I didn’t do this, Rose thought, reeling as she recalled what she had known all along. Clara did.
Yes. Clara had wanted this, unquestioningly. She’d shaken Evil Lynn awake at dawn, told her to call the nearest Memory Enhancement clinic. A recording said they opened at nine. She’d sat and waited. Evil Lynn had never heard of Memory Enhancement and talked to her, greatly troubled after an hour of researching it online. There were some problems, Evil Lynn had said; it was too new and untested; it was something to think about for a few days and not leap into. But she’d said Please, over and over, and when Evil Lynn then said yes, she said Thank you. Finally, the office opened. What luck—she could go that afternoon; they’d had a cancellation. Why would anyone cancel anything so miraculous? Don’t plan to do anything afterward, she was told—you’ll just sleep and sleep. Evil Lynn tried to get her to eat breakfast. She wasn’t a bit hungry. Evil Lynn asked if she wanted to sleep a few hours. She couldn’t lie still. She carefully went over the route there on her phone, again and again, memorizing the names of streets, even visualizing all the turns. On the walk over, she didn’t have to refer to the phone once; she could’ve made the trip in her sleep. Evil Lynn kept asking if she was absolutely sure about this.
Yes, Clara was absolutely sure. Because the woman in the red convertible had actually done it.
She had changed places with herself.
CHAPTER 24
“You were given a shot of Alitrol,” Dr. Star said.
“Yes, on my jaw.” She pointed to the spot. “It’s been hurting all week.”
“Unrelated. The needle we use is tiny and doesn’t even leave a mark.”
“Maybe you hit a nerve.”
Dr. Star tightened her lips.
Had Rose just hit a nerve here, too? “If I was a frog, that spot would be my tympanum.”
Dr. Star shrugged at that and turned her screen back to face her. “Last week, the special light we use plus the Alitrol put you into a state we call IT—Irresistible Trance.”
“A trance,” Rose said. Clara’s life in the glass coffin had been a kind of trance. Had she traded in that trance for a new one?
“It is most certainly not a parlor trick. Just like the woman in the ad said, Memory Enhancement is a proven technology that works with a person’s own memories and realigns the emotions attached to those memories. That’s all.” Dr. Star peered at her computer. “I’ve never dealt with a case like this before, though it’s part of the training, of course. Here we are, breakthrough, blue light . . .” She took a few moments to read, and then she gestured toward the tall standing lamp. “We use the red light during ME, which gives the room a lovely glow.”
“Red light—I see it when I wake up.”
“That has been reported in extremely rare cases, as well. Harmless and temporary,” she added with emphasis. “Now, the blue light; that’s what we need to use in case of breakthrough.” She got up, fiddled with the lamp. “Wait, I have to change the setting—it’s stuck. My first time doing this— There!” She clicked it on.
Rose had to adjust to the light, the color of the ocean when a storm approaches. At first she thought maybe she was seeing things behind her eyelids, but she was blinking, which meant her eyes must be open. She felt she was half awake, half asleep, and half something else . . . but that was too many halves. . . . Would she be waking up to blue light from now on?
“Does the light affect you, too?” she asked.
“I wear special contacts,” Dr. Star replied.
“So your eyes aren’t really green?”
“They are not.” Dr. Star sounded a little disappointed. “Now, I’ll walk you through it. You will remember things as I tell them to you. We began by talking about memory, which we hold sacred here at Forget-Me-Not; we honor and cherish it. Without memory, one philosopher said, we’d be no better than a looking glass, constantly receiving images and reflecting them back, never the better or worse for it.”
“You mean mirror.”
“It was a quote, Rose; no one says ‘looking glass’ anymore. Memory molds our personalities, shapes our possibilities, lends depth to our consciousness, depth like the buried cities near Mount Vesuvius, one on top of the other, the present cities on top of increasingly long-ago ruins of cities.”
“I tried talking to Mr. Slocum about Mount Vesuvius. He didn’t want to hear it.”
Dr. Star ignored this and adjusted the lamp.