Christmas 2020

Blood Pudding

Chapter 7: Asclepeion

As, by the light of a sun-ray coming through a broken cloud, mine eyes have seen a meadow of flowers before covered with shadow, so did I see more hosts of splendors, illumined from above by ardent light, yet saw not the source of the effulgence. — Dante, Paradiso

Ellie is about to answer when another doctor, a woman, comes in, carrying a clipboard. Ellie turns to her and I see Ellie wipe the doubt and worry from her face. I struggle to do the same.

"Hey, Dr. Woodcomb, I gather our patient is conscious." She smiles at Ellie but quickly shifts the smile to me. Ellie says yes and then turns to me. "This is Dr. Kruetzer. She's the neurosurgeon…"

I swallow my panic for Sarah and try to manage a smile. I manage a water facsimile — at least that's how it feels to me. The doctor gives me a quick nod and turns to Ellie. "So?"

Ellie smiles. "He's basically lucid. He's moved some — arms, shoulders, head, legs. He's too weak to manage much movement, but my quick exam was all positive."

"Good." She turns back to me and smiles beneath brunette bangs. She's not a beauty but there's something sweet and compelling in her smile. This time I manage a better smile myself, trying to follow Ellie's lead. I can hardly remember a time my heart was more at odds with my face.

She touches my foot. "Can you feel that, Mr. Bartowski?"

"Yes."

We repeat the procedure several times, with my other foot, my knees (I manage to bend them a little), my hands and arms. She takes a pen from the pocket beneath the stitched 'UCLA' on her coat and makes a note. When she finishes, as she returns the pen to the pocket, she glances at me then at Ellie. "Mrs. Bartowski isn't back yet?"

The wording of the question causes me to spear Ellie with a look. But before Ellie can respond, I see past Ellie and I see her. Her.

Sarah.

Sarah. Standing in the door, laden with wrapped packages.

"I'm back," she announces, her eyes fixed on me. Her face breaks into a sunlit smile and I smile back with my heart.

"Sarah!" I whisper her name. I think of that man in Gideons', the invalid by the Pool of Bethesda, who rose, took up his bed, and walked. I can't rise; I can't take up my bed, I can't walk: but she is no less a miracle. She stoops, puts the packages on the floor, and runs to me.

"Careful," the doctor warns, Sarah slows at the last moment, settling softly against me instead of leaping atop me, but even so, the emotion of her hug is eloquent.

"Chuck!" She breathes my name in my ear after a moment, saying it as only she does, as she said it in Miami, and, years ago, in Burbank. "Chuck!"

I feel a sob and am unsure if it is mine, hers, or ours. And then I am unable to see, blinded by tears, and I feel her tears warm on my neck.

Dr. Kuetzer clears her throat and, in response, Sarah steps back while keeping her hands on me.

"We'll give you two some time," Ellie says in a warm but official tone, and Dr. Kuetzer, turning to look at Ellie, smiles.

Sarah watches them leave the room. I watch Sarah. When the door closes, she turns back to me with that same sunlit smile. I bask in it, unable to speak, too full of feeling for words: my cup runs over.

"Chuck, I'm remembering." She squeezes my hand. "I remembered bits and pieces before, flashes…" — she pauses for a moment after the word — "of our life together, but now it's coming back, all of it. It's just not coming back the way I expected. When I saw Brighton's daughter in that tiger-striped coat, and you stepped out of the closet, I remembered. But not in a cascade of images, although I did remember the tiger and that awful spy couple. But what hit me was visceral, a complete gut-certainty about you and me and us together that I had never known since Quinn."

She stops and looks into my eyes. I see sorrow in hers but joy too. She keeps my hand in hers but sits down in the chair Ellie had been using.

She looks down at my hand and then I look down at hers. I see her wedding ring, a golden circlet. She sees me see it and tears reappear in her eyes. She says one word softly, so softly. "Miami."

I nod; I understand her thought. As much as I want to know about DC, Langley, Sarah's here now, beside my bed, holding my hand. And, I realize, the stories, all the stories, Burbank too, are likely to be connected, anyway.

Sarah sighs and then begins. "I didn't have my ring on in Miami, did I?"

I shake my head.

"I took it with me when I left Burbank, Chuck, kept it in DC. — But I can't explain Miami without explaining Burbank."

