Rota Fortunae (3/?)
After a great deal of haggling, not to mention some angry glares from a real estate agent who saw her fat commission slipping away, Reid had finally convinced Angus to wire him a few hundred dollars, enough for a cup of strong coffee, a bag full of sandwiches and drinks-and a single one-way bus ticket to Oakdale, Illinois. As Reid perched in his seat on the smelly Greyhound bus, wincing at the exposure to countless forms of germs, bacteria, and other infectious agents tracked in by his fellow occupants, he had had plenty of time to consider explanations for the strange course his days had taken.
His first theory, and the one with the most obvious plausibility, had been that this was simply a bad dream, and that he would wake up soon enough to find himself back in the Dallas condo he knew. But even Reid he hadn’t already pinched himself a hundred times to no effect, he was sure that no one could actually sleep through a dream encompassing the soul-crushing drudgery of a 28-hour bus ride... so the dream theory was clearly out of the question. Next, he'd somewhat fancifully considered the mysteries of patients existing in a prolonged coma, and even recalled a TV show that had entertainingly trapped a coma patient in a 1970s police station... but even though coma was one possible consequence of barbiturate overdose, he was perfectly aware of the scientific implausibility of coma patients dreaming about anything. So much for theory number two.
By the end of the grueling trip to Oakdale, Reid had come to the conclusion that he had simply had his identity stolen by some unknown person, probably with the intent of practicing a con on the unsuspecting, undereducated residents of Podunk, Illinois. If the conman had died in a train accident before his deception was uncovered-well, Reid had seen enough mindless bureaucracy in his time to know how easily the fraud could have gone undetected. Angus would have had no reason to doubt a story about his nephew’s death, and Reid had been far too busy with his court appearances to contact Angus himself. The theory didn’t quite explain how the furniture had been removed from Reid’s condo or how it had been on the market for so long, but he was willing to ignore that particular mystery until he’d been restored to the ranks of the living.
It was nearly three in the morning when the latest bus in a series of transfers pulled to a stop in the tiny bus station in Oakdale. As there was simply no way Reid was going to compound his contaminant exposure with a hotel stay, he directed the lone taxi driver on site to drop him off at the town’s biggest hospital. (It did not surprise Reid when he was told the town’s biggest hospital was in fact its only hospital, Oakdale Memorial.)
After leaving the cab at the front entrance, Reid crept into the main foyer and made his way over to the hospital map posted on the wall. The room was dimly lit, out of deference to the late hour, and the receptionist on staff at the desk hardly spared him a glance as she sat behind her desk, listlessly ruffling through a stack of manila folders. Reid quickly located the new neurology wing and followed the map’s guidance to the elevators up to the fifth floor, then down a series of long, quiet corridors.
Reid wasn’t sure quite what he’d expected of the new wing-a shoddy, half-hearted endeavor, perhaps, designed by a con artist putting up a clever front while diverting large amounts of the donated funds into his own personal accounts-but what he found was an absolute marvel. Light, spacious, and airy, the new wing practically sang with pristine architecture and solid construction. Reid pushed through the double doors leading to the operating suites, and marveled at sight upon sight of the very best, most technologically advanced equipment on the market. A dedicated lab was nestled amidst the surgery rooms, in exactly the right setup for diagnostic emergencies, when a living brain had been exposed to air and every second of delay heightened the risk of surgical complications.
The wing was everything Reid could ever have asked for in a neurosurgery wing, and more.
He felt his hands itch with the need to hold a patient’s chart between them, to review the thick files of patient histories and diagnostic results that signaled a patient in need of the very best in medical care, and to embrace the challenge and the satisfaction of knowing that he was uniquely talented to make a difference. The ache of his lost license hit Reid anew, striking him with a blow of such painful and devastating loss that he almost cried out.
“Excuse me, sir?” a timid voice pierced through his painful remembrance. “I’m afraid you can’t be in here; this is reserved for…”
Reid turned to see a slight, brown-haired woman in a vividly pink nurse’s uniform standing behind him. As he faced her, the woman gave a faint cry of surprise; she leapt back, knocking into a portable CT scan in the hallway that in turn slid back a few inches and banged loudly against the wall.
