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Belle doesn’t remember how it all began, when it began.
Doesn’t know if it's the first time when she watches Jack examine a little girl’s broken arm, saying I wish I could see through to her bones, or if she’s seen this before.
A flash of a picture, popping up in her head, something akin to a black and white drawing of the human skeleton, but it’s gone as quickly as it was there.
The time between the moment she woke up after the successful operation on her heart, and the moment where she got discharged from the hospital, is a hazy blur in her head.
She remembers fragments of conversations, sobbed, desperate words, I thought I lost you, and pieces of memories, like Jack’s lips pressed to her knuckles, but it’s all ripped out of context.
The next time she sees the picture a soft hum and a faint buzzing sound accompanies it. Followed by a click.
It’s not until it’s gone again when she realizes it’s not a sketch, like she first believed.
It’s a ghostly photograph showing the inside of a human body, the skull, the sternum, the ribs, everything , but the bones are fog-like shadows.
Belle can’t sleep for days.
She doesn’t tell Jack about it. She wants to, but he’s got so much to think, to do, to make happen , now that he’s head surgeon at the Port Victory Hospital.
Reading patient file after patient file is how she kills the time, the long stretch between the dark hours of the night and the first ray of morning light.
It’s then when she finds out about it and everything starts to make sense.
The patient, Mary Davis, 27 years old, has been complaining about “unexpected, vivid dreams while being fully awake”, and how they feel like they are “seemingly conjured by an unseen force.”
The doctor in charge sends the woman to the mental hospital where she dies years later.
Belle has read about something similar once in a book of witchcraft from 1572 she found in her grandmother's library back in London.
She forgot most of it, but she remembers the term that describes the phenomenon: visions.
She shuts the file and puts it back on the stack. She takes the candle from her desk and walks over to her bed, feeling the exhaustion of a long night in her bones.
On her bed she stares at the ceiling, wondering if what she just read could be her truth, too.
*
The picture of the skeleton doesn’t come back.
A part of her is relieved, the other part wishes she could have another look at it, now that she knows what it is – or what she thinks it is.
She keeps asking herself, would she be able to make out more details, could she experience it again? If she could hear the noise again, or if there’d be a smell of some sorts.
Belle attempts a drawing of her vision. It’s harder than one would think, putting something to paper you’ve only ever seen in your head.
She writes the date on it and a couple of notes, and adds the paper to her medical journal she keeps under her bed.
Belle has a strong feeling her seeing things wasn’t a one-time occurrence.
*
Lucas Smith, age seventeen, with a deep cut on his thigh, and a gaping wound on the back of his head, lies on the operating table, unconscious.
A knife fight with his brother.
The young man got stabbed in the thigh, stumbled backwards, fell and hit his head on the concrete.
“ Please , Doctor Dawkins, please help my brother,” the brother cries as a nurse drags him out of the operating theater. “I didn’t mean to hurt him! We were just messing around, please –”
Lucas’ trouser-leg is drenched in blood, and Belle swiftly cuts it open lengthways with a pair of scissors. The thick red liquid practically pours out of him.
The wound on his head is bleeding like hell as well, making a mess on the floor.
“We’ll have to work quickly, Belle. You go ahead and stop the bleeding on his head, careful not to slip on the blood. Hetty, I need your assistance with the leg.”
They stop the bleeding, stitch Lucas up.
They sanitize the wound, and bring him to the ward.
Still, the young man doesn’t make it, doesn’t wake up.
Lost too much blood.
“In 1928 the German Doctor Klett performed the very first successful blood transfusion of a young mother after she lost a lot of blood in childbirth,” Jack tells Belle as they clean the floor of the operating theater.
The cleaning rags are red in color, the water in the buckets dirty.
“The next time Klett did it, he proceeded the exact same way. It didn’t work. The blood thickened, couldn’t flow through the veins anymore and the patient died. The time after that, the patient lived.“
Belle hums, thinking.
She’s studied about the procedure of transferring blood from one human to another, as well as its difficulties.
“I can only speculate, Jack, but perhaps blood isn’t the same in every human. Maybe it’s made differently, in structure or in characteristics, maybe there are different types–”
And then and there, next to the viewing gallery of the theater with the weight of a lost soul bearing down on them, it happens again.
A picture flashes before Belle’s eyes, a pouch of blood hanging from the hook of metal pole , a narrow see-through tube, with blood in it, that runs from the bottom of pouch down to–
It’s gone before Belle can see the rest of it.
“Belle, darling, where did you just go?” Jack, who was just standing by the door to the preparation’s room, is now cupping her warm cheeks, his gaze full of worry.
She blinks, her mind floating somewhere between her daydream and reality. “I… uh. I’ve just – seen something.”
Jack's breath catches in his throat. “What did you see , Belle?”
The memory of the vision is fading away like a dream, one that you know the moment when you wake up but is gone the next, and Belle doesn't know how to answer.
Jack takes the rag with which she was cleaning gently out of her hand, and drops it into the bucket. Small drops of the brown liquid splatter on the floor.
With a steady hand on the small of her back, he leads Belle out of the operating theater to his office.
*
Though she promises him faithfully that she’s alright, just a little tired and overheated, Jack insists on examining Belle.
He listens to her heart, checks her pulse, but there’s nothing wrong there.
It’s beating wonderfully, Jack smiles, pressing a kiss to the nape of Belle’s neck. She sighs softly, all thanks to you.
Jack places the flat of his palm against Belle’s forehead. No fever. Skin’s warm, but that’s the weather.
Belle catches his eyes, holds them. I’m fine, Jack. No need to worry. She gives him a smile, but he just hums, thoughtful.
Pupils are slightly dilated , Jack says, to which Belle answers, that’s because I like looking at you work.
Despite Belle’s best efforts, it’s clear Jack knows something must be wrong. It’s in the crease between his eyebrows, in the serious tone of his words.
Jack leans against his desