The Anesthesia Game Read online

  “And who’s this?” Hannah asks, approaching Dane, sitting royally on his drum throne.

  “Oh hey,” says the rock star. “Dane,” he says, waving.

  Syd’s belly is a volcano of swirling ash. She just hopes she doesn’t pass out.

  Pandora

  Above the dense sea of aspens, spruce, and ponderosa pines leading from her back deck across the Tahoe basin to Heavenly Mountain, Pandora spots her messenger in the night sky. A novice might think it was a planet or a star, but Pandora knows better. The halo of violet that surrounds him confirms it, though she suspects the halo is only visible to her. She pulls her scarlet shawl tight across her broad shoulders, her dense cloud of white hair whipping in the maelstrom created by the messenger’s proximity. She’s been avoiding him for years; encounters are costly. One doesn’t meet the uncontained energy of the cosmos with one’s spindly spirit often, and when one does, well. One pays.

  The messenger beams across the sky like a searchlight, exposing graceful lengths of branch, high wire, wisps of clouds and plumes of white smoke from nearby stacks. Pandora watches neutrally, inhaling the pungent, life-giving fragrance of her beloved Sierra Nevada’s at night—the sharp pine, the acrid cinder; the apple bite of mountain air. She wants no interruptions to this banquet. Don’t come, Anjah, she signals. I’m not ready for you.

  But will he come anyway? At some point it’s inevitable. But tonight? Will he come tonight? Or retreat again as he’s been doing, sensing her ambivalence, citing her chronic unpreparedness to address her personal issues first. She thinks of these so-called issues as less character flaws than delay tactics—she needs time! She’s not ready. But will she get the time? Can she afford it? She stands squarely in her worn turquoise cowgirl boots on the redwood deck, a daring stance—long legs planted, arms folded against her vested chest, hands gripping the fringe of her vintage tribal shawl.

  A moment of peace descends. She inhales the eternal moment, drawing it all the way to her toes and back. In with the new; out with the old. Be here now. Peace reigns. If she can just keep Anjah at bay a little longer, she’ll have time to sort through her own ideas first. Figure out a few things for herself before he bombards her with his usual power surge of unsorted information. Ignoring him is the best tactic; that and an arsenal of cigarette smoke to scramble her signal…and his. Which reminds her, where are the cigarettes? If she wants to keep him away, she better start smoking.

  She turns toward the wrought iron table behind her, but a few steps in it’s already too late. Out of nowhere he wraps his white hot blanket of heat around her head, her shoulders, her torso. She is ambushed by his searing energy. Clenching her teeth, she wills herself centered and dominant, as equal as she can make herself in the presence of his superior matter. She won’t succumb; she is no spiritual novice.

  Time doesn’t pass. Instead it opens and expands, holding her in its eternal grip, and she becomes agitated. She has never been bold enough to smoke a cigarette in Anjah’s immediate presence, but she wants one now. Needs one! If only she could reach the table. She steadies herself; feels her feet rooted to the deck slats, trying to recall the protocol to disarm him. He never did understand how difficult these encounters were for her. He never cared.

  “Are you ready yet?” he signals.

  She looks down to deflect his glare. “I don’t know,” she says lamely. The heat binds her like a tourniquet. All around her she feels the information he is ready to convey; wants to convey, but withholds. A billion bits of raw data captured in his field ready to spring free. Let him convey it for God’s sake, she thinks. As long as he’s here.

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m ready.” What the hell. She’ll need the information eventually, she supposes. Or not. If she can figure out how to spin her own thread this time, she may be able to do away with him completely. God, how she would love that! But there are no guarantees.

  “To heal the girl you must first be healed,” he says. His energy vibrates on both sides of her head. “I can’t give you any real information until you heal yourself.”

  She nods back to her stash of marijuana, cigarettes, and paraphernalia on the table. “You came all this way to tell me that?” she says aloud. “I can quit that stuff any time, if that’s what you’re talking about.” Her words issue vapor into the brisk air. “I’m just killing time with sloppy habits. Blowing off a little well-earned steam.”

  “Your bad habits limit you,” he signals.

