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“I don’t belong here,” she whispers.
Jordan’s not surprised to hear this. He’s been interning for less than a week, and this is the twentieth time someone has spoken that sentence. He asks, “At Belman? Or in the quiet room?”
“I mean in thiscentury,” Hannah says.
To be successful here, Jordan, you’ll need to be able to tell when a patient is delusional …
Maybe Hannah sees a flicker of doubt cross his face, or maybe she just changes her mind. She says, “Actually—forget that. Never mind.”
“No, please,” he says, not wanting to shut her down.Engage with the patients, Amy had said to him.Be open and friendly. “I wish you’d keep going.”
She sighs. Her shoulders slump. “Do you know what it feels like to not be believed?”
Jordan gives a half shrug. “The summer before college, my brother hid a handle of whiskey in my closet, and my parents couldn’t be convinced it wasn’t mine. Does that count?” he asks.
Hannah rolls her eyes. “Barely,” she says. “But if that’s what we have to work with …” Then she gets up and goes to look out the tiny window into the hall. Jordan sees her wave to someone. “That’s Mitch on safety check,” she says to him. “I’m just letting him know that I’m fine.”
“Nice of you,” he says.
“Not really, I just don’t want him bothering me,” she says. She smiles again. “Botheringus.” She sits back down next to him. “I might like talking to you, Jordan Hassan. Is that weird?”
He feels a nervous jolt of pleasure. Already he can tell that he likes talking to her, too. For one thing, it makes him feel like he might be able to do a good job here. For another, she’s surprising and curious and crackling with energy. Despite the fact that she’s locked in a room, wearing shapeless, invalid clothes, with hair that hasn’t seen a brush in weeks, there’s an aura of assurance about her right now. Of charisma—power, even.
“So do you want to hear what I have to say?” she asks.
“Yes, I want to hear what you have to say,” he says. “And I want to believe it, too.”
CHAPTER 21
“Okay,” she says. “Basically what you need to understand is that I livehere, in the twenty-first century, but I also have a life in the fourteenth century. And it’s as real as this one.”
Even though Dr. Klein had warned him, he’s surprised to hear her say it.
“I know how that sounds,” she goes on, “but I promise I’m not insane, and I’m not lying. It’s been happening for years. I’ve lived two lives, in two different centuries, for almost as long as I can remember.”
Hannah’s voice is so calm and matter-of-fact; it’s like she’s telling him that her favorite color is blue. Jordan stares at the blank wall of the quiet room while he tries to take this in, but he can tell Hannah is looking at him. Trying to gauge his reaction.
I want to hear what you have to say, he’d just told her.And I want to believe it.
He keeps his face open. Neutral. Whatever happens, he wants her to trust him. He’s on her side.
Hallucinations are perception-like experiences that occur without an external stimulus, says theDSM-5, the bible of mental disorders.They are vivid and clear, with the full force and impact of normal perceptions, and not under voluntary control.
“Basically,” Hannah says, “I’m able to go back and forth in time.”
Without meaning to, Jordan blurts, “But that’s impossible.”
“A lot of things seem impossible,” Hannah says, unperturbed. “But it’s really just because they can’t be explained. No one knows why a muon does what it does, for example.”
“A what?” he says. He suddenly feels like his head’s spinning.
“It’s a subatomic particle that basically disobeys the laws of physics. Scientists can’t figure out what’s going on with it. Just like doctors and therapists can’t figure out how I go back and forth in time.”
“Okay,” Jordan says cautiously. Maybe he should ask the dark-haired girl in his dorm, the one who’s always reading a physics textbook, if she knows anything about muons. Or maybe he should ask Hannah if the Middle Ages are as awful as his high school history class made them sound—like they were nothing but privation, bloodletting, and lice.
“Life’s definitely a lot easier here,” Hannah goes on, almost like she’s just read his mind. “I’m not hungry all the time, for one thing. There’s running water and electricity, which are basically miracles, and I don’t always have to wear the same filthy dress.” She gets up and begins pacing around the room. “But in my other life, we have a strip of land we plant in spring, and this year we were going to get a goat—Mary wanted to name her Sally—and Mother said we might be able to get a pig we can fatten up on acorns …”
Her eyes have a distant look in them now, and her hands flutter in the air as she speaks. “I don’t have anyone here,” she says. “There, I’ve got a family. We have a little cottage. My father’s gone, but there’s my mother and my brother and my sister …”
