Judith Tarr - Household Gods

She throttled down hysteria. Look, she thought. Look at it. Study it. Make sense of it.

It wasn’t her arm. It was thinner — a great deal thinner. There were muscles on it, hard ropy muscles, no softness, no deskbound flab. Her arm was smooth-skinned and round and dusted with pale blond hairs, not these rougher and thicker dark ones. The skin was darker, too; not the darkness of a California tan but a warmer olive tone that had to be its natural shade. There was a scar above the wrist, a good two inches long. She had no scars, not on her arms.

This was not her arm. Nor her hand. Her hands were smooth, the nails filed and rounded and painted a light and unobtrusive shell-pink.

This was — these were, as the right emerged from the blanket to join the left — battered, callused. The nails were short and ragged. They had black dirt ground in under them. If these hands had ever seen a nail-file or an emery board, let alone a bottle of nail polish, it hadn’t been in years.

Hysteria yammered still, not far under her hard-fought calm. She looked around, not wildly but not what you’d call calmly either. No mirror on the wall. Mirror, mirror, she thought dizzily. Who’s the craziest of us —?

Calm. Be calm. She raised those stranger’s hands, those hands that answered when she called, and laid them shaking against her cheeks. Like a blind woman, she explored the face that, it seemed, she had come to live behind. Not her face, of course not. No soft, faintly sagging curves. No blunt German nose. This was leaner, longer, with cheekbones standing sharp in it, and a nose with a pronounced arch. She had to look — God, she couldn’t giggle, she’d break down completely — she had to look something, maybe a little more than something, like Sheldon Rosenthal.

Calm. Calm. Focus. Explore. Make this make sense. She ran her tongue over her — someone’s — teeth. They weren’t hers, any more than the rest of it. No years of orthodontia here. No caps, no crowns, no carefully cleaned and regularly brushed and flossed tributes to modern dentistry. These are crooked. One in front was broken. Two uppers and one lower, a molar, were gone, long gone, the gaps healed over, no sign of a wound.

One of those that hadn’t vanished still made its presence felt. It was broken, too, and ached, not horribly but persistently, as if it had settled in and meant to stay. She prodded it with a finger. It twinged. Her finger jerked away. Dentist, she wrote in a mental file. Find. Make appointment. Soonest.

Find where? Find how? Where was she?

Here. She was here. Wherever here was. She had to keep going. She had to take inventory. Right now she had two choices. She could fret about tiny details, or she could fall down in a screaming fit.

She wiped her finger on the blanket, shuddering a little at the scratchy wool, and reached up to touch her hair. It felt greasy, dirty between her fingers. It was shorter and curlier than her own — what she remembered as her own. Her scalp itched, too. Dandruff, she thought.

She pulled a strand forward to peer at it out of the corner of her eye. It was dark, dark brown, almost black — nothing like her own light brown shoulder-length professional woman’s cut with its faded blond rinse. The name of the rinse was as clear as if she’d read it on the wall: Amber Essence. She’d chosen it as much for its name as for what it did for her hair.

Nicole lowered the hand with care, folded back the blanket, and rose gingerly to feet that had not, till now, belonged to her. They were filthy, black with grime, hard-soled and ragged-nailed. They were — and this was almost a pleasure — both smaller and narrower than her own broad Austrian farmer’s feet. Cleaned and pedicured, they might have been something to look at.

They protruded from beneath the hem of a garment as completely unlike her Neiman-Marcus sweats as this body was unlike her own. Wool again — no wonder she wanted to scratch — dyed much the same color as the blanket. The rasp of her legs against it told her what her eyes confirmed as she pulled it up: they were desperately in need of shaving, though not grown out as full and shaggy as if they’d never been shaved at all. Under the furze of dark hair they were, like her arms, leaner, narrower, finer-boned, than the ones she’d always owned, with long ropes of muscles in the calves. The ankles were fine, finer than hers had ever been; her legs went to thunder thighs at the drop of a plate of strudel. No thunder thighs here. These were lean but shapely, muscled and strong, as if she — this body — worked out on the stair-stepper every day.

Her foot brushed something under the bed. She reached down and pulled out a pair of sandals that, for fancy leatherwork, would have run into three figures at a boutique on Ventura Boulevard — if they were new. These were anything but. The leather was faded and filthy and sweat-stained, and patched here and there.

For a moment, as she reached for the sandals, she’d touched something else. She hesitated, shutting down visions of skulls and bones and monsters under the bed. Go on. Find out everything.

She stooped and got a grip on the thing and pulled it out. Her nose wrinkled. Bigger than a skull, than two skulls, wide-mouthed, unglazed like the lamps, sloshing with acrid liquid: no doubt about it. She’d found the facilities. A chamberpot. A real, live chamberpot.

She wasn’t dreaming. Dreams didn’t take care of every last detail. Even fantasy gamers didn’t do that — and she’d seen a few when Frank was in his Multiple-User Dungeon phase. Dreams slid over the essentials of life: an unshaved leg, a half-full chamberpot, a bladder that told her in no uncertain terms it would like to finish filling the pot.

So she’d gone crazy, yes? Gone right around the bend. She’d never had such a detailed dream in her life.

She’d never heard of anyone going crazy quite like this. Delusions could come only from your own experience. She knew that. She’d seen it on TV, one night when she’d actually had time to watch, some shrink show or other, or maybe one of those movies, disease of the week, delusion of the decade, whatever. Maybe it was the shrimp she’d had for dinner. No, they’d been frozen. The ones from lunch at Yang Chow? God, shrimp twice a day. Not only was she in a rut; she was repeating herself from one meal to the next.

This sure wasn’t any repetition of anything she’d done before. She was feeling punchy again. She couldn’t get a grip on anything. This body she was in, this room, these things that were all completely and unmitigatedly strange — this was insanity. Had to be. The shrink show had talked about that, too. “Things aren’t real,” some thin intense person had said, rocking back and forth, talking to her — his — its knees pulled up to its chest. “Things don’t connect. The world isn’t there, not the world. You know? Just all this not-realness.”

This was not real, it could not be real, but it was as real as a stink in the nose, a prickle of wool, a taste of sour morning mouth and bad teeth and something she couldn’t identify and didn’t want to.

She got hold of what she could get hold of, which was an increasingly urgent need to use the bathroom. Except that, according to the chamberpot, there was no bathroom.

She glanced at the door. A bar lay across it, a heavy wooden thing lying on dark metal hooks. She had no desire, none whatsoever, to lift that bar and open that door and see what was on the other side of it. Even if it was her bedroom, or a nice safe insane asylum — because it might not be. It might be blank nothingness, or worse: it might be the world that went with this room.

She pulled up the tunic to identify the garment underneath: linen, she recognized that, though it was rougher than her linen suits, and undyed. It looked more like a loincloth than panties, and had no elastic to hold it up. She tugged at it. It came down over hips narrower than her own were — had been. What it had covered…