Read Out There: a novel for Free Online Page B

the minimum number of years required to get through college and then medical school. When he’d come up with the number seven—some people graduated from regular college in three years, he knew—he looked again at Dr. Wesleyan. She must have graduated from high school at age fourteen, he decided.
    “Hey, good afternoon. How’s it going?” he said finally.
    “I’m doing well, thank you. It’s Jefferson, right?”
    “Yep.”
    She sat down across from him in the swivel chair. It looked far more comfortable than either of the two metal chairs, but it was clearly labeled “the doctor’s chair” in an unlabeled way, so he hadn’t thought of sitting in it. He chuckled a little to himself at the thought of this young woman in front of him being a medical doctor. She was probably the same age as he was.
    “So what brings you in here today, Jefferson?” she began—a little too quickly, he thought. Wasn’t there going to be a warm-up joke or two? Wasn’t there going to be a moment for him to get to know her before the serious talk began? But the doctor had jumped straight in, and now she plowed right ahead in what seemed to him a droning singsong, hardly stopping to draw breath.
    He thought he’d uttered some sort of answer, and then she’d gone on to ask him about when he’d first gone over to Iraq and where he’d been stationed exactly, the name of his unit, his commanding officer’s name, what his title had been, what kind of daily assignments he’d been given—“You know, just a few of the details, to give me a little of the background of your experience.” Once she’d recorded all of that, she explained, they could get on to whatever he wanted to talk about.
    Jefferson heard all of this, and yet he didn’t. He was trying so very hard to concentrate on what she was asking of him—he knew it must be important but his head was beginning to have a strange watery feel to it, a dizziness that the purplish hue of the room’s fluorescent lights accentuated. Her words swam at him like the faces of people he had seen in a long-ago dream. And just as Jefferson began to grasp the fact that these words were in fact people he had known, not just ones he’d dreamed, they became butterflies escaping her mouth, lovely free creatures circumnavigating the room. He watched the doctor’s eyebrows move up and down, the up-and-down of her lips. And this odd squinting thing she did with her nose—an unattractive little antic in an otherwise soft face. He glanced back at the ceiling, where the butterflies were now disappearing into the metal grate of an air conditioning vent. Suddenly he found himself wondering why he was sitting in this blue room.
    “What was the question again?”
    “Right, so I know that was a lot to throw at you—but can you just tell me a little about yourself?” She smiled a sweet-seeming smile as she sat, her pen poised over the yellow legal pad that lay on her lap, and for a moment Jefferson wondered if she had practiced the expression in her bathroom medicine cabinet mirror. He wanted to believe that the doctor was on his side, that she could help him answer the question Why? But something inside his brain was preventing him from believing it. Jefferson knew this was most likely his own problem, that his lack of trust was due to a problem—a temporary problem, but acute at the moment—with his brain, that it had nothing at all to do with Dr. Wesleyan or her intentions. It was true that she was young and most likely inexperienced, and that she could have used a little work on her bedside manner. She probably worked too hard to have a boyfriend to loosen up her smile. It didn’t mean she was an enemy.
    “My name is Jefferson Long Soldier,” he said, and stopped. As soon as he heard his own voice, the sound of his own name inside that calm, blue room, he felt he could not say any more.
    The doctor wrote something on her yellow paper and looked up at him, waiting. “And you were with the