Choke

Chapter 45

THE MINUTE BEFORE I LEFT ST. ANTHONY'S for the last time, the minute before I was out the door and running, Paige tried to explain.

Yes, she was a doctor. Talking in a rush, her words crowded together. Yes, she was a patient committed here. Clicking and unclicking her ballpoint pen, fast. She was really a doctor of genetics, and she was only a patient here because she'd told the truth. She wasn't trying to hurt me. Pudding still smeared around her mouth. She was just trying to do her job.

In the hallway, during our last moment together, Paige pulled my sleeve so I'd have to look at her, and she said, "You have to believe this."

Her eyes were bulging so the whites showed all around the iris, and the little black brain of her hair was coming loose.

She was a doctor, she said, a specialist in genetics. From the year 2556. And she'd traveled back in time to become impregnated by a typical male of this period in history.

So she could preserve and document a genetic sampling, she said. They needed the sample to help cure a plague. In the year 2556. This wasn't a cheap and easy trip. Traveling in time was the equivalent of what space travel is for humans now, she said. It was a chancy, expensive gamble, and unless she came back impregnated with an intact fetus, any future missions would be canceled.

Here in my 1734 costume, bent double with my impacted bowels, I'm still stuck on her idea of a typical male.

"I'm only locked in here because I told people the truth about myself," she says. "You were the only available reproductive male."

Oh, I say, that makes this all lots better. Now everything makes perfect sense.

She just wanted me to know that, tonight, she was to be recalled to the year 2556. This would be the last time we'd ever see each other, and she just wanted me to know that she was grateful.

"I'm profoundly grateful," she said. "And I do love you."

And standing there in the hallway, in the strong light from the sun rising outside the windows, I took a black felt-tipped pen from the chest pocket of her lab coat.

The way she stood with her shadow falling on the wall behind her for the last time, I started to trace her outline.

And Paige Marshall said, "What's that for?"

It's how art was invented.

And I said, "Just in case. It's just in case you're not crazy."