Gravity Well
by the stylus
A not my typewriter story: Turning
your orbit around.
Follow-up to an episode
yet to be written.
"Hey, Jan." She is silhouetted in your doorway. Bright hair, bright eyes, bright smile.
"Sam. Feeling better?"
"Yeah, much. When can I get out of here?"
"Tomorrow."
It is a little hangdog, a little petulant, that look. "But Janet--"
"No buts, Major. Considering you just got your brain vacuumed by a Goa'uld version of a Hoover Upright, I think you should consider yourself very fortunate that I'm letting you out of here that soon. And since that gown doesn't close in the back, you'd better hop back into bed before my nursing staff returns."
She retreats, pouting, one hand pointedly holding the fabric together.
An afterthought. "And hook yourself back up to your monitors!"
You consider making a note in her file, open at your elbow, dutifully charting the progress of the patient's recovery. But the file is nearly three inches thick, littered with old MRIs, X-rays, a hundred notations in your illegible hand. You opt for rubbing your temples a little harder than necessary and taking two asprin dry.
For the span of that first elevator ride underground, the first assignment of your new security clearance, this had felt like a culmination. College; med school; the sleepless gritty weeks of endless residency; basic and the weight of your field pack; the steady ascent up the ladder of rank and responsibility. All to be here and find yourself saying "I don't know." I don't know what's wrong with them, sir. I don't even know if there is anything wrong with them. If there is something wrong, I don't know how to fix it. You have cured diseases and beings of which you never dreamed. Yet still, some days it feels like all you can do is confess your own powerlessness.
As a resident, you were an excellent diagnostician. It was something you relied on later. Over the noise of the tent canvass snapping and the choppers rotoring away and your own voice calling for fluids and blood and on the count of three, you could always hear that calm inner voice running down the checklist. Triage and treatment. You almost never missed.
Now you tend a jungle of wild things who have stars in their eyes and in their brains. The latest abnormal MRI, before another miraculous recovery, looked like Sam had a map of the Milky Way in her temporal lobe. It's scratched somewhere, tiredly: "Patient has multiple severe lesions of right middle fusiform gyrus. Impaired facial recognition due to introduction of foreign materials." Something to hang on to. To say: Yes, sir. She has damage to the part of the brain that recognizes faces. You had that much.
And no idea how to put neurons back where they had simply vanished.
By now you do have some experience treating your best friend like a feral child. Some experience killing the people you love or simply letting them die. Some experience having your hands tied. You have a daughter, sprung whole from the Gate like Athena, a dog you neither bought nor named, and none of the innocence that seems in such generous supply thirty levels under the earth.
Research used to be something you enjoyed, a long-view look at the problems you saw in their shorter clinical terms. Whole days could be lost in the tiny intricacies of graceful proteins, with only the sound of your breath for company, or the hissing of a suit's air supply. The clean elegance of the viruses was a refuge. These days there is not even time to breathe.
"Janet?" Sam's voice hums, pitched low because the infirmary at night has a peculiar stillness even here where there are no circadian rhythms.
"Coming." The chair scrapes softly as you stand. Your back creaks perilously.
She is, miraculously, in bed, and you palm the overhead lights a bit lower. Otherwise, the room is empty.
"What's up, Sam?" Your hand goes to her wrist without thinking, your eyes to your watch. The monitor at her bedside could tell you these things, but without the reassuring skein of her skin under your fingers.
"Can I have some water?"
"Sure." The pitcher and cup are on a tray nearby. Wheeling them over you wonder aloud, "For this you disturb me from my paperwork?"
"Well, my doctor told me not to get out of bed. She threatened me with really big needles."
"She did not." You are both smiling.
"She might have. I'm telling you, she's scary." It is a truce of sorts: Sam admitting that she needs the company, you that you are not really bothered. Studying the MRIs a thousand more times will not tell you what the Tokra did, or how it cured her.
The MRIs will not explain the way she looked at you when everyone had become a stranger, how she gentled under your touch. You are very good at what you do. At least, you used to be, when you were certain of what that was.
You permit yourself the indulgence of brushing a lock of hair from her forehead, a gesture that is comforting, maternal. "Try and get some sleep?" There is a light sedative in her system so the words, too, are an extraneous gesture.
"'kay." Her eyes are already closing, her breathing becoming more even.
You stand for a minute, hands locked around the cool metal of the bedrail, feeling the strain in the small bones. The heart monitor bleats regularly.
"Jan?" The word is thick with impending sleep.
"Hmm?"
"Thanks." She says it so quietly, the vowel slurred out, that you wouldn't hear if not for the lateness of the hour, the emptiness of the room.
It sets your teeth on edge but you are too well trained to react. Trained to do heart massage in a firefight. Trained to work with diseases that kill in ways fiction writers never imagined, and quicker. Trained to shoot an enemy to save a colleague, yourself, whatever the Air Force deems worthy.
Trained to tamp down the bleakness that rises like bile. To walk back to your office empty-handed, just out of rhythm with her steady heart. To note in your small script on the top sheet "Patient appears fully recovered after treatment with unknown Tokra device" below the relevant numbers and tuck it over the last MRI, which is clean. Whatever universe burned there has been extinguished.
fin
All characters are the property of their creators. The author makes no profit from this work.