The Anesthesia Game Page 4

  Her dad lowers himself on his knees beside her; his slick black hair and handsome James Bond ala Clive Cussler face just inches from hers. “A friend of mine,” he says. “A guy in the office. She’s a rescue. Half chocolate lab, half samoyed.”

  “Aaron,” says her mom icily. “Can we talk? Now.”

  Looking at Syd, her dad says, “Watcha gonna name her?”

  The puppy runs in circles on the marble kitchen floor and then slips, collapsing. Syd could just explode with joy. Just disintegrate into a thousand smiles. “Chocolate lab?” she says.

  “Mmhmm,” says her dad, “and samoyed.”

  “Samoyeds shed like crazy,” says the spoiler. “And they can be aggressive. Not to mention the germs, Aaron. Honestly.” Her arms are all tight and folded. “Honest to God.”

  Syd’s head is dizzy with names that involve chocolate. Hershey, Nestle, Milky Way, Snickers… “Godiva!” she shouts. “Godiva! Godiva! How’s that? The most sumptuous chocolate.”

  “Aaron,” warns Mom.

  Dad leans back up on his knees and rises, straightening his pant legs. “Godiva it is,” he says. “Now why don’t you watch her for a few minutes while I talk to Mom?”

  At the threshold, Mom says, “Don’t roll around with that dog, Sydney. Keep your distance. We have no idea what germs and diseases it’s got. I bet it hasn’t even seen a vet. It could have worms for all we know.”

  “I don’t care what germs it has,” mutters Syd after her mother leaves. “This dog is mine.” She snuggles the little fur ball in her lap, picks it up and kisses her nose, lets the pup lick her entire face. Hahahaha! I’m in love finally! This is the first good thing that’s happened in a hundred years, she thinks. If anyone takes this puppy away, she’s taking the next train to Virginia to live with Aunt Hannah. Hannah has a farm. Hannah will let her live there with Godiva for sure.

  The low hum of the buzz saw revs up and penetrates the wall.

  From Mom—“Don’t you think I have enough to do?”

  From Dad—“We all do our part, Mitsy. All of us, not just you. We have to take this chance. She needs companionship, for God’s sake.”

  From Mom—“I’ll have to consult my…”

  From Dad—“Your what? Who? What about your husband, for God’s sake? You put more stock in that …what’s her name? Pandora? You put more stock in that psychic than any of the people you live with.” A pause, then, “I’ve had it.”

  All very predictable, actually, and not that disturbing, until Syd hears a door slam, footsteps pound up the back staircase, and her mother break into bawling tears interrupted by whiney little gaspy shrieks. So melodramatic.

  She feels bad for her mother; she does. Her mother is no match at all for the Dad/Syd team, and never was. And she does try hard, it’s true. But she’s just such a drag, which is probably not even her fault, when you think about it. After all, it was bad enough when she was sick all on her own, but now that she has a sick daughter, well. Who can handle that much sickness? Nobody, especially her. Syd’s mom is one person who just cannot learn to relax and pull up a chair in the middle of hell, like Syd and her dad can. Even hell has its heavenly moments if you let them in. But you have to be open to it. You have to let go. You have to remember how to say yes to life even when it pushes you off a twenty-story ledge into a pile of broken glass.

  “Right, Godiva?” she says, nuzzling the puppy’s hilariously out-of-control fur.

  “Right,” Syd says back to herself in a high puppy voice.

  Finally she has somebody who agrees with her.

  Pandora

  Pandora places the dog-eared book beside her on the gray corduroy couch, reaches forward for the joint and puffs thoughtfully. She holds the smoke to the count of five and releases. An electron can be a particle or a wave, she thinks for about the millionth time. This is huge. This could revolutionize her thinking on what can actually be done out-of-body, or exo-corpus as she prefers to call it. It would probably work. Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe! Collapse the wave, and boom—it’s a particle. All potential ends right there. Future defined.

  She leans over her pile of books and empty microwave dinner container for the nail file.

