CHAPTER NINETEEN
"Are you sure you're all right?"
I glanced at Richard, shading my eyes from the bright white of sun bouncing off the snow as we walked to Ward Z.
"I'm fine." I usually walked alone, but this morning I came outside to Richard waiting for me on my porch.
"Dr. Violet," he paused, "can I call you Adeline?" He seemed so uncertain, nervous almost. I didn't like it. Richard had been a beam of certainty in my life these past months. We were familiar. We'd watched movies on my couch. Why would he ask me that?
I frowned. "Of course you can. You know that."
"I'm worried about you, Adeline."
"Why?"
"I just feel like you haven't been yourself lately."
My snow boots crunched through our well-worn path. I liked the way it sounded, crisp and spongy all at once. "Myself?" I asked.
"Yes. I'm just, just worried about you."
Richard wore black scrubs today, just like every day. They were unusual to me. No one else in the ward wore black scrubs, they seemed ominous, almost.
"You shouldn't be worried. I'm fine. This is a high stress job, just takes some getting used to." I sounded so professional, so sure, like I really had my shit together. Like I hadn't made out with a patient in their room yesterday while we both bled all over each other. Like I wasn't completely obsessed with Aaron Whitman. Because that's what it was. I knew that now. The denial, the blood, the tears, the uncertainty – they made me want him more.
"You hardly spend any time with some of the patients, Adeline. You spend most of your time with—"
"What's your point?"
Richard sucked in a shocked breath. "I just know how it is to be down in Ward Z, Adeline. I don't want you to get lost in these patients, especially Aaron Whitman."
I chuckle. The sound was dry, irritable, even. "Lost? In a patient? I'm his doctor, Richard."
"So you're just trying to help him then? That's why you spend twice the amount of time with him that you do with the others?" His voice was accusatory. "I've kept my mouth shut all this time, assuming you had some sort of good reason being with him that much. But it's starting to feel inappropriate."
I glanced at him. I could see the accusation in his eyes as well. There was some sort of hurt there too. "Richard," I paused. "Aaron Whitman is showing great potential. I think I can really help him."
Liar. You want to help yourself.
"Help him?"
"Yes." We'd almost reached the frosty moss-covered doors of Ward Z. I had the urge to sprint toward them, to race down the stairs and hide away in my office where Richard couldn't probe and bother me about all of this.
"Do you not get it, Adeline?"
I sighed, frustrated. "Get what, Richard?" I tried not to, I really did, but I glared at him anyway, wishing his blue eyes weren't so kind and perceptive.
"These people in Ward Z are beyond help. That's why they're here. There's no form of rehabilitation in their future. They have no future outside of these walls. They are going to die inside Ward Z. Every. Single. One. Of. Them." We were stopped at the door. He towered over me, punctuating his words, trying to make a point.
And fuck if he made it.
Something inside me gasped for air, a drowning ray of hope as it slid beneath dark waters. I knew these things Richard said were true. Every. Single. Word. But I didn't want to acknowledge that truth. I didn't want to embrace the reality that Aaron Whitman would never leave Ward Z, that he would probably never leave room Z15, not for the rest of his life. His reality was confined to those four white walls for the rest of forever. The words in his skin would live only there until there was nothing left of them, no more stories to tell, no one to read them.
One day I would leave Ward Z behind – and Aaron, Patricia – all of them. I would go on from here. He, they, would not. Nausea bubbled up inside me. I jerked forward to press my hand against the pad that would give us entrance – and get me the hell away from Richard, but the folders I carried slipped forward and tumbled out of my hands on the ground.
"Shit."
"Adeline, look, wait. I'm sorry." A warm hand touched my shoulder just before I leaned down to pick them up. I gazed up at Richard. Sorrow covered his face. "I just worry about you. You're the best psych doctor we've had down here since I've been here for the last year. You care, so much, and you try really hard. And that's awesome." He dropped his hand away and rubbed the back of his head. "No one else, that I've seen, has come down here with the kind of passion you have, the desire to help these people. That's admirable, considering the things they've done. I just don't want you to get lost in their crazy. It's happened. I know, you know that, and that we've talked about it before, but, fuck, I'm sorry. I just worry about you."
I nodded, remembering Dr. Smith being wheeled through Ward N, taken to his own personal room – as a patient.
"I don't want that to be you."
I sucked in a deep breath, the cold seeping through my jacket. I wanted to lash out at Richard, but I couldn't. "Thanks, Richard." My words sounded cold, stale, but I couldn't deny that I meant them. He was so genuine, such a good person. He bent down next to me as I gathered the papers that had scattered around us.
As his big hands shuffled through a few pages, I stopped him. "Wait."
I frowned.
"What is it, Adeline?" He glanced between me and the pages in his hands.
