THE SHADOW OVER VINLAND sample: “Doctored”
At the start, he could only say that he and Kevin had gone to the clearing to camp. That was all that would come out, and then his shoulders would start shaking and his sight would jitter, and the doctor would sigh and the milk muscles would come in and give him shots and load him back to his room.
That was all he could say for a long time, whenever they asked him, and that was the only thing that they asked him, so all he told them day after day, every doctor who asked, was that he and Kevin had gone to the clearing to camp, then nothing but jitters and shaky breath.
One doctor was finally smarter than the others. She was a redhead, with white hair starting at the temples, and wore glasses that were too small for her face. She said, Let’s talk about getting ready for camping. What gear to you have?
And without any jitters or shakes, he said, I’ve got an old mummy bag, I got it from my dad, it’s waterproof and pretty warm even in the middle of winter, even though it’s old. And I didn’t need it to be really warm for summer camping anyway. And I’ve got a butane stove, just a single burner and a can of butane, and I’ve got a combination lantern and bug zapper but it’s rechargeable and I guess it was too long since I charged it because it was dead so I didn’t bring it.
The Smart Doctor said, What gear did Kevin have?
He said, Kevin had an even nicer sleeping bag, his was new, and the tent was his. And he had a better camping stove, but it’s bigger with two burners and we didn’t need it for just the two of us, and it would be heavier for hiking in, so he let me bring mine.
The Smart Doctor said, Sounds like you’ve both been camping before.
He said, We both used to do a lot of camping with our families—with me it was just with my dad, but with Kevin it was his whole family—and we were used to doing it every weekend almost when the weather was good, so when we got to college and there was no one to go camping with, I almost pulled my hair out and I think it was the same with Kevin, so when we found out that we both really wanted to go camping—we lived in the same complex and ran into each other a couple of times, and my roommates knew his roommates—we started going camping together whenever we didn’t have to work or study.
The Smart Doctor nodded and said, So it was Kevin’s tent that you set up in the clearing.
He said, Yes, and then he was surprised that the shaking hadn’t started. So he went on because he didn’t know how long he could, Then I started gathering wood for the fire, the camp stove was really for breakfast and —
Then his vision got jittering with wavy lines and he started gasping and could feel his shoulders shaking and he couldn’t say anything else.
The Smart Doctor patted his knee and smiled and told him not to worry because it was a good sign and they were making progress. Then the milk muscles came to take him back to his room. But it must have been a good sign, because they got him back there and didn’t have to give him shots, they just left him to lie on his bed and stair at the ceiling until the shaking stopped.
***
The doctors all wore normal clothes, not white coats and stuff. Some of them wore jeans and casual shirts, others wore good blouses and colored shirt with ties, and only their lanyards showed that they were doctors. The big guys, though, the orderlies, they always wore white pants and white golf shirts to show off their muscles. That’s why he called them “milk muscles,” because they were hired for their muscle and they always worse white. He didn’t call them that out loud; he didn’t ever speak to them and they rarely had to speak to him. But he called them that in his mind.
Actually only one doctor wore a tie, usually a black tie with a maroon or burgundy shirt. The doctor had a salt and pepper beard and an aggressively bald head and wore large round glasses, and was shorter than anyone else on the staff. The milk muscles looked like trees next to that doctor.
He called that doctor the Owl Doctor because of his large round glasses. He didn’t bother to remember any doctor’s name, because the name didn’t really tell him anything about them, it was just another stupid piece of information, and with all of their efforts around getting him to remember, it didn’t seem useful to bother remembering something that didn’t matter. And who was he going to use their names with? It’s not like he was going to tell Dr. Trevor about something that Dr. Wallfinsch said. It was just easier to call them the Smart Doctor and the Owl Doctor and the Bad Skin Doctor and the No Shoulders Doctor and the No Tits Doctor. He wasn’t sure how many doctors he had seen, but remembering them this way helped him recognize them when they came back. He didn’t think there had been any new doctors since he came here, just the same half-dozen or so, appearing randomly to talk to him in the room that the milk muscles took him to.
The Owl Doctor’s big thing was transitions. The memory is a funny thing, the Owl Doctor said frequently, once even laughing to show how funny it was. It’s like a bunch of train cars. The cars themselves are hard and inflexible. But where they connect, that part can bend, and that’s where the doors are that let you go from one car to another. Memories are like that. Our memories of a particular day, a particular place, sometimes they lock up tight and hard, but in the human mind, the transitions between them—the time breaks, the traveling to and fro—those are the flexible parts, and that’s where the doorways are to get inside the train cars.
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