Household Gods

They ran an ultrasound. They took a series of ordinary X-rays. Dr. Feldman did a spinal tap – that hurt. It hurt rather badly, but never as badly as having her tooth pulled without anesthetic. She had to hold still, that was the hardest part. But she did it.

They ran a CAT scan, which was claustrophobic, and an MRI, which was both claustrophobic and noisy. It was much like going through a car wash, except for the water, and the hot wax afterwards.

Being silly helped. So did just being – being here, in this world and time, where pain was seldom worse than a brief discomfort, and where everything was so very clean.

It was the middle of the afternoon before she got back to her room. She was exhausted, and she was starving. It was well past the lunch hour, but Dr. Feldman was ready for that: she called Dietary, and the kitchen sent up a tuna-salad sandwich, a plate of orange heavy-duty Jell-O, and an oversized chocolate-chip cookie. The bread was soft and wonderfully free from grit, though it didn’t have a tenth the flavor of her own baking in Carnuntum – but Umma’s shoulder and elbow had ached endlessly from working the quern.

But even better than the bread was the cookie. Until she bit into what was, really, an indifferently good cookie grudgingly flecked with poor-quality chocolate, she’d forgotten just how much she missed that dark sweetness. No chocolate in Carnuntum. No food of the gods. Even knowing how much better it could be, she savored each bite. God, it was good.

When she’d eaten her lunch in blissful solitude, she hunted around for the remote and turned on the TV news. There was plenty of local crime, but there were also New York and Moscow and Angola and the Persian Gulf, right in the room with her. She could find out what was going on in any of those places more readily than she could have learned what was happening in Vindobona, twenty miles up the Danube from Carnuntum. What a wonder of a world this was!

She reined herself in before she got too giddy. She should calm down or she’d get into trouble, but it was rather wonderful to be so very much aware of all the things she’d taken for granted. It made her feel more alive; more in the world.

She was still thinking about half in Latin, till she ran into concepts that needed English. Or she thought it was Latin. If she’d hallucinated a year and a half in Carnuntum, she could just as easily have hallucinated a language to go with it. She’d been at a party once, one of Frank’s academic mill-and-swills, in which she’d overheard one of the guests telling another about a colleague who’d apparently gone around the bend: “He claims he’s been channeling one of Alexander the Great’s historians – in Greek, no less.”

“And is it real Greek?” the other had asked.

“Well,” said the first with a touch of scorn, “it is Greek – but it’s much too archaic for the place and the time.”

At the time she’d laughed, thinking how very academic that conversation was. They weren’t disturbed by the channeling, but channeling in too archaic a dialect – that was very bad form.

Now she wondered. What if..?

No. It was preposterous. And yet…

Somewhere between the international scene and the financial report, a nurse brought in a plastic bag filled with clothes. Frank hadn’t wasted any time sending them. Neither had he taken the time to come up and visit. He wasn’t that considerate.

Then again, maybe he was. They couldn’t stay in the same room without squabbling. It was a great deal easier on her nerves if he stayed in his place and she stayed in hers.

The day could have dragged, but she had the TV and the remote, and she entertained herself with relentless channel-surfing. Soap operas, game shows, movies old and almost new, kids’ programming, women’s programming, talk shows, reality shows, the entertainment report, the news, sports, Discover, PBS, the Learning Channel… She was as drunk on images as she’d once been on wine.

Dinner came on time: frozen fried chicken, frozen peas, mashed potatoes with the same gluey gravy she remembered from her high-school cafeteria, and in place of tough Jell-O in colors never seen in nature, a scoop of gelatinous tapioca pudding. The novelty was wearing off: she was starting to think that hospital cuisine left a bit to be desired. But the styrofoam cup held real coffee. How on earth had they let that through Dietary?

She didn’t care how, just that it was there. She sighed with pleasure over every lukewarm sip.

Just about two sips from the bottom of the cup, Dr. Feldman strode into the room, not quite so springily as she had in the morning. Her face wore a distinctly sour expression.

She didn’t linger long in small talk of the good-evening-how-are-you? variety. “I’ve been going over your new tests,” she said.

Nicole’s heart thudded. She was glad the monitor was disconnected: it would have brought a nurse at the run. “Yes?” she prompted when the doctor didn’t go on.