“Careful!” Reid snapped, without thinking. “Do you know how sensitive that kind of equipment is to sudden jolts? How expensive it is to calibrate? What the hell kind of nurse are you, anyway?”
The woman’s already pale face went completely ashen at this; she raised shaking hands to her mouth, as if physically trying to hold back a scream, before turning to flee headlong down the corridor.
Belatedly, Reid realized he might have run off someone who might prove to be a useful source of information. “Wait!” he called out, then proceeded to give chase.
He followed the woman’s swiftly retreating form down the hall and into a well-lit lobby, only to catch a last glimpse of her as she disappeared through a door marked “Emergency Exit/Staircase.” The clamoring sound of her pounding down the stairs made him cringe for every patient that might be attempting to sleep in the building, but he shrugged off the missed opportunity to get answers and looked back toward the surgical suite...
....where suddenly he found himself standing face to face with himself.
A picture of himself, that is, looming large on the wall over a small waiting area in the lobby-an area filled with overstuffed couches and dark wood tables, adding a surprisingly homey touch to the otherwise austere wing. He drew closer to the picture on the wall and read the embossed lettering on the picture’s gilt frame:
In memory of Dr. Reid Oliver, 1977-2010, whose knowledge and dedication made possible the completion of this neurosurgical facility.
Reid’s knees trembled and a moment of weakness left him rather abruptly taking a seat on the waiting room’s rich carpet. That idiotic nurse hadn’t just looked like she’d seen a ghost, she’d thought she’d seen a ghost-the ghost of a man wearing Reid’s face, using Reid’s name, practicing Reid’s specialty, and pouring every bit of Reid’s expertise into this brilliantly state-of-the-art facility, before what? Dying in a freak accident before he could ever enjoy the fruits of Reid’s genius?
But he was Reid Oliver. Wasn’t he?
Reid wasn’t sure how long he sat there, staring fixedly at the picture on the wall, before he faintly registered the slide of elevator doors opening behind him and the sound of man’s voice as footsteps approached.
“For pity’s sake, nurse, stop crying. I can’t understand what you’re saying, and…” the voice abruptly went silent, and Reid tore his eyes away from the picture (of him) to look up at the man standing over him, an older gentleman with a craggy face and a faint mustache growing beneath his generous nose. His white labcoat and the stethoscope hanging around his neck suggested he was a doctor on staff.
“Well,” the man said wryly, “I guess that explains what our young nurse here is so worked up about. And who might you be?”
Reid looked from the older doctor to the trembling nurse at his shoulder, then gestured wildly at the picture on the wall. “I’m... I’m him,” he answered, with an embarrassingly unsteady laugh. “He’s me. But… but how can he be me, if I’m me, and I’m definitely not him."
“You’re… Reid Oliver, you say?” the man asked dubiously. “Reid Oliver, the neurosurgeon?”
“Yes!” Reid nodded. “Yes, dammit; the one and only. Or… or so I thought, but I…. I’ve never even been here before, much less… much less driven myself into a train here… though, if this is some sort of extended psychotic episode I’m having, the train would have a certain appeal.”
“Well, son, I don’t know what to tell you.” The older doctor pointed at the picture on the wall. “All I can say is, I met that Reid Oliver, neurosurgeon, when he called me to Oakdale for a consult back in August, and I was the one who extracted that Reid Oliver’s organs after the accident. If you’re the same Reid Oliver, neurosurgeon--the one and only--then somehow you must have found your way back from the dead.”
Reid eyed the other man narrowly for a moment, the man’s calmness doing wonders to ease Reid’s own scattered wits. “If I didn’t know better,” he said with a huff, “I’d almost believe you thought that was a perfectly reasonable possibility.”
The mustached man gave a hearty laugh. “Welcome to Oakdale. You’re not the first person who’s ever returned from the dead in these parts, and I doubt you’ll be the last.” He frowned suddenly, crossing his arms over his chest. “Still, I’m afraid I can’t just accept that you are who you say until I’ve done a little more to confirm your story. People come and people go and some people even come back, but when I’ve personally cut a man’s heart from his chest, I tend to think of it as a lasting goodbye.”
