"Gramma Rosa, do you think you're going to heaven?"
The old woman felt her frail heartbeat shudder with both fear and a strange sense of excited contentment. She reached out a shaky hand, and a very small and warm palm wrapped around her fingers. "I believe so, Charlie." she answered her grandson. Her eyes were closed, and she barely had the energy to open them. She could tell that she was fading fast, and she would soon find out what lay beyond death. After a moment, her lids fluttered open, and she could see her family standing around her hospital bed. Tears and pain stained their faces, but they knew that it was her time to leave this earth. Her husband, Richard, sat in a chair to her right, his forehead resting on her shoulder as he waited for her imminent departure. When they were alone last night, they had exchanged their heartfelt goodbyes. And he was somewhat ready to let her go.
"Momma," she heard her daughter say, her voice cracking before she paused to swallow, "we love you so much. I'm so grateful that I had you as my mom." Rosa smiled, feeling her own tears come to her tired eyes. "I love you all, too." she said faintly. And then she was gone.
The echo of a flatline on an EKG machine rang in her ears as darkness flooded her entire reality. She felt nothing. She was no longer of her body, just a wisp of a thought flashing and fading in and out of existence. Was this all that there was after life and death? Somehow she didn't mind it. It was an eternity of peace and silence after a lifetime of noise and pain and love.
For the longest time, everything was silence. She couldn't tell how long it was. Did time exist here? As she pondered that, it was then that she noticed a tiny pinpoint of light. Curious, she moved towards it, in whatever form she was. She couldn't feel herself moving or changing location, but the light slowly became bigger and brighter. Then, all of a sudden, it rushed towards her and consumed her being, and a flood of sensations hit her like a brick wall being slammed into her chest. She felt a heavy sense of weight, a sense of being, a sense of touch. Her nervous system started to pick up different signals, like the soft cotton beneath her back and the light linen covering her body. Why did she have a body now? Was this reincarnation like Buddhists talked about?
"Anna. Anna Finley. Can you hear me?"
Her eyes flew open and she took in a giant gasp of breath, her lungs burning for oxygen. She started to breathe quickly and heavily, looking around her. Doctors and men dressed up in lab coats were surrounding her, and she could hear machines beeping and whirring all around her. Who was Anna? "Wh-where am I?" she asked, her throat raspy and her voice crackling. It felt like she hadn't spoken in weeks. Years. It also sounded much different than her own. Much, much younger than her own.
One of the doctors touched her face, parting one of her eyelids so he could shine a flashlight into her eyes. She winced, and started to feel panicky. "Where am I?" she asked again with much struggle, and tried to sit up. Several doctors said "whoa, whoa," and gently pushed her shoulders back down. One of them, a woman, started answering her question. "Your name is Anna Finley and you've just completed a very new experiment. You were very successful. We'll tell you more about it soon, but right now we need to get your body woken back up. You have been unconscious for a month." Her smile was excited and congratulatory, yet at the same time very sterile and distant.
A month? Anna Finley? That name was.. familiar. But she was Rosa. Hadn't she just died? Although she was terrified, she cooperated and lay still for the doctors, trying to sort everything out in her mind. The doctors and lab coats moved around her quickly, taking small blood samples and checking her temperature, asking her to flex her fingers and toes, furiously scribbling on their charts. Anna. Anna, Anna, Anna. The more she thought about the name, the more her brain started to try and put together an explanation for this. Little facts started coming to her about whoever Anna was, almost like she was trying to recall an old schoolmate. She was nineteen.. or twenty? While she struggled to remember, she also thought about what they had said. She had been unconscious for a month, participating in an experiment. But she was Rosa Everdeen, the elderly woman who had passed away at a ripe old age of 96. Deciding that it was too much for her weak, tired body to deal with right now, she tried to just not think about any of it felt something inside of her starting to shut down.
After a good while of no one speaking to her, the same woman approached her again, her face calm, like the world was somehow making sense right now. "Anna, we're going to remove a head piece from you now. Don't be alarmed." Head piece? She weakly reached up, and touched the rim of some helmet shaped contraption that was on her head with her fingertips. How hadn't she noticed it until now? She also gazed at her hand, which was slender and pale, the skin so young and beautiful. It was also shaking uncontrollably. Two doctors worked and loosening a few screws on the helmet. They slid it off of her skull then removed a couple of small sticky pads that were attached to her scalp. Her bed was then adjusted so that she was sitting up more, and the woman brought her a small hand mirror. "Here, this is what you look like." she said gently, holding up the mirror for the girl to see.
