Fan Fiction (Attempt!)

So, here it is!
My first attempt at a Fan Fiction!
I wanted to sort of expand upon some of the ideas that I discussed from my previous post about Kevin and Dana's opposing roles in their relationship to history at the level of the body.
I've attempted a pseudo-role reversal in that aspect, while introducing an element of causality that the novel doesn't address.
I give all credit to original texts taken from the novel Kindred  by Octavia Butler, and I hope that you appreciate my synthesis of creative interjection with the original work.
Enjoy!

I woke up a week later still in the hospital.

I tried to think through the drugs and remember what had happened, and then the throbbing, distant pain in my arm reminded me.

I closed my eyes, remembering. The knife. Rufus. The memory of Rufus’s unyielding grip. A hot, agonizing pain. I remembered coming to a few days earlier, and seeing the empty place…the stump. I opened my eyes to face the loss of my limb, thinking vaguely that I was glad it hadn't been my right arm.

An incubator lay next to me enveloping my left arm, from above the elbow and down. It breathed in mechanical intervals that seemed to slow down as my heart monitor sped to a race of blips that rang in my ears, telling me that I was indeed awake. My eyes opened wider still, as if hoping to understand something better by peeling my eyelids back, and I forced a measured breath in…and out. In, and out, staring at the breathing incubator.

I turned to my right and grabbed the nurses call button and pressed it firmly, two, three times. The room around me looked like any ordinary hospital room I had ever seen, but this alien structure encompassing my arm felt as if it didn't belong. Suddenly I feared for my sanity, that my memories of Rufus and Alice and Nigel and the other slaves of the Weylin property were hallucinations. I remembered the sting of my back and the crack of a whip echoing in the air, and then the room seemed to blur and darken around me. I was struck with a sudden fear that Rufus was calling me back, that I hadn’t killed him with that last thrust of my knife. I began to feel dizzy, nauseated. I waited for it to come, but I stayed in my bed and the room around me didn’t change. I fought my dizziness and focused on the bare wall in front of me. It had all felt so real, more real than this moment. I began to wonder if I could I have imagined the entire thing. Was I hallucinating still, or dreaming? And then an even scarier thought, what kind of hospital was I in, anyway?

I pressed the nurses call button a few more times in a row, clutching it in my right hand to assure myself that I was awake. I desperately needed answers and questioning my own sanity was not helping.

A nurse walked into the room, and smiled as she noticed I was awake and coherent enough. “Oh good, you’re awake,” she said kindly. She moved toward the incubator. “Let’s just take a look and see how your regrowth process is going.”

Regrowth process? “Can you tell me what this thing is?” I asked, motioning with my eyes to the structure around my arm.

“This is the Tissue Rebuilding Incubator Pod that is rebuilding the bone, muscle, and tissue in your arm, of course!” She seemed to forgive my ignorance due to my injuries, but continued as if it was still an odd question. She put on a pair of blue latex gloves and pressed a series of buttons on the side of the structure. “You’ve probably never seen a real one up close, have you?” She opened the lid to the incubator and it let out a long sigh, as if it was tired from breathing the life back into my arm.

I felt her touch my elbow, forearm, and fingertips. I was shocked that I had feeling that wasn’t the result of a phantom sensation. But just to be sure, I asked “You’re touching my arm, right?”

She smiled again. “Yes, that’s good you can feel that,” she reassured me. Her warm eyes twinkled slightly, and her kind face assured me that this was real. It wasn’t a dream. And I wasn’t hallucinating. Or if I was hallucinating, it was quite convincing.

“You should be able to go home within a day or two with a well-functioning left arm,” she said as she replaced the lid to the incubator. It began making that slow, steady breathing sound once again. She turned around and removed the latex gloves from her hands, and I wiggled the fingers on my left hand.

I could feel them move!

I had felt my arm squeezed off from the rest of my body. I had seen the stump where my arm had once attached above the elbow. And now I felt the fingers of a new arm move gently inside the incubator.

I smiled.

*          *          *

EPILOGUE

We flew to Maryland as soon as my arm was well enough. There, we rented a car—Kevin was driving again, finally—and wandered around Baltimore and over to Easton. There was a bridge now, not the steamship Rufus had used. And at last I got a good look of the town I had lived so near and seen so little of. We found the courthouse and an old church, a few other buildings time had not worn away. And we found Burger King and Holiday Inn and Texaco and schools with black kids and white kids together and a plaque in the middle of town directing us to the Weylin house.

Actually it directed us to “The Plantation that Gave Birth to Modern Medicine: The Weylin House.”