  She pulls away, extracting herself with difficulty from the draw of his magnetic field. “I’m human,” is all she says. Let him figure it out. After twenty years of using her as his lightning rod, he should know how much heat she can handle by now. 100% less than he thinks!

  Anjah mercifully dissipates. “A healer’s gifts come from her own healing,” he asserts.

  Pandora raises her chin. “So heal me,” she says with a nonchalance she doesn’t feel. “Or give me the damn ruby heels and I’ll click them myself.”

  Anjah moves back and forth like an angelic tsk tsk. “You want to heal the girl,” he says. “Do you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then face the past. Look it in the eye. Time is short.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious,” she says under her breath.

  He quivers—a question.

  “A human term of endearment,” she lies. She backs up to the table, reaches for the pack of cigarettes, presents it to him then tosses it into the woods. “My last pack, I swear.”

  “It’s not just the cigarettes,” he signals. “Or any other substance for that matter.”

  She nods, swallowing.

  “You have one month, Pandora. At most.”

  And then, as quickly as he arrived he retreats into the tips of moon-kissed pine. His violet halo spasms, resounding down the long length of his laser trail. “Don’t waste it, waste it, waste it, waste it,” it warns in a diminishing echo.

  The imminence of this message surprises Pandora since Mitsy hasn’t mentioned any acute features of Sydney’s condition recently. But then Mitsy is underwater herself.

  “I’ll do what I can,” she says, shivering in the chill that remains. She half-heartedly salutes him as he compresses into a dense, sparkling ball, then further into a pinpoint dot that disappears into a fold of the universe. Couldn’t you just tell me what to do, she thinks. Couldn’t you just do it yourself? But she knows it doesn’t work that way. Some people are receptors for the information, that’s all. How else can the unlimited dimensions of the divine channel itself into this 3D world? Human surge protectors. Put on earth for that, she supposes. God help me!

  Pandora treads slowly across the deck to the glass doors, which she slides open. She reaches over the ledge to her right, and grabs the flashlight. As she’s about to close the door, her renegade Persian feline, Guru, jumps from the railing and shoots into the house. “Why, you little twit,” she says. “Where the hell have you been?” She hasn’t seen him in a week. But no time to chastise Guru now; there are more pressing matters. She scurries down the twenty stone steps to the steep snowy incline to retrieve her cigarettes. Kicking aside snow with the square toe of her boot, she spots the pack propped up against the stump of a long gone sugar pine. As she bends down to get it, she spots a portion of silver behind it and reaches reflexively.

  “Oh my God,” she says, shocked. Dropping to her knees, she digs through the snow and frosty scrub with her fingers, unburying the tarnished knife she’d nearly pierced herself with the night Anjah saved her. Not that she wanted to be saved; she did not. She wanted to die like her daughter. She wanted to join Elysha in the beyond.

  Elysha is a lit match against the dry tinder of Pandora’s addled brain. In five seconds it’s an inferno of grief and regret. She pushes back on her thighs and stands, hurling the knife down the forested slope. That knife can come to nothing but grief in her hand. How will she ever face it? How? And yet, in less than a month another child could…this is her second chance. She couldn’t save
Elysha in time all those years ago, but she could save Sydney now. Or is she kidding herself?

  “A healer’s gift comes from healing herself first.”

  Maybe some things are just not meant to be.

  Back in the house, Pandora changes into a muslin gown, sheepskin slippers, and her hand-embroidered Peruvian robe. She lights a blaze in the fireplace and a pinch of hashish in her jade pipe. She will think about things in peace and without the pressure of Anjah’s demands. He knows a few things, it’s true. But not all things. He knows Pandora is claimed, for instance. Claimed by him. But Sydney is her own spirit, bound by no one, including Anjah. No one in the spirit realm has tagged the child yet, and maybe never will. After all, just because you have certain gifts doesn’t mean you’re obligated to share them with a celestial Svengali. Pandora will have to remember to warn Sydney about such liaisons when this is over. For now, the girl feels anything but gifted.

