Chapter 1 – The Accident
I rubbed my eyes against the harsh light, willing them to open even as my body forced them closed. I took a deep breath, and was assaulted with the chemical smells that always fill a hospital. Trying to mask the scent of sickness and death, I suppose. I didn’t remember coming to a hospital, but that wasn’t unusual for me. My deaths usually passed quickly, and I could wake up in a new body in a new place in a matter of minutes. Sometimes the move was so quick I didn’t even realize I’d passed until I was already coming to in a new body and a new place.
Had I died already? That didn’t sound right. He usually left me in an individual for much longer than I’d been around this time.
“Are you awake, honey?”
The hesitant words came from just to the left of me, and startled me enough to open my eyes. The light was still blindingly painful, though, so I slammed them shut quickly. The speaker moved closer to my bed. I could hear their clothes rustling as they leaned in, could smell the tangy odor of someone who needs to bathe, but doesn’t actually stink quite yet. Musky and sweaty, mixed with deodorant and cologne.
A warm hand touched me then, gentle fingers wrapping around my hand.
“Honey, can you hear me? Do you need me to get the nurse?” There was anxious concern in the voice, and something else…fear, maybe? The voice was familiar, but that didn’t always mean anything in my life. Once you’ve heard a million voices, they all start to sound a little familiar.
I forced my eyes open to get a glimpse of the voice’s source. A man stood over me, his worry making the skin around his eyes and mouth crease. Making that face would give him wrinkles someday, I thought, as I took a quick glance at his features. Average, nothing out of the ordinary about him. Click, brain, please click, I need to remember who he is. Then it came back, a short rush of memories. I hadn’t moved on yet.
“Yes, sweetie, I can hear you. And no, I don’t need the nurse.” My response eased the worry lines from his face, and a soft smile replaced them.
“Thank God you’re alright,” he said, with a sigh of relief. “When I got the call at work…that’d you’d had an accident…I didn’t know what to think. I was so worried, honey. I got here as fast as I could, but they already had you in surgery and wouldn’t let me see you until you came out to recovery. I argued with the docs but they wouldn’t tell me anything until after-“
“Shhh,” I whispered, squeezing his fingers gently. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m alright. It wasn’t bad, I just hurt my…” And then I remembered why I was waking up in a hospital bed. The car had come out of nowhere, almost like it was aiming for me. I couldn’t get out of its way fast enough, and remember bits and pieces of a rough tumble over the hood and onto the ground. And as though triggered by the memory, the pain flooded back, as well, and I fought back a grimace. “…leg. Just my leg, I think.”
I tried to shift in the bed, but couldn’t seem to bend my left knee. I took a calming breath, flashed a fake smile at the man standing beside me, and looked under the sheets. I breathed a huge sigh of relief to see that my leg was, in fact, still attached, just wrapped in a giant brace of some sort. I don’t mind death, but I hate having to live without one of the limbs. It makes the process nearly unbearable, especially since I can usually still feel my own parts where the body’s parts are missing. It gives a whole new meaning to the term “phantom limb”.
The man, (Marty, I remembered…his name was Marty) watched me hesitantly, as if afraid to speak and break whatever dam was holding back my emotions. Marty didn’t know me very well. I don’t really get emotional. I’m pretty sure I have all the standard emotions; I yell when I’m angry, I smile when I’m happy, I feel disappointment and anxiety and even fear, sometimes. These emotions come, but all in moderation. And I don’t cry. I feel loss when it happens to me, and I can empathize with those around me when they’re sad, but I don’t remember ever actually crying. I’m sure it’s happened at some point, but I can’t remember when. I’m in a human body, so the tear ducts exist, which means it must just be me that doesn’t possess whatever trait makes a human weep. Maybe my kind doesn’t come pre-programmed for that response.
To be fair, though, it’s not Marty’s fault that he didn’t know much about me. He hadn’t married me. When he got married, I wasn’t in this body yet. His wife had been occupying it at the time. I didn’t know much about her, except what I could see in the mirror. She seemed nice enough, and the few memories I had access to in her mind were happy. But she wasn’t here anymore, and the change had stressed poor Marty to the breaking point. We’re not allowed to explain to mortals why the person they knew suddenly has new and different characteristics. It’s not that we don’t want to; believe me I’ve tried. We’re actually physically not able to. The words catch in our throats, the pen runs out of ink, the pencil lead breaks; something prevents us from passing our information to others that aren’t like us. So when the Collector had decided He wanted Marty’s wife’s soul, out she went, and in popped me.
In all these millennia, I still haven’t figured out what drives the Collector. I’ve never met Him, nor do I think have any of my kind. The Creator makes souls and sends them out into the world, and when the Collector sees one He likes, He takes it. But through some divine deal they worked out in the beginning of time, the Collector can’t take a soul unless He has a “place-holder” of sorts, because otherwise He messes up the Grand Design. That’s where my kind comes into play. We were created as fillers, in a literal and metaphysical sense. We inhabit the soul-less bodies of the Collector’s recent acquisitions until such time as they were originally supposed to die. We have free will, for the most part, but get bits and pieces of direction showing us where to take the mortal shells we’ve been pushed into, to keep with the “big picture” plan. The one thing we don’t control is into which bodies we’re placed.
