Omega

by Christopher Evans

Genres: Science Fiction; Alternative History sci-fi; Thrillers

Synopsis

Omega: an apocalyptic rumour from the Eastern Front. Omega: something that will alter all the strategic calculations of the Earth's great military blocs. Omega: the code name for a weapon that may well bring doomsday with it. But if Omega is indeed the agent that will destroy the world, that world is not our own. For this is a timeline in which World War Two never truly ended: a timeline in which Hitler died in a plane crash, Britain joined Germany in its battle against Communist Russia, and the present is an age of intermittent, but deadly, armed conflict between the USSR, the European Alliance, and the USA. The frontier regions are radioactive wastelands, nuclear winter threatens catastrophe, global confrontation could erupt again any time - and that's before Omega is taken into account...This is the reality experienced by Owen Meredith when an accident forces his consciousness from the England we know into the mind of his cognate self in that other darker, Europe. Switching back and forth between being plain Owen Meredith and troubled Major Owain Maredudd, Owen is faced not only with a Cold War going Hot, but with a deep crisis of identity. Who is he? Whose twisted destiny is he treading? Did the ordinary domestic life he remembers ever even take place? Perhaps the universe of Owain and Omega is merely a symptom of mental illness - but if so, why is it so urgently tangible?

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 355

Sample

Omega opens with a shock; a literally explosive start to a story set in two worlds. Our narrator, Owen Meredith, is the victim of the bombing in our cosy, contemporary London. He’s the producer of Battlegrounds, a CGI television series recreating old battles, and a very popular programme. Recovering in hospital he begins to learn that his personal world is not the world he remembers.

At the same time Major Owain Maredudd, in a brilliantly drawn war-time London of the 21st century, is also the victim of an explosion. But this time the source of the attack is a mystery. How eerie to have the whole of Soho a militarily guarded “forbidden zone”. Nelson’s Column topped by a gold eagle rampant!

But of course, we are in Chris Evans’s territory. The confusion and interaction of alternatives that Chris always does so well; here, with this new novel, and in past tales.

Chris is excellent at evoking a constant atmosphere of mystery, of uncertainty. Everything is clear—but is everything as it seems? As the two worlds run in parallel, the mysteries are different but oddly reflective of each other. We are constantly asking how the characters are being manipulated, and to what extent the reader is too.

And when Owen and Owain start becoming aware of each others’ worlds, we are in for a mind-game to take the breath away.

Both men are examples of a character trait that Chris does well: the displaced man, characters in search of their true ground. Perhaps this is how the author himself felt when he left a valley in Wales for the cold sprawl of London. Perhaps it is not. In any event, it’s a theme that often crops up in Chris’s work.

And displacement is at the heart of Omega in several forms; and “Omega” itself is at the heart of it all.

Chris Evans writes slowly and carefully and it shows in the incredible detail. He is also very strong on character. Though Owen and Owain are the same man, he shows the similarities in character as human and the differences caused by their individual situations. And the same goes for the women in the book. Chris is very strong on female characterisation. They inform his stories with power and insight.

Omega is very much a story of relationships, from love, to authority; from brothers, to deception. But the most intriguing relationship in Omega is that between Owen and Owain, as each man becomes aware of the other.

The dark world of Major Owain Maredudd that Chris explores is packed with facts and references, political and military. It’s tempting to redraw the political map of the world based on this section, the different alliances, the different war zones—America encroaching on Australian Pacific territory, statues of Field Marshal Montgomery celebrating his landings along the Baltic in 1943! Owen, in this world, would have a field day with his tv programme! The astonishingly vivid sequence set in Russia, in Major Owain’s war-torn continent, certainly takes Owen to a battleground.

Omega is a story of dark, deep, sometimes desolate but always hopeful alternatives. We run our lives alongside the “what might have been”. We run those lives with compassion. And with humour. And with the persistence of love. Omega is two stories, both very human, both addressing the harsh realities of a world of this age and this time: one recognisable, the other sinister. We are invited to sympathise with both sides.

I met Chris thirty years ago and we found we had much in common in our attitude and desires for what we wished to achieve from our writing, even though we were very different writers. We were both published at the time by Faber and Faber. His first novel was Capella’s Golden Eyes. In the early and middle 80s we enjoyed a little “time off”, co-editing a writer’s magazine (Focus)and three volumes of stories, Other Edens, which featured early work by some now well-known authors in the field.

