The doctors organized their notepads and papers and started to file out of the room as if all other questions had fled their minds. Dr. Hemaz indicated to Lilly to follow him out of the room and past the dispersing crowd. The pair of nurses who helped earlier were doing a good job ushering the curious onlookers back to work, assuring them the charts and logs would be available after their shifts were completed.
Dr. Hemaz led Lilly down a few halls until they arrived at a particular hall with black tape on the carpeted ground and a distant eye chart.
Lilly was instructed to stand on the line and she covered one eye to stare at the chart, “Let’s start here.” Dr. Hemaz stated as he pointed at the twenty-thirty vision line.
“Too easy!” she easily rattled off the very bottom line instead, twenty-fifteen—she got them all right.
“Well,” Dr. Hemaz said, noticing the dilemma, “we are going to need to make a stronger chart for you.” It didn’t take long, a few measurements and a couple hot copies off the printer later and he had several new rows of letters taped below the twenty-fifteen vision line. “Start here,” he pointed at the row below the one she just did.
“B, E, F, H, E, T, L, F,” he marked down her answers and told her to move down to the next row. She rattled off more letters. His eyebrows rose as he told her to move down to the next row; he didn’t say if her answers were correct or not. The next row was actually a bit hard to read; she had slight difficulties with a few of the letters but managed to finish the line.
After that line she was instructed to go one more down and after that another row down. She struggled to complete the second to last line. Dr. Hemaz had her switch which eye instead of moving on, so she covered her opposite eye and repeat the lines starting at the one below the twenty-fifteen line. Once she finished down to the second-to-last line Dr. Hemaz finally talked again, “Well, the line below 20/15 was 20/10, that’s twice the vision of a normal human, after that was 20/6 then 20/4. The bottom row is the vision quality of a hawk or eagle. Try it, first with your right eye.”
She could barely make out the letters, “Uh, B, G, K, K, L, F, F, H?” she knew she had to have been wrong; they never put two of the same letter next to each other on these tests.
He marked down the letters then told her to switch eyes. She did as she was told and repeated the line, somehow she getting different letters, now she knew she was wrong.
“On the left eye you got them all correct up to 20/4, where you missed one letter, then 20/2 where you missed five. On the right eye you got them all correct up to 20/2, where you missed only three letters. According to these results you have the eye sight just short of an eagle, something that was thought to be completely impossible to the human physique, until now,” he snapped his metal clipboard shut and continued, “Now time for the next, test, I want to see if this change has, in any way, affected your movement or endurance.”
Lilly followed the doctor to the hospital’s brand new rehab gym, taking several turns and passing what was considered her room. He went up to the patient desk at the gym and ordered a standard long sleeve gray shirt and sweats for Lilly. She went into an unused room next to the gym and changed into the gym clothes, expecting to be stuck running on some treadmill in the gym. Once she met up with him again Dr. Hemaz did something surprising, he went directly for a password-locked door at the back end of the gym, punched in a code, and exited the rehab gym revealing a cloudy day.
He motioned for her to follow. She was confused as to why he chose not to use the gym equipment, sure she felt the equipment was pointless and a waste of time, but also ecstatic that they didn’t go near the machines. As the pair stepped outside Dr. Hemaz pulled a white brimmed hat and a pair of grey gloves out of a small black bag, “Put these on, you’ll need them.”
As Lilly placed the hat on her head and covered her hands with the gloves she took note for the first time of the lack of her parents, she expected at least a visit, “I haven’t seen my parents since the gunshot. What happened to them? My mom would be worried about me.” She slowly twisted her head around, smelling the warm moist concrete and noticing the graffiti on the white wall across from them. The backdoor exited into what appeared to be an abandonded employee parking lot, only a pair of dumpsters and the graffiti to keep it company.
“Parents, well. Your dad is in jail for attempted murder and your mother still thinks you’re dead, even when we tried to convince her otherwise. She saw you get back up, and saw you get dragged off to the hospital, but no matter the circumstances she cannot be convinced you’re alive. We haven’t told her you’re awake now.”
“You haven’t told her? And my dad is in jail?”
“Oh, yes it was fairly obvious; the police arrested him moments after you were rushed out of the house, his finger prints were found on the gun and gunpowder was on his hand. The evidence piled up against him is so convincing that he’s going away for a long time .”
Lilly took a good look at Dr. Hemaz’s face. Noticing he was completely serious her eyes steered back to the sidewalk now in front of her, “And you didn’t tell my mom I’m awake because…?”
