Chapter 18

We kind of patched it up Sunday. No, I wasn't really all that sure her memory wouldn't carry over, I admitted; yes, I knew she'd remember. I pretended to be completely over my snit of the night before and she pretended to believe me.

But underneath there was still a lot of tension. The more I thought about it, the more my comparison with computer RAM made sense. I mean, could this really be the first time in human history that somebody'd been bad hurt and their minds had strayed away from their injured bodies? If it wasn't, though, how come nobody'd ever talked about it before once they recovered? Maybe, just maybe, they hadn't remembered?

I thought, too, about the various reports I'd read about people, really sick people, having what the literature called "out-of-body" experiences. They'd remembered that much, all right—looking down at their ailing bodies, even watching surgery being performed on those bodies. But always the details were pretty vague. They could recall the experience, but nothing very specific about it. The nuts and bolts of what had actually gone on got lost somewhere in the transition between out-of-body and back-in-body.

It wasn't a very happy thought.

Even so, I put it aside. What I had for sure was right now, when Susan was with me in spirit if not otherwise. And I decided I was damn well going to make the most of it instead of spoiling it by worrying about what came later. If this was all I'd ever have of her, there was nothing I could do about it, and I wasn't going to waste a precious second brooding over what I couldn't do anything about. I'd always wondered about the intelligence of people who lost whole days, weeks, months, even years of their lives over an obsession with what tomorrow might bring. I'd never done that in my life before, and wasn't about to start now.

So we actually wound up having a pretty good day. With nothing else on the agenda, I suggested going to the local museum of natural history; Susan had seemed to enjoy our visits to various art galleries and one or two of the other museums around town, and before the whole last few days had happened we'd planned this one, too. She was all for it, and felt the visit would be safe for me.

"Even if Walter's still out there looking for you," she said, "a museum's about the last place he'd think to look. Walter's a pure Philistine so far as I know."

So we went and had a very pleasant afternoon checking out the exhibits and chatting about them. I couldn't talk aloud, of course, but I was getting pretty good at communicating with her silently; and of course nobody but me could hear her. I must have seemed like something of an odd duck wandering through the museum alone and never speaking to anyone, but probably not that odd—museums attract a contemplative crowd—and I didn't much care what strangers thought anyway.

Which brought us to the evening, which we spent once again with room service at the hotel, and from there to the night and sleep, and from there to Monday morning and an argument. Well, OK, not really an argument, call it a disagreement.

Susan wanted me to phone in sick again, but I flat refused. She reminded me of the close shave I'd had in the hospital parking lot and harped on it. I reminded her that I had a life to live, dammit, and I couldn't spend it hiding away in anonymous hotel rooms. We went round and round that way for a while.

"Honey, how long do you think chicken pox lasts?" I asked, exasperated. "It wasn't the strongest story in the world to start with, and I can't just ride it into the damn sunset. I mean, yeah, this Walter dude is scary, all right, but doesn't he have a life to live, too, beyond chasing me? You said he was some kind of an aide to Senator what's-his-face, doesn't he have to show up in the office once in a while? So he's back there doing whatever it is he does there, and I'm still hiding away from shadows half a world away?"

I didn't convince her, of course. But I was adamant. Today was the day to start getting back to normal. Work was calling, and I was damn well going to go. Finally she gave up; I went.

It was actually pretty much a non-event. I drove in early, as I was used to in order to beat the rush hour, and the parking lot was only about half full as usual. But most of the people in my department were already in or came in shortly after me, and everybody greeted me enthusiastically and inquired about my health.

"You had the chicken pox?" several people demanded incredulously. I told them yes in what I thought was an appropriately embarrassed tone. I agreed that it was usually a kid's disease, but said it had missed me then—which was true—and must've decided to make up for lost time. One perceptive woman wondered about my lack of blisters; her son, she said, had carried them for weeks. Mild dose, I told her, never got to my face, just some on my body. Fortunately we were in long-sleeve weather, so not much was exposed; she bought it easily.

There was the usual Monday morning department meeting where we each outlined the previous week's activity and coordinated plans for the coming week. My brief stint at telecommuting had left me sufficiently up to speed that I could participate pretty fully. As I usually did I glossed quickly over the bugs I'd been finding, except for a repetition of a really stupid one that had occurred before.

"Ted, if you write it like this"—I got up and scribbled a couple of lines of code on the blackboard—"you're telling it to go back to here"—I pointed—"unless it gets the specific input. But you're not allowing for the input until after the loop, see? So the thing just goes in an endless circle like the Worm Ouroboros."