  But no, not really. It doesn’t really end right there, does it? No. Because it can become a wave again if it wants to, just—“OK, now I think I’ll be a wave.” If it knows how to be a wave, it can be one. Holy shit! Are you serious, Einstein? Dead serious, Pandora Madigan. She files the nail of her left index finger which has a snag of a hang nail right…there. Dead serious. She reaches behind her for the clipper and snips.

  But the question is…can I go back to the moment before the incident ever happened? Before the wave collapsed into a particle? Before it was observed. And if she can figure out how to go back, can she return the electron or the person (!!!) to its quantum state? That is the question.

  She hopes she remembers it in the morning.

  She knows she can’t figure it out now with her stoned-out prefrontal cortex such as it is. But the calculus will not occur there anyway, she knows. The answer arrives only when she lets go of intellectual control, when she surrenders the question to the outreaches of her frontier mind. That…is what will give her the E=MC2 of her (and for that matter, anyone else’s) mystical career. If you can call something you’ve fought against your entire life…a career. More of a prison, right? The prison of what you were meant to do; what you must do; what you came to this earth to do or you’ll just keep coming back again and again in an endless loop until you do it. How many lifetimes will it take?! Do it now! It feels like a thousand lifetimes already.

  Pandora pulls her long rope of unruly silver white hair into three strands and starts braiding it on the left side. Her fingernails are a mess. She wishes she were the manicure type, but she’s not. She sometimes fantasizes about talons of unbreakable purple gel attached to her long, brown fingers. Piano fingers, as her mother called them, not that she ever played. And as long as she’s fantasizing, a pair of spiraling gold suns would look great on her thumbnails. If she only had the patience. But anyway, she doesn’t.

  So to be clear, she thinks, focusing hard, the real question isn’t whether one can travel back to influence an event before it happened. Right? I mean, one can travel back. After all, even solid objects possess a wave nature. So theoretically it pans out. The real question is—can Pandora do it? Can she? And what are the risks?

  The phone rings and in her current trance, she practically springs to the ceiling. Holy crap! She was just getting comfortable. And who is calling her at 9PM on a Friday night anyway? She searches for her phone under the mess of cushions, finds it, and turns it over. Oh no. Not her! But maybe she can do it—talk, that is. Maybe she can talk coherently. She squeezes her eyes shut, searching for a good reason to ignore this call, but. Okay fine.

  “Hello?” she says in a rich, low tone. Her Pandora voice. “Can I help you?”

  “Pandora, I just…I’m so…thank God you answered. I just need your help. Can you help me?”

  “Hold on,” Pandora says to her sniveling client. “Let’s take a breath break.”

  “O…okay,” says the client.

  “Where are you?” says Pandora.

  “In the bedroom? I’m so sorry to be calling in the evening, really.”

  “Okay,” says Pandora, “here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to lean back against the pillows, understand? Relax…fully.” She waits. “Are you relaxing?”

  There’s some rustling. “Okay, yes, I’m relaxing. I…I’m trying.” She gasps for breath.

  Pandora stomps her foot. “Do not gasp!” she commands. “Do not gasp, okay? Gasping is exactly…exactly what I do not want you to do.”

  Maybe she shouldn’t have picked up the phone. She doesn’t have the kind of patience she needs right now for this messy, undisciplined spirit of a client. She reaches deep, “I’m going to put some music on, okay? And I want you to listen and inhale to the slow count of five then ex
hale to the slow count of five. Repeatedly. Can you do this?”

  “I…I…”

  “Can you do this, Mitsy?”

  “Yes,” she whimpers.

  “Okay then, here goes. I’ll get back on the phone in ten minutes. That’s ten full minutes of conscious breathing. Do you know why, Mitsy?”

  “To control myself?”

  “You can’t cry and breathe consciously at the same time, that’s why. We need to bring you back to center before we continue.”

  Pandora turns her iPod to an Enya album and places the phone beside it. She just hopes she remembers to check back. Or maybe if she’s lucky Mitsy will fall asleep to the music and that’s that. An evening to herself, which is what she was counting on to begin with.