The man reached out a hand to assist Reid back to his feet, then turned to the still shaking nurse. “Gretchen, right?” he asked. “Call Chris Hughes and tell him I need to see him and his wife immediately. And, nurse? Let’s keep this between ourselves for now, shall we?”
=====
Either Nurse Gretchen was as hopeless a gossip as she was a nurse, or someone else had caught wind of the town’s new arrival, because within an hour no less than a dozen persons were gathered inside a small conference room in the hospital’s new wing, talking excitedly amongst themselves and peering at Reid as if he were a new species of life to be categorized.
A perky blonde woman had spent twenty minutes grilling Reid about his favorite sandwich toppings and his bathroom routine before abruptly bursting into tears and gathering him into an over-perfumed (yet strangely comforting) hug. Her husband-a man about Reid’s age with a certain oily charm and an apparent case of heartburn, judging by the way he kept rubbing at his chest-had asked Reid a number of penetrating questions about his med school days, and seemed disappointed at the lack of response he received to his pointed jabs about honor codes and fellowship grants. An older man with a somber demeanor pumped Reid for information about neurosurgical procedures, from run-of-the-mill tumor excision to recent experimental procedures for the repair of optic nerve damage. And a thin man with possibly the biggest eyesore of a shirt ever seen outside of a Hawaiian cruise ship had spent the whole time waving his arms and ranting about the impossibility of it all.
But at the end, each of them seemed to have reached the same conclusion he’d been proclaiming all along, with increasingly obvious displays of impatience: he was Reid Oliver. Yes, really.
“But how?” a silver-haired woman asked, looking unsure whether she wanted to scowl or jump for joy at the doctor’s return. “We were all here when they brought Dr. Oliver in from the crash, and… and his heart is in Chris’s chest! How could this possibly be the same man?”
Twelve pairs of eyes turned expectantly to Reid.
“Yes, well…” he sputtered, recognizing that while he generally enjoyed being looked to as the most knowledgeable person in the room, it was also true that he preferred being able to demonstrate the truth of that perception, “I went to sleep in a world where I was living in Dallas in December 2010, and I woke up in one where I died in this town three months earlier. It seems the only conceivable explanation, even though I know it seems crazy unless you're one of those deranged comic book nerds who goes around wearing pointy ears and smacking people with made-up alien weapons”-Christ, Reid, you’re babbling-“is that I’m… somehow… impossibly… from… a… another universe?”
He trailed off, trying to brazen it out without cringing as the others absorbed the ridiculous hypothesis.
“My late husband’s ghost possessed Henry last Christmas, so he could say goodbye to our son,” the blonde woman confided to Reid suddenly.
The man with the demented shirt looked for a moment like he wanted to object to the tangent, but the blonde cut him short with an elbow to his side. “Well, yes….” the man said instead, “and… and there was Paul, of course, who had that microchip implanted in him that made him go crazy.”
A young man with short blond hair and very nice arms who had earlier seemed content to sit back and watch the spectacle unfold suddenly piped up. “My off-again fiancé had an affair with a man who was brainwashed into believing he was someone else.”
The older man-Bob?-lay a warm hand on Reid’s shoulder and chuckled. “I guess what we’re trying to say, doctor, is that strange things are a part of everyday life here in Oakdale. Whatever the reason for it, I for one am damn glad to have you back.”
In the easy silence that followed, the sound of a commotion from outside the room was clearly audible.
“Darling, slow down!” a woman’s voice called out sharply. “Take a breath. You’re not going to learn anything if you give yourself an aneurysm in the corridor.”
“Calm down?” a man’s voice answered, his tone indicating that the speaker had no intention of obeying the woman’s command. “How can you possibly expect me to calm down, Grandmother? Where is he, is he in here?”
An instant later, the doors to the conference room fell open and a young man with tousled golden-blond hair rushed in, his haphazard dress and panting breaths giving him the air of a late-night emergency room arrival-someone who had stumbled out of bed in a frenzy of shock and urgency and made a headlong dash for the hospital. The man stopped abruptly at the sight of the small crowd gathered inside; his chocolate brown eyes scanned the room frantically before fixing themselves upon Reid.
As their eyes met, both men gave a gasp of surprise.
Reid blinked up at the new arrival, vaguely noting the way the younger man seemed transfixed by the sight before him, looking as if he was having trouble drawing breath as a stylish older woman stopped behind the young man and placed a gentle hand on his back, her own face stiff with surprise.
