Alan stood over a stretcher in the ER, looking down at a dead woman whose unblinking eyes stared up at him. Janet, he thought, but Janet had been blonde and stunning, and this woman had dark hair and was... ordinary. Then she smiled, and her face changed — and she became his pretty next-door neighbor. Smiling. But still dead.

He woke and sat up and shook his head from side to side to clear the nightmare. “Hell,” he whispered. Except for that first year after he lost Janet and Chick, he’d never been subject to nightmares — not the kind that came while he was asleep, anyway. He had always been a good sleeper. He brought his work home with him; no matter what anyone might say, doctors who gave a shit about their patients did. But he’d never carried his work into his sleep before.

“Hell and fuck that.” He still breathed hard, and he realized he’d knotted the sheet in his hands. He was sweating. Middle of the day, hot as hell in the house — of course he was sweating. Which was probably what had caused the nightmare, too.

He considered going back to sleep, but he didn’t want to sleep. If he was going to have dreams like that, he’d invest in coffee and never go back to sleep again.

He decided he might as well go work on his secret project for a while, the thing no one he worked with, no one related to him, and not a single friend new about. He stretched and headed upstairs to his home office and the computer. Turned it on, brought up the document he’d been working on, and did a search for “aaa” — his place marker.

He wasn’t too far into the book. He’d forgotten how much he’d deleted. Dammit. He settled into his chair and stared at the blinking line of the cursor, at the nearly empty document, at the smattering of letters on the screen. He rested his hands on the keyboard, fingers on the home row, and he waited for the words to come.

The world stayed with him, though he needed it to fall away. The soft whir of the computer fan. From overhead, a small twin-engine plane circling for a landing at Executive Airfield. The ticking of his watch, usually inaudible but now painfully loud. The oppressive air of waiting gave the townhouse a silence deeper than mere stillness.

The pretty woman next door.

From somewhere in the house, a soft thump that set his heart racing... and then the air conditioner kicked on. Alan sighed, the release from the tension almost painful, as if he’d been an overinflated balloon that had finally burst. Air conditioner. Outside, the temperature was in the high nineties. Without AC, indoors began to feel like the inside of an oven by ten a.m. And because he ran the damned air conditioner all the time, it wore out and broke down frequently. He had some sort of compressor problem, perhaps. Or maybe the ants had gotten into the outdoor circuitry again and eaten the plastic coating off the wiring. That had been $430 to fix last October, when it was still hotter than hell.

Hotter than hell. Heat. Heat and wetness.

Suddenly an image of his next-door neighbor was in front of him, with her clothes clinging to her, pert little breasts jutting out, hot and sweaty and with a look of utter, wanton passion in her dark eyes...

Alan frowned, stared at the computer screen. Where the hell had that come from?

Air-conditioning — he’d been thinking about air-conditioning and suddenly there was a woman he didn’t know with little breasts and big eyes staring back at him, looking like the personification of wild sex.

He did not need to think about his next-door neighbor, sweaty or not. Unless she repaired air conditioners. He needed to think about air-conditioning, because the AC wasn’t supposed to thump. If it did it again, he’d have to have someone come out and take a look. He had a contract with the service people. He could call them.

In a while. Later. Before the damned thing actually broke down again, stranding him with sweat-drenched sheets and ceiling fans that did nothing but circulate hot air.

But not right at that moment. Later. After he finished what he was doing.

He shook his head and resumed his writing stance: eyes fixed on the computer screen, hands resting on the gentle curves of his ergonomically correct keyboard, shoulders tense. He resumed his vigil for the words that wouldn’t come. Words that were supposed to help him make sense of his loss, that were supposed to help him lay Janet and Chick to rest after five long, hard years, that were supposed to bring him through the pain and anger and despair to the place where his life would begin again.

Maybe he was asking too much of words. Maybe he was expecting too much of himself. But the endless stream of human misery that poured through the emergency room doors was becoming more than he could bear: In every child’s face he saw his dead daughter; in every beautiful woman, his dead wife. His bitterness towards beautiful women, his anguish in dealing with children — they were getting in his way. If he couldn’t deal more productively with his loss, he was going to have to find another line of work.

“Physician, heal thyself,” he muttered, and glared at the screen.

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