"This one." The page was only half exposed, but even as the paper sat perfectly still in Richard's hands, the ink on the page continued to move.
I shook my head, slipping the page out of his hand. The image swirled and danced before my eyes. I couldn't pinpoint what it was, it moved too quickly, dancing, taunting. I blinked – and when it didn't stop, I blinked again.
"Adeline? Are you okay?"
Richard's voice seemed far away.
I couldn't take my gaze off the dancing, the swirling – the something.
"Adeline?"
I sucked in a deep breath, tearing my gaze away. "Fine. I'm fine." I handed him the page without looking at it again.
"Are you sure?"
I nodded. "Yes. Just tired is all."
We didn't say anything else as we picked up the things I dropped.
I'm fine. It's fine. Everything is fine.
But something else bubbled under my skin – panic. The feeling followed me down the steps and into Ward Z.
"Dr. Violet, so good of you to be here, on time." Christopher's voice drug me from my thoughts as I reached the bottom of the stairs. A glance at my watch revealed I was one minute and thirty-six seconds late.
"I'm hardly late." There was a tremble in my voice. I cleared my throat and glanced at Richard, who had paused next to me, though not for long. Someone else drew my attention. Someone new. He stood next to Christopher, a man somewhere in his fifties wearing a white lab coat and thick glasses.
"Dr. Violet, allow me to introduce you to the new medical doctor of Ward Z, Dr. Calvin Wintrone."
"Just call me Calvin," he said, extending his hand toward me.
I took it, feeling slightly bewildered. No one had said anything to me about a new doctor being brought in.
"Dr. Violet, is, I'm sure, thrilled for you to be here. She was very concerned when she started a few months ago, about the physical health of her patients, and of course without a medical doctor on staff, she was concerned that a mishap could come about."
Calvin nodded, an understanding smile covering his face. "I get that. It's amazing the ward has gone this long without one. I'm just glad to be here now, and that there hasn't been any serious medical issues recently."
"As are we." Christopher smiled, revealing his crooked teeth. He glanced between Calvin and I as if there was something he knew that I didn't. He cleared his throat. "I've already shown Dr. Wintrone around, but I'm sure the two of you have some things to chat about with scheduling, and such." And just like that, Christopher headed off down the hall. Richard hurried to catch up with him, leaving me with Calvin.
"It's great to be down here," Calvin said, awkwardly.
I nodded. "I'm surprised honestly. When I started a few months ago the ward had been without a medical doctor for some time. I just assumed we would never get one."
"Well, here I am." He held out his arms.
"Did you come from upstairs?"
"I did." He dropped them. "I came from Ward E, you know, where they primarily hold self-abusers."
"Ah, yes, I've heard of Ward E. I came from Ward N."
"Nice." He nodded his head quickly, too quickly. He was nervous, or maybe he was just an awkward person. I couldn't decide.
"It's hard to imagine how this place will run down here with another doctor." My voice sounded disappointed, though it wasn't because of the fact that I would be sharing my power down here, but rather because I didn't know what this would mean for me and for Aaron.
"I'm hoping I can make your life easier." We moved to walk down the hall toward my office and toward Z15. "Christopher said that you haven't taken a day off since you started, even though all of the other staff members have taken several."
It was true. But what would I do all day in the house? Aaron was here, which was where I needed to be. I chewed on the inside of my lip at the thought.
"Well, there's a lot to be done, and when the staff is small…"
"Yeah, I get it." He nodded and smiled. "My office is next to yours." He gestured at the closed door. "But I'd really like to talk with you about something I found in the OR."
I frowned. "The OR?" I'd been inside the operating room one time on my first day. The array of medical machinery scattered about the space hadn't interested me in the least – all of them foreign, mystery objects.
"Yeah, there's this machine, well, just let me show you."
I followed him inside the room at the end of the hall. I didn't look at Aaron's door like I usually did when I was close by, hoping to catch a glance. Fear bloomed inside me.
Why would they hire a medical doctor now, when they haven't had one in months?
They know what you're doing, Adeline. You can't hide.
Panic. It welled inside me again, for the second time in the last five minutes, like an ugly troll, ready to barrel out and attack everything in its path.
No, they can't know!
Calvin moved into a room off to the side of the OR. I hadn't gone into this one before.
"This machine—" Calvin flicked on the light "—is something I've only read about. I never thought I'd see one in real life."
I glanced at the big contraption in front of me. It was tube-like, where a person could lay and be moved into. "Isn't this just an MRI machine?"
"No, no, no, no, no!" Calvin clapped his hands together in excitement "It looks like that, sure, but this, this is something else entirely." He ran his hands along the smooth metal. "This is the Memory Echo Imaging machine."
I frowned. "MEI? What does it do?"