“I don’t know, it didn’t seem important.”
Lilly thought that response was even odder than the first. As she remembered it, she shot herself in the head. She thought a patient not being dead was an important factor that doctors were supposed to tell the patient’s loved ones.
The pair didn’t have to walk far through the small neighborhood behind the hospital. The hospital was never supposed to grow as large as it did, but as more people decided suburban life was the way to grown the population that used it grew as well. Soon the hospital which was built to replace a large closed down high school, had taken up the entire several-acre plot and then some. It’s most recent construction, the wing Lilly’s room was in, had to buy out and bulldoze almost a dozen homes and remove a small cul-de-sac, resulting in the hospital pushing awkwardly into suburbia.
A short walk from the back door through the empty alley/parking lot and a turn to the left was a neatly repaved sidewalk, courtesy of the hospital which partly destroyed it during construction. The particular side of the hospital they exited out to didn’t actually have an official entrance, only a side door, this was to prevent unwanted hospital-related traffic from brothering the local residents any more than they had to. A couple blocks down the street, with the two-story rehab wing still in sight the sidewalk was lined with neat houses, each with a considerable amount of front yard and nicely trimmed green grass, required by the home association.
The fresh sent of trimmed grass only grew as they moved another block to a three-way intersection, to the right more houses, in front of them as far as they could see was a never-ending street the road and houses rolling ever-so-slightly with the hilly terrain, and to the left, just off the corner and behind a row of houses was a park. A distant lawnmower roared from somewhere deep in the park, but otherwise it was entirely empty. During this time of day, it being a weekday, any visitors would be at the very far side, with the play structures and children too young for school instead of the grass field and quarter-mile dirt track circle surrounding it.
As Lilly’s feet touched the dirt track Dr. Hemaz, acting as if the current conversation about her parents wasn’t as interesting as Lilly thought it was, asked her, “Ready?”
“Sure,” she was completely stumped. Nothing seemed to make any sense at all, but she wanted to learn what happened as much as he did—she wanted to do this.
“Okay, first I want you to try to run the track. Go as fast as you can, but don’t push yourself too much. If you feel dizzy or nauseous, stop immediately. I don’t want you to hurt yourself..” he glanced down and a metal clipboard he produced out of the small bag and glanced at the chart, his assumptions were written on the paper. Lilly glanced over real quick and saw that, if his guesses were correct she would either collapse because of her low blood pressure, or go faster than a normal athlete because her regulated, slow heartbeats would allow her to push her body much further.
And she took off. At first her speed was quite normal, but she slowly went faster and faster and faster. He clocked her first lap as she continued around the track. “Fifty-six seconds!” he yelled, the speed of a trained runner. She barreled around the second lap, this time with her speed up to par with professional runners. As she zipped by Dr. Hemaz, he checked the clock, “39.8 seconds!”. she just beat the world record! She zoomed around the third lap, “34.4 seconds!” fourth lap—this seemed impossible! “Twenty-eight seconds!” There was no way this is possible!
“Stop!” he yelled out at the track. She froze in a quick halt on the opposite side of the track. He looked shocked she was able to hear him while going so fast. She just ran a mile in two and a half minutes. Impossible.
“Come here, quick,” he spoke at a normal volume to see if she could still hear him. On cue she jogged across the middle of the track and approached him. “Come closer.” He beckoned, pointing at her arm. She lifted her arm and handed it to him. He placed two fingers on her wrist to count her pulse as he admired her breathing. Her breaths were slow and controlled. The mile was easy for her. He pulled his fingers away from her cold skin and jotted down the results: pulse, twelve. It managed to rise. If twelve is what it rose to after a mile, then her body could take a lot more before she was pushed to the limit..
“Well?” Lilly’s voice was calm and controlled. “That was actually easy.” She actually enjoyed running the mile, it felt—good.
“Can you go faster?” he asked. It was fairly obvious the collapsing factor he feared wasn’t going to happen.
She smiled at the doctor. “I’ll try.” She took off; this time her start wasn’t as rusty, thirty seven seconds the first lap. Twenty-eight seconds the second. Fourteen the third- how could someone move this fast? Then, she was gone. A sickly cloud of black smoke slowly evaporated across from Dr. Hemaz, at the exact location she was at a moment ago. He stopped the clock and threw his hands into the air, shouting at no one in particular, “What the hell!?”
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