‘Are you his wife?’
Yes. Almost.
FRASER
‘Does she have any allergies?’
Not to medication.
AUDREY
‘Medications?’
Antidepressants.
FRASER
I got her sacked once. Over penguins.
AUDREY
It was the way he looked at me, over his glasses …
FRASER
We’re alive here and we’re dead somewhere else along the timeline.
AUDREY
‘We’re losing him.’ It hits so hard, so sharp, so deep, so loud I can’t survive it. I’m desperate,desperate, for this to be the other way around.
FRASER
A bolt of agony shoots along the length of the corridor, slicing me in half, along with time and space, opening some new black hole into which we’re all imploding …
AUDREY
… tumbling. Can’t catch my breath. There’s not enough oxygen on this earth for two. Is it me losing my life here?Is it?Or is it Fraser losing his?
FRASER
And she is beside me. Passing through this corridor. Passing through my life, in some inexplicable transformation that my atheist mind will forever fight to unravel as she slips into some parallel world, where this nightmare isn’t mine at all.
It’s hers.
THE END
21
AUDREY
Nobody tells you about the weightlessness of loss.
Isn’t it Fraser who is supposed to be having the out-of-body experience? Why does it feel like it’s me floating near the ceiling of this hospital room with a bird’s-eye view of my crisis?
From this angle, it doesn’t even resemble panic. He looks asleep on the bed while I just stand there, staring at him, the way a parent watches over a slumbering child.
No urgency. No rush. Nothing to be thought or said or done. Just me. Detached from him. From everything. An actor frozen onstage in the last moments of the final scene before the lights go down.
