a giddy chaos of absolutes and wherefores and what-ifs, and you often emerged from those sessions as exultant and intoxicated as any hedonistic undergrad on a three-bar tour.
And there were the PCAs, of course. They weren't friends of your own choosing, but it's hard not to be intimate with someone who sees you naked twice a day and wipes your ass when you're too tired and spastic to do it yourself. So they became confidantes of necessity, wingmen conspicuous in their white scrubs and crepe-soled shoes. They were meant to preserve your oft-battered dignity by ensuring you didn't slop drinks down your front or swallow your hair with your hamburger or piss down your leg because you couldn't fit into the bathroom, and so they did, but their hovering presence also repelled the very people you so desperately wanted to attract. It was hard to get cheerfully wasted beneath the watchful, disapproving gaze of a gimp wrangler, and not even the most indiscriminate frat boy wanted to ply his seductive wiles on a woman who needed a second to help her out of her panties and into position.
So your hours and your nights were your own, and the only thing left to you were the handful of secrets you could hide from the watchful, prying gazes of your aides cum overseers, who dutifully recorded every tear and every drop of piss in their duty logs. There weren't friends enough to fill the empty spaces and the endless hours, and there was certainly no rosy future with a husband and children on the horizon. Just the interminable stretch of days before you, a road that went ever on and on, only to end where it began, in a room filled with artificial light and the dust of dead men's bones on the air.
Maybe that's why you agreed when Mama suggested a tour of the cryogenics facility the summer after you got your master's. You were so proud of that hank of lambskin, so fit to burst, but you were lost, too, and dazed at the prospect of life after school. There, you were primus inter pares, first among equals, and sure of your place, of your purpose. You were respected by teachers and fellow students alike, flaunted by the former as incontrovertible proof of their intellectual and didactic prowess and viewed with curiosity by the latter, who saw in your twisted limbs and stellar marks a contradiction their parents' wisdom could not explain.
But outside those walls, those classrooms and lecture halls with their whiteboards and neat rows of desks, you were just a woman with a high-dollar degree and a crushing liability under your scrawny behind. Your only work experience was as student-assistant to the history chair, and there were plenty of fresh faces with your degree who could do the work with half the difficulty. There was no thesis or resume you could write that would blind prospective employers to the insurance nightmare you posed or the specter of an ADA lawsuit waiting in the wings when your piddling, entry-level position was axed in favor of a raise for the principal or the board of regents. Perhaps the goodwill of your professors could secure you an interview, but there were no guarantees, and while goodwill might open doors, it made no promises as to what might lie behind them. Maybe you'd end up as some eager-beaver T.A., teaching Intro World history to glassy-eyed freshmen and catching all the shit that rolled downhill from the ivory tower you coveted, but you might also wind up working a desk job at the local senior center, answering the phone and handing out fliers for free blood pressure checks, bingo nights, and diabetes awareness month, living a subsistence life on the lavender-scented largesse of withered old spinsters and cancer widows trying to buy their way past the pearly gates at the eleventh hour.
You weren't sure you wanted a life of what-might-have-been, so you saw no harm in making the trip. It was an option, a failsafe in case your modest plans collapsed in the face of condescension and cold-blooded pragmatism. So you presented yourself at this latest temple of Blue Cross and Blue Shield and let the salesmen in doctor's whites shepherd you through their sterile, sacred halls.
But there was nothing hallowed about that ground. It was perverse, a monument to hubris where death was denied its rightful tribute and frightened people were stuffed into steel sarcophagi like well-fleshed mummies. It was a mockery of the natural order, of Grandmama Lavinia's belief that even things that happened just because had a purpose beyond human understanding, a ripple of consequence, unintended or otherwise, that turned the course of the world. It was terror and arrogance and vanity and greed, and you feared it. You wanted nothing to do with it, and you were so glad when the tour was over that you let out a reedy, cackling half-sob of relief.