That one threw us for a loop. Kevin and I looked at each other, and then back at the sign. I moved closer to him. “‘The Plantation that Gave Birth to Modern Medicine,’ huh?” Kevin said, his brows furrowed. “Well there’s something I’ve never heard of…” he trailed off, absently rubbing the scar on his forehead. We followed the directions to the Weylin house and discovered that it was still standing, and a museum.

There was a large sign down the road, now a paved road, and another above the front door to the house. Aside from these attachments, the house looked the same as I remembered it. It had been maintained well over the years. There were a few other groups of people, and one large group of school children with one older teacher trying to tame them through the tour.

They were offering tours of the Weylin house.

Kevin and I grabbed a brochure from a table by the door and caught up with our present world. On the front was an old picture of a white man, the doctor that we had both seen when Rufus had broken his leg. I realized that I had never learned his name. It read, Dr. T. Raleigh Garrison: The Father of Modern Medicine. This man seemed nearly incompetent in the few interactions I’d had with him, and when I looked up at Kevin I saw we shared the same confused frown. If this man’s medical practices had somehow made an impact in modern medicine, I feared for humanity.

Inside the brochure was a short autobiography and a detailed description of how this man’s primitive concepts of medicine had transformed the industry. I felt a sting of surprise in my chest when I recognized Rufus’s name on the paper in my hands.

My stab wounds hadn’t been immediately fatal, and Nigel had called the doctor. I had left my pack…full of modern medicine. He had used the medication that I had brought back for myself! Not surprisingly, modern medicine or not, Rufus didn’t last long under his care. He died a few days later, but the doctor must have been intrigued by my seemingly “miracle” medication. Dr. Garrison conducted experiments with what was left of my muscle relaxers and pain medications and compared his results to his knowledge of opiates. He had made a deal with Mrs. Weylin, and had used the slaves on the plantation as subjects for his experiments. The brochure didn't mention my part in it, or anything similar to the outlandish reality. But it was the only explanation that filled in the gaps between incompetence and a plantation of people forced to act as experimental test subjects.

 “Do you want to go inside?” Kevin asked me, cautiously. I realized that this must have been his second time asking me this, and the most I could do was nod. There was a small gallery area in the entrance room, and on the walls hung aged posters in shiny frames preserving them. Illustrated with smiling white faces and diseased, suffering black bodies, the posted screamed at down at us, We buy diseased slaves! and Put your sick and injured slaves to use! Sell now! My stomach turned and I felt nauseous. I grabbed Kevin by the arm, and he saw in my eyes what I couldn’t say out loud.

“My God,” Kevin gasped, as we walked quickly  away from the house and down the road back to town. “All those people…” he trailed off, lost in thought. I breathed in the fresh air and reminded myself where I was. Rufus was dead, and he couldn’t call me back. There was nothing I could do for those people, for my friends.

The brochure didn’t mention what had happened to Margaret Weylin after she made a deal with the doctor, or the fate of Rufus’s children, my ancestors. Rufus had sent them away to his aunt in Baltimore. Hopefully she accepted them as family. At the very least, Joe and Hagar had to survive, because I was still here.

“It’s over,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do to change any of it now.”

“I know.” He drew a deep breath. “I wonder what happened to the slaves I helped escape—maybe they stayed free…” He rubbed the scar on his forehead. “I can’t stand to think about someone like that finding them…conducting experiments.” He said that last word like it was a curse word.

It was based upon these early experiments that lead to the regrowth technology that had mended my severed arm. Without the horrible actions of this man, I would still have the stump that I remember seeing, the empty place.

I touched the healing outline of Tom Weylin’s boot that had cut into my face, and looked down at my left arm. I wiggled my fingers one after the other, watching the new, slightly lighter skin pull down with each stroke. I looked at Kevin, at the scar on his forehead, and wondered if there was a new medical technology that could heal that too.

Kevin let out a sigh. “Why did I even want to come here. You’d think I would have had enough of the past.”

“You probably needed to come here for the same reason I did,” I replied, still examining the skin of my new arm. With my right index finger I traced a line from where Rufus had grabbed me to my wrist, and felt the softness of the new skin. “To try to understand. To find solid evidence that that those people existed. To reassure yourself that you’re sane.”

Kevin looked back towards the Weylin house, the museum that preserved some unfamiliar part of the past. “If we told anyone else about this, anyone at all, they wouldn’t think we were so sane,” he said, his gaze still fixed behind us.

“We are,” I said. “And now that Rufus is long dead, we have some chance of staying that way.”