When Marie-Lucien, climbing the stairs, passed the open door of the painter's apartment he saw a woman standing inside, a woman he remembered having seen twice before. She was gazing at a new, unfinished painting, standing before it as unclad as the figure in the painting, which was herself, Yadwigha. In the painting her dead body lay beside a stream, watched over by the wide eyes of lions and monkeys. In the painter's apartment, her ghost turned to Marie-Lucien with an expression innocent as a child's; a look of expectancy and of joy. In a moment a woman came out from the second room of the apartment, a women Marie-Lucien had never met nor heard the painter speak of, a woman in black crepe, the painter's daughter Julia. And in the unfinished painting, death's bright angel ascended through the impossibly blue sky.
Galápagos by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Whenever I wake up screaming, the nurses kindly come in and give me the shiny yellow pills and the white pills flecked with gray; they prick my skin with hollow needles until I grow quiet and calm again. They speak in exquisitely gentle voices, reminding me that I'm home, that I've been home for many, many months. They remind me that if I open the blinds and look out the hospital window, I will see a parking lot, and cars, and a carefully tended lawn. I will only see California. I will see only Earth. If I look up, and it happens to be day, I'll see the sky, too, sprawled blue above me and peppered with dirty-white clouds and contrails. If it happens to be night, instead, I'll see the comforting pale orange skyglow that mercifully hides the stars from view. I'm home, not strapped into Yastreb-4's taxi module. I can't crane my neck for a glance at the monitor screen displaying a tableaux of dusty volcanic wastelands as I speed by the Tharsis plateau, more than four hundred kilometers below me. I can't turn my head and gaze through the tiny docking windows at Pilgrimage's glittering alabaster hull, quickly growing larger as I rush towards the aft docking port. These are merely memories, inaccurate and untrustworthy, and may only do me the harm that memories are capable of doing.
Then the nurses go away. They leave the light above my bed burning, and tell me if I need anything at all to press the intercom button. They're just down the hall, and they always come when I call. They're never anything except prompt, and do not fail to arrive bearing the chemical solace of pharmaceuticals, only half of which I know by name. I am not neglected. My needs are met as well as anyone alive can meet them. I'm too precious a commodity not to coddle. I'm the woman who was invited to the strangest, most terrible rendezvous in the history of space exploration. The one they dragged all the way to Mars after Pilgrimage abruptly, inexplicably, diverged from its mission parameters, when the crew went silent and the AI stopped responding. I'm the woman who stepped through an airlock hatch and into that alien Eden; I'm the one who spoke with a goddess. I'm the woman who was the goddess' lover, when she was still human and had a name and a consciousness that could be comprehended.
"Are you sleeping better?" the psychiatrist asks, and I tell him that I sleep just fine, thank you, seven to eight hours every night now. He nods and patiently smiles, but I know I haven't answered his question. He's actually asking me if I'm still having the nightmares about my time aboard Pilgrimage, if they've decreased in their frequency and/or severity. He doesn't want to know if I sleep, or how long I sleep, but if my sleep is still haunted. Though he'd never use that particular word, haunted.
He's a thin, balding man, with perfectly manicured nails and an unremarkable mid-Atlantic accent. He dutifully makes the commute down from Berkeley once a week, because those are his orders, and I'm too great a puzzle for his inquisitive mind to ignore. All in all, I find the psychiatrist far less helpful than the nurses and their dependable drugs. Whereas they've been assigned the task of watching over me, of soothing and steadying me and keeping me from harming myself, he's been given the unenviable responsibility of discovering what happened during the comms blackout, those seventeen interminable minutes after I boarded the derelict ship and promptly lost radio contact with Yastreb-4 and Earth. Despite so many debriefings and interviews that I've lost count, NASA still thinks I'm holding out on them. And maybe I am. Honestly, it's hard for me to say. It's hard for me to keep it all straight anymore: what happened and what didn't, what I've said to them and what I've only thought about saying, what I genuinely remember and what I may have fabricated wholesale as a means of self-preservation.
The psychiatrist says it's to be expected, this sort of confusion from someone who's survived very traumatic events. He calls the events very traumatic, by the way. I don't; I'm not yet sure if I think of them that way. Regardless, he's diagnosed me as suffering from Survivor Syndrome, which he also calls K-Z Syndrome. There's a jack in my hospital room, filtered web access, but I was able to look up "K-Z Syndrome." It was named for a Nazi concentration camp survivor, an Israeli author named Yehiel De-Nur. De-Nur published under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik 135633. That was his designation or prisoner number or whatever at Auschwitz, and K-Z Syndrome is named after him. In 1956, he published House of Dolls, describing the Nazi "Joy Division," a system that utilized Jewish women as sex slaves.
The psychiatrist is the one who asked if I would at least try to write it down, what happened, what I saw and heard (and smelled and felt) when I entered the Pilgrimage a year and a half ago. He knows, of course, that there have already been numerous written and vidded depositions and affidavits for NASA and the CSS/NSA, the WHO, the CDC and the CIA and, to tell the truth, I don't know who requested and read and then filed away all those reports. He knows about them, though, and that, by my own admission, they barely scratched the surface of whatever happened out there. He knows, but I reminded him, anyway.
"This will be different," he said. "This will be more subjective." And the psychiatrist explained that he wasn't looking for a blow-by-blow linear narrative of my experiences aboard Pilgrimage, and I told him that was good, because I seem to have forgotten how to think or relate events in a linear fashion, without a lot of switchbacks and digressions and meandering.
"Just write," he said. "Write what you can remember, and write until you don't want to write anymore."
"That would be now," I said, and he silently stared at me for a while. He didn't laugh, even though I'd thought it was pretty funny.
"I understand that the medication makes this sort of thing more difficult for you," he said, sometime later. "But the medication helps you reach back to those things you don't want to remember, those things you're trying to forget." I almost told him that he was starting to sound like a character in a Lewis Carroll story, but I didn't. Our hour was almost over, anyway.
So, after three days of stalling, I'm trying to write something that will make you happy, Dr. Ostrowski. I know you're trying to do your job, and I know a lot of people must be peering over your shoulder, expecting the sort of results they've failed to get themselves. I don't want to show up for our next session empty handed.
The taxi module was on autopilot during the approach. See, I'm not an astronaut or mission specialist or engineer or anything like that. I'm an anthropologist, and I mostly study the Middle Paleolithic of Europe and Asia Minor. I have a keen interest in tool use and manufacture by the Neanderthals. Or at least that's who I used to be. Right now, I'm a madwoman in a psych ward at a military hospital in San Jose, California. I'm a case number, and an eyewitness who has proven less than satisfactory. But, what I'm trying to say, doctor, the module was on autopilot, and there was nothing for me to do but wait there inside my encounter suit and sweat and watch the round screen divided by the Y-shaped reticle as I approached the derelict's docking port, the taxi barreling forward at 0.06 meters per second. The ship grew so huge so quickly, looming up in the blackness, and that only made the whole thing seem that much more unreal.