Mama and the doctor mistook it for the wordless mewling of indescribable hope, thought you a cripple who had glimpsed the face of Jesus and stretched forth an imploring hand, and when the doctor clapped a reassuring hand on your shoulder and Mama hugged you hard enough to make your bones creak and grind and dropped a tearful kiss on the top of your head, you smiled and sniffled and let them believe it, but you knew better. There was nothing of God there. On the contrary, you had stood upon the precipice of Hell and seen but obliquely its dark and frozen heart.
You were a rabbit but narrowly escaped from the snapping jaws of the beast, and you had no intention of going back there. You considered it a filial duty faithfully executed and resolved to pursue your Ph.D in the fall. School had always been the simple, routine way of it, and if Mama was disappointed, then the sting of it would surely ease once she saw you in yet another cap and gown with yet another honor cord around your neck. A doctorate was rarer and more prestigious than a master's, and if a bachelor's degree was the glass slipper that gained you admittance to the castle, then the doctorate was the one that would see you into the ivory tower of your childhood dreams.
But that was before I told you the truth, opened your eyes to what you had been doing to the family for all these years with your incessant need. All those laurels of which you were so proud had cost more than you realized. Not just in tuition and fees, but the salaries of the therapists and the PCAs who tended to your every whim around the clock. Daddy was a wealthy man, a man who had earned his place in the gated community and at the country club golf course by the sweat of his brow and his endless reservoir of determination. Mama was the sweetest flower of a distinguished Savannah family whose bloodline ran deep into the Southern soil. Her money was as old as the South, steeped in cotton and tobacco and all those ugly truths we try so hard to bury when we gather for the Fourth of July barbecue. Old money runs out as fast as new, though, and while your little problem hadn't bled them dry, it had certainly left them more than a little peaky, as Grandmama Lavina was wont to say.
It wasn't just a question of money, either. It was about all the hours Daddy put in behind the desk at the brokerage firm and the ones Mama lost shuttling you to doctors' appointments and IEP meetings and equestrian therapy three times a week. It was in the loss of privacy in their social circle. The rules of civility meant that nobody stared or asked gauche questions over the brisket, but the particulars of your disability were hardly subtle and couldn't be hidden behind gracious smiles and layers of of lace and satin and delicate perfume, and the gossip mill was happy to speculate on the reasons for your misfortune and the extent to which the good Lord had visited his judgment upon your fragile head. They sipped their snifters of brandy and glasses of dessert wine and whispered about genetic abnormalities and childhood hysterectomies and shortened life expectancies with salacious glee, shaking their heads in doleful, clucking sympathy even as they shivered with dark and shameful anticipation of your tragic demise. Most of it was pure foolishness, the idle, idiotic musings of the woefully uninformed, but juicy gossip is the meat and marrow of Southern life, the darker the better, and if the facts must needs be brushed hastily aside in the telling of a good story, then so be it. Your death, when it came, would be the social event of the season, the grim, tragic denouement of a Flannery O'Connor Gothic.
Mama and Daddy never said mum about any of it, of course. No society woman worth her pedigree exposed either her wounds or her ass to public scrutiny, and Daddy loved you too much to burden you with such knowledge. A real man, a good man, bore his burdens in stoic silence and kept his regrets behind lips sealed with whiskey and a Cuban cigar. They insulated you from it with assiduous care, built for you a tower of security and blissful ignorance. It was only money, after all, and if the price of your keep was dear, then surely an even dearer price had been exacted from your weak and unwilling flesh.
I loved you, too, but I had the courage to be my sister's keeper and pluck the scales from your eyes. I showed you the true cost of your life, and once you saw, you understood the eagerness in Mama's eyes that afternoon at the facility and the bruises beneath Daddy's when he straggled home from the office long after dark and made a beeline for the liquor cabinet, loosening his tie as he went. You understood why she kept broaching the subject after your initial refusal, and why Daddy kept watching you over the rim of his tumbler.