Now I was in Marty’s wife’s body, and she was gone. But Marty didn’t know any of this, and I couldn’t clue him in. Sometimes I can access enough of the body’s memories to fill in the gaps and act in a similar manner to the person who previously inhabited the body, since memories are stored as simple electrical data in the synapses of the physical brain. Unfortunately, it didn’t always work that way; personally I’m of the opinion that sometimes there is an electrical surge as the soul leaves the body, and it sort of short-circuits the memory section of the brain. Or maybe the departing soul does it on purpose, trying to hold on to their mortal memories. Either way, this was one of those times, and I couldn’t seem to get much useful information from the inner regions of this woman’s brain. I used to feel bad about that, but guilt gets you nowhere in my type of existence. So I took Marty’s cues, and had tried for the last year to act the way he thought his wife had acted. Except that I’m still me, so there were some changes that had to be made.
“Naomi, sweetie, do you remember what happened?” he asked, his voice quiet, the words catching in his throat.
I set the sheets back down on my busted leg, and looked up at his face.
“Of course, Marty. I was out jogging, and got hit by an out-of-control car. Weird, random accident, but I’m fine,” I said, trying like hell to be soothing and supportive.
“Wh- what were you doing jogging so early, and so far from the house?” I could tell the question weighed heavily on his mind. Marty had feared for a few months now that I – as his precious Naomi – was cheating on him. I suppose it was the weight loss, and the effort I put in to get Naomi’s neglected body back into shape, and the fact that I carried myself with a confidence I’m not sure Naomi had ever possessed. Naomi had apparently preferred to sleep in and lounge around all day; I wasn’t wired for that lifestyle. Like I said, still me in this body, even if it’s not technically mine.
I was about to answer him, and reassure his fragile ego once again that I was not, in fact, having an affair, when I was thankfully saved by a knock at the door.
“Come in,” I called, trying not to sound relieved by the save.
A tall, heavily built man wearing a long white coat opened the door and came into the room. He introduced himself as Dr. Adams, then picked up my chart and flipped through a few pages, glancing at various lines and bits of information as he made small murmurs to himself. After a moment, he set the chart back down and came to the opposite side of my bed from Marty.
“So, Mrs. Glass, how are we feeling today?” he asked. I hate it when doctors ask how “we’re” doing. I always want to remind them that “we” are not feeling anything, because “we” are not the same person, dumbass.
“A little shaken, and a little sore,” I answered instead. “What happened to my leg?”
“You were very lucky, Mrs. Glass. It seems the car that hit you was at just the right angle and you fell on top of the hood instead of under the car. But during the fall, your knee was twisted pretty badly and you tore some of the ligaments in it. We went in and repaired what we could, and replaced your ACL because it was torn too badly to fix. The brace you have on now is to keep your leg perfectly straight while those new ligaments heal. After a few weeks, we’ll start your rehab to get your flexibility back.”
A nice deep breath to stay calm. Of course I hadn’t been lucky, but the doctor couldn’t know that. I had been injured to force me back on the track that Naomi was supposed to be following, which apparently didn’t involve losing thirty pounds and making her husband a nervous wreck. So much for my five mile runs.
“And the driver of the car?” I asked. “Are they alright?”
Dr. Adams smiled at me then, that ridiculous patronizing smile that people give you when they think you’re stupid or slow.
“The man who hit you is just fine, Mrs. Glass,” he answered, patting my hand. I wanted to punch him in the face then, but managed to restrain myself. “He feels just awful about it, too. Says it was the weirdest thing, he was driving along and his car seemed to just lose all control. His brakes wouldn’t work, the steering wheel wasn’t responding. He’s got some bumps and bruises, and the cops have been talking to him for a while, making sure he wasn’t drunk or high or being reckless. They can’t seem to find any reason for the car to have veered off and hit you.”
I knew why the car hit me, and it had nothing to do with the driver.
“When can I go home?” I asked the doc.
He picked up my chart again, reading a short paragraph on the front page before looking back to me.
“Looks like you can check out whenever you’re ready, Mrs. Glass. We’ve had you under observation for almost two days, and you show no other signs of trauma, so –“
“Wait, I’ve been here for two days?!” Two days, how had I been out for two days? Marty’s hand gripped mine a little tighter, so I took a breath and let the doctor continue.
“Well, we kept you sedated for the first day after surgery, so we could monitor your vitals in a resting state. Then you’ve been sleeping off the medication for the past six or eight hours. But it seems your only real injury was to your knee, and there’s no further reason for you to be here for that injury. As I said, you can check out whenever you’re ready.” With that, Dr. Adams left the room. Not exactly Mr. Bedside Manner.
I put my head back down on the not-quite-comfortable hospital pillow. Marty was watching my face anxiously, not daring to speak to me yet. I hated that he was so meek, but it wasn’t in my capacity to change him. If I tried, the Powers That Be would just undo anything I did and put him back on his destined path. So I just took a lot of deep breaths and dealt with him to the best of my abilities.
I forced a smile back onto my face, and looked into his eyes. “Honey, can you go find out from the nurses what we need to do to get me out of here? I want to go home.” I put a little extra emphasis on that last word, and achieved the desired result.
Marty’s face lost most of its tension, and he gave me a genuine smile that made his brown eyes sparkle. His eyes were almost familiar, and pulled at my heartstrings in a way that made me feel like part of me was empty. I had tried to no avail to dredge up whatever memory caused this strange ache deep inside me whenever I looked into Marty’s eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was my memory, or Naomi’s, or if it had belonged to one of the hundreds of bodies I had occupied in my lifetime.
“Sure, Naomi. I’ll take care of it right now.”
When he left the room, I closed my eyes and shook my head, trying to clear that nagging thought that something was missing. Right now, all I wanted was to get out of here. I’d died too many times in hospitals to have any desire to stay in one, and the bed was ridiculously uncomfortable.
Marty checked me out, and the nurse wheeled me to our car. We had a mostly silent ride home, which was fine with me.
