Two-Eyed Seeing, Part One

A short story by Amy Johnson

Welcome to the December edition of Thrutopia! Outside my window, the winter sun is blearily breaking through the clouds, and the wider world somehow keeps on turning even though it’s increasingly clear that the current system is untenable for most of us.

So here at Welcome to Thrutopia, we’d like to welcome you to a future world in which we made it through. This is part one of a short story by Amy Johnson; parts two and three will be posted later this month. Please enjoy!

Two-Eyed Seeing by Amy Johnson

(Part one, in which an exhausted psychiatrist finally makes it to the bathroom and ends up… somewhere else.)

The door to the Provider Workstation opened with her new badge. She entered a dark basement lounge decorated in yellow chickens and roosters, along with bucolic farm scenes, and employee “notices of your rights” pinned 5 deep on a crumbling cork bulletin board. One of these was called Preventing Burnout. Another said, “This Is A Right-To-Work State.” Under it, a table was lined with plastic water bottles, Mentos, and saltine crackers.

BATHROOM! NOW! THIS IS YOUR BLADDER SPEAKING! Henrietta had not had time to pee since entering the Psych unit this morning. She was about ready to burst. In a dark corner, a male doctor was slumped in one of the cubicles, dictating, and he knowingly pointed to a sliding metal door.

I waited too long, she thought as she sat on the toilet and looked around the small stainless steel room. Maybe I need to wear a diaper at work. Hen relaxed and let go, while also checking her phone, which was now flashing CODE RED UNIT 5B. Probably Mr. Jolly, who was agitated, needing lots of Haldol and Ativan last night. The other nineteen patients were also unstable, coming off meth, or hallucinating because they had stopped their meds. Then there were the quiet ones in their rooms, suicidal, but not making a fuss. These worried her the most.

Hells bells, the unit can manage for two minutes. She was the only psychiatrist there, working as a locum tenens temporary doctor, on call every night. The money was good and would help pay off her $200k in student loans. But this was grueling. Since Purdoo Farms Equity Division took over the bankrupt HPV Hospital, things had gone from bad to worse. With a multinational chicken processor now running health care clinics and hospitals, everything had sped up, and the past “frills” of therapy and support staff were gone. Just meds and beds, she thought. Most of the patients were unhoused, with a rolling admission and discharge list of three a day, often sent back to tents or the woods along the river. The one holdout social worker looked frozen, a pale statue, and the nurses had a dartboard in their locker room of the CEOs of Purdoo showing their millions in salaries. There was also a handwritten sign urging them to join the union and strike. The worst, though, was the Utilization Review robot-woman who came by every morning, suggesting discharges for people whose insurance had stopped paying. It seemed to Dr. Jones that she was not helping anyone at this place. There was no time for that.

Reaching down, psychiatrist Henrietta Jones pushed a cool metal button below the rim to flush.

With a resounding CRACK, the toilet began shaking. Just what I need, an earthquake.

The metal room shook too. Lights flashed. Warm water began squirting up, soaking her brand-new designer scrubs. Hen pulled them up anyway and opened the door to get out of there. When she looked back, the toilet had transformed into a gleaming white porcelain bidet.

What she saw next was astounding. No earthquake, but a clean light-filled room full of people having lunch, chatting and laughing, shelves of healthy-looking salads, and a grill. I must really be sleep deprived, she thought. Nobody dashing from the room or lurking back in the shadows, signing endless orders and “deficiencies.” She sat down with a thud, flabbergasted, while eyeing the grilled goat cheese on artisan bread at the next table. Her stomach growled. Borborygmi, my old friend, she thought, realizing she hadn’t eaten yet today.

“Excuse me, are you Dr. Jones?” A young man in a relaxed cotton jumpsuit approached her.

“Yes, and who are you?”

“I’m Rob, your orientation specialist.”

Rob was smiling at her, a slim androgynous person with a slight English accent, and generous but very appealing ears sporting silver granny glasses. His fingernails were painted orange.

Henrietta still felt stunned. “Can you please tell me what is going on?”

