Theo sipped his lukewarm coffee and thumbed through each folder. He grimaced as he matched the names of Bob’s patients to the digital copies of their sleep studies in the clinic’s database. Though modern technology had improved the diagnostic process, Theo remained stubbornly old-school: He preferred to print hard copies of patient reports so he could fan them out on a desk or a table and trace the inky waves of their EKGs and EEGs with the sensitive tip of his finger. This subtle and intuitive technique had often helped him catch details his ever-younger colleagues sometimes missed.
But this morning, in order to fit all of Bob’s patients in as well as his own, Theo would have to give up his printouts and move through the assessments quickly online. He set to work, sighing heavily as he watched the patients’ lives rise and fall across Bob’s monitor, so uninspiring, so wearisome.
The minutes crept by while Theo jotted concise and unerringly correct notes in each patient’s file, his eyes barely flickering at the unremarkable readouts therein. Apnea, narcolepsy, night terrors, insomnia—he’d seen it all. From time to time, he’d stop and press his fingertips to the waves breaking on the screen, searching for something even he couldn’t name, but then he would sigh again, and his hand would sink back to the mouse.
Lately, in an effort to stave off his deepening malaise, Theo had begun arriving early to play “Lost at Sea” or sometimes “Mystery Cruise,” little games he’d invented, using his patients’ readouts. He’d print out a report, note the patient’s name, age and gender, then run his yearning fingers across every line, charting in his mind their hidden topographies, navigating the troughs and crests of an intricate fantasy world.
He embellished the patients’ waves with visions of intriguing heiresses dripping with exquisite deltas, dastardly villains brandishing razor-sharp sawtooths, and damsels in distress, crying for help from the shortwave depths—until Joy, his admin, arrived and he would hastily set aside his realm for another dreary day.
He finished his coffee, now grown cold, and glanced at his watch: The first patient on Bob’s calendar would be arriving in the office in less than half an hour. That gave him time, he calculated, for one more review.
He checked the name printed in block letters on the patient information sheet and frowned at the smudged-out number in the space for her age. Probably peanut butter from one of Bob’s little cherubs, he thought. He sniffed the paper with a wrinkled nose and congratulated himself again—more unconvincingly, these days—for having missed out on such nonsense.
While he waited for the woman’s report to render on the monitor, he read her name aloud several times, letting the remnants of his college French lessons guide the play of his tongue and lips around its sleek syllables. Jacqueline LeClerc, he whispered, once, twice, three times, imagining that this mysterious patient would say her name to him just so, not the more vulgar, Americanized “Jack-lynn LuhClerk” he feared he would more likely hear.
When the woman’s EEG finally opened on the screen, Theo’s lips parted in surprise. He tilted his head, zoomed in, and tried to get a better angle. Frustrated at the limitations of the monitor, he checked the time again and hit Print. He hummed a little Edith Piaf and cleared the top of Bob’s desk to make room. When it was complete, he spread the sheets eagerly across the glossy wood.
Softly, daringly, he ran his fingers across her dazzling waves: Jacqueline’s night in the sleep lab, her life, her very soul, laid bare before his wondering eyes. He’d never seen anything quite like her: soaring peaks and fathomless valleys, heavy slashes and filigreed flourishes. She was, he could see, utterly ravishing.
Here, she stares at the ceiling and thinks of a lost love, prays for sleep to set her free. Tracing her elegant delta waves, he feels the tidal pull of her, feels her drifting, dreamless, as she floats in a silver boat on a calm and tranquil sea. He pulls the next section of her EEG from the printer; his heart quickens as he sees the nightmare begin. He feels her terror and pain, but also her courage. At the last moment, when the sea monsters are closing in all around, she breaks free. She begins to float again, a slow, graceful descent into serene forgetfulness. He follows her all the way down…
As he touched the tip of his finger to each hauntingly etched line, the whole of her began to take shape in his fevered mind—how proud, how strong, how beautiful she must be! Luminous and fierce, she shone up at him through the jagged bars of her printed prison.
Heart pounding, Theo reached the end, desolate at the finality of the paper’s sudden, heartless edge; his fingertip was hot and tender as he raised it to his lips. “Magnifique,” he whispered.
The knock on the door startled him. “Your first patient is here,” Bob’s admin, Corinne, squawked.
“Thank you,” he said with a covering cough. “Give me a minute, then send her back.”
He knew it would be her. Of course it would be her.
He carefully stacked the printed sheets and laid them on the corner of Bob’s desk. He straightened his tie and ran his hands through his hair; he was proud of how thick and full it still was, just beginning to gray at the temples. He fumbled in his briefcase for the tin of mints he always kept there. His heart pounded harder, anticipation making his movements clumsy and jerky.
At the second knock, he rose and stood behind Bob’s desk, shoulders back, head held high, hoping she’d find him worthy. “Come in,” he said, aiming for a tone grave enough for this, their first meeting in the flesh. A sudden shyness fluttered against his ribs, and he held his breath.
The woman who stepped unsteadily through the door was tiny—so tiny!—and frail. So frail. She was gray from head to toe: her hair, her eyes, her skin, her gentle smile, her pearls. A vision she was, indeed, but gray, so gray, as if all the colors of the world had fled the spot on Bob’s carpet where she teetered now in her sad, gray, orthopedic shoes.
Theo’s lips parted. He glanced at her EEG, stacked neatly on the desk before him, then back at the old woman smiling at him from the open door. Surely this could not be her? There must have been some mistake, she was—how could this be?
“Mrs.—?” he asked. His growing dread rendered him incapable of more. If someone had looked at his own EEG at that moment, it would have revealed a flat, black line. He swept the copy of her printout into her folder and extended his hand. He shivered when the tip of his finger brushed the rice-paper skin at her wrist.
“LeClerc,” she answered, with that soft, gray smile and a slow nod of that gray, gray head. “Jacqueline LeClerc.”
She said it just the way he feared she would—just as he’d imagined—and for the first time in his life, Theo knew how it might feel to drown, to let another’s fathomless gaze swallow him whole. He hesitated a moment longer, feeling that gaze wash over him. When she smiled again, he knew he was lost. He took a deep breath, gripped her hand tighter, and let the waves pull them both under.
