Elsewhere(17)

Liz racks her brain. "It's a circle because, um . . . Earth is a sphere, which is kind of like a, um, three-dimensional circle?"

Yetta shakes her head in disgust. "Exactly as I thought!"

"Look, I'm sorry about falling asleep." Liz speaks very quickly to avoid being interrupted. "Maybe I can watch the end of the video again?"

Yetta Brown ignores Liz. "We have a lot to get done today, Ms. Hall. Things will go far more smoothly if you can manage to stay awake."

"This is Elizabeth Marie Hall, Mr. Ghent." Yetta pronounces Liz's name as if it were a particularly unpleasant word like gingivitis. Aldous Ghent looks up as Yetta and Liz enter the office.

"Thank you, Ms. Brown," Aldous calls as Yetta basically slams the door in his face. "Ah well, perhaps she didn't hear me? Yetta seems to have peculiarly bad hearing. She's always interrupting me."

Liz laughs politely.

"Hello, Elizabeth Hall. I am Aldous Ghent, your acclimation counselor. Please have a seat." He indicates that Liz should sit in the chair in front of his desk. However, that chair is entirely covered in paperwork. Indeed, all of his windowless office is shrouded in paperwork.

"Should I move these files?" Liz asks.

"Oh, please do!" Aldous smiles and then looks sadly around his cluttered office. "I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork."

"Maybe you need a bigger office?" Liz suggests.

"They keep promising me one. It's the thing I'm most looking forward to. Except for my hair growing back." He pats his bald pate affectionately. "I started going bald around twentyfive, so I figure I only have around thirty-six more years to wait for a full head of hair. The sad part is, we all lose most of our hair when we become babies anyway. The way I see it, I'll only have about a twentyfour-year window of hair before I lose it all over again. Ah well!" Aldous sighs.

Liz runs her fingers through her own newly grown hair.

"Last year my teeth came back in. The teething was murder! I kept my wife up all night with my blubbering and ballyhoo." Aldous grins so that Liz can see his teeth. "I'm going to take good care of them this time around. Dentures are not good. They're worse than not good actually. Dentures, they um . . ."

"Suck?" Liz suggests.

"Dentures suck," Aldous says with a laugh. "They really do. The sound they make when you eat is just like sucking."

Aldous carefully removes a file from the bottom of a precarious pile of paperwork in the center of his desk. He opens the file and reads aloud, "You're from Bermuda where you died in a boating accident?"

"Um, that's not me," Liz says.

"Sorry." Aldous selects another file, "You're from Manhattan, and had, uh, breast cancer, is it?"

Liz shakes her head. She doesn't even have much in the way of breasts.

Aldous selects a third file. "Massachusetts? Head trauma in a bicycle accident?"

Liz nods. That's her.

"Well" Aldous shrugs "at least it was quick. Except for the coma part, but you probably don't remember that anyway."

Indeed, Liz does not. "How long was I in a coma?"

"About a week, but you were already brain-dead. Says here your poor parents had to decide to pull the plug. We, my wife Rowena and I, had to pull the plug on our son, Joseph, back on Earth.

His best friend accidentally shot him when they were playing with an old gun of mine. It was the worst day of my life. If you ever have children " Aldous stops himself.

"If I ever have children, what?"

"I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that. No one can have children on Elsewhere," Aldous says.

Liz takes a moment to absorb this information. From Al-dous's tone, she knows he thinks this news will upset her. But Liz hasn't really thought about having children.

"Do you see your son now?" Liz asks.

Aldous shakes his head. "No, he was already back on Earth by the time Ro and I got here. I would have liked to see him again, but it was not to be." Aldous blows his nose. "Allergies," he apologizes.

"What kind?" Liz asks.

"Oh," Aldous replies, "I'm allergic to sad memories. It's the worst. Would you like to see a picture of my wife, Rowena?"

Liz nods. Aldous holds out a silver frame with a picture of a lovely Japanese lady about Aldous's age. "This is my Rowena," he says proudly.

"She's very elegant," Liz says.

"She is, isn't she? We died on the same day in a plane crash."

"That's awful."

"No," Aldous says, "we were actually very, very lucky."

"For the longest time, I didn't even realize that I was dead," Liz confides in Aldous. "Is that normal?"

"Sure," Aldous reassures her, "people take all different amounts of time to acclimate. Some people reach Elsewhere, and they still think it's a dream. I knew a man who was here fifty years and went all the way back to Earth without catching on." Aldous shrugs. "Depends on how a person died, how old they were it's lots of factors, and it's all part of the process. It can be particularly difficult for young people to realize they have passed," Aldous says.