The improbability-proof control cabin of the Heart of Gold looked like a perfectly conventional spaceship except that it was perfectly clean because it was so new. Some of the control seats hadn't had the plastic wrapping taken off yet. The cabin was mostly white, oblong, and about the size of a smallish restaurant. In fact it wasn't perfectly oblong: the two long walls were raked round in a slight parallel curve, and all the angles and corners of the cabin were contoured in excitingly chunky shapes. The truth of the matter is that it would have been a great deal simpler and more practical to build the cabin as an ordinary three-dimensional oblong room, but then the designers would have got miserable. As it was the cabin looked excitingly purposeful, with large video screens ranged over the control and guidance system panels on the concave wall, and long banks of computers set into the convex wall. In one corner a robot sat humped, its gleaming brushed steel head hanging loosely between its gleaming brushed steel knees. It too was fairly new, but though it was beautifully constructed and polished it somehow looked as if the various parts of its more or less humanoid body didn't quite fit properly. In fact they fitted perfectly well, but something in its bearing suggested that they might have fitted better.
Perhaps you noticed in the above paragraph that everything is just a little bit off. The room. Walls. Computers. Robot. It's as though Salvador Dali created the Millennium Falcon or Enterprise. Science fiction with a side of surrealism.
My days this week have seemed slightly surreal. Tomorrow will be my last day to work for the surgery center my sister built. Ever. I'm not really working at the surgery center anymore. I'm working at the idea of the surgery center. A little over a month ago, the physical surgery center ceased to exist. It was packed up, emptied out, and mothballed. Right now, I'm working with the surgery center staff at a temporary location, doing surgery center stuff. (It's difficult to follow, I know.) Thus, the essence of the surgery center sort of still exists, in the staff and work and patients.
However, after tomorrow, that essence will cease to exist for me. I will register patients for the last time. Assemble charts for the last time. Answer phones for the last time. For about nine hours, I will still be able to call myself a surgery center employee. Then all that will vanish forever. No returning. No looking back.
Truth be told, this last month of work has felt like a long goodbye. Like I've been sitting on an airplane for over 30 days, waiting for my flight to take off. Nothing has really felt quite . . . right. Behind my desk where I register patients now, a clock is mounted on the wall. The battery in the clock has been slowly dying, so it is forever slow or fast, the second hand tick, tick, ticking in the same spot for hours. It's my own little version of The Persistence of Memory, the clock melting on the wall behind me.
Tomorrow, at about 2:30 p.m., that clock will stop ticking as I pack up my things and leave for the last time. When I turn off the lights and close the door, everything will remain frozen in that final moment. The desk I'm using right now used to be my sister's, the one that sat in her office for over 25 years. I sort of have this vision of me turning around as I leave the office tomorrow afternoon and seeing her sitting at the desk, like she always did, smiling and saying, "I'll see you tomorrow, Mart."
That is what I will be losing. The last living part of my sister. She will pass into memory and be gone. Forever. Only my friend, Missy, who still works with me at the surgery center, gets that. She was one of my sister's best friends. Is one of my best friends. She knows that my sister is going to die for me again tomorrow. One last time.
Saint Marty is a little haunted tonight.
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