Lakewood(15)

“It’s really the best word for it.”

Lena rubbed her forehead. Yawned. She could use another cup or two of coffee.

“And if you get a headache, you have to tell me immediately.”

The doctor handed her a list to memorize: golden caviar, dead lipstick, broken space station, chocolate loveseat.

“What does it mean if I have a headache?”

“Do you?” Dr. Maggie’s eyebrows raised, her mouth parted.

“No. I’m fine.”

What Lena hadn’t anticipated was how annoying it was to not know what was going on. She wanted to make this work out, to get into whatever the Lakewood Project was. It didn’t matter that Dr. Lisa’s questions were mostly about killing. They were just questions. Lena decided she would care when the doctor handed her a gun and said, “You have to shoot one of us.” Dr. Maggie made her feel unexpectedly closer to her mother. It was probably a small taste of what it was like to be her, trying to sort out her health. Here’s a doctor throwing a bunch of tests at you and telling you nothing substantial. You’re expected to trust them, but they haven’t given you a single reason to believe that they care about you. It’s like a word search to them, while to you it’s everything.

Dr. Maggie handed her a book. “We need to wait an hour now before doing anything else.”

The book was about a woman traveling the world on her 45th birthday. She wanted to understand something new about life. The main character had just got divorced, and traveling was a thing she said that people did after divorces. They did something their spouse would have hated, like a train trip across the country. They went to The Great Wall of China and thought about how it could be seen from space. And how they would never be seen from space and that was sad, but somehow life-affirming. The book was boring, but it made Lena want to get a divorce. The time afterward seemed wild and glamorous.

When the hour was up, Lena repeated the parts of the list she remembered: caviar, dead, broken space station, chocolate.

Dr. Maggie checked her blood pressure, the inside of her mouth, and asked if her eyes or vagina felt painfully dry.

“Thankfully, no,” Lena replied.

“Then we can go on to part 2.” She pulled out a large needle and injected a clear fluid into Lena’s arm. “Make a fist five times really fast.”

The doctor watched her as she did it. Lena yawned. The doctor kept staring. Lena’s left arm itched. She checked it for a rash, hives. Then, heat. Burning. A wildfire spread from the middle of her left arm to her fingers, up her shoulder. Lena’s mouth was saying a blur of “Oh my God, Help, Fuck, and What?” and sounds that in her pain she hoped she wouldn’t remember making.

She was on the floor in a ball.

The doctor was writing notes, pen moving fast. Her mouth was moving.

Lena sweated from the pain.

It was in her throat, claws out, scuttling quickly to her face. I’m going to die, she thought, and for the first time in her life she wasn’t being dramatic when she thought it.

A spasm in her lower back. Her mouth and face were wet from drool and tears. It was over. Lena’s vagina ached. She was relieved when she felt down there that she hadn’t peed.

“Now, tell me,” Dr. Maggie said, eyes still on her sheet, “which of those phrases do you remember?”

“What was that?”

“I said, ‘What do you remember?’”

“Caviar. Couch. Dead. Broken. Golden caviar.”

And then her feet were moving. She was in the hallway. If Lena could have sprinted, she would have. Her fingers were pressing against the wall, leaving sweaty prints. There was loud air coming through vents and a noise Lena realized was the sound of her breathing. A woman was standing in the middle of the hallway wearing gray workout clothes identical to Lena’s.

“Mom?” Lena asked. Her mother’s skin was gleaming as if it were freshly lotioned. Her hair in fresh braids. “I don’t feel well.”

Lena vomited. Looked up, shook her head.

It wasn’t her mother.

The woman was significantly taller, at least 10 years younger. She took another long look at Lena and sprinted away. She went to one of the doors and slammed it behind her. Lena followed, tried the door, but it was locked.

“Please, I’m sick,” Lena said.

If someone had asked her, she could not have said why it was so important to get this woman to acknowledge her. Maybe it was to think about anything other than what had just happened. Or how much her body still hurt. She knocked again on the door. In the instructional material they had talked about the need for isolation. From beneath the door came the sounds of what could have been a documentary or maybe a podcast. A man’s voice talking about recycling and plastic bottles that would be on the Earth for longer than anyone could ever possibly live. She leaned against the door, shut her eyes.

When Lena opened her eyes, she was being shaken awaken in her bed. Two people she didn’t recognize were looking down at her. Their faces were hard to see in the dark—only their white teeth and the shine of their eyes were visible at first.

“Don’t be scared,” a woman’s voice said. It was soft and kind, as if she were speaking to a child she loved. Lena coughed. She sat up, rubbed her eyes.

“It’s time to do some work,” a man’s voice said.