She doesn't really remember the first time it happened. She knew only that she had left the surface of the bed beneath her and was slowly rising, until she reached a point where she stopped and simply hovered. She hung there, feeling surprised, but joyous, and lighter, definitely lighter. After a while she descended just as gently as she had risen, and she couldn't help feeling disappointed about going down. But the descent was not the quick flop gravity would have given her; no, she was still in the grip of something delicate and independent and strong.
The second time she found herself going a little higher, feeling a little lighter, a little more joyous. And this time she noticed the light above for the first time. It covered the ceiling, but seemed focused exactly above her, too pale to be bright, but intense and warm. It was a warmth she hadn't felt before'a welcoming warmth. But as she began her descent she knew she could only go as far up as she was taken, that she had to be lighter to rise higher, to reach that warmth.
Soon she found that she didn't need to wait for the rising experience to call her. This was quite startling at first -- she wished for it, and it happened. Still she could only go as high as she was "allowed." She rose higher and higher. But the ceiling and the light were just out of reach. But she had learned to be patient; she knew she would get there.
She told the shrink and Rex about the rising and even about the lights. But she didn't tell them she could command the experience to start. This strange power of her will is her secret.
As the days passed, she noticed something new. Her skin was getting thinner. She was growing lighter and lighter --and transparent. She felt she could choose to pass through her skin from the inside, and then throw it away like a cellophane wrapper. But she could never quite bring herself to this, even though she felt "called" to do so. She was still too heavy, too heavy. On earth, she was so appallingly heavy. She was a burden to everyone.
Only Rex's voice could reach her when she was up. Hearing it, she would always will herself down. Alice didn't know why Rex pulled her back, but one time he said, "They like you up there, don't they?" When Alice stammered some lame joke in reply, Rex shocked her by looking her earnestly in the eyes and saying, "Please, Al -- I want you down here for a while. Promise me -- don't fly away yet, okay?" Alice laughed, but when he insisted on the promise, she gave it. Now sometimes, up high, she almost regretted that promise.
Chapter One
Waiting only a couple of seconds for the air to settle a little after the doctor stormed from the room, Rex stretched in the institutional-green armchair like a waking cat and said, "Further evidence supporting my theory that some -- not all, but some -- people go to medical school because they get off on scaring other people, and see the unlimited possibilities that that M.D. and white coat give them."
"Don't I scare you, honey?" said the nurse with a mock pout. "I got a whole white dress." Rex gave a dismissive snort.
From the bed, where she was still going through something somewhere between an extended shudder and a bad case of the shivers, Alice managed to say, "Well, if he was out to scare me, he gets a 9.7, maybe a 9.8." For almost a week now she had been in the grips of a hallucination that let her see the words thatcame out of people's mouths -- as something between pure light and brightly tinted plastic shapes. As her hallucinations went, it was one of the more amusing. She saw the fear in her voice now; she was talking in balloonlike, elongated, twisted ovals, silvery-gray and fading fast.
Rex looked at her keenly for a second. "You don't mean that coma stuff actually got to you?"
Alice tried to shrug, but it came off as an even bigger shudder. "It's possible my ability to scoff and blow off my doctor telling me I'm probably going to drop into a coma within twenty-four hours has been weakened a bit, by my having lost those famous thirty-two pounds he kept hammering on about."
"Don't need to hammer on -- go look in a mirror, child," said the nurse. But Alice avoided mirrors.
Rex made another dismissive, mildly obscene mouth noise, which had a very brief but fascinating appearance to Alice -- a series of bright-red bubbles that popped in descending order of size. "Comas are nothing special," he said. "As you know, I've -- "
"-- survived three of them in the past eighteen months, yeah, yeah. You're the legendary Prince of Remission, well-known far and wide in the medical community for your miraculous hardiness in the face of a supposedly terminal disease and your fearless subjection to every experimental technique for a cure known to science. Whereas I am just a gal who won't eat, still subject to trifling fears at the idea of disappearing into a total lack of consciousness for an indefinite period, possibly forever." She tried a jaunty grin at Rex. "Remember, I didn't get into this thing to try to die or anything -- "
"And all this time I thought your secret motivation was to keep mecompany as I wasted away," Rex sighed. "I had hoped this I-won't-go-home-and-be-unhappy business was just for show." He sighed again. "Another illusion about the brotherhood of man brutally shattered."
"It must be rough," said Alice. "If I were really your friend I would make sure I dropped dead at the exact moment you did."
"The exact moment I do," Rex corrected her grimly. He then said, "If you're afraid, try saying the word over and over again until it means nothing. That works for me sometimes. I just go 'Death Death Death Death . . .' and pretty soon I might as well be saying 'Toast Toast Toast-'" He clapped a hand over his mouth. "Oops. How tactless of me to mention food."
Alice tried it, repeating Coma eight times. Then she was silent.
"Well?" said Rex. "Are we better now?"
Alice shook her head. "Worse," she whispered.
"Okay, then try thinking of this: If you're in a coma, see, then that stepfather of yours can walk in here and, like, yell at you all he wants, and even threaten to swat you, and, like, you won't even hear him! Because you'll be, like, in a coma, see! Come on, man'it's beautiful, in its way." Rex gave a big fake smile that would have included highly raised eyebrows if he had possessed any, and nodded. "Now how's about that for some cheery thinkin'?"
"Gee, thanks," said Alice gravely.
Rex gave a disgusted wave. "Oh, then go ahead and believe your overdressed doctor-dude and be a fraidy-cat. 'Coma, '" he said in falsetto, rolling his eyes. "Oooooh, how vewy fwightening."
Alice looked out through her window, ignoring Rex. It was a winter morning. Lately she had been feeling as if she were a winter morning, all day, right there in her body: cold, dry,leafless, twiggy, but still very much alive, very much in motion. She had lost thirty-two pounds, and though she did not know it, she looked quite a bit like a dead tree with eyes.
In a few minutes, in a more sober voice, Rex said, "What part worries you, really? About the coma thing? Is it the idea of indefiniteness?"
It was a good question, one she had asked of herself many times. She believed she had never felt better. She also believed she spent most of her time hovering above the beds of the children's ward on a plateau of pure light.
"What scares me is the short-term memory loss he keeps mentioning as, like, a side effect."
"Oh, that." Rex waved a contemptuous hand. "It's probably a crock, and anyway who cares if you lose a little short-term memory?" He swept his arm around the empty ward. "You want to remember all this? Along with those fascinating visits from your mom, when she sits and reads a magazine article about putting the thrill back into her sex life while you think you're hovering up near the ceiling? Or the visits from my mom or dad, when they stand there for fifteen minutes with