The Swap - Part III

A Story by Kherry McKay

This is a serial. Check back in a week to read more of the story. A woman decides her life needs a change, and a poet becomes her change agent.

Part III

( Part I is here if you haven't seen it! )

A Day Earlier

Helen looked at her husband, Jim. He started to sign at her furiously. His lips moved. Anger showed in his face.

“I can’t stand you anymore!” he signed. “You’re out of control.”

She signed back: “Screw you, you b*****d. I get no support from you, anyway.”

“No support? Really? ”

“That’s right,” Helen’s hands seesawed.

“I’ll tell you of support. How’s a supportive d-i-v-o-r-c-e? Is that supportive enough?”

Helen winced. He had never signed that.

He took another drink. “Divorces are supportive. And pretty easy!” His hands crossed themselves to indicate an emphasis on the word easy. His signing went to hell when he drank, Helen knew.

“What do you want?” she gestured. “Do you want me to tell you to go ahead—”

“I want a wife who doesn’t stare at the ceiling for nine hours a day. The supportive ceiling.”

Helen started to cry.

“What do you do with all your time, anway?” he asked. “What’s the problem?. . . ”

She answered in a slow, even way. “I don’t know. I’m looking for, for something—”

“You have something. . . .”

“Would you!” she signed, “. . .stop interrupting? Jesus.” The last word she did by touching her left palm with her right-middle finger and right palm with her left-middle finger; the American Sign indication for Jesus, a reference to Christ’s crucifixion.

Jim turned and stared at the pots hanging from overhead racks in the kitchen. He touched his stomach as if he felt some heartburn. He walked away to another room and away from their argument then.

She looked at her husband’s profile before he turned. They’d been married for ten years. He’d asked her to marry him on one bended knee. She was twenty-five at the time. Her life was ahead of her. She didn’t have any reason to say no. He was handsome and hard-working. She loved him. What was love, really? she’d asked no one in particular at the time. No answer was forthcoming.

Their first years were, if not perfect, at least happy. Their firstborn, Jason Alexander, came during Year Three. (Helen remembered her marriage in years: Year One, Year Two, etc.)

Jason was born on their anniversary. They both had laughed at that! They were so excited about his birth they forgot it was their anniversary. But Jim had brought flowers to her apologetically, the next day at the hospital. He brought them in to the maternity ward. She was holding their son when he came with the bouquet. She had smiled and cried at the same time. The baby touched her mouth, her tears.

Life had been ahead of them. Now the world seemed disarranged, like it was working altogether wrong. Nothing seemed right. Jim’s business, while successful, took him further and further away from the family. He was fading into the distance, like a plane flying away.

Sally Jean was born mid-way through Year Five. She was a handful from the start — up all night, colicky. But Helen loved Sally Jean, even as she learned how hard parenting was.

She loved her kids. But as that love grew, it seemed to wane for her husband. It wasn’t that he did anything wrong, if occasionally he drank too much. It was more, somehow he didn’t share the family dream, the magic. Some part of him had loathed his own childhood. Now he was watching his kids grow up. It scared him. And it bothered him too. He hadn’t been abusive. But he hadn’t wanted to understand his kids either; nor did he care how he didn’t understand them.

Year Six, Year Seven. . . then it started to get lonely for her.

Sometime during Year Eight, strange things started to happen. Helen was sitting in the kitchen one day. Both the kids were home. A new au pair was playing with them in the family room.

All of a sudden, Helen couldn’t picture her husband’s face. It was the strangest moment of her life. She tried and tried but couldn’t picture Jim. It scared her.

He had been removed from her mind, expunged like a minor character in a novel whose author had suddenly changed his mind. Prior to that, Jim showed up and did his part, but like a story throwaway, no one cared if he really appeared, if he did his duties well or bollixed them all to hell. He could get killed off at any time.

About the time Helen first couldn’t picture her husband, something else had happened. Helen started to see inexplicable images while she was awake. Waking visions. They were fragmentary at first, like one or two puzzle-pieces discovered in the laundry.

But last year, they began to grow more distinct, and become more frequent.

There were scenes of strange places: A running track. A coffee bar with smiling faces. Long walks in a snowy park. Workmen renovating the interior of a high school gym, laying down carpet, putting in track-lighting, even putting in large artworks.

