Household Gods

She was going to go crazy unless she could get an answer to that. But this neurologist all too obviously, and all too unhappily, didn’t have one.

Best to do as she was told. If she didn’t wake up in the second century, the hospital wasn’t so bad a place. And if she didn’t wake up at all…

“My insurance will cover an extra day,” she said.

“Good,“ Dr. Feldman said. “That’s wise. And while you’re resting, I’ll see if I can come up with more tests for you. I do want to get to the bottom of this if I possibly can.”

“I understand,” Nicole said.

The doctor left, still frowning, still obviously unhappy to have no answers. Nor was Nicole about to give her any, even if she’d had one that a modern medical scientist would accept.

The evening wound down between primetime television and the ringing of the telephone. Her mother called from Bloomington, with interpolations from the elder of her two sisters and the kids. Nicole gave them an expanded version of the official story, and got the expected hammering of questions for which she had no credible answers. She might still have been fending off “But why? Why were you out like that for a week? Don’t tell me the doctor doesn’t know! So get a new doctor! ‘ right through the change of nursing shifts at eleven o’clock, and never mind what time it was in Indiana, if a nurse hadn’t come in to take her pulse and temperature and meddle generally with her arrangements.

After the nurse went to harass the next patient, Nicole took refuge in television. That was what it was, a refuge. She’d fled to it every night when she came home from the office, used it as a pacifier to wind down from the stress of the day. And yet, if you’d asked her what she thought of television, she’d have come out with a whole canned rant against it, complete with assertion that she would never, no, never, use it as a babysitter for her children.

And all the while they’d be parked in front of it while she got her head together after a hard day at the firm, and when she’d put them to bed, she’d park there herself till she fell asleep. The Emperor, she had to admit, had no clothes.

And yet, she thought, she’d met an Emperor, and he most definitely was not blind to his own faults. Quite the opposite: he’d gone in search of them so that he could get rid of them.

Of all the things she’d found in the second century, Marcus Aurelius was the one the twentieth couldn’t match. If he turned out to be a dream or a hallucination, she’d be more than sorry. The world was a better place, by a little, for that he’d been in it.

At eleven o’clock, a nurse marched in and turned off the television. “We do have to get some rest,” he said primly.

What do you mean, we? Nicole refrained from saying. She was wide awake and in fine shape. And she did not want to sleep. She did not want to wake in that tavern in Carnuntum.

The nurse couldn’t know that, nor would he have cared if he had. He turned out the light in the room and laid the bed down flat. His air of superior virtue made Nicole want to kick him.

She lay in the not-quite-dark, dim-lit by the lights in the hallway and the flicker of the heart monitor that the nurse had hooked up again — Making sure I don’t sit up and turn the TV back on, she thought sourly. The mattress was not what she’d have called comfortable, and yet it was thicker and softer than the one she’d slept on above the tavern.

They’d told her she’d been asleep six days. It was sleep, the doctors had admitted grudgingly, though right on the edge of true coma. No dreams. She’d asked. She’d stayed in the deepest level of sleep throughout. “As if there was nobody home,” one of the nurses had said between tests. Dr. Feldman had said the same thing.

So she didn’t need more sleep now, did she? And she’d had coffee with dinner. She would stay awake. She would. Even if she yawned. Even if..

Nicole’s dreams were muddy, confused. Sometimes she was in Carnuntum, but no one could see or hear her; she ran here and there, trying to get Julia to listen, then Gaius Calidius Severus, then — and by this she knew it was a dream — Titus Calidius Severus. He smiled at her and said, “Welcome back among the dead, Umma.”

Then she was in West Hills, trying to get a much younger Justin to eat his prunes, but Kimberley kept tugging at her to go and feed the “other baby,” except it wasn’t a baby, it was Lucius in a blue bunny bib and a toga.

She woke with a start, suddenly and fully aware, and grimly determined not to open her eyes. There was light beyond her eyelids, she couldn’t escape that. And — she breathed deep. Nothing. No complex reek of Roman city.

Her eyes opened. She was in West Hills Medical Center, in the bed in which she’d fallen asleep. Had anyone ever been so happy to wake up in a hospital?

Reality came crashing in as soon as she sat up and set the heart monitor off again. There was breakfast, sponge-bath — though she could perfectly well have bathed herself, they weren’t letting her — and, when she was cleaner, even by this sketchy method, than she had been in a year and a half in Carnuntum, a nurse with the stack of paperwork. The deductibles were going to strain her to the limit, but just then she didn’t care. She’d manage. And Frank, she thought with a slow smile, was going to help. It was time he paid up.

After paperwork came more tests, and more frustration for Dr. Feldman. There wasn’t one anomalous thing anywhere, no matter how often she repeated her tests, or how many variations she tried. At last she flung up her hands and sent Nicole back to her room. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” she said as the nurse settled Nicole in the obligatory and unnecessary wheelchair, “even now we have much less knowledge of the brain and its functions than I wish we did.”

What about the functions of the brain under the influence of two Roman gods? Nicole thought. But she nodded, and held her tongue.

That afternoon, faced with a wasteland of TV soap operas, Nicole determined to give herself a gift she’d yearned for since the day she arrived in Carnuntum. After consulting with Dr. Feldman, the nurses let her get away with it.

She took a long, hot, wonderful shower. With soap. And shampoo. And towels that, while not exactly luxurious, were thick enough and soft enough to be a pleasure on her clean skin. It was an almost orgasmic delight to be so clean. Her body still felt strange, as if it didn’t quite fit. Its skin was too pale, its middle too thick and soft. And yet there wasn’t a louse or a fleabite on it. For that alone she loved it.

Then, when she’d showered, she rummaged in the bag Frank had sent and found the little blow dryer she’d bought a long time ago for traveling — and a small makeup kit that had to be Dawn’s contribution; she couldn’t imagine Frank thinking of such a thing.

It was a brand-new Nicole Gunther-Perrin who came out of the steamy bathroom and settled again in the bed. She was more than ready for her dinner. And when, after the tray had been taken away, Dr. Feldman appeared in the doorway, Nicole greeted her almost happily.

The doctor’s expression was as sour as ever. She wasn’t at all pleased to say, “I can’t see any valid medical reason for keeping you here past tomorrow morning. You are, as far as any test can determine, perfectly normal and healthy. I wish I could tell you if your syndrome will recur, but I can’t.”

Nicole bit her tongue. She could guarantee a longer stay by telling the doctor exactly what, as far as she could tell, had happened to her during those six days. For that matter, she could talk herself right into a nice long stay in a padded cell.

No, thank you. “We’ll just have to hope it was a one-time thing, won’t we?” she said.

“Hope is just about as much as we’ve got,” Dr. Feldman said. “I’d like to see you in my office next week — it’s right across the street.” She handed Nicole a business card. “Call and make an appointment, and I’ll see you then.”

“I’ll do that,” Nicole said. She meant it. If, as she was increasingly convinced, she really had traveled in time by the offices of a pair of antique gods, it wasn’t bloody likely she’d ever do it again. But if it kept the doctor happy, and if it made her look like a normal, baffled, honestly concerned victim of an unknown syndrome, then she’d do it and welcome it.

“Please do come and see me,” the doctor said. “Just because I can’t find anything now doesn’t mean nothing happened. People don’t lose consciousness for six days for no reason at all.”

“Yes,” Nicole said. “I understand. It’s like when the car is acting up, and you take it to the mechanic and it’s