What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(14)

We have doctors who make sure that we’re not admitting anyone likely to suffer serious complications from our treatment, so my job is mainly monitoring and addressing complaints and unrealistic expectations. I can fake sympathy for days: Aunt Thomasina says I am a psychopath and that it’s a good thing I came under the right influences at a young age. I also do night shifts, since we can’t lock anybody into their rooms and I’m good with sleepwalkers. Last week we had two. One guy rose up pulling tubes out of his skin because he’s not used to sleeping indoors in summer. He grew up in an earthquake-prone region and his family hit upon the strategy of sleeping in a nearby field so as to avoid having their house fall down on them. My shift partner got him back into bed with warm assurances of safety, but when it was my turn I merely whispered: “You are interrupting the process, my friend. Do you want her to regret or not?” He sleep-ran back down the corridor and had to be restrained from re-attaching himself to the vitamin machine. That was what he’d written in his questionnaire beside “objective”: TO BE SEXY SO THAT SHE REGRETS.

Our other sleepwalker was just extremely hungry. You can’t coax someone out of that. This client got up and searched for food with such determination that she had to have her drug dose significantly elevated. For a couple of hours it seemed her hunger was stronger than the drugs. I sat out the third intervention and stayed in the monitor room watching the camera feed: It was fascinating to watch her returning to the surface of sleep crying, “Chips . . . chips . . . ,” but eventually she went down hard and stayed under. Ultimately she was happy with her results but apart from the usual disorientation she also looked really thoughtful, as if asking herself: Worth it? She probably won’t be back.

The sleepwalkers upset my shift partner Tyche. Her being upset helps her get through to them, I think. They can tell that she cares about them and isn’t judging them like I am. Tyche is someone that I think Ched should meet. She’s only a part-timer at the clinic; her business card states that the rest of the time she does ODD JOBS—INVOCATIONS. Invocations. Something she learned while trying to do something else, she says. So she can relate to Aunt Thomasina’s weight-loss discovery. Tyche’s beauty is interestingly kinetic; it comes and goes and comes back again. Or maybe it’s more that you observe it in the first second of seeing her and then she makes you shelve that exquisite first impression for a while so she can get on with things. Then in some moment when she’s not talking or when she suddenly turns her head it hits you all over again. There’s a four-star constellation on her wrist that isn’t always there either. When it is, its appearance goes through various degrees of permanence, from drawn on with kohl to full tattoo. I mentioned this to her, but she laughed it off: “But don’t you stare at me too much? Everything OK with your boyfriend?” In my matchmaking capacity I’ve paid closer attention to her visuals than I would pay to anybody on my own behalf. On to inner qualities: She’s powerful. Not just in doing whatever she does to make people listen to her instead of watch her, but . . . I think she heals herself. She wears a wedding ring, so I made reference to her partner, but she held her hand up and said: “Oh, this? I found it.” Then she told me about it. A while ago she’d been in a relationship with someone who was adamant about keeping her a secret, to the extent that they didn’t acknowledge each other if there was even one other person in sight. Her superpower was picking emotionally unavailable partners and she doubted she’d get a better offer. She also assumed that the relationship would gradually get less secret. Nothing changed, and while she continued to profess her commitment to her secret boyfriend, her body disagreed and tried to get her out of it. She got sick. Her hair started falling out and her skin went scaly; she was cold all the time, and could only fall asleep by reciting words of summoning.

—

NOBODY CAME, but one evening at the pub down the road from her house she found a ring at the bottom of a pint of lager she was drinking. The ring was heavier than it looked, and she recognized it without remembering exactly where she’d seen it before. Since no one at the pub seemed to know anything about the ring, she took it to the police station, only to return there to collect it at the end of the month: There had been no inquiries related to the item, so it was hers. And when she wore it she felt that a love existed. For her . . . her, of all people. And it was on all the time. Of this love there would be no photographs, no handwritten declarations, no token at all save the ring. If this was the only way that what she’d called could come to her then it sufficed; she was content. The hand that wore the ring grew smooth, and she recouped her losses.

“Didn’t some nuns used to wear wedding rings?” I asked her.

She nodded and said that that was something she thought about a lot.

I’d best introduce her to Ched before the nuns get her. Ched’s voices are bullies: They won’t let him play unless it’s for keeps. Tyche might have an answer for them.

—

BUT WHY AM I treating Ched’s celibacy as something to be fixed? Maybe because I am so much in his debt for so many things and I can’t think of any other way to settle up. Maybe I’ve become evangelical ever since I got a little family of my own. The scene at the homestead is different every day. My boyfriend has joint custody of his two daughters with his ex-wife, whose schedule is ever-changing, so the girls might be at home or they might not.