She saw a man’s hands typing; typing as if to save a life.

At times when Helen started to doze, she “felt” someone watching her. Her deafness prevented her from hearing any movement in a room, but she was sure someone was watching her and could hear her. It mostly happened when Jim was out of town. But sometimes Jim was asleep beside her, and the “visitor” still came.

A presence. A watcher. Someone or something in the room with her, observing. But whoever or whatever it was, it didn’t feel evil. If anything, it felt concerned. Like it cared. Like it wanted to help.

She once saw an article in a magazine that had piqued her interest. It talked of a phenomena neurologists had discerned in a handful of people. It was similar to déjà vu, but specifically, it was the feeling of having swapped lives with another person: of living the wrong life, as if someone had the life you were meant to live, and you had the life they were meant to live.

When she read about this, a voice inside her had said, This applies to you. Listen up, Helen girl!

Some people, the article noted, experience the crossed lives intensely. Some find their “swap mates” — even try to reclaim their lives. One had murdered a person whom he swore had “. . .stolen his whole life.”

Helen wrote down the name of the condition but lost the scrap-paper on which she’d made the note. It was pioneering work in the field of neuropsychiatry. Controversial. Some had accused the author of espousing only parapsychology. But why was it impossible that someone’s soul might make it to another body? Helen believed in souls. Organized religions held little for her, but she believed in souls.

Feelings of strangeness had grown more pronounced during that year. At odd times, Helen felt like everything in her life had gone wrong; like she was in a body she didn’t even recognize. Her deafness, which she was born with, now seemed an addition, an afterthought.

Her feelings around the kids started to change in subtle ways, too. She’d be playing with Sally Jean and a notion would sweep through her: This isn’t my child. It’s someone else’s. I need to give her back!

Or Jim and Helen would be making love. They’d be close, very close; as intimate as ever. Then it would all feel wrong, as if Helen were an actress in a movie. She was playing a scene: Woman kisses man, moans, pretends to enjoy it. Someone had absconded with her life, had nicked the part she had been meant to play. This imaginary thief, for reasons Helen couldn’t quite understand, was called away to another “studio.” They’d put Helen in the role at the last moment, hoping she’d manage, but she was failing.

She didn’t know the correct lines. She was faking her own life! . . .

In the world she visited, she could hear.

Helen was born deaf. It was congenital. No fetal cochleas in either of her ears. Thankfully, her children were not born similarly.

In the world she sometimes visited, she thought she could hear sounds, and she understood what she was hearing. Strange sounds like laughter. Airplane engines. The sound of water splashing on the sides of a sink in a strange new bathroom.

In her life, sounds were represented by motion or not at all. Laughter was the movement of someone’s head and the change of the position of their lips. Airplanes could be shadows; but usually they were unseen things in the sky pointed out by others, or not seen at all.

Water was harder, for it had no “sound.” But she could watch water, and sometimes it had what Helen called an “extra silence” to it, a silence within its silence. Water, eddying and twisting, almost alive in its playfulness, held a quiet contemplativeness for Helen.

In her visions, she could hear the water. She heard it lap, heard it gurgle; heard splashes, drops of it falling from the showerhead into the filled bathtub: “Plop!”

At times, Helen could look up at her living room ceiling and “hear” the sound of water, or its silence, in the swirls of the plaster. The swirls called to her. She was meant to go somewhere and learn more about them.

She’d been unable to decipher the water’s messages, but strange images were coming regularly to her now, urging her to listen.

Something was about to happen.

And she had something to do. But first she had to learn a secret.

* * *

“Dr. Hiklovic, are you absolutely sure?

“Yes.”

“You said it was a woman.”

“She’s thirty-five. Or thereabouts.”

“What happens if we don’t. . . if we don’t make contact?”

The doctor pulled his glasses off his nose. He wore a white lab coat. He looked at me carefully.

“It’s difficult to say.”

“What’s your best guess?”

“My best guess is, she’ll go crazy.”

“Crazy?”

“You have to understand, this isn’t an illusion to her. She’s actually meant to have a life completely different from the one she has. Different from at least one iteration of it, anyway.”

“She’s meant to have my life, you mean?”

