After a dejected night at a modest hotel, frustrated to realize my impairment allowance wouldn’t go far in this city, I wandered through a chill spring morning. Traffic scrubbed vision to smears. So, I kept my attention on the houses. Each looked snug in its own loneliness.
I crossed into Strathcona, an old neighborhood of weatherboard houses with deep bay windows, elaborate gables, and pillared porches.
A small park of huddled trees drew me in. I sat on a stone bench and watched leafy shadows rubbing sunlight into the grass.
“May I join you?” A tall, elderly woman stood before me in curious clothing, her silver hair swept up in a voluptuous Gibson-girl bouffant.
She wore a blue corset inset with panels of oxblood leather that snugly fit an absurdly narrow waist above a long gray skirt. Her high-laced boots glinted silver with filigreed circuitry and chrome boot-tips.
Steampunk?
I offered a weak “Hello.”
“I’ve never seen you here before,” she said. Her antiquated attire and the suffering in her large pale eyes made me want to glance at her wrist.
I had seen that dark look before, on my psych ward rotation. Was she wearing a hospital name band? I restrained myself from looking.
“I’m new in town,” I said as she sat, close enough for her scent to touch me. Cold and elemental, the smell reminded me of glacial wind. (Phantosmia, I assumed. An olfactory hallucination.)
A gold collar-bar fastened her high-necked blouse. This dainty elegance belied the stalwart strength baked into her face. Brown and seamed as a Prairie woman from a desolate era, she assessed me. “You look careworn, dear.”
“We seem to have that in common,” I mumbled, unable to budge my gaze from her weathered face or those dolorous, winter eyes. “Soulful lives,” I heard myself say, though I felt soulless.
“Oh, yes.” She shifted closer, and the heartsink in her gaze pushed me back. “Soul is our dark awareness as human beings. We know that everything we love we will lose.”
Stiffening with mild alarm, she pulled away. “Forgive my forwardness. We’ve just met. My name is Arethusa Xenakis.”
“John Prosper.” Her presence touched me with the most forlorn melancholy, and I verged on a place where all is darkness.
Strictly out of fear of losing myself there, I began to speak. “My suffering isn’t that philosophical—or unfamiliar these days.” I told her my soldier’s story.
Her eyes brightened. “Doctor Prosper, this is a serendipitous meeting.” She tipped her snaggle-toothed smile toward me. “I believe I have a residence for you not far from here—and gainful employment!”
The joy in her seamed face delayed my distrust, and I brightened when she said, “My niece’s work requires someone with medical experience. To help with her clients.”
I imagined medical care of the homeless or a recovery program for street addicts. “What work is that?”
“She is an alchemist.”
Darkness clouded my heart again. “Turning lead into gold?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I’m not qualified.” I tried to shrug off my disappointment, but the splendor of the morning had already depreciated to the sparkle of cheap jewelry. “I’m a medical doctor, not a doctor of philosophy.”
“Lead into gold. It’s a metaphor.” She read my letdown with those arctic eyes. “Think of it as transforming sickness into health. That’s what you’re trained to do.”
I averted my gaze to the jigsaw shadows under the trees. “What does alchemy have to do with healing sickness?”
“Medicine heals the body.” She said this in the flat tone of the obvious. “Alchemy heals the soul. Healing is about keeping body and soul together, yes?”
No, I thought, having seen nothing of soul and too much of body. But I shrugged and replied, “I don’t know.”
She returned a frown of temperate understanding. “My niece can provide a pleasant place to live.” With a gentle slap to my knee, she stood. “It’s a paying job. If it’s not to your liking, move on.”
Even my addled brain recognized the logic of that.
She spoke the address to me quietly and clearly, and then added, “It’s a stationery shop called Inklings. The name is lifted from the book club that thrived at Oxford University in the Thirties and Forties. You’ve heard of them?”
“Tolkien was a member,” I recalled. “And C. S. Lewis.”
“Yes,” she affirmed smartly and with a cheery “Ta!” ambled off into the spangled morning.
Fantasy and Science
No comments:
Post a Comment