Scene 5 - October 14th

Interior Hospital Room, Evening

Quinn Kaufman

“Your son is here to see you, Mr. Kaufman,” the nurse called to my father as she opened the door to his room. “Just remember, visiting hours are over in forty five minutes, okay?” she said to me.

I nodded politely, waiting until she had left and closed the door behind her to walk over to dad, grumbling, “One day, when I run this hospital, everyone will know what being nonbinary means.”

Dad smiled up at me from the bed where he lay. “You’ll change the world for sure, kiddo,” he agreed. “But in the meantime, you just have to struggle through. It’s not worth it to fight every little battle, not with people you’ll never see again.”

“I know, I know.”

“So...” he glanced around and lowered his voice as though about to discuss something illicit. “You got the goods?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I got the goods.” I produced a container of stew and handed it to him along with a spoon. “I don’t know why you always have me smuggle this in. I mean, surely you’re used to hospital food by now, right?”

“It’s the principal of the thing,” he declared, popping it open. “Like the man says, ‘Tell me not, in mournful numbers, / Life is but an empty dream!— / For the soul is dead that slumbers, / And things are not what they seem.' In other words,” he explained, taking a sip, “you have to take pleasure in the little things. Like good food, even when you’re in the hospital. And on that note, yum! How much garlic did you use?”

“I just threw in all the cloves I could find in the cupboard,” I joked.

He frowned at me. “You didn’t buy extra? I know I’ve taught you better than that.”

“I thought about it,” I explained, “but any more wouldn’t have fit in the pot.”

“That’s no excuse,” he scolded, “we have a bathtub.”

“But the bathtub is full of eels.”

“Why is the bathtub full of eels?”

“Couldn’t fit any more in the hovercraft.”

Dad broke down at that point, and that set me off. It was an occasional game of ours - to respond with more and more ridiculous statements until we couldn’t handle it anymore.

Eventually the laughter died down and we just grinned at each other for a moment. “Which man was that, anyway?” I asked after the moment past, scratching at the back of the neck.

“Hmm?”

“The poem you quoted.”

“Ah. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He wrote Paul Revere’s Ride, among other things,” Dad told me when I didn’t immediately recognize the name. He taught poetry at the University of New Venice, and was a world-renowned scholar in poetic circles. “That was the opening stanza of A Psalm of Life. You ought to recognize it - or at least the line ‘footprints on the sands of time’.”

“A good line,” I agreed.

“Indeed.”

I scratched at my wrist as I began telling Dad about my day. Whatever had made the suit so itchy had been left behind after I took it off, and I couldn’t wait to take a shower later tonight.

“You okay, kiddo?” Dad asked a few minutes later. “You’ve been scratching a lot. Do you have a rash? I could call the nurse back...”

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “It’s from... well...” I paused. “I was going through some of the attic stuff earlier, and I found something in the wardrobe while I was sorting through clothes.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it was this weird thing that Mom made. A suit - like, a superhero suit.”

Dad went still. “Was it labeled?” he asked after a moment. “Psychic Augmenter?”

“Mark 4, yeah.” I told him.

He sighed. “That was a project which consumed your mother’s life for three years,” he told me. “You know Laura was trying to research cosmic-powered metahumans, right?”

“Yeah.”

“She had a theory that a commonality between a lot of cosmic-powered heroes was that their powers were psychic,” Dad explained. “Some kind of difference in the their nerves and brain tissue that broke the laws of physics in a different way than magically-powered heroes. She wanted to find a way to grant that to everyone - ‘to awaken the latent psychic powers in all of us’.”

“Sounds like a cool idea. What went wrong?” I asked. After all, if it had worked, the thing wouldn’t have been packed away in our attic - it would have revolutionized the world. “Funding dry up?”

He nodded. “The first version didn’t do much to the rats it was being tested on. The second seemed to do something, but it wasn’t clear what, so the third version was made for people. As I recall, results suggested that the nerves were being enhanced - faster reaction times and the like while wearing it - but people got incredible migraines after only a few minutes, and the results wore off. Laura was certain that the fourth model worked, and that it would awaken dormant powers, but...” He sighed. “Turns out that people don’t actually have dormant psychic powers. The migraines of the third model were precursors to people’s neural systems melting, which happened in only a minute or so with the fourth. Funding failed pretty quickly after that,” he said, dryly. “...you didn’t wear it, did you?”

I met his worried eyes. “Um...” He began to look panicked. “Just for a few minutes!” I tried to defend myself. “And I’m fine! Just itchy from whatever the thing was made of!”

“Itchy!” he demanded. “Quinn, you could be hurt! What if the itching is a sign of nerve damage!?”

“I don’t think that’s how nerve damage works,” I said, trying to placate him.

“You may be a med student, but I was married to a neurologist for eleven years,” He insisted, pressing a button on the side of his hospital bed to call a nurse. “I’m getting you an MRI.”

“We can’t afford that, Dad!” I protested.

He glared at me. “We’ll find a way. I need to know you’re okay, kid.”

“Is something wrong?” asked a nurse - not the same one who had led me here - opening the door to see me and my father glaring at each other.

“My idiot child exposed themself to a substance that may have damaged their nerves or brain,” he told her, still glaring at me. “I’d like them to get an MRI.”

“I’m fine!” I said again. “I’m fine,” I told the nurse.

“Sure,” he said placatingly. “I’ll just get a doctor about those tests for your daughter, alright Mr. Kaufman?” he told my dad, then left before I could protest that I wasn’t his daughter any more than I was his son.

“Let it go, Quinn,” Dad told me as I sank into a seat. “And you’re getting that scan.”