But importantly, Chris went on to write The Insider—a, story of alien occupation in the most invasive of ways—and In Limbo. In Limbo, a story concerning “Carpenter”, a man in care after a nervous breakdown, contains some of Chris’s funniest and most personal writing in the second of its three sections. Intensely political though much of his work is, he is also a very wry observer with a great sense of humour. In Omega, for instance, Owen’s historian father is described as having a “prodigious appetite for disapproval. He had a special distaste for what he called ‘fantasists’—historians who did not stick scrupulously to the facts but were prepared to speculate on alternative outcomes.”

After In Limbo, Chris produced a collection of related short stories entitled Chimeras. Again, they are set in a world we can recognise but which is not our own world. They deal with the process of creation, of invention, of the desire to fashion beauty in a place where beauty is both ubiquitous and yet absent. They are Chris’s take on the way we live in two worlds: that of the real and that of the imagined—the creative process, another theme that fascinates him. Art, in these tales, is conjured out of the air: “creations deliberately fashioned with an excess of ambition so that they dissolved away within minutes of their emergence, leaving nothing but dust behind.” An eloquent comment on the ephemeral nature of “art for art’s sake”? And yet, in another tale, an artist of genuine talent is described as claiming that “becoming an artist had given meaning to his life. He wanted to leave behind something lasting. When he had difficulties with a creation, he would pause… focusing his imagination.” He would become as a “locked door.”

Imagination is fleeting, but it can leave dust or reality.

Chris spent his childhood in South Wales. Hard work, respect for family, the courage to challenge authority informs his writing, the mood of his writing, the passion of his writing; and indeed, the politics of his writing. In his 1993 novel Aztec Century he takes a huge chance by setting up a Britain as it might have been if taken over by a fascist state; but he twists the tale to make the conquering forces the Aztecs, in a world where the Spanish had failed to conquer them and the Aztec kingdom has become all powerful. By so doing he doesn’t just set two political regimes into conflict and contrast, as happened in the middle 20th Century; he deals with the confrontation of belief systems and the role and respect of two hierarchical societies, the brutality of such societies, where the notion of sacrifice is played for everything that “sacrifice” means.

I read a proof of Omega whilst on vacation. It was hot. Everything around me was lazy with ease. In the villa, I read a book that was dark and compelling, and which punched holes in the society that we have become. It is a story of two worlds, two men who are the same man, two lives that are entangled across a strange barrier. Chris often argues through fiction for an understanding of the way we live in a dual reality. Omega opens many doors, and there are scenes that are shocking in their truth and in their brutality. What Omega does very precisely, and very much for the time in which it is being published, is ask the big question about how we cope with our lives, how we deal with the dark, or the bright, that is in the lives of others; how we trust. And the question is both an alpha and an omega question.

Robert HoldstockSeptember 2007

I woke up in the back of an ambulance. Two men in short-sleeved shirts were standing over me.

“I’m sure I’ve seen him before” one said.

The other one leaned closer. “What’s your name?”

For some reason I grinned. It probably looked cheesy.

“Owen,” I mouthed. “Owen Meredith.”

I wasn’t sure whether the words had actually come out.

A gold Christmas-tree star hung from the roof, swaying with the movement of the vehicle. I tried to remember what had happened. An explosion. I’d been knocked over. The ambulance’s siren was wailing.

The man who had loosened my tie was asking me other questions, but I couldn’t hear him properly. Pain was blossoming in my head. Everything began to fade.

It was Lyneth who had insisted we take the girls Christmas shopping in the West End. We’d set off early, taking the train so that Sara and Bethany, seven and five, could peer excitedly at the industrial estates and wrecked car graveyards that lined the approaches to London Bridge station.

We spent a couple of hours in Covent Garden, where there were jugglers and mime artists to keep the children entertained, before lunching in the Piazza. Then it was on to Regent Street, Lyneth already having accumulated three carrier bags of presents by strategic strikes on selected stores while I shepherded the girls away from ice cream stalls and street vendors selling helium balloons of Winnie the Pooh and Harry Potter.

As Lyneth led the way down Regent Street I felt myself beginning to flag. We were headed for Hamley’s, where the girls had been promised an audience with Santa Claus. The pavements were thick with uncompromising shoppers. I clung on tightly to Bethany’s hand as we wove through the crowds, dodging buggies and squalling toddlers, pulling up sharply at intersections where traffic lurched out of side streets the moment the lights changed.