But Reid’s mind was too busy reeling from the shock of recognition to make any sense of the young man’s demeanor.
Holy God, Reid thought dazedly. It’s Luke Snyder.
His first theory, and the one with the most obvious plausibility, had been that this was simply a bad dream, and that he would wake up soon enough to find himself back in the Dallas condo he knew. But even Reid he hadn’t already pinched himself a hundred times to no effect, he was sure that no one could actually sleep through a dream encompassing the soul-crushing drudgery of a 28-hour bus ride... so the dream theory was clearly out of the question. Next, he'd somewhat fancifully considered the mysteries of patients existing in a prolonged coma, and even recalled a TV show that had entertainingly trapped a coma patient in a 1970s police station... but even though coma was one possible consequence of barbiturate overdose, he was perfectly aware of the scientific implausibility of coma patients dreaming about anything. So much for theory number two.
By the end of the grueling trip to Oakdale, Reid had come to the conclusion that he had simply had his identity stolen by some unknown person, probably with the intent of practicing a con on the unsuspecting, undereducated residents of Podunk, Illinois. If the conman had died in a train accident before his deception was uncovered-well, Reid had seen enough mindless bureaucracy in his time to know how easily the fraud could have gone undetected. Angus would have had no reason to doubt a story about his nephew’s death, and Reid had been far too busy with his court appearances to contact Angus himself. The theory didn’t quite explain how the furniture had been removed from Reid’s condo or how it had been on the market for so long, but he was willing to ignore that particular mystery until he’d been restored to the ranks of the living.
It was nearly three in the morning when the latest bus in a series of transfers pulled to a stop in the tiny bus station in Oakdale. As there was simply no way Reid was going to compound his contaminant exposure with a hotel stay, he directed the lone taxi driver on site to drop him off at the town’s biggest hospital. (It did not surprise Reid when he was told the town’s biggest hospital was in fact its only hospital, Oakdale Memorial.)
After leaving the cab at the front entrance, Reid crept into the main foyer and made his way over to the hospital map posted on the wall. The room was dimly lit, out of deference to the late hour, and the receptionist on staff at the desk hardly spared him a glance as she sat behind her desk, listlessly ruffling through a stack of manila folders. Reid quickly located the new neurology wing and followed the map’s guidance to the elevators up to the fifth floor, then down a series of long, quiet corridors.
Reid wasn’t sure quite what he’d expected of the new wing-a shoddy, half-hearted endeavor, perhaps, designed by a con artist putting up a clever front while diverting large amounts of the donated funds into his own personal accounts-but what he found was an absolute marvel. Light, spacious, and airy, the new wing practically sang with pristine architecture and solid construction. Reid pushed through the double doors leading to the operating suites, and marveled at sight upon sight of the very best, most technologically advanced equipment on the market. A dedicated lab was nestled amidst the surgery rooms, in exactly the right setup for diagnostic emergencies, when a living brain had been exposed to air and every second of delay heightened the risk of surgical complications.
The wing was everything Reid could ever have asked for in a neurosurgery wing, and more.
He felt his hands itch with the need to hold a patient’s chart between them, to review the thick files of patient histories and diagnostic results that signaled a patient in need of the very best in medical care, and to embrace the challenge and the satisfaction of knowing that he was uniquely talented to make a difference. The ache of his lost license hit Reid anew, striking him with a blow of such painful and devastating loss that he almost cried out.
“Excuse me, sir?” a timid voice pierced through his painful remembrance. “I’m afraid you can’t be in here; this is reserved for…”
Reid turned to see a slight, brown-haired woman in a vividly pink nurse’s uniform standing behind him. As he faced her, the woman gave a faint cry of surprise; she leapt back, knocking into a portable CT scan in the hallway that in turn slid back a few inches and banged loudly against the wall.
“Careful!” Reid snapped, without thinking. “Do you know how sensitive that kind of equipment is to sudden jolts? How expensive it is to calibrate? What the hell kind of nurse are you, anyway?”
The woman’s already pale face went completely ashen at this; she raised shaking hands to her mouth, as if physically trying to hold back a scream, before turning to flee headlong down the corridor.