Her words pick up speed, urgency, her urgency for my understanding. "My leaving you that day on the beach. I felt it, Chuck; in fact, I felt it all along but I didn't understand what I felt — and at first, I was so lost and stunned; the only thing I was sure I felt was anger, anger at the rupture of my life.

"All that I had learned from you during those five years in Burbank seemed gone, distant, and I was reset, trapped again in the too-small, threadbare, con-spy emotionless categories I had lived in for years before I met you: 'love' was a four-letter word."

We both shake our heads in unison at that.

"So — what I felt for you overwhelmed me totally; I was swallowed by a massive wave and had no idea how to swim. I couldn't balance the fullness in my heart against the emptiness in my head. The story you told me, our story, moved me, but as a story: I knew it was mine...but it wasn't mine. It was...like hearing about things that happened to you while you were unconscious…"

"Or in a coma?"

She smiles a frown and nods. "Yes, like that. — Sort of like what happened to me after the Norseman, before our wedding."

I move my hand so that I am holding hers. "You remember?"

She smiles more completely. "I just did. — That's what I meant, Chuck, the memories are back but I haven't recalled them all, partly, I guess, because I need the right stimulus to access them. When you came out of that closet in Brighton's office, I knew my memory was back but I didn't remember everything then. I still haven't. It was like I felt myself become full where I had been empty; I could feel that those years, the decisive years of my life, were there, available, suddenly. The feeling was so strange I couldn't hide it; I was afraid I'd given us away." I can see her embarrassment. She's always been a perfectionist, the consummate professional spy. That lapse was uncharacteristic. — But completely forgivable: what would it feel like to reacquire five years of your life?

Five years: it's weird how my life has fallen into five-year segments since college. Five years lost mourning Jill (incorrectly), five years falling in love with and marrying Sarah (correctly), and five years mourning Sarah (correctly — after all, of the many things true of Sarah, one's that she's worth mourning).

"But I was talking about Burbank, explaining." She continues, shaking off her embarrassment. "So, the imbalance inside me terrified me; I couldn't right it. That's why I left you in Burbank. But I was reset. I knew nothing, I had nowhere to go — but back to Langley, I had nothing to be but a spy.

"I wasn't sure the Director would take me back, but she did — but only after a lot of interviews and psych evals and physical examinations. I had been in DC for a few weeks when she told me I was rehired and ready to return to missions. I went. I went on several — all small, simple missions, but I succeeded. Except I realized my heart was not in it. Not in it at all. I was just going through the espionage motions. My head was full of spies, spy stuff: mission parameters, protocols, rules, maxims — but my heart was empty, barren; it ached. I was imbalanced the other way; I couldn't get my head and heart together. Langley claimed my head. Burbank claimed my heart."

"And Burbank won. I decided I needed to return to you, to Burbank. I was going to follow my heart, not my head. But when I went to tell the Director, to resign, just after I got back from a mission, she told me you had joined the CIA while I was away. I was...crushed, lost all over again. I never imagined you would make that choice."

I shake my head. "Really, never, after all that happened,...after Prague?" The name tastes bitter on my tongue.

The pain in her eyes tells me she's remembered Prague — or that she is now remembering it.

I wait for her to respond. I left Prague out on the beach that day. I left a fair amount of the time after Prague out too. I skirted those months with bland phrases about a dark period, dating other people.

Vulnerability softens her eyes. "But I didn't remember Prague then, Chuck."

I shut my eyes tight, then open them. "Sorry, I forgot."

She gives me a wavering smile. "With us, remembering and forgetting are complicated. — I just...well, given what I knew of you, what you told me about us, how...bad you seemed to be at spying when I asked you to help me find Quinn" — her smile becomes smirkish for a moment as she gauges my reaction — "...I just couldn't imagine you doing it. It...felt...completely wrong to me.

"Once the initial shock passed, I asked the Director to pair us, to make us a team. I needed to be beside you, to protect you. But then she pointed to my wedding ring and she refused. She told me that I needed to know you no longer wore yours, that you were trying to move on, that I should stop wearing mine…And then she told me a bunch of stuff, putative results from psych evals..."

I break in. "That wasn't true — about my ring. I only took it off on missions that required it...And even then, it was in my pocket."