“I told you, you are one of several foci for the slipstream. She may even have other lives, and she may encounter other cross-stream phenomena. She would eventually encounter them, too, in her consciousness. Yours is simply the first.”

“Why does she dislike her own life so much? Is it that bad?”

“This might sound funny, but her behavior is quite rational. The effect is rare, exceedingly rare to be this strong, especially for the sigma to encounter the tau’s waking thoughts. We’ve never seen it before. There’s something unique about her and you. But, her wanting to be in your life is regular within the range of what we’re calling regular.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Dr. Hiklovic raised an eyebrow. “It isn’t that bad. It’s just different from what she was expecting. It’s very much like déjà vu. She has an ongoing feeling of vertigo, like she has made a wrong turn. It’s very disconcerting for her.”

“And the switch. Will it help?”

“Very much, I think. I understand how you may have some skepticism. Believe me, very few comprehend or accept this when they first hear about it. You have to experience it first-hand. But I’ve observed sixteen swaps now. They happened right before my eyes. I assure you, they are very real.”

“What was your method for insuring it actually takes place? What if your patients panicked, or thought they were experiencing some kind of schizophrenia?”

“Schizophrenia is a condition we diagnose with absolute accuracy, and schizophrenia is ruled out in these cases. I assure you, you do not have schizophrenia; and neither does she.”

“Reassuring, but I’m beginning to feel contrariwise.”

“Be in my office tomorrow at ten. You’ll see. We’ll prep, and then I’ll personally take you back to your residence and supervise the last phase. You’ll find yourself a believer.”

“Why can’t we do this in your office?”

“For a number of reasons. First, the woman isn’t going to be prepared for it to happen. At first, she won’t believe it. She’s been having visions of your space, your world. Showing up in a different body won’t be as confusing for her if she immediately sees things and people with which she is familiar. Remember, you’ll be able to talk to her while she’s in your life. You’ll have primary control over the tether between your two worlds, but I warn you, she’ll be able to look in and see glimpses of things you’re doing in her world. And she’ll improve at this, the longer she’s occupying your body.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll coach you on how to work with her during the transfer, to help her understand what’s going on. Of course, she won’t know about me or the procedures behind the swap. At first, she’ll think she’s dreaming or hallucinating, or worse. It will take her a day or two to fully understand she has temporarily taken over another life.”

“Do we know anything about her?”

“Only what we’ve gathered from your observations under hypnosis. We think she lives in Seattle. Or maybe Portland.”

“When I see her, yes, I see a big house. It feels like the Northwest.”

“There’s something else I should tell you,” said the doctor. “Yours is the first case where the sigma hasn’t reported understanding any of the tau’s verbalizations. You did say, you experienced a migratory moment in which you have occupied her body, correct?”

“It’s as silent as a church there.”

“We’ve never encountered this, and we don’t have an explanation for it. So we’ll have to improvise and come to an understanding of the uniqueness of the swap after you’ve arrived. You must phone us immediately when you get to her body. You’ve memorized the number, right?”

“How does this work?”

“We’ll put you under a deep hypnosis. I’ll have some electronic equipment with me at your residence. I’ll flip a switch, you’ll go to sleep, and a second later you’ll be in this woman’s life for a week.”

The nurse entered.

“We have another injection for you,” the doctor said to me. “It’s preliminary to what we’ll have to do tomorrow. Nurse Shumacher will administer it.”

Nurse Schumacher gave me a shot with a large hypodermic needle. I started to feel drowsy. When I was almost unconscious, I heard the doctor and her quietly talking.

“What do you think it will be like? Does he know?”

“I don’t think he does.”

“Are you sure it’s fair?”

“It’s cutting-edge, Stace. Who knows what’s fair? I’m only glad he came to us before going anywhere else. Think of all the neurologists he could have gone to in Pittsburgh.”

“Still, he should know.”

“Part of the experiment involves his lability in the environment; and her lability, too. Is the team ready?”

“Doctor Thompson called from his hotel room in Seattle. They’re ready.”

I heard a little more of the conversation but thought I was dreaming. Their words seemed strange, but what’s more strange than planning to switch bodies with another person? I quickly ascribed the rest to the drugs. I couldn’t remember what they had until several days after the swap. The words would haunt me, then like a nightmare.