Guilt pinned their tongues, stifled the secret, craven desire of their hearts. They loved you-you were their firstborn, their mourning dove with broken wings-but they resented you, too. You were their albatross of bills and custom orthotics and spoked wheels they needed replacing every two years, and they wanted you gone. They wanted to return to the life they had known before you, a life of soirees and fundraisers for underprivileged children and charity golf tournaments for a disease that didn't wear their child's face; a life without timetables and PCA schedules and vacations that needed months of advance planning; a life not lived in a prison whose borders were determined by the distance your wheels and your fickle constitution could travel.
You might have been bent and feeble and spastic, but you were also as stubborn and bound by dignity and honor as your forebearers, as Grandmama Lavinia, who could take the starch out of a blowhard with a single gelid look, and as great-great-granddad Eustace Ewell Peabody, who charged the Yankees with nothing but an upraised saber at the Battle of Chickamauga and got a bellyful of grape shot for his troubles. You couldn't walk or curtsey or even wipe your ass, but you understood sacrifice and loyalty and upholding the family honor.
You were an invalid, but you were neither stupid nor a coward, and so when Mama broached the subject again just after midsummer, you swallowed your terror and your dinner roll and told her you thought it was a fine idea. After living life at waist-level, you reckoned you wanted to see how the other half lived, to feel the solidity of the earth beneath your feet and the center of gravity in its rightful place in your pelvis instead of at the bottom of your ass. You wanted to look people in the face instead of speaking to their crotch like it was a goddamn microphone, and you wanted to run and skip and lose your footing in the rain. You wanted to dance, to tuck your knees to your chest without fighting yourself every step of the way and toppling sideways onto the bed or floor like an expelled fetus. And oh, yes, a good and proper fuck would be nice, one born of lust and not drunken, misguided pity or the horny desperation of a frat boy with initiation and a twenty riding on the outcome.
It was the truth artfully told. You had dreamed of all those things in the privacy of your room, when the house was quiet and the PCA had retired to her room for the night to conduct an ill-fated romance by the glow of her cellphone's light, but you never wanted to pay for them in years, never wanted to while away the years in a steel sarcophagus. If the informational DVDs and glossy brochures were true and the aging process was suspended by the magic of chemical stasis, what of it? The world around you would not be so fortunate or so damned. It would go on. Summer would pass into fall and then into winter, and snow would drift over the branches of the magnolia tree in the yard and coat the road like a fine layer of salt. There would be Thanksgiving and Christmas at Grandmama Lavinia's, with tinsel and candy canes on the tree and holly and mistletoe on the mantel. There would be eggnog, and Grandmama Lavinia in her Christmas finery. There would be the family portrait, the sprawl of four generations arranged before the family matriarch, who would preside over the proceedings from the comfort of her favorite wingback chair, resplendent in sequins and pearls. Daddy beside her on the left and Uncle Theo on the right, both with their hands on Grandmama's shoulders, and Uncle Beau crouched next to the arm of her chair, one arm propped on the arm of her chair. You always sat on her right, a break in the ordered familial hierarchy dictated by your wheelchair. Except you wouldn't be there. Not that year, and maybe not for many years thereafter. Of all the diseases and conditions humanity had vowed to eradicate, congenital CP was near the bottom of the list.
The family would change in your absence, expand with new life and contract as the old and familiar took one step too many on Father Time's march and shuffled flat off this mortal coil. Grandmama would go to glory, her title of family matriarch claimed by Mama or one of our uncles' insipid wives. Cousins would outgrow their shortpants, and silver and grey would thread Daddy's hair before it turned white as the cotton that still grew in sporadic tufts out back the house. Sherman, the brutal son of a bitch, hadn't gotten it all, after all.