Anna gasped when she saw herself. This face wasn't Rosa's face. It never had been. She had blue eyes, a dainty rounded nose, supple lips. Her cheek bones were prominent from not having moved or eaten real food in a month. Her head had been shaved so that the helmet could fit on her properly and so the sensors had a place to stick on her skin. She watched tears brimming in her eyes as she hesitantly touched her barely fuzzy head. A vivid image of herself flickered in her mind of herself with long, wavy brown hair, sparked with gold and deep red. Now it was all gone. The more she stared at herself, the more she started to remember about herself. Her birthday was April 14th. Her favorite color was green. More and more snapshots of Anna’s fuzzy memories were surfacing in her mind, and they were bleeding together with her own. Was this a dream? There was no way that she had gone through a lifetime in a month. That was impossible. Where were Richard and her daughter and the rest of her family?
"Where's Richard?" she asked the woman softly. She just wanted her husband there. The woman gave her a long, sympathetic look. "Anna, you won't be seeing Richard again." she said with the sympathy of telling a child that their favorite toy was lost for good, and took back the hand mirror and left the room. Anna stared at the spot the woman had been, her mouth open a little. She had known that when she had said goodbye to him just last night. But she had expected to be.. dead.
"Alright, Anna. It's time to get you home." She turned her head to look at the doorway as a male doctor came in, one she hadn't seen before. He sat down in a chair next to her bed, and smiled at her kindly. "Hi, Anna, I’m Dr. Lawson. I know this is all very confusing to you right now, but I'm going to explain the experiment that happened to you. A month ago, you were induced into unconsciousness and we simulated an entire lifetime in your brain. In just one month, you experienced nearly a century!" Anna gawked at him, horrified. He seemed so happy about this.
"Simulated? It wasn't.. real?" she asked, her voice cracking under the strain of trying not to cry. No, this couldn't be happening. They were wrong. That wasn’t possible.
"Yes ma'am. None of it was real. Today we'll be sending you home so you can recuperate, and then in another month we'll meet again to discuss the experiment. You'll be going home with your girlfriend, ah," he paused to flip up a page on his chart. "Ameline. Ameline Greene. You know Ameline, right?"
Girlfriend. Anna felt as if her heart was literally tearing away from its place in her chest. Her head hurt so bad. Richard wasn't real. Clara, her daughter, wasn't real. Charlie wasn't real. They were all in her head. They weren't real. Ameline? That name brought a face to her mind, and a faint feeling of love and happiness. Yet it sent her brain reeling. She hadn’t been.. gay in her lifetime.
"Yes." she answered the doctor, staring down at her lap as tears blurred her vision and dripped down her chin onto her arms. "Great." the doctor smiled cheerfully in reply. He didn't even realize that the storm inside her was literally tearing her heart and mind apart. What had she done to deserve this? "We'll do a few more tests before you go and get you dressed and you'll be on your way home." he said, and then he was up and gone.
- - -
Several nurses performed a couple of tests to make sure that her body was healthy, checking her reflexes and her throat and the insides of her ears, then provided her with a neatly folded pile of clothes for her to change into and left the room to give her privacy. Shivering, Anna shakily removed the hospital gown she had been wearing and pulled on the simple black panties and bra that she had apparently been wearing before all of this. She hadn't stopped crying this whole time, silent as tears streamed down her face. One of the nurses told her that it was the beginning of December, and she supposed her past self had planned well for that. She pulled on the big, gray cable knit sweater and dark jeans. The smell of the sweater invoked thoughts of that woman she very faintly remembered. Ameline. She was gradually becoming more relieved that she was coming to pick her up. Thoughts of her brought on feelings of comfort and safety. She sniffled and sat carefully on the ground, putting on her thick socks and worn black Converse. Using the bed to pull herself up, she grabbed the remaining red woolen scarf and clutched it closely to her, and carefully walked out of her room.
A nurse was waiting for her, and she put her in a wheel chair and pushed her down several hallways. The building they were in was reminiscent of a hospital, except even more clean and bare, with several more office rooms and doors marked as labs than patient rooms. They reached what she was assumed was a waiting room, as there was a reception desk and a glass door to the outside. She was put in a chair and told to wait for Ameline to get there. It was just her and the receptionist after the nurse left, and soft jazz music playing from behind the counter.
She glanced around what seemed to be a typical waiting room for a doctor’s office as she shifted her position a little. Chairs lined up against the wall, a small coffee table with magazine sitting neatly on top of it. “Ivan Psychiatric Research Center” was emblazoned in gray, minimalistic lettering on the front of the receptionist’s counter.
"Anna?" the receptionist said after a minute of quiet. Anna had been absentmindedly touching her shaved head, and jerked up when her name was called, suddenly feeling self-conscious. "Yes?" she answered, quickly trying to dry her eyes. "This is for you," the woman said as she walked over to Anna, her heels clicking on the laminated floors as she brandished an envelope towards the girl. "Here you go, sweetheart." she smiled politely, and handed it to her. Anna hesitantly took it. The receptionist returned to her station, and started typing away at her computer.
Anna stared at the envelope. It was blank, except for her name and an identification number printed on the front of it. She tucked it into her folded up scarf, which she was still holding, and continued to wait. She didn't care what was in it. She didn't care about the tears wetting her pale face. She just wanted to go home.