  The hashish relaxes Pandora enough to allow the idea of her own daughter, Elysha, to enter softly, crossing the threshold of tragedy into warm familiarity. Oh yes, she was a magical child! Wide-eyed and playful. She’d inherited the piercing blue eyes of Pandora and her Peruvian grandmother, Leila. It was a spectacular mix, that deep copper skin, those blue eyes—visibly confusing to onlookers. Elysha was worth the heartbreak of Pandora’s broken relationship with that bozo, Wilfred, from the Bronx. A handsome bastard, but still, fuck him! He never cared about anybody but himself. Pandora tries not to blame herself for misjudging his character. Just because she’s a mystic doesn’t make her any less human. Mystics screw up too.

  Pandora sips merlot from her grandmother’s silver chalice. Why use a glass when a chalice will do! Sacred things are meant to be used. Pandora doesn’t believe in setting them aside, because really…everything is sacred, is it not? Every breath, every thought, every action. Everything! She pops a square of extra sharp mountain cheddar into her mouth. Mmmmm. The concrete, sequential world can be so comforting when you assemble the right ingredients. Merlot in the chalice; piles of juniper in the fireplace; hashish in the pipe; and the finest aged artisan cheddar melting on your tongue. These things feed the body and the spirit both.

  The fire whistles and spits; Pandora gazes to her left out the wall of glass into the western night sky of dazzling marcasite and out of nowhere, she thinks, signal.

  Everything has a signal!

  “Everything has a signal,” she says aloud slowly, deliberately, heart pounding. “And every signal can be scrambled or even… blocked.” She smiles, raising her arms in excitement. Yes!!! Even disease, she thinks. Even disease has a signal. She breaks into a grin so deep it drops to her throat, chest, and belly where it gurgles back up in a gasp.

  “Oh this is rich,” she says aloud, raising a glass to her muses. “So rich.” She might have just decoded the secret to the universe. Or at least the secret to Sydney’s cure.

  Everything has a signal, including disease! Discover the signal; cancel the disease.

  Who needs Anjah anyway? Well, maybe she does, but not yet. Anjah wants her to confront the past first…to deal with Elysha’s death before she heals Sydney. But Pandora knows that, at least in the short term, Elysha will only weaken her. Let her daughter’s spirit rest peacefully. No need to disturb the past to conquer the present, at least not yet.

  But Sydney is a different matter. Sydney still lays claim to this world.

  Hours later with half a notebook of ideas and equations committed to paper, Pandora reclines full length on the faded couch. She sets her head against the gray corduroy pillow and sinks with the full force of mental and physical gravity into her dense cellular mass. As soon as she falls out of consciousness, her astral body lifts out and up with a lightness that always surprises her. There is simply nothing like abandoning the carapace of the material body like a songbird and just…rising up. Pure spirit; pure light. Oh, the freedom! Not that Pandora plans these trips, not really. And not that there can’t be consequences, there often are. Which is why she’s been MIA in the ether of late. But oh my God, it’s so good to know she’s still adept at take-off.

  Her body of light stands beside the fireplace with its whistling embers, watching her sleeping physical mass—the slackened jaw and full bottom lip drooling remnant drops of merlot. One arm hangs off the edge of the couch, her hand resting gracelessly in a bowl of melting Cherry Garcia, M&Ms spread across the table. She’s not proud of the scene; who would be? But so what? Forgiveness must manifest from the inside out. Me first.

  From the low end of a cedar crossbeam that connects to the cathedral ceiling above her, Guru jumps, landing on the back of the couch. He walks the length like a tightrope artist, back arched, and finally drops between her shoulder blades. Thunk! From a distance, she watches her body lurch, shudder, and come to rest. She doesn’t awaken, thankfully, or she would soon find her spirit awareness back inside. That is—unless she were dead—a thought that sometimes challenges her, because what if one day she goes too far? Well, no sense worrying at this point. She’s traveled in this state halfway around the world and back without issue. Why freak herself out now? Or at all.

  The silver Persian stares ahead, alert and focused. He sees her astral body standing there; Pandora’s sure of it. Guru isn’t named Guru for nothing. “Hisssssss,” she mouths, and he returns the promise. He will guard her body while she’s away.