Calvin smiled and adjusted his glasses. "I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it – though it is going to change your line of work forever. Last I heard they were illegal, created in North Korea, and only used there." Calvin moved and began to type on a computer attached to one end of the machine. After a few clicks a low humming sound came out of the machine, like the power up of an industrial fan. A soft blue light illuminated the tube. "This machine has the ability to track memories."
"Memories?" A dry chuckle escaped my lips.
"Yes." Calvin wasn't looking at me, but at the computer, his fingers typing furiously. A bright royal blue filled a projector screen I hadn't noticed before, over the machine. "It's able to pick up memories from any person placed inside the machine, even repressed memories."
I frowned, but my heart escalated in my chest. "Repressed memories? And then, it just, what? Displays them on the screen?"
"Exactly." He stopped typing and frowned. "From what I can tell, this one has never been used before, unless the memory storage of previous patients has been put in a different file that I'm not seeing."
"Why is it illegal? Privacy laws?"
"Something like that." He glanced at me. "Also, it's supposedly extremely painful for the patient. The very act of digging around inside someone's mind is not a painless process, at least, not yet."
"Wow." I played with the loose piece of hair that had fallen in front of my eye. "So, I could literally access the past of patients and see it." Giddiness filled me.
"Yes, not their past as a truth, but their past as they saw it. The things they remember – and only that." He scratched his head. "Or at least that was my understanding of it, my buddy in medical school…"
Calving continued to talk, but I stopped listening. My brain immediately jumped to Aaron, where it usually spent most of its time these days. It went back to yesterday, back to before our kiss, back to her.
What was she like – the woman he loved? Was she out there waiting for him, biding her time until he could be free?
"They have no future outside these walls." Richard's words came back to me. A twist of happiness flooded me, like a squeezed lemon into crisp, clean water. She could wait forever. He wasn't getting out.
The happiness faded almost as soon as it emerged. He still thought about her. She was still a part of him. If she wasn't, he would talk about her. He would have told me the terrible things she had done to break his heart, so I could fix it, so I could put him back together.
"She is a part of me, not you."
I squeezed my hands into fists. How dare he.
"Can you remove memories?"
"I'm sorry?" Calvin glanced over the computer screen with a frown.
"Can you change them?" I tapped my fingers on the metal hull. "Can you change them with the machine?"
Calvin scratched his head. "Uh, I don't know. I don't think so. I think it only has the technology to read them." He paused. "Why would you want to change someone's memories?"
A smile spread across my lips. "I could erase her."
"I'm sorry, what?"
I coughed into my hand and met his gaze. "If I could erase memories, or change them, then I could potentially remove the trauma that possibly added to a patient's mental illness." I sounded so professional, so thoughtful and caring about my work. But instead I was a ball of jealousy inside, determined to destroy every last memory of the mystery woman in Aaron's head.
"Oh, yes, that would be something." Calvin smiled. "Spoken like a good doctor, always wanting to help her patients." He paused and frowned. "Oh, come look at this." He turned the screen toward me. There was a list of different emotions filling the screen. "I didn't know the machine could do this, but apparently you can choose the type of memories you want to target." He shook his head. "It makes sense though, since the machine is supposed to be physically painful, and you wanted to do multiple sessions, then you wouldn't want to watch the same memories over and over, or all the memories of a person's life." A small smile spread across his lips. "Genius."
"So this would allow us to target only memories that sparked a certain emotion, like happiness?"
"Sure, but it even allows you to be more specific. Happiness spawned from feelings of love, or even anger spawned from feelings of love. There is an option for just love in general, or happiness in general. Wow, that's so remarkable. I wonder how deeply one could go, if someone could be so specific in their qualifications for a memory that they could materialize just one specific memory from someone?" He turned the screen back to him. I watched as he continued clicking, my mind racing. A few minutes later he powered the MEI machine down.
"It's too bad, though, really, that the machine can't erase memories purely for the benefit of patients. I don't know if any such thing exists. The ability to watch the memories, especially those repressed is impressive enough and the be specific about the kind of memories summoned, but to change them?" He came and stood next to me, we both gazed at the machine. "That would be some serious real world-changing shit."
I glanced at him, surprised to hear him say the word shit. I'd known him for less than twenty minutes, yet he seemed like the kind of doctor who was endlessly professional. "How so?" I asked.
"Think of what someone could do if that type of machine got into the wrong hands. Hell, even this is something else – the ability to watch someone's memories in HD on a screen, like a movie – to witness their trauma, their tragedies, their triumphs. It's mind-blowing."
Calvin left then, mentioning something about Ryan the orderly and paperwork, before leaving me alone with the machine.
I ran my hand along the hull and tapped my fingers against the metal. It made a hollow sound. Empty.
I knew what I needed to do.