Godspeed

Chapter 12

My waking hours were few in the weeks that followed. A routine of sorts was established in which little was said, by either Schuyler or the doctor, about the continued state of my health.

Each day when morning came and one of them arrived to wake me, they still seemed nervous upon entering the room until I turned upon my bed and looked up at them with vivid, living eyes.

Days, and then weeks, blurred one into another as I slept most of them away, my body desperate for restorative rest to help repair all the damage done to it.

On the good days, I could spend most of my time attached only to the thing Godspeed referred to as 'the box'. On the worst, I would have to be carried back to the laboratory. Though I had often wondered exactly where it was, I was always just far enough from lucidity in those moments to determine its location relative to my room in the attic.

At times, when the laboratory was at its quietest, I was certain that I heard disembodied voices; conversations, laughter, sometimes even music. Sounds completely irreconcilable to my surroundings. I had no idea if they were real or imagined, but every time I heard them, I wondered if they were those distant voices of the afterlife calling to me again as they had before, urging me to just give up my fight and return to them, to stay.

Every day and often at night, at the oddest of hours, Doctor Godspeed went through his paces, hooking the wires that led to my chest up to this form of machinery and that. He tested me, took readings and it seemed took stock of the contents of my soul at the same time.

Each time he did so, I grew increasingly anxious to understand the intricate workings of his mind, and more so the heart, that powered both the form and the psyche of this utterly brilliant being.

On one particular late afternoon, it seemed that my internal inquiries, though I tried to conceal them from his uncanny intuition, had become all too easy for him to detect.

"You have an expression of curiosity in your eyes," he said, after he'd set the listening scope aside again. "Is there something that you want to ask me?"

There was so much that I wanted to ask him that I didn't know where to begin. I wanted to know everything about him in the finest detail. I wanted to know about his family and upbringing. I wanted to know about his experiences with schooling and his decision to go into the field of medicine as a profession. I wanted to know why he didn't seem to have any sort of everyday practice that one would expect of a physician of his obvious talent.

I wanted to know exactly why he came and went in great secrecy, as if living away from the world on purpose, in hiding.

I realized, though, that any one of these questions could jeopardize the fragile trust we had begun to build, so I restrained myself. I could only hope that I would find the answers in time, if I observed him closely enough.

"Come now, no questions?" He began to disconnect me from the machines, which indicated that he was satisfied I was stable, at least for now. "If you do not venture forth with any, perhaps I may be inclined to start asking them about you."

Believing there wasn't much about me to tell that could possibly interest him, finally, I spoke. "I'm curious about Mr. Algernon."

"Schuyler? First of all, he would bristle if he heard you call him 'Mr. Algernon.'” He instantly relaxed a little, as much as I had ever seen him relax, when he saw that the conversation was turning away from either one of us present. "What do you want to know?"

"Does he make a habit of rescuing young women in distress, or am I an oddity?"

"A little of both," the doctor replied, enigmatic as ever. "Schuyler is a singular sort of person. Artist. Dreamer. Much in the way his father was. At least he seems to have inherited the same business savvy, and so he managed to keep the shop going after his father left this life."