  She stares at the half-smoked joint on the coffee table. The copper ashtray is the shape of a rugged hand with the joint in its meaty palm. There it sits, all ready for her, and now she has to wait which is ironic. It’s ironic because if she smoked the rest of that joint she might be in a better position to deal with Mitsy. Not that Mitsy is the reason Pandora smokes pot. She’s not. Neither were any of the thirty clients Pandora just suspended from her roster. She needs a break. She needs a break!

  But for some reason, she just can’t let go of Mitsy. Although she’d very much like to. And it isn’t because of the woman herself, who’s frankly a lost cause. The woman can’t grasp anything, any spiritual concept, as hard as she tries. And as difficult and complicated as Pandora’s life has gotten, she can’t share a word of these difficulties with Mitsy, not that she wants to. It’s hard to relate to the woman’s homogenous, culturally juvenile upbringing. Just the name! Not to mention the constant driveling complaints of a hypochondriac when your own mental health is borderline unhinged. No, it isn’t because of Mitsy Michaels that Pandora won’t let go; it’s because of Mitsy’s daughter, Sydney. That’s why. Of Pandora’s obsession with curing Sydney. And Mitsy doesn’t know that either.

  Pandora nods off for a while, jerked awake by the strident change in music from Enya to Pink. “Raaaaiiiiise that glass! Come on…and come on and…raise that glass!” She grabs the phone. “Are you there, Mitsy?” she says, switching off the music.

  “I’m here.”

  “And are you centered?”

  “Yes, thank you, I’m much better.”

  “And you realize you could do that all by yourself, right? You could just go up to your room, sit back against the pillows and breathe.”

  “I guess. But I’m just…I don’t know. Frantic.”

  Pandora leans forward for her cigarettes. Not that she normally smokes, just in extreme situations like this. This exact conversation in the middle of psychic burnout, which is probably the correct diagnosis for Pandora’s current mental state. “Hold on,” she says to Mitsy. She mutes the phone and lights a cigarette, inhaling deeply, luxuriously. Such a wonderful bad habit is this. Such an exquisitely terrible indulgence. And anyway, her old friend Joy told her it keeps the negatives away. Chokes them in a toxic cloud, probably. And God knows Pandora could use some protection from negative influences.

  She releases the mute button. “Okay,” she says, “you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that sound I hear in the background, Mitsy?”

  “Well, that’s why I’m calling. Aaron bought Sydney a puppy. Just brought it home and gave it right to her. Absolutely no consultation with me.”

  Pandora smiles; this makes sense. “How lovely,” she says.

  “What?” whines Mitsy. “You know about my arthritis. How am I going to take care of a puppy when I have all Sydney’s challenges on top of rheumatoid arthritis…or MS, whatever they finally diagnose?” She whimpers. “How?”

  “What does the puppy look like?” asks Pandora. “Is it hideous?”

  “Hideous?” Mitsy says. “No, of course not. It’s a puppy.”

  “Describe it.”

  “Well, it’s fluffy and brown and tiny. It’s part lab and part samoyed. But I’ve heard samoyeds are protective and…”

  “Hold on. Hold….on.” Pandora exhales deeply, listening, channeling. “Okay,” she says, “here’s the thing. The dog is going nowhere.”

  “What? But why should I have to take on a dog when I’m already…”

  “Listen to me,” Pandora says. “You are not taking on the dog. The dog is taking on you. Do you understand? The dog is a healing presence.” She pauses, inhale/exhale. “I heard that from my sources, Mitsy. I just heard it.”

  “You heard it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. The dog is angelic. It’s a healer dog. Not every dog is beneficial, but this one is. Her name begins with a G, I’m told. That’s all I’m getting. Have you named her yet? What’s her name?”

  Mitsy hesitates. “Well, yes it does begin with a G. And how did you know it’s a she? Because it is a she. Her name is Godiva.”

  Pandora chuckles at the same time she chokes on cigarette smoke, immediately pushing the mute button. The last thing she needs right now is to explain her own human issues. This is not about her; it’s about Sydney. And Mitsy, maybe, but not really. She sips water backwards, pauses, and un-mutes. “Listen to me,” she says firmly. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to do something for yourself that you’ve never been able to do before, okay?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “I don’t want you to try, Mitsy. I want you to actually do it. I want you to go downstairs and hug that puppy and tell your daughter that you’re thrilled about it. That you’re happy to do whatever it takes to bring life back into your home. It’s a dead house.”