"I know — or I suspected. Miami, remember?"

"All of it." I try to pack all that I mean into those three words.

We sit for a moment and I squeeze her hand and she squeezes mine back.

She inhales, gathering resolve. "The Director kept telling me the same sorts of things any time I brought you up, brought pairing us up. She told me you were asking for more...demanding...missions. She never told me what you were doing, but she hinted. I didn't know what to make of it. And she kept me so busy. I was rarely in DC for more than a couple of days between missions, and, when I was, I often stayed at Carina's; it was...lonely...at my place."

"I drove by your place a lot but never stopped." I wait for a beat as she gives me a look and then I rush on, ask: "What kinds of missions did she send you on?"

I don't tell her the rumors I heard because I don't trust them. And I hate myself for asking but I couldn't stop myself. She looks at me directly, still vulnerable, surprisingly easy to read. "No terminations, Chuck, although The Director kept pushing. But I refused. I told her I would quit if she insisted. Most were deep-cover infiltrations or recovery missions. I'm not sure she trusted me entirely when on missions, my shaky memory, my lack of enthusiasm...She made use of me, but I believe her main objective was keeping you and me from crossing paths, connecting.

"Like in Miami."

"Yes, like in Miami. Miami was chance, Chuck. Dumb luck. You surprised me. I was there on a nothing mission, then suddenly I realized you're the man ahead of me at check-in."

"The Director didn't know I was going to Miami. It was a split-second decision; I didn't tell anyone. — And you were going to leave me there, weren't you? After we spoke?"

She glances away then immediately back, her eyes holding mine. "I was. I thought I should. But I couldn't. I missed you so much; I ached for you. I lost the battle with myself. I went to your room."

"But your memories?"

"Some had come back by then but they were disconnected, onions on a string. But I knew what I felt in Burbank; I had come to acknowledge that I loved you." She pauses, and then she says what so often proved difficult for her in the past. "I love you, Chuck."

"I love you too, Sarah. Always have."

She rises from the chair and kisses me softly. "I know now, but in Miami, I was unsure; I didn't know what to think about you, what to believe. You were so strange. The Director had filled me with so much doubt. I wasn't sure what to say to you, if I should say anything to you, and that got worse when you said nothing to me. You were passionate — so passionate," she colors, her eyes lose focus for a moment, "but then you slept between love-makings."

"We slept, Sarah."

"No," she shakes her head, "you slept, Chuck. You may have thought I did, but I didn't — or only a little, at first. After that, I listened to music or watched TV — but mostly I looked at you. My eyes were starving for you, all of me was. I waited for you to wake up and talk to me. I thought we could make things right, but then I started to worry that all you wanted was what we had in that room." There's a bereft tone in her voice, pain in her eyes.

I stare down at our joined hands. "I'm not Bryce, Sarah. The Director told me similar lies about you. And the Laudanol…"

Sarah nods and sits for a minute; her fingers move up my arm to my forearm, caressing it.

"No, you are not Bryce. I understood once we found the Laudanol. A member of your backup team at Brighton's — the only one who escaped — told us where you were staying and we found your things there, including the Laudanol. That was a couple of days after we got you here." She gestures around us.

"Did Ellie really worry I was taking Laudanol knowingly?"

Sarah nods reluctantly. "Yes, she did. Even though she knows our story, Chuck, I don't think she understood clearly how much danger we have always been in from the supposed good guys. Maybe Beckman's support for us confused Ellie. Maybe she thought there were people in spying with white hats." She pauses. "But she and I have taken turns getting you wrong. She encouraged me to talk to you, see you, early on, when I wouldn't. I eventually wore her down on that score, but I think the Laudanol did too. She saw you, when I didn't, saw changes in you. You no longer seemed to care about your family — and that was really hard on her." Sarah slows.

"When we found the Laudanol, she thought it was an effect of your changes, not their cause. But I knew better because I knew worse: I knew people like Graham personally, knew spying, the CIA, from the inside; it wasn't hard to figure the Director's plan."

We look at each other for a moment and then I ask her. "So, Langley, the Director? You went there, saw her?"

