"Why? You were almost dead last night, scuzz bucket." Wendy approaches Pam in the bed to the left and pecks her on the forehead. "You both scared the hell out us. You're too old to be so pathetic doing junk. I don't need to be friends with junkie losers. And having said that, I want you to sit up and have a look across the room."

Pam says, "My head hurts, I—"

"Just look, you two losers."

With two push-button controls, Wendy elevates Pam and Hamilton's backrests, then opens the curtains, allowing them to see Richard and Karen across the room; Richard is holding Karen's arm, wagging it back and forth, and the two of them are making faces. Karen is wearing a shirt Lois brought along with her—the same Levi's shirt she wore in high school: rough cotton, embroidered parakeets.

George and Lois and Megan are parked on stools, and Lois looks furious, first at Wendy and then at Hamilton: "Wendy, I don't think there's anything useful to come of having two … drug addicts in the room. They're the worst possible influence, and just look at Hamilton. What a dreadful sight to wake up to after seventeen years. There must be some sort of rule about this."

"Lois," Wendy says, "I had to pull a whack of strings to get them all in here. You think this was easy?"

"But they're so … ugh."

"Once more, Lois, it will be good for them to be together. They all need support."

"Oh, God. This is a hallucination," says Hamilton.

"Hi, Hamilton," Karen says. "Who'd you take to the prom?"Pam, not fully clicked in to the tableau across the room, pipes up and hears the voice—Karen is back from McDonald's. "Karen? You're herel"

"Hi kids," says Karen. "How was grad? I missed it. As you know."

"Oh, oh—you wouldn't believe it; Hamilton took Cindy Webber. A computer date. I went with Raymond Merlis."

"No!"

"Yes, and—"

"I did not have a computer date," Hamilton interjects.

"Oh shut your gob. No one would take you."

"Did Raymond remove Keith for the night?" Keith is their name for the single strand of wiry hair growing from a mole on Raymond Merlis's face.

Instantly, Pam and Karen relapse into their older, younger selves, like exotic birds chattering in a mango tree. Pam tries to step out of bed and stumbles toward Karen, but her body aches and she's unable to stand up. Her knees buckle. The activated granulated charcoal given to her earlier seems to have sunk like ball bearings into her lower colon. Hamilton, meanwhile, is nauseated and feels as though he's lying on a dock in choppy weather. He vomits Halloween chocolate and dead martinis into a bedside bucket while his muscles spasm and he feels the onset of scorch-and-burn diarrhea.

"Just so you know, Kare," Pam says, "Keith came, too."

"Wendy," Lois barks. "This is revolting. They're sick. I really must protest."

"Sickness is part of life, Lois."

"Mi scusa, everybody—" Pam begins to sweat and clam; her anxiety is escalating. Hamilton is already desperate for a fix, Pam not quite so, but soon she will be. "You can't say we're dull."

In the background Lois is saying, "Very well then, Doctor Chernin. I'm going to call my lawyer. George? Call my lawyer."

"Lois, be quiet," says George.

Karen has been awake a few days and has had some rare time alone with her thoughts. The first two days were such a circus that she hadto ask Wendy to lock everybody out of the room save for Mom, Dad, Richard, and Megan.

Pam and Ham are now gone; she has the room to herself. She looks down at her body—bones marinated in liquid and only vaguely responsive to her will. She has already gained three pounds and she thinks this is a sick joke. She lifts her hand to where her breasts once were; she touches what is now mere parchment and bone, emits a squeak, and sighs.

She surveys her hospital room, her world, almost identical to the room she had during her appendix removal in third grade. Where has she been for seventeen years? What other world did she visit? She is furious with herself for not remembring. Her coma was dreamless, but she knows she went to some place real. Not the place you go when you die—some other place. She thinks back to the previous week, the week before the coma, and she remembers being chased by darkness. Darkness? What? Some of it returns to her. She was trying to find a way to cheat the darkness. And she lost in the end. Shit.

She tries to raise her arm but the sensation is as though she is trying to lift a telephone pole. Megan, her "surprise daughter," will be in soon to help her with stretching exercises. Megan and Lois and Richard are taking shifts. Her tendons apparently need to tenderize before muscle can rebuild. She feels as though she's an item on a menu.

Why has she been kept alive? She can't imagine the point of it. She's happy to be awake but is secretly appalled at the thought of the money and human effort it must have taken to keep her going for so long.

What has happened to the world? What has happened to the people in her world?

She's been awake just a little bit of time, but much is apparent. Richard: He's so different yet he still holds her the way he used to— bodies retain memories long after the mind forgets them. His face is so ravaged. Drinking? How did that happen? And Ham and Pam on heroin? Such a punch line. It's as though Karen walked through a door in 1979 and directly entered a health guidance class showing a film on the unmentioned perils of aging.Wendy, working hard—too hard, it seems. She's not much in love with Linus—obvious to anybody—nor is Linus much in love with Wendy. His soul is full of glue. Karen seems to have understood everyone's life immediately; the others think she is too out of it—too clued out about the modern world—but Karen sees all. She remembers the innocent pointless aims of their youths (Hawaii! Ski bum at Whistler!) and sees that they were never acted upon. But at the same time, larger aims were never defined. Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.

Her friends are not particularly happy—not with their lives. Pam had rolled her eyes when Karen asked her if she was happy.

"No."

"Fulfilled?"

"No."

"Creative?"

"A little."

Through the monsters they design and the TV shows they work on, they give vent to the loss they feel inside. Expressions of pettiness, loss, and corruption. She asked not to see any more of their FX photos. Yuck. The photos sit on a stack beside flowers from the mayor as well as from various studios and film production companies wishing to purchase rights to her life story.

On top of it all, the world itself has changed. Karen must try and absorb seventeen years of global changes. That can wait. And she thinks she'll go crazy if one more person tells her that the Berlin Wall came down and AIDS exists in the world.

One week later, Wendy still can't comprehend Karen's return to the living and her complete retention of all her brain power. Wendy knows the medical statistics. To others, Karen's awakening is a lottery win—a prize behind Door Number 3, a pair of snowmobiles. But to Wendy, Karen is a river running backward, a rose that blooms under moonlight—something transcendent, an epiphany.

Wendy thinks of Karen's long rehab road to reach the point whereshe will be able to perform simple everyday functions once more. Brittle bones; atrophied ligaments. Yet her face is already fully animated, and she smiles as clearly as always. Already her arms are now skittishly mobile, storky chopsticks reaching for gum and the squeeze bottle of water. Checks and balances. Karen is a time capsule—a creature from another era reborn, a lotus seed asleep for ten thousand years that springs to life as clear and true as though born yesterday.

Wendy is concerned about swamping Karen with too much information or too much novelty. As a doctor, she can limit certain things. Richard has been coming in with the annual volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia and teaching Karen about the new years leading up to 1997. He is already at 1989: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AIDS quilt—Karen must be so amazed at this. And then there's crack. Cloning. Life on Mars. Velcro. Charles and Diana. MAC cosmetics. Imagine learning so much stuff at once.