  “A dead house?”

  “D-E-A-D,” Pandora says.

  “Uh huh. Oh.”

  “There’s no air in your house, Mitsy. I can absolutely feel it from here. I’m choking on the dead air in your house just talking to you.” She takes this opportunity to cough the rest of the smoke from her lungs.

  “Oh dear,” says Mitsy. “You really are choking.”

  Pandora sips water. “We’ve got to heal that daughter of yours,” she says. “We’ve got to do whatever it takes to bring that house back to life.”

  “Okay. But should I tell her it’s a dead house?”

  “No, of course not. Use some discretion. Just tell her you’re absolutely thrilled about the dog, okay? Because you don’t want to know what it will be like if Sydney doesn’t get better, and the dog will make her better. It’s making her better already. If you think you’ve got it bad now, never mind. You do not want to know.”

  Pandora is shivering, shaking, practically convulsing. She’s so angry she could bi-locate right into Mitsy’s bedroom and strangle the last breath out of her thick neck. Thank God this is a phone conference. The woman’s daughter is still alive, damn it. Her daughter is alive!! That woman has got to get it together.

  “I do realize that on some level,” says Mitsy. “I do. But I just feel so unappreciated; I can’t help it. I mean why couldn’t Aaron have asked me first? Why did he have to go out and buy…”

  “You’re kidding me, right? Because he knew you’d say no, that’s why.” After a long pause, Pandora says, “Did you hear me? I don’t have all night, Mitsy. You would have said no.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe I wouldn’t have. Maybe I would have called you and you’d have told me that the dog would be a healer and I would have gone merrily along with the whole thing.”

  “You don’t go merrily along with anything, Mitsy. Are you listening? Nothing. Furthermore, you might have gotten the wrong dog. You or someone you know might have been attracted to another dog, some kind of lunatic newfie-dachshund with a giant slobbering head and stubby little legs. Or whatever mix, you never know. You can’t second guess this. This is how it happened. Listen to me, this is the right dog. Do not second guess how the right dog got into your dead house, okay? Do not second guess perfection.”


  “Okay.”

  “Because your obsessively linear and logical approach to life is going to be the death of you if you don’t learn to overcome it, do you understand?” Pandora knows she has to pull back. Whoa! She’s galloping across the field at breakneck speed, too far ahead of herself, not to mention how far ahead of Mitsy she is. It’s pure burnout that’s talking now.

  She throttles back. “I’m sorry,” she says more gently, “but you just cannot afford to make this about yourself. It’s about you in some ways, yes, your spiritual constriction, but it’s about your daughter, too. Your daughter needs to know that you can release your own troubles once in a while to care for her.” She sighs. “Can you do that?”

  After a long pause, Mitsy says, “I think so. I’m better. I’ll go down and talk to Sydney now.”

  “You do that. And you get strong for her. She’s a spiritual force, that child, I can feel it. We’re going to do something together one day, she and I.”

  “Ohhh!” says Mitsy. “Really? That’s wonderful!”

  “Something to do with…I don’t know…a place. A place in Tuscany, I think.” She pulls on her braid, thinking, digging deep. “What’s that? Oh, okay. Florence. An estate outside Florence.”

  “Florence, Italy?!” says Mitsy. “Well, isn’t that interesting? Florence was where we all went two years ago before Sydney got sick in the first place.”

  “Before Sydney got sick?” says Pandora, focusing—before her wave collapsed.

  “Yes, and before Aaron had the affair.”

  “What you think was an affair,” says Pandora. “You don’t know, Mitsy. You don’t.”

  “But you said…”

  “I said I don’t know. I can’t corroborate what you told me. It isn’t clear. Everything isn’t always illuminated at once, or at all. It’s very possible that he developed a meaningful friendship, nothing more.”

  “But I found…”