September 3
“Alone?” I ask. Weird. Why would a doctor send a kid alone like this?
“What’s that?” she asks, pointing at me.
“What’s what?” I ask. “My shirt?”
“No,” she says, “the–” She stops and squints at me. “Nothing. It’s gone now,” she says. “It was there, though, on your shirt. Like a big bug or something.”
I glance down at my chest. The Steamer is still there, boiling away slowly; it doesn’t appear to have gotten any bigger during the office visit. The girl, though, is watching me closely. “It’s nothing,” I say.
“But it’s something, isn’t it?” she asks. “I mean, I think it is. It feels like it is.” The way she stresses ‘feels’ makes me wonder. It almost sounds like she’s using the word in an entirely different way to how she thinks it sounds to me. “I– I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
I sit down across the waiting room from her. “Is there anything you can talk about?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “You’re a stranger.”
“What if I told you there was something on my chest?”
She glances at me, and for an instant we make eye contact. Her expression changes in that moment. I know how crazy this is going to sound, but I swear to you it’s the truth. I can literally feel her go through a dozen different emotions. Not just notice that she’s experiencing them, but actually feel them with her. The conflict roils in my mind just as much as hers. Is this girl a time traveler?
September 2
“You’re sick,” she says, not looking up.
“So I heard,” I mumble. I glance around, but the waiting room is empty except for the two of us. She idly swings her legs back and forth underneath the chair, and flips the page.
“You should sit down, you’re gonna fall over.” She waves at one of the chairs next to her.
“I’m not,” I start, but a wave of dizziness comes over me. My equilibrium is shot, and I land on my butt, barely avoiding crushing my purse. “Whoa.”
“Told you,” she says, smiling slightly.
“Knock it off,” I say. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“I’m sick, too,” she says, and frowns. She puts down the magazine and stares me in the eye. “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
This girl looks to be no older than about eight or so. She has long-ish straight blonde hair, and her pale blue eyes look clear and bright. She certainly doesn’t look sick. Maybe a little skinny– her jeans and t-shirt are hanging off of her– but not too badly. Maybe her mom thought she’d grow into them.
“Sounds familiar,” I mumble, picking myself up off the floor. “Are you with a sister or something?”
“Nope,” she says, glancing at the table next to her. She shuffles a few of the magazines around, trying to find something more on her level, I guess. For a moment I catch myself wondering just what is on her level. Child psychology isn’t my thing. “My other doctor told me to come here.”
September 1
“But you don’t know?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ll go get the doctor.” She mumbles something as she leaves, but I can’t quite make it out.
As the door closes again, I glance at the door across the hall. It’s open, and the exam room is empty. I’m not really sure what I expected to find there, really. But deep down, the girl in the other room worries me. Maybe she’s Maris. Or a friend of Maris’s.
A few minutes later the doctor comes in and goes over pretty much all of the tests Amy put me through. “Well,” he says.
“I’m sick,” I offer weakly.
“Yeah, no kidding.” The doctor grimaces. “I’m going to prescribe you an antiviral, and I’d like you to come back in a day or so with a stool sample.”
“You want… my poo,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“And that will help you determine what I have?”
“Possibly,” the doctor shrugs.
I pause for a moment, suppressing a sneeze. “How about chicken entrails? You want a side of those, too?”
“Just go out into the lobby and make an appointment,” the doctor says, rolling his eyes. “I’ll have the prescription for you in a bit.”
I trudge back into the waiting area to find the blonde girl from before sitting and reading an ancient copy of Highlights for Children. She looks bored. That in and of itself is not surprising, given that it’s a clinic waiting room and that Highlights was never really all that interesting to begin with, but there’s something about how this girl is bored that goes beyond ordinary boredom. She looks like she has an active contempt for the magazine.
August 31
The girl inside that room stares me in the eye for the split-second that we can see each other, before a tall woman in gray scrubs exits the other room. Abruptly the door to my room closes, and I’m left staring at the cheap wood paneling of the door.
Did that girl know me? Do I know her? Maybe she’s a time traveler. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. It’s hard to tell the difference anymore. I close my eyes for a moment, trying to clear the fogginess from my head.
“Fran? Fran?” A tall black woman is speaking to me as I open my eyes. “You all right?”
I sit up– when did I lay down?– and look at the woman. “I guess I dozed off,” I say, my voice thick and crusted.
“Hmm,” the woman says. “I’m Amy, the physician’s assistant,” she adds. “Let’s have a look at you, shall we?” We go through the usual motions of a physical examination, with Amy clucking here and there as she checks my vitals. “Well.”
“Well?” I ask.
“You’re sick,” she says, with apparent finality.
“With what?”
“Something.”
“Something,” I repeat. “Can you be more specific? Is it the flu? Zombie-itis? Flesh-eating ebola?”
“Well, you’re not a zombie,” she says, “and most of you is still here, so we can rule out those last two.”
August 30
“Have you been keeping busy?” the orderly asks, smiling.
“A little,” I croak. My voice is crackling and broken; I haven’t spoken more than five or ten words today. My throat feels like it’s on fire, and the world is swaying around me; even looking into the mirror was a bad idea, because it threatened to throw off my equilibrium. Only the sight of the Steamer anchored me, which when you think about it is really perverse.
Then again, my answer is a bit of a lie, as well. It’s true that finals wrapped up last week, and that Kyle has been flitting back and forth between the apartment and the student center in order to get all her papers in order for the move to New York. Naturally, helping her has consumed a lot of my time. But, if there had been any time travelers passing through this era lately, I wouldn’t have had time to help her pick out clothes. Subsequently I wouldn’t have gotten drenched in that rainstorm last Friday.
“Well, just sit right down, and the PA will be with you soon,” the orderly says. She waves vaguely at the examination bed in the room on the left. I nod and pull myself up onto it. As she closes the door to the exam room, the door across the hall opens.
August 29
Episode 5: What You Have Gathered From Coincidence
Tuesday, May 22, 2001
“Fran?” The orderly pops her head into the small waiting room as she calls my name. Shakily, I stand up and walk to the door, rubbing my nose and sniffling pathetically. I’m really not trying to play up the whole thing, but I can just feel the stares of the other patients in the waiting room.
I do not get sick often. In point of fact, I hardly ever get sick. When I do, though, it hits me hard. I can power through your basic colds and coughs, I can even handle a day or so out of sorts. Motion sickness is just a minor little inconvenience. But in the unlikely event that I catch something really nasty, I’m down for quite a while as I recover. Kyle says it’s because I have a strong metabolism, but coming from the girl who thinks french fries should count as a vegetable I consider pretty much all her health advice somewhat suspect.
As I pass by the examination mirror in the hallway, I glance at the Steamer on my chest. It’s grown ever so slowly since February, to the point where it’s about fist-sized now. Its red core isn’t yet there, but I have the odd feeling that it’s not too long now before it does open up. I’ve tried to ask Peter about it, but every time I try to arrange a meeting with him, some extremely contrived situation arises to prevent me from making it. The deluge of junk mail was a real subtle hint, I think.
August 28
“I gotta ask, though,” I say. “The forward-progress rule. That is an absolute, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not like she could have been telling the truth, is it?”
Peter nods. “Time travel’s still a very much inexact science,” he says. “We might find some other way of traveling non-destructively, but I don’t think that there’s any way to safely travel into the future, except the hard way.”
“And what’s the hard way?” I ask.
“One second at a time,” Peter says, grinning. “One second at a time.”
As I settle into bed that night, I glance down into the covers, at the part of my pajamas that’s rising and falling gently with my breath. The Steamer is still there.