At the entrance to the store Lyneth stopped and marshalled us. She looked, if anything, fresher than when we had set out that morning, her bobbed blonde hair sprinkled with drizzle, her cheeks rosy, her eyes filled with the gleam of a good morning’s work already done, targets met, everything still on schedule. We’d met at school and had first gone out together when we were sixteen. Half a lifetime ago. So long a companionship only heightens those moments when you look at someone and see if not a stranger then someone whose familiarity is in itself strange.

Of course I can’t honestly say I thought anything of the sort at that moment. I remember only her standing there in her navy gabardine coat, putting her shopping bags down to wipe Bethany’s nose before straightening.

“Listen” she said to me in the considerate-yet-purposeful tone she always adopted when making a concession, “why don’t I take the girls inside while you pop off for half an hour and get something for Rees? A sweater or something.”

Rees was my brother, always a problem to buy for.

I grinned. “An hour would be better.”

She gave me a firm look. “Forty-five minutes at most. It’s going to be heaving in there.”

“OK. I’ll see you at the grotto.”

“There isn’t one. He does the rounds.”

“Then how will I find you?”

“Mobile, silly.”

This was Sara, always quick off the mark, just like her mother. I poked my tongue out at her and she responded in kind.

“Make sure you switch it on,” Lyneth said.

“Will do.” We had one each of course, so Lyneth could co-ordinate our movements in situations like this. She was always doing battle with my timekeeping and organisation.

I watched her take the girls inside before crossing the road at a red light and heading down a side street for a swift drink to restore myself.

I stood at the bar of a pub whose name I can’t remember, sipping a half. In the mirror I could see three men in their twenties sitting at a table. One of them was staring at me. Cropped hair, lots of muscles, a bit fearsome looking. He said something to the others and began making gestures in my direction. They looked blank. Before I knew it, he was at my side.

“You did that series, right?”

His accent was cod-cockney: grafted on, like a studied attempt at de-refinement. He was in his early twenties, a silver ring in one ear, his tight ribbed polo neck showing evidence of bodybuilding.

I nodded amiably.

“Battlezones, yeah?”

“Battlegrounds”

He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “Those tank battles, man. Awesome.”

His lips were pursed in approval. I made appreciative noises.

“That Tiger tank—where was it? Same place as that submarine.”

“Kursk.”

“The way you took us inside, showed us what it was really like. The graphics were A-1. And that tank commander, he was a real hero. Six kills! He survive the war?”

“He wasn’t a real person. We generated the character from a variety of original sources.”

“You felt as if you were really in there, you know? All the controls, the bumping and hustle. You could almost smell the sweat and ammunition!”

“We wanted to make it as realistic as possible.”

“There going to be a PC game or anything? I’ve got Steel Storm and Red Star Rising, but I liked the intimacy, you know?”

I wondered how to reply to this.

“Excellent idea,” I told him. “I’ll talk to my brother. He’s the computer wizard.”

“You’d rake it in. What about another series?”

“It’s in the planning stage.”

“Yeah?” He plainly wanted to know more.

“We’ll be focusing on more recent conflicts—the Falklands, the Gulf, Bosnia, possibly Iraq.”

“You travel there? All those places? North Africa and stuff?”

“Some,” I said vaguely.

“I’m in the T.A. myself. Hitched a ride on a Challenger on Salisbury Plain one time.”

“Oh? Was it fun?”

“Nearly fucking choked from the exhaust fumes. Those things can really motor.”

I kept smiling, now a bit uncertain of the exact nature of his enthusiasm.

“Best thing I’ve seen on the box in years,” he announced.

“That’s great to hear.”

He was offering his hand. I took it and shook. His grip was firm and muscular, and he pumped my arm as if he was sending me off on a suicide mission.

“When’s it out on DVD?”

“In the spring. Lots of background info on how we did the simulations.”

“I’ll look out for it. You really opened my eyes.”

He returned to his table.

It was hard not to look in the mirror, to watch him enthuse to his friends. At the same time I’d learned to be wary of the enthusiasms of militaristic types. It wasn’t often that I was recognised and it still surprised me whenever it happened.