"Yes, but first I went to see Beckman, to tell her what had happened. I wanted to be able to use her as a back-up and she was happy to help. Actually, she was pissed I wouldn't let her go after the Director by herself, but I told her that we weren't interested in fireworks — ultimately, just in being left alone. She and I talked. She sends her best, by the way, and she said she hopes to get here to see you soon." I sense a calmness in Sarah that has been with her since she came in the room, always beneath her other reactions, but now it is plain.

"After I met with Beckman, I headed to Langley. I stopped on the way and bought a bottle of aspirin and tore off the label. I stuffed it in my purse. I had been in the Director's office any number of times and, you know me, I notice things. As I expected, she let me in to see her. She wasn't sure what happened in LA; her curiosity was getting the best of her."

"Wait," I say, breaking in, "How did you end up at Brighton's office in LA, anyway? I mean, I'm pretty sure you were in deep-cover and that your mark was Brighton's contact, right? And you had no idea we would meet in that upstairs room?"

"Right. I'd have been shocked enough to find you there, but with the sudden onset of my memory…"

Sarah stops. "I should tell you this in order. I was in deep-cover. I was working at Chambers Corp, trying to determine if the CEO, Darren Chambers, the man at Brighton's, was working for North Korea, spying for North Korea. There had been persistent rumors but nothing substantial. My goal was to get close enough to Chambers to be able to figure it out."

I look at her for a moment. "Close?"

Sarah seems to expect the question. Like the Sarah I first met in Burbank, she answers my question with a question. "Karen Brighton?"

I hold her gaze. "No. Never. There was only Miami."

She looks at me, a long, warm, possessive look. Surety. "Me too, Chuck. Never. Only Miami." She waves her wedding-ringed hand. "I was and am a married woman."

She stands and kisses me again and I kiss her back. She grins down at me, her blond hair falling onto my cheeks. "That makes you a married man."

"Happily married," I sigh.

Her grin fades, disbelief replaces it, and she sits. "Really, Chuck, after all this, after five years of mutual, unnecessary longing, misery?"

I nod hard, underlining my own words, what I mean. "Yes, the best thing I have done in my life — and it will always and forever be the best thing — no matter what happens to me in the future — is marry you, Sarah. I got that right and nothing that happens could make it wrong."

Sarah blinks back tears, and then her eyes shift focus as tears run down her cheeks. "She said you'd say that."

"Who said I'd say what?"

She looks at me again and shrugs slightly as she answers, wiping her eyes. "The woman next to me on the plane to DC."

"A woman?"

"Yes, middle-aged, small, her hair dark but graying. We started chatting — she could tell I was agitated, worried, angry, and she took my hand and told me it would all be alright. — Do you know that German word, Chuck, 'Gelassenheit'?" I shrug blankly, no Intersect, and Sarah goes on. "The woman said it would all be alright with such calmness and assurance that I believed her, and I still believe her, even though she couldn't have known what she was talking about."

Sarah shrugs again. "She was sweet and nice; we started talking. I told her about you and me — in a very general way, no real details — and she listened with such attentive patience. She seemed to understand somehow. I...I told her my biggest fear," Sarah drops her head, "that meeting me, marrying me, would become your greatest regret, if it wasn't already, that you would decide you had married me for only worse, not better." I start to respond but Sarah lifts her head.

"She responded, rather sternly, that that was nonsense: that she was certain that for you, marrying me was the best thing you'd done, not the worst." She takes a moment to gather herself, her voice breaking. "She told me to keep the faith, to keep hoping, to keep loving you. 'Faith, hope and love,' she said, 'are not the means to happiness, they are happiness itself — for creatures like us.' She calmed me, Chuck, focused me; she was a balm."

Sarah's voice gains strength. "I don't know what I would have done to the Director if I hadn't been seated by the woman on the plane. I was so angry, maybe angrier than I was with Quinn. — Oh, by the way, the woman's name's your mom's name."

Something clicks inside me but I don't try to reckon with it.

My head is clearing, clearer. The Laudanol might still have residue in my system, but, for the first time in a long time — years? — my thoughts seem unjumbled, unfragmented. Coherent. They are no longer misgiven. I feel like...me. Not Agent Me, just me. Chuck. The man who loves Sarah.

Sarah Bartowski. She's a married woman, after all.

"So, what happened with the Director?"

Sarah twists her lips. "Let's just say we're both out, and with a handsome severance package."