And the world... Who knew just how much it would change while you breathed recycled air and drifted in the dark like a disembodied soul, a ghost denied the final dignity of death? The history degree for which you had so diligently worked would be worthless, a quaint relic of a bygone era, a souvenir from an insignificant dream. New cities would rise from the bedrock, while old ones fell into decay and crumbled into dust. There would be new heroes and their attendant villains, new crises to be endured and immortalized in granite and bronze and commemorative coins hawked on late-night infomercials. Rebellion would give rise to new nations whose names your tongue had never tasted, and presidents for whom you had never voted would swear to uphold the Constitution of these United States. Assuming, naturally, that we hadn't gotten our fool selves blown to the Kingdom Come we claim so zealously to revere and represent.
That assumed, of course, that you returned to the world at all. Maybe it was a scam for the desperate and dying and the terminally vain. Maybe those state-of-the-art facilities were a sham, a front set up by the mob to lure the starry-eyed dupes, and once the checks cleared, the buildings and their occupants would be abandoned, the helpless hopefuls left to pickle in their own juices while the doctors ditched their scrubs and jetted off to a resort in the Balkans. You and your fellow dawn treaders would be lost to thought and time, at least until the equipment failed or the buildings went back on the market after the rent checks stopped.
Or maybe the world would just go to hell, and you'd sleep through the apocalypse, mercifully deaf, dumb, and blind as the world burned. Maybe you'd be vaporized in a nuclear furnace when Kim Jong-il or his equally crackpot son finally snapped and pushed the red button, or maybe you'd plummet into the void when the earth heaved and spasmed and shook itself apart. Could be that the end would be slower, less a wracking calamity and more an inexorable attrition. Death by starvation or plague or mass sterility or simply a great, collective inertia and apathy so complete that we couldn't be bothered to go on living.
However it happened, you'd never emerge from that cryotube, a wobbling Lazarus restored to life by the miracle of modern science. No, you'd just linger in a tube buried beneath dust and rubble and forgetfulness, a life forever interrupted. You'd slumber there for centuries, and the earth, having at last thrown off the crushing, malignant yoke of man, would flourish. Trees would sprout in the ruins of skyscrapers and rise from the damp soil of wells and cisterns, and grass would thrust its way through cracks in the sidewalk in a final, lush triumph over man's failed dominion. Ivy and moss would crawl over the facades of buildings, including your unmarked grave, and the birds that nested in the narrow cornices and hollows of shattered lampposts would sing odes to a sunrise no longer obscured by smog.
You would be so many bones beneath the earth, as inconsequential to memory as the mutt buried beneath an apple tree by a boy long gone, and when the alien archaeologists descended on the planet and excavated the facility, they would pry open your cryotube and gaze, nonplussed, at your sad remains. They would poke and prod and speculate, and the more speculative among them would theorize that your warped bones were irrefutable evidence that humankind had fallen prey to a terrible, degenerative plague. This, they would proclaim with the overweening confidence of the highly-educated and supremely-shortsighted, was the cause of their extinction. Some would believe, and some would disagree, but united by singular purpose, they would pack you up and cart you off to some anthropological lab, where they'd thread wire through your defleshed bones and use them in xenobiology class.
God knows what they'd make of the woman in the tank, the one whose red hair fanned around her head like a spreading bloodstain. Maybe nothing, or maybe they'd think she was an aquatic variant of the species and alien schoolchildren would flock to see her, their wide, reptilian faces pressed to the window of the exhibit while a guide who'd lost his sense of wonder three months and a hundred tours ago went through his spiel by rote, a tape worn thin by constant repetition. To the scientists, she would be a tantalizing evolutionary enigma, but to the public, especially to the children gathered around her tank, she would be The Mermaid Girl From Earth, a slice of P.T. Barnum's garish, ghoulish wonder brought into the distant future.
The thought filled you with a dull, swooning dread, and in your mind's eye, you saw strands of red hair bobbing on the surface of a man-made sea and shiny, metal cylinders arranged in neat, symmetrical rows. Doctors with dead eyes above filtered surgical masks and booties over there crepe-soled shoes. Loveless and deathless and cold, purgatory's vestibule, and you recoiled from it with every fiber of your being, but your heart saw Mama and Daddy with its eyes wide open for the first time, and the ill-concealed hope in her eyes was as painful as the anguished, guilty relief in his. In that moment, with your fork full of green beans and your mouth full of half-truths, you loved and despised them both.