Battlegrounds had been broadcast in the autumn on Channel 5. The series had been given plenty of pre-publicity emphasising the use of state-of-the-art computer animation to give tactical and strategic overviews as well as more intimate portraits of the actual experiences of individual soldiers in major battles. Although it had been designed to appeal to a wide audience the scale of its success exceeded everyone’s expectations.

Battlezones. Now that was a title worth considering for the new series. It had a suitable ring of modernity to it.

I swallowed the last of my beer and departed with a mannered wave to the three men.

Five minutes later I slipped into Racing Green and emerged with a heathery V-neck. It was unlikely Rees would ever wear it, his style tending more to sweatshirts and ancient denims, but Lyneth had a mission to civilise him. Rees was a talented software designer specialising in graphical interfaces, and we’d employed him during the making of the series, so for once he wasn’t short of cash. But his personal life was a mess and he was presently living alone in a Peckham bedsit. Lyneth had invited him to spend Christmas Day with us. I doubted he would actually show up.

I spotted a gap in the traffic and sprinted across the road. Two things happened, one after the other. The mobile in my pocket started trilling and I instinctively paused to pull it free. An instant later there was an enormous bang that picked me up and hurled me backwards.

My head hit something—it may have been the body of a car—and I felt a blaze of enveloping pain. I saw the entire front of Hamley’s bulging outwards, dust blossoming and debris cascading down on the swarming street. Darkness swallowed me up.

What followed were snippets of disconnected impressions: the persistent squeaking of a trolley wheel as I was bundled down a corridor; Christmas greetings cards pinned around the frame of a notice board; distant voices blurring in and out of earshot; a taste of stale blood on my bloated tongue. The pain in my head was so intense that it dwarfed everything else, even my fleeting thoughts of Lyneth and the girls. I kept passing out and resurfacing before eventually settling into a more prolonged period of unconsciousness. When I finally woke again I was in another world entirely.

The room was painted a duck-egg green. I lay in a dim light, in a wrought iron bed that was not a modern fashionable type but one of authentic age. My head was raised on a series of pillows with starchy covers. There was the smell of something sooty.

I risked a slight movement of the head, and felt a wave of pain worse than any headache. But it ebbed and I was able to inch myself up from the pillow.

A crimson patchwork quilt lay across the bed. Beyond the foot of the bed was a mirrored dresser on which a tasselled table lamp gave off a dull orange glow. The room looked utilitarian, but the furniture gave it a cosy feel. A computer sat on a drop-leaf table beside the door. It was not switched on, and someone had hung a crocheted doily over its screen. Next to the dresser an area of wall had been hacked out to make a fireplace where coals were burning low in a cast iron grate. Its bricked-in surrounds were crudely finished.

Had I been taken out of hospital? If so, to where? The room was quite unfamiliar to me, though in my drowsy state this didn’t bother me unduly.

The door opened, casting a swathe of brighter light into the room. A squat middle aged woman in a floral dress and black cardigan entered. She came to the bed and, seeing that I was awake, said, “There is water here for your thirst.”

She spoke gruffly, her English heavily accented. I tried to speak, failed.

She filled a tumbler from a glass pitcher on the bedside table, put one hand behind my back and sat me upright. Blood swirled in my head. When my vision cleared I saw that she was holding the tumbler in front of my mouth. She was stocky and swarthy and smelt of mothballs and stale sweat. Her dark eyes regarded me incuriously from what I found myself thinking was a peasant’s face.

I gulped like a child, the water dribbling down my chin. Finally she laid me back on the pillow and swabbed my chin with a scrap of cloth from her cardigan pocket.

“There, there,” she said, giving a gap-toothed smile. “That will be better, yes?”

For a long time after she was gone I just lay there, registering the unfamiliar surroundings with a kind of bleary curiosity. I began to make small movements, growing bolder when none provoked a renewed spasm of head pain. I threw back the covers. Swung my feet down to the floor. Slowly, very slowly, levered myself up until I was standing.

A dull throbbing in the head, nothing more. I glimpsed my nakedness in the mirror as I crossed the room to the window. I began cranking a handle to raise the blind.

Outside it was dark. No street lamps shone and there were no lights in any of the windows of the shadowy buildings visible across a snow-covered square. They were squat concrete fortresses of slit windows and angular walls, their roofs topped with radar dishes, artillery and missile emplacements. I knew them to be just the surface structures of an extensive underground complex housing all the administrative functions of the state. This was Westminster, the heart of a London I’d never seen before.