“Sure, why don’t we get some food and go to the courtyard?” Courtyard, sunshine, food. OK, I’m game. She had only been at work or at the Residence Inn, bingeing Netflix and eating fast food for the last week. Hope I don’t wake up soon. Maybe they’ll admit me to the unit, and I can get some rest.

They stepped out into an enormous fruit and flower garden, a completely different place from what she had entered this morning.

It was hot, damn hot, and muggy too. Her polyester scrubs felt like a suffocating second skin. The sky was an odd color, a gray-yellow, but the sun still beat down. Rob saw her shock and took her over to a shady bench under some trees, near a fountain. The mist of the fountain brushed her face every now and then.

“I know this is all very strange, but please understand that you are safe and I will explain everything,” he said with his friendly, open smile.

Either I’ve had a psychotic break or there was LSD in my coffee. I thought it tasted funny.

“I’ll put it plainly. You are in the future. Somehow, there is a portal from the doctors’ lounge bathroom to our current time, which is twenty years into your future. We’ve had so many upset doctors travelling through here that we’ve created a new position to help them. Me. I’ve done this many times, and I haven’t lost anyone yet.”

Henrietta still did not believe this, but played along while wolfing down her semi-soft goat cheese, arugula, and pickle on sourdough. “Can I ever go back?”

Rob smiled. “Yes, if you want to, but most people don’t.”

The sandwich tasted great. “Wow, this is delicious. I haven’t eaten all day. Is the bread homemade? And the cheese, ahhhmmm, tastes like something I got at a Portuguese deli. Are the pickles homemade? They’re like my grandmother Henny’s. But who is covering the unit and my patients?”

Stop your blabbering, and pay attention, her Gran’s voice whispered in her ear..

“Not to worry. The way this works is, if you want to go back, it is as if no time passed while you were gone. Time in your earlier world has stopped, so you won’t meet your younger self. It’s like reality on two tracks. In the meantime, what can I tell you?”

Oh shit, I’m in Outlander, she thought. “What started this? Was it the flush?” She was now digging into her walnut and fig slice, covered in full cream caramel sauce and mint leaves.

If this is a psychotic break, at least the food is good.

“Yes,” Rob squinted his eyes, and his ears moved up just a bit. “There’s something about the presence of strong feelings of either anger, despair, or fear that seems to activate the portal when the toilet is flushed. We don’t know why, but some think that the hospital was built on an old Cherokee sacred site atop the hill here. It’s not the only one in the Southern Appalachians, but this one only seems to transport healers. Perhaps it was used in the past 10,000 years that the Cherokee roamed these mountains. Maybe they travelled to the future and back to get help or wisdom. It’s part of the lore of the vortex in this valley.”

Now that her belly was full, Henrietta began to relax. At least she had a story to explain what was happening. But isn’t that how delusions are formed? Things feel so exquisitely heightened with suspicion that a story must be constructed to explain it. The CIA is tracking me, or I have chips embedded in me by vaccines. The transmitters are talking in my ear. That old dopamine paranoia, not easily treated by any medication. Maybe I’m like old Aunt Tosh, who got paranoid as time went on, and believed everything she heard on Faux News. Henrietta’s diagnosis: some generalized brain atrophy with a soupcon of paranoid flair and mob mentality. Hope that’s not genetic…

Looking around, she noticed that all the former parking lots around the hospital had been transformed into gardens, ponds, paths, and cool shady spots for reflection. People were walking and talking quietly in pairs. There were hundreds of bikes and scooters. A black and orange bird sang out in the sycamore tree, “Drink your teeea.” A cool breeze rolled down the mountain, as if it were breathing out a sigh. It was so quiet.

“Where are all the cars?”

Rob smiled again, sighed, and said, “Sit back and I will tell you a story from your time until now.” He gently squeezed her hand.

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Thanks for reading this first instalment! We’ll leave Henrietta and Rob there; come back next week to hear Rob’s story. UPDATE: Please go here to read Part Two! And please feel free to share or comment to let us know your thoughts!