  Pandora glides to the deck, knowing the one thing she has to avoid on this outing is Anjah. In spirit form, Pandora is more visible to him than in solid physical form, since the physical form conceals her full radiance. Not to mention that as a spirit, she isn’t able to smoke cigarettes to deflect her light. Or is she? She’s never tried. It might be worth a shot.

  At any rate, she must be careful or Anjah is sure to lead her into the lair of his confusing metadata before she has a chance to develop a coherent thread. About signal! The signal of disease. First she has to find Sydney, see where she goes when she’s knocked out by anesthesia or exhaustion. She has to find the girl and evaluate her signal. Not that Sydney knows she actually leaves her body; she doesn’t. But Pandora knows. Tuscany, perhaps. It makes sense since that’s the region Pandora connected with Sydney in the first place. She has to start somewhere, so…

  No sooner does Pandora rise up from her cottage than she’s perched on a rocky cliff overlooking a dark, roiling sea lit by an amber sliver of February moon. But is this Tuscany? She’d imagined gentle hills, rolling vineyards, tidy villages with cobblestone streets. Siena, maybe, or better yet, Il Duomo in Florence—a place of deep spiritual significance and established power. Wherever she is now, it’s on a coast. Fierce waves of iridescent sea foam bash the cliffs repeatedly, and even with her limited astral senses, Pandora can tell the air is frigid. Is Italy this cold? It must be. Unless this isn’t Italy at all.

  To her far left, the diamond-pane windows of a stone field house are alight with a flickering fire. It’s the only edifice in sight. She glides toward a murmur within the house that rises and falls with the wind. She’s careful not to move through the stone, though she could if she wanted to. But first she must check to see if the enchanting sound comes from living people or spirits. Living people are mostly clueless; spirits are not. It will affect how she proceeds. She peeks in the window.

  Inside there are three druid-like figures in black robes kneeling beside a recumbent child, their hands extended above her, chanting a phrase Pandora can’t decipher. From the sparse, crudely-crafted furnishings and the dim but abundant candlelight, she knows she hasn’t landed in the twenty-first century. A closer look suggests these figures are female. Were there female druids? A medieval abbey, perhaps, or nunnery.

  She speculates that even if these women are clairvoyant they won’t be able to see her astral body, arriving from the future as it has. So she allows her spirit to penetrate the walls. She has to investigate why she landed here in the first place. For instance, is Sydney the child on the floor? Or is the girl’s spirit floating o
n the cliffs or somewhere nearby? Why is Pandora here?! Maybe it has nothing to do with Sydney—just a random occurrence, fragments of the past. It happens.

  The women druids, as it turns out, are not novices to spiritualism. Pandora’s energy is detected. “Someone’s here,” says one. Although their language is foreign and ancient, Pandora understands it in her own tongue. The other two stop chanting, rest their arms at their sides and cock their heads toward the stone window seat where Pandora sits. Do they see her? Or just sense her?

  “Over there,” says another one. She pushes her hood back, sweeps her long black hair to the side, and points directly at Pandora.

  The third follows the direction of the first, but it is she who takes Pandora’s breath away. Though unlike Pandora in some ways—she is pale-skinned—they are otherwise like twins adorned with the same topaz eyes. It’s like looking at herself across lifetimes. An ancestor, perhaps, but no. Closer than that. Their eyes connect and lock.

  “It is you,” says the druid with certitude.

  Pandora steadies her energy, trying to conceal herself, trying to retreat.

  “It is you,” repeats the blue-eyed cleric, and the others stare, too. “It is you and it is I. We are the same thing.”

  Pandora stares ahead, stunned. The woman speaks truth.

  Her ancestral twin stands, walks forward and reaches for Pandora’s hand, but Pandora has lost her ability to move. The druid points back to the child. “Come with me,” she says.

  With Herculean effort, Pandora manages to follow. It isn’t easy. This woman owns a piece of her, which makes it difficult to share space without pouring herself into the past. Without becoming her! And then what would become of her present? Would she regress? Die? Start over? When she finally gets to the child, Pandora lowers her head to view what she innately knows will be Sydney in all her pain and suffering. She has to prepare to witness the pain.