And I was in one such building myself, several floors above ground. A fleeting memory came of flying low over the city at night: I’d looked down on the coiled milky band of the frozen Thames, with dark lines of roads and clusters of buildings stretching away on either side. There were extensive areas of mottled whiteness between them. The city’s broken panorama was like a study in monochrome, a photographic negative of something that was familiar yet unfamiliar.

A dim reflection faced me in the window glass. It wasn’t me—not quite. A slimmer, harder-edged version of myself, with cropped hair and a more upright stance. An alter ego, staring back like a not-quite-identical twin.

I heard footsteps outside the room, felt my legs beginning to give way. Somehow I managed to get back to the bed, burying myself under the quilt, letting sleep wash over me like a benediction.

All that night I dreamt that I kept waking to find myself lying in a modern hospital room, a monitor blinking off to my left. I was propped up under crisp cotton sheets, left alone in the suffocating sterile warmth. It was a fever sleep filled with confusion. At various times I saw two quite distinct women. The first, seated beside the door in the hospital room, was the same age as myself, dark auburn hair framing a sensuous and intelligent face. I couldn’t recall her name, though I knew we had once been lovers. At other times I was back in the green room, attended by a younger woman, sallow skinned and gamin, her black hair tied back in a ponytail. When I woke fully again I was in the wrought iron bed and a man in a white coat was standing beside me.

“Good morning,” he said. “Would you like some breakfast?”

A noise escaped my throat, something between a cough and a clearing of the throat.

“What time is it?”

This was an odd question under the circumstances, but it hadn’t really come from me. The voice was different from my own, huskier, with a stronger Welsh accent.

“Just after eight,” he said. “I’d suggest something light. Some cereal or toast. I’m Tyler, by the way. Sir Gruffydd consigned you to my tender mercies.”

He meant my other self’s uncle. I had an image of a florid, white-haired man in his seventies. A field marshal with a long record of service. His name was spelt in the Welsh fashion—I knew this without knowing how.

“Am I all right?” I heard myself ask.

“You were lucky,” Tyler said. “It’s probably just mild concussion and a few scratches. You should be up and about in a day or two.”

“Was it a bomb?”

“Not my pigeon.” He pulled down one of my eyelids and peered perfunctorily at it. I could smell the nicotine on his yellowed fingers. He was middle-aged, brisk in manner, a horseshoe of greying hair fringing his bald skull. He wore a taupe-coloured shirt and tie under his white coat.

“Any headaches or grogginess?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Other symptoms?”

“Like what?”

“Sleep disturbances? Nausea? Nightmares?”

“No. Nothing.”

This was said brusquely, a determined rejection of any admission that might be construed as personal weakness. It wasn’t me talking: it was my other self.

“Good,” Tyler said. “We’ll rest you up for twenty-four hours, put you on light duties for a couple of weeks.”

“I’m only just back from overseas. I’d rather be occupied.”

“Up to you. But don’t overdo it. Now—breakfast. What’s it to be?”

I realised that I had no appetite—or rather my counterpart had none.

“I never eat breakfast,” I heard him say. “A glass of orange juice would do, if there’s any.”

I sensed a craving for some freshly squeezed juice, like that available during his recent trip to Brazil, sharp and sweet and thick with pulp. There was little chance of it here.

“We’ll see what we can do. I take it you remember everything that happened?”

A sudden panic at this. He was blank. Then he remembered a blinding soundless flash, his car being consumed by it, though he was not inside it. He was hurled over as the shock wave hit him. A further memory of crawling through rubble before hands took him, helping him up into the back of a white van with the shield and crossed swords emblem of the Security Police.

“Of course,” he said. “There was an—”

Tyler put his hand up sharply. “Don’t tell me. Need to know basis. Wait till you see Sir Gruffydd.”

He checked my pulse, asked to see my tongue. It felt coated.

“I do believe you’ll live,” he announced at last. “Make sure you eat something. I’ll pop in tomorrow morning and give you a final once over. All right?”

“Yes.”

With this, he left.

I felt like a spy perched in someone else’s head, an invisible spectator to thoughts and speech and actions that came from within me yet did not belong to me. I was cohabiting, but with no knowledge of the life I had here except what I could glean from my counterpart’s reactions. The explosion that had injured him was not the one I remembered.