Love won in the end, because with the truth I had so kindly revealed to you had come guilt, hot and gnawing and crushing as a pressing stone. Our folks had sacrificed their dreams and comfort for you, had worked until all that remained of life was the hard, ugly pith of it. You had used them up, a tick draining the life from its unsuspecting host. You owed them more than your accomplishments could ever hope to repay, owed them a life free of the crippling burden of your imperfection. Maybe that place was purgatory, a sentence of living death, but it was also your chance to settle a debt. If the good Lord chose to bestow His grace upon you, then perhaps a cure would be found within their lifetimes and you could return to them as the daughter they'd no doubt dreamed of so many years ago, when you were nothing but a bump in Mama's belly. If He had other plans for you, His unfinished child, then at least they would be free to live the lives they deserved.
So, there was only one choice to make. They gave you one last summer, and you savored every hour with the manic fervor of the condemned. You spent the last week with Grandmama Lavinia, who was blissfully unaware of your intentions, and when you left, you cried so hard you made yourself sick, sobbing into the fabric of her favorite summer blouse and inhaling her perfume. Your uncharacteristic hysteria startled and frightened her, and she didn't want to let you go, but Mama was too close to her prize to be thwarted now, and she pulled you away and stowed you in the passenger seat and told her that it had just been a trying time for you, what with your impending job search now that school was done. A lie! A dirty lie! you wanted to scream, but the bargain had been struck, so you clutched the door handle like a drunkard and let the lie stand. The last time you saw Grandmama Lavinia, she was standing on the shady veranda of her house with the summer breeze in her hair and your tears on her collar.
Mama sang all the way home.
I wasn't there when they took you to the cryogenics facility. I was in Rio, living it up before I entered grad school at Brown. Your selfless decision had freed up the funds, you see, and I was determined to make the most of them. I was sunbathing three thousand miles away when the little girl who had once read Sleeping Beauty while I wriggled and gurgled on her lap went to sleep herself, pricked, not by a spindle, but by a hypodermic needle slipped into her vein. Perhaps it was grief or a pang of conscience, or maybe I was so glad to be shut of you that I couldn't wait to celebrate my freedom. You didn't have time to wonder then, with the sedatives a cold delirium in your blood, pulling you into the smothering darkness, but you wonder now, you surely do.
She could confess none of this to the men gathered around her bed, however. It was too raw and lunatic and private. It was the last of Before, and she would not surrender it. So she fought to subdue her rising panic and slow her pounding heart. From the corner of her eye, she saw McCoy scramble from his seat, drawn by the shrill bleating of the cardiac monitor.
"I-I'm all right," she stammered unconvincingly, and flapped ineffectually at him. "I'm fine. It's just some memories that have bubbled to the surface."
A grunt from McCoy, who duly waved a miniature salt shaker over her from head to toe, a shaman cleansing her of impurities with faith and holy smoke. "That happens sometimes, but your vitals are all over the place right now." He peered at a readout she could not see. "I'm not sure she should be doing this now," he said to Kirk. "Better to let her stabilize."
I'm not going to stabilize, she thought irascibly. Not as long as those memories are stuck in my head. "I'm fine," she repeated peevishly, and scowled at the salt shaker. She turned her attention to Kirk. "My parents had me put into stasis so they could find a cure for my CP. I don't think they thought it would take this long."
Or maybe they did, whispered a cold voice inside her head, and she thought of her mother singing all the way home that last afternoon, of the wild hope in her eyes when she capitulated over green beans and mashed potatoes.
"Do you remember the name of the facility?" Spock asked.
"Cumberland Cryogenics Corporation. It was in Atlanta near Emory Medical Center." The phantom tip of a hypodermic needle pierced the crook of her arm, and she absently rubbed at the thin flesh there. "But I still don't understand. I wasn't supposed to be brought out until a cure was found, and I damn sure wasn't supposed to be in space."
