Spatial inventory. She's on her back, probably on a bed, and can't move her arms. She carefully raises her head, as she'd do in Pilates in preparation for the Hundred, and sees that her arms at least are there, or seem to be, beneath a thin gray blanket and a folded edge of white sheet, but that there are two restraining bands of gray webbing, one just below her shoulders and the other just below her elbows.
This seems not a good thing.
She lowers her head and groans, because this has caused the key to be turned at least twice, and quickly.
The ceiling, which she finds she can focus on now, is blank and white. Rolling her head gingerly to the right, she sees an equally blank wall, also white. To the left, the ceiling's light fixture, which is rectangular and featureless, and then a row of beds, three at least, which are empty, and made of white-painted metal.
All of that seems a lot to do, because it makes her very tired.
A gray-haired woman, wearing a gray cardigan over a shapeless gray dress, is there with a tray.
The bed has been cranked up to partial sitting position and the restraints are gone. So, she finds, is the expanding interior skull ring.
"Where am I?"
The woman says something, no more than four syllables, and places the tray, on wire supports, across Cayce's stomach. There is a plastic bowl of something that looks like thick clam chowder, perhaps minus the clams, and a plastic tumbler of grayish-white fluid.
The woman hands Cayce a strangely blunt-looking spoon that proves to be made of some rubbery, flexible plastic, rigid enough to eat soup with but soft enough to bend until its two ends meet. Cayce uses it to eat the soup, which is warm, and thick, and very good, and more heavily spiced than anything she's eaten in a hospital before.
Cayce eyes the gray beverage suspiciously. The woman points to it and utters a single syllable.
It tastes, Cayce finds, not entirely unlike Bikkle. An organic Bikkle.
When she's finished, and has returned the tumbler to the tray, she's rewarded with another monosyllable, neutral in tone. The woman takes the tray, crosses the floor, opens the room's single door, which is cream-colored, and goes out, closing the door behind her.
The position of her bed has prevented Cayce from seeing anything of what might be beyond that door, but the geography of hospitals suggests a corridor.
She sits up, discovering that she's wearing a backless hospital gown, though one made of some thin, extensively laundered flannel print that seems once to have been decorated with small pink-and-yellow clown figures on a pale blue background.
The ceiling fixture fades abruptly, but doesn't go entirely out.
She tugs blanket and sheet aside, discovering a remarkable assortment of bruises on the front of both thighs, and swings her legs off the bed. She suspects that actually standing will be an experiment, but finds she doesn't do too badly.
The room, or ward, is floored with something seamless and gray and rubbery, faintly gritty beneath her feet.
She places her feet together now and finds the "magnets" from the Pilates towel exercises, points of focus, pulling the muscles of her legs together, into internal isometric alignment. Makes her spine as long as possible. A wave of vertigo. She waits for it to pass. She tries a roll-down, rolling her head forward one vertebra at a time, while bending slowly at the knees until she's in a crouch, head dangling…
There's something under the bed. Black.
She freezes.
She goes down on her knees, peering.
Touches it. Her carry-on. She slides it out. Unzipped, her clothing wadded, bulging out. She runs her hands through them, touch telling her she finds jeans, sweater, the cold slick nylon shell of the Rickson's. But the Stasi envelope isn't there, and neither is the Luggage Label bag. No phone, no iBook, no wallet, no passport.
Her Parco boots have been squashed flat and jammed into one of the outer pockets.
She stands and finds the tie, at the back of her neck, that frees her from the bare-ass flannel clown gown. Stands naked in greenish fluorescent twilight, then bends and starts feeling for her clothes. She can't find socks, but underpants, jeans, a black T-shirt will have to do. She sits on the edge of the hospital bed to tie the Parco boots.
And then it occurs to her that of course the door will be locked. It has to be.
It isn't. The institutional thumb-push depresses smoothly. She feels the door shift slightly on its hinges. Opens it.
Corridor, yes; hospital, no. High school?
A wall of faded turquoise lockers with small, three-digit number plates. Strip lighting. Synthetic floor the color of cork.
Looks left: The corridor terminates in brown fire doors. Looks right: glass doors with push bars, sunlight.
Easy choice.
Torn between the desire to run and the desire to pass, if possible, for someone with a reason to be here, wherever and whatever here is, she tries to open the door and step out normally.