As soon as Tyler was gone, I got out of bed—or rather my other self did so. Still naked, he crossed to the mirror on the dressing table.

A cut above the right eyebrow was already healing, and there was no other sign of injury. He had a similar complexion and was about the same height and age as myself, though distinctly leaner. He stared at his reflection for a long time with an expression of mild consternation. It was like looking at a close relative, a brother, perhaps, yet he was someone I had never seen before. A thick growth of stubble did not disguise the pockmarks that covered his face from brow to chin. I assumed he had suffered badly from acne, though his thoughts remained resolutely closed to me at that moment. When he put a hand up to the mirror I saw crescents of grime under his fingernails and felt the cool smoothness of the glass.

An adjoining door opened on a narrow bathroom. It was unheated and chilly. The brass showerhead that sprouted from the white-tiled wall looked antiquated and encrusted with hard-water deposits. When he turned the tap there was a creaking noise, followed by a delay before tea-coloured water began spurting out. It soon cleared, though it remained tepid. To my alarm he twisted the lever to cold before climbing under it. The chill made him gasp with a mixture of shock and exhilaration that I felt myself just as keenly.

The soap was a mustard-yellow brick that stank of coal tar. He lathered himself vigorously, especially his groin and armpits. His body was wiry, with not a hint of spare flesh. I had the queasy feeling of being an involuntary witness to the intimate actions of a stranger. At the same time I was fascinated by the contrast between his habits and my own. I was used to hot showers in a heated bathroom. I’d fold a soft towelling robe around myself, whereas he began to rub himself down with a stiff off-white bath towel redolent of carbolic.

After this, still naked, he shaved, using a bristle brush, a stick of shaving soap and a single-bladed steel razor that sat on the shelf. There were other toiletries in plain white packaging. It was years since I had wet-shaved, and never with such a primitive razor. He was diligent, lathering thoroughly, stretching and contorting his pitted face as he slid the razor over it, paying scrupulous attention to the crevices under his nostrils and the line of his sideboards. There was several days’ growth to remove, and he made a great ceremony of it.

His eyes were a deeper brown than mine, his nose narrower, hair cropped in a short-back-and-sides that made no concessions to style. Abdominal muscles rippled as he did a series of stretching exercises in front of the mirror, taking deep breaths and exhalations. He had none of my incipient middle-aged flab.

His clothing had been draped over the back of an armchair in the bedroom—an army uniform in a greyish khaki. The jacket had shoulder patches showing the Union flag below a sky-blue diamond with a single five-pointed star in gold. It signified a major’s rank.

I knew this only because he knew it: the uniform was otherwise unfamiliar, and certainly not that of the present British Army. Under the chair were matt-black leather boots, fleece-lined. The closure strips had attachments resembling Velcro. A padded thigh-length combat jacket in pale winter-camouflage colours hung on the back of the door.

He donned his vest and underpants. Everything had been freshly laundered. I knew that he was intending to dress and go out, but suddenly he felt weak and sat down on the bed.

A tumbler of orange juice had been put on the bedside table while he was showering. He picked it up and drained it. The juice was thin and from a can; but it took the sour taste from his mouth. He rose again and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

The toiletries were his own: a bag bearing the initials O.M. sat on the shelf. I knew instantly his name was the same as mine. A plain white tube had FLUORIDE stencilled along it in black. The toothpaste tasted like mashed minted chalk, but he even scrubbed his tongue, probing so deeply I was amazed he didn’t gag.

As we emerged from the bathroom the woman entered. She was plainly surprised to find us out of our bed and in our underwear.

“What is this?” she said in her accented English. “No getting up yet! Back to bed.”

His inclination was to ignore her, but he couldn’t deny the weakness he felt.

“You will land us in bad trouble!” the woman said, scuttling forward and taking him by the elbow. “No getting up today. You must rest. Plenty of resting.”

He let her lead him back to the bed, though he insisted on getting into it himself. She tucked him in as one might do a child, though he noticed that never once did she look directly at him.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Here,” she said, folding under the bottom edges of the quilt. “I live here.”

“I mean originally.”

She gave no answer, still busy with the sheets.

“Are you Polish?”

She made a noise that sounded like an expletive, and left without another word.

The white hospital room. I was back. Through the window I could see dingy clouds scudding across a blue sky.

There was no sensation of trans