"I don't have any answers for you, Miss Walker, but when I do, you'll be the first to know." Kirk drummed his fingers on the end of her bed.
There's one I haven't heard before. "What happens to me in the meantime?"
"We're several weeks from the nearest starbase. Until then, you'll remain under the care of Dr. McCoy. Once you're up to it, we'll move you to temporary quarters." He drummed his fingers on the end of the bed again and turned to the doctor in question. "Keep me posted, Bones. "I'll be on the bridge."
"Bones?" she sputtered incredulously. "His nickname is Bones? Oh, that's reassuring." She eyed Dr. McCoy warily and edged away from his side of the bed.
"Fantastic," he growled, and leveled a thunderous expression at the captain, who was unmoved by his pique.
Kirk gave a rakish grin and a jaunty salute and disappeared through the sliding doors.
"Doctor," Spock said, and followed suit.
"What happens now?" she asked wearily when the doors had closed.
"Now you finish purging your system, and I wait for your bloodwork." He plopped into the chair behind his desk and picked up his stylus, which he tapped on the screen of his tablet.
She nodded to his bowed head and settled back against the pillows, the sickbowl balanced on her lap. Quiet settled over the room, broken only by the rhythmic chirp of the cardiac monitor and the squeak of his chair as he shifted. Now and then, she sat up and dry-heaved into the bowl, and McCoy's head would snap up, eyes alert and body poised to spring into action at the first sign of distress.
The minutes ticked by, and she waited for him to turn off his desk lamp, draw the curtain around her bed, and turn her over to another doctor, but he simply sat at his desk and pecked resolutely at his tablet. His occasional mutterings as he bent to his files were a soothing counterpoint to the strident cry of the monitor overhead. She drowsed, but each time sleep beckoned, the venomous bite of a needle would find her arm, and she would jolt to panicky wakefulness.
Finally, a nurse appeared. "Doctor McCoy?" she said softly, as though she feared waking her. "Her results are in." She passed him a credit-card machine.
This medical care provided by Visa, she thought, and giggled sleepily.
McCoy studied the credit-card machine. "Thank you," he muttered to the nurse, and set the machine on his desk. Then he approached her bed. "Well, your bloodwork is clean," he announced, and toggled a switch on the side of the bed. A flash of blue static crackled above her bed and disappeared.
"I told you I was." Her voice was hoarse from retching and thick with fatigue.
"And I told you I couldn't take your word for it." He picked up her sickbowl and placed it on a nearby tray. "I'll bring you a clean one. The nausea seems to be subsiding, but there might be a few more aftershocks. You need to sleep. There's nothing more I can do tonight. In the morning, we can get you cleaned and fed and then discuss treatment options."
"Like what?" she demanded.
McCoy only shook his head. "Sleep. That's an order," he said sternly.
She wanted to so badly, but the specter of a needle waited on the cusp of dreams, and so she resisted.
"I know you don't believe this yet," he said softly, "but you're in good hands." He held her heavy-lidded gaze a moment longer, and then he stepped back and drew the curtain around her bed. His shadow drifted over the fabric, a soul untethered from its vessel. It receded from view and returned with a kidney bean in hand, Jack come home from the market with his magic beans.
The fresh sickbowl, she realized as a disembodied hand slipped through the curtain to place it on the tray.
She expected McCoy to leave once her results had been duly interpreted and recorded, but instead he returned to his seat and resumed his low, garrulous chuntering. It lulled her, a potent, overpowering foe for the fear that seized her muscles and chilled her flesh, and she slept, curled on her side and facing his desk.
She woke twice in the never-ending night, and each time, she was greeted by his silhouette as he hunched over his desk.
Are you the gatekeeper of the afterlife? she wanted to ask, but her tongue was dry as cotton batting in her mouth, and so she could only watch his shadow seep into the curtain's creases until the needle found her again and dragged her into the darkness.