Belatedly, Reid realized he might have run off someone who might prove to be a useful source of information. “Wait!” he called out, then proceeded to give chase.
He followed the woman’s swiftly retreating form down the hall and into a well-lit lobby, only to catch a last glimpse of her as she disappeared through a door marked “Emergency Exit/Staircase.” The clamoring sound of her pounding down the stairs made him cringe for every patient that might be attempting to sleep in the building, but he shrugged off the missed opportunity to get answers and looked back toward the surgical suite...
....where suddenly he found himself standing face to face with himself.
A picture of himself, that is, looming large on the wall over a small waiting area in the lobby-an area filled with overstuffed couches and dark wood tables, adding a surprisingly homey touch to the otherwise austere wing. He drew closer to the picture on the wall and read the embossed lettering on the picture’s gilt frame:
In memory of Dr. Reid Oliver, 1977-2010, whose knowledge and dedication made possible the completion of this neurosurgical facility.
Reid’s knees trembled and a moment of weakness left him rather abruptly taking a seat on the waiting room’s rich carpet. That idiotic nurse hadn’t just looked like she’d seen a ghost, she’d thought she’d seen a ghost-the ghost of a man wearing Reid’s face, using Reid’s name, practicing Reid’s specialty, and pouring every bit of Reid’s expertise into this brilliantly state-of-the-art facility, before what? Dying in a freak accident before he could ever enjoy the fruits of Reid’s genius?
But he was Reid Oliver. Wasn’t he?
Reid wasn’t sure how long he sat there, staring fixedly at the picture on the wall, before he faintly registered the slide of elevator doors opening behind him and the sound of man’s voice as footsteps approached.
“For pity’s sake, nurse, stop crying. I can’t understand what you’re saying, and…” the voice abruptly went silent, and Reid tore his eyes away from the picture (of him) to look up at the man standing over him, an older gentleman with a craggy face and a faint mustache growing beneath his generous nose. His white labcoat and the stethoscope hanging around his neck suggested he was a doctor on staff.
“Well,” the man said wryly, “I guess that explains what our young nurse here is so worked up about. And who might you be?”
Reid looked from the older doctor to the trembling nurse at his shoulder, then gestured wildly at the picture on the wall. “I’m... I’m him,” he answered, with an embarrassingly unsteady laugh. “He’s me. But… but how can he be me, if I’m me, and I’m definitely not him."
“You’re… Reid Oliver, you say?” the man asked dubiously. “Reid Oliver, the neurosurgeon?”
“Yes!” Reid nodded. “Yes, dammit; the one and only. Or… or so I thought, but I…. I’ve never even been here before, much less… much less driven myself into a train here… though, if this is some sort of extended psychotic episode I’m having, the train would have a certain appeal.”
“Well, son, I don’t know what to tell you.” The older doctor pointed at the picture on the wall. “All I can say is, I met that Reid Oliver, neurosurgeon, when he called me to Oakdale for a consult back in August, and I was the one who extracted that Reid Oliver’s organs after the accident. If you’re the same Reid Oliver, neurosurgeon--the one and only--then somehow you must have found your way back from the dead.”
Reid eyed the other man narrowly for a moment, the man’s calmness doing wonders to ease Reid’s own scattered wits. “If I didn’t know better,” he said with a huff, “I’d almost believe you thought that was a perfectly reasonable possibility.”
The mustached man gave a hearty laugh. “Welcome to Oakdale. You’re not the first person who’s ever returned from the dead in these parts, and I doubt you’ll be the last.” He frowned suddenly, crossing his arms over his chest. “Still, I’m afraid I can’t just accept that you are who you say until I’ve done a little more to confirm your story. People come and people go and some people even come back, but when I’ve personally cut a man’s heart from his chest, I tend to think of it as a lasting goodbye.”
The man reached out a hand to assist Reid back to his feet, then turned to the still shaking nurse. “Gretchen, right?” he asked. “Call Chris Hughes and tell him I need to see him and his wife immediately. And, nurse? Let’s keep this between ourselves for now, shall we?”