"How?"

"Do you remember that long, flat, brass letter opener, the antique one, the Director kept on her desk?"

I visualize the Director's desk. I hadn't paid any special attention to it, but I remembered it being there. "Yes."

"When I went in, I retrieved the bottle of aspirin from my purse and flung it to her. As she caught it, I snatched her letter opener. I...fondled...it during our conversation. She understood."

I swallow hard, imagining the scene.

"It helped that, as Beckman and I had arranged, Beckman called soon after I arrived at the office. She asked the Director if I was there — and then said one word to the Director: Laudanol.

"The Director already looked queasy. Throwing her the aspirin bottle seemed to shake her, but I'm not sure why."

"I am." I tell her about the Director tossing me the bottle of Laudanol before each mission.

"Well," Sarah says, her eyes narrowing but laughing softly, "I made an inspired choice, I guess. Good! Anyway, she then saw the letter opener in my hands and she turned seriously green. Beckman's call finished her.

"She slumped in her chair and asked what I wanted. I explained simply. I told her you no longer had the Intersect and that it was unlikely you could ever download it again. I told her we wanted out, to resign, to be left alone, and that, as long as we were left alone, Beckman would leave the Director alone — and I would leave the Director alone. She accepted our resignation on the spot and suggested the generous severance package. — Did I do right, Chuck?"

"Absolutely. Is that all?"

"No, actually. The Director muttered something bitter about the experiment being a failure. I waved the letter opener and demanded to know what she meant. She told me that she had kept upping the amount of Laudanol she was giving you, little by little, but that you seemed always to manage to resist it — not completely, but enough to keep you from ever becoming what she wanted.

"She thought you'd finally...capitulated...to the Laudanol on a mission to...New York?" Sarah pauses and I nod. "Yes, New York. But then you proved that you could still resist the drug. You disappeared for a while and when you came back, she said you were partially resistant again."

"Miami. I'm sorry about how I was, but you saved me, Sarah. Making love to me, leaving that note, they let me withstand what was happening to me. You were my resistance, my love for you. My faith and hope, tattered though they were…You remember when the Belgian took me? You saved me then, even before you saved me. Having you in my heart…"

Sarah gazes at me. "I'm sorry I was almost too late in Brighton's office, Chuck. I was so terrified when I finally got back, found you there, seated in a pool of your own blood, holding that angel." She looks at the angel on the table.

"I was holding it?"

"Yeah, you were. Cuddling it."

"And it wasn't broken?"

She gives me a funny look. "No, Chuck, bloody, but unbroken."

Unbroken.

I blink and then you're back. Hallucination maybe, after-effects of the sedatives, the residual Laudanol?

But I see you in the room now, standing quiet behind Sarah.

I know there's more she has to tell me, about how she ended up, unarmed, with Chambers in Brighton's office, about how she managed to get back to me, to save me. She will tell me all that soon.

But right now, you know, it really doesn't matter, does it? She is what matters. Sarah. My wife, not my ex. We matter. What we do with the time we have left, the rest of our lives. I'm not dead. She's back.

You nod to me and I think again of the invalid at the Pool of Bethesda. He had been an invalid for years, years, before he was healed. But if he was going to be healed, why not sooner, why make him wait, lose those years?

You understand the question, right? — But you aren't going to answer it, are you? — Hallucinations, I guess, don't always answer. But maybe I am asking the wrong question. Maybe that's what I'm supposed to understand?

Maybe what matters is always where we're going, not where we've been.

And maybe the thought that time can be lost is itself misguided, misgiven. Maybe time can always be redeemed.

The last word on today cannot be told until tomorrow. Time's a mystery. Maybe our stories never end?

You leave, disappear — and I listen to my wife as she tells me about my salvation.

The End

Blood Pudding

Asclepeions were healing temples in ancient Greece (and in the wider Hellenistic and Roman world), dedicated to Asclepius, the first doctor-demigod in Greek mythology. Asclepius was said to have been such a skilled doctor that he could even raise people from the dead. Because of his great healing powers, pilgrims would flock to temples built in his honor to seek spiritual and physical healing.

Story Theme Music: Great Lengths, The Lucksmiths

A/N: That's that. Sorry there was a prolonged intermission in the story.