=====
Either Nurse Gretchen was as hopeless a gossip as she was a nurse, or someone else had caught wind of the town’s new arrival, because within an hour no less than a dozen persons were gathered inside a small conference room in the hospital’s new wing, talking excitedly amongst themselves and peering at Reid as if he were a new species of life to be categorized.
A perky blonde woman had spent twenty minutes grilling Reid about his favorite sandwich toppings and his bathroom routine before abruptly bursting into tears and gathering him into an over-perfumed (yet strangely comforting) hug. Her husband-a man about Reid’s age with a certain oily charm and an apparent case of heartburn, judging by the way he kept rubbing at his chest-had asked Reid a number of penetrating questions about his med school days, and seemed disappointed at the lack of response he received to his pointed jabs about honor codes and fellowship grants. An older man with a somber demeanor pumped Reid for information about neurosurgical procedures, from run-of-the-mill tumor excision to recent experimental procedures for the repair of optic nerve damage. And a thin man with possibly the biggest eyesore of a shirt ever seen outside of a Hawaiian cruise ship had spent the whole time waving his arms and ranting about the impossibility of it all.
But at the end, each of them seemed to have reached the same conclusion he’d been proclaiming all along, with increasingly obvious displays of impatience: he was Reid Oliver. Yes, really.
“But how?” a silver-haired woman asked, looking unsure whether she wanted to scowl or jump for joy at the doctor’s return. “We were all here when they brought Dr. Oliver in from the crash, and… and his heart is in Chris’s chest! How could this possibly be the same man?”
Twelve pairs of eyes turned expectantly to Reid.
“Yes, well…” he sputtered, recognizing that while he generally enjoyed being looked to as the most knowledgeable person in the room, it was also true that he preferred being able to demonstrate the truth of that perception, “I went to sleep in a world where I was living in Dallas in December 2010, and I woke up in one where I died in this town three months earlier. It seems the only conceivable explanation, even though I know it seems crazy unless you're one of those deranged comic book nerds who goes around wearing pointy ears and smacking people with made-up alien weapons”-Christ, Reid, you’re babbling-“is that I’m… somehow… impossibly… from… a… another universe?”
He trailed off, trying to brazen it out without cringing as the others absorbed the ridiculous hypothesis.
“My late husband’s ghost possessed Henry last Christmas, so he could say goodbye to our son,” the blonde woman confided to Reid suddenly.
The man with the demented shirt looked for a moment like he wanted to object to the tangent, but the blonde cut him short with an elbow to his side. “Well, yes….” the man said instead, “and… and there was Paul, of course, who had that microchip implanted in him that made him go crazy.”
A young man with short blond hair and very nice arms who had earlier seemed content to sit back and watch the spectacle unfold suddenly piped up. “My off-again fiancé had an affair with a man who was brainwashed into believing he was someone else.”
The older man-Bob?-lay a warm hand on Reid’s shoulder and chuckled. “I guess what we’re trying to say, doctor, is that strange things are a part of everyday life here in Oakdale. Whatever the reason for it, I for one am damn glad to have you back.”
In the easy silence that followed, the sound of a commotion from outside the room was clearly audible.
“Darling, slow down!” a woman’s voice called out sharply. “Take a breath. You’re not going to learn anything if you give yourself an aneurysm in the corridor.”
“Calm down?” a man’s voice answered, his tone indicating that the speaker had no intention of obeying the woman’s command. “How can you possibly expect me to calm down, Grandmother? Where is he, is he in here?”
An instant later, the doors to the conference room fell open and a young man with tousled golden-blond hair rushed in, his haphazard dress and panting breaths giving him the air of a late-night emergency room arrival-someone who had stumbled out of bed in a frenzy of shock and urgency and made a headlong dash for the hospital. The man stopped abruptly at the sight of the small crowd gathered inside; his chocolate brown eyes scanned the room frantically before fixing themselves upon Reid.
As their eyes met, both men gave a gasp of surprise.
Reid blinked up at the new arrival, vaguely noting the way the younger man seemed transfixed by the sight before him, looking as if he was having trouble drawing breath as a stylish older woman stopped behind the young man and placed a gentle hand on his back, her own face stiff with surprise.
But Reid’s mind was too busy reeling from the shock of recognition to make any sense of the young man’s demeanor.
Holy God, Reid thought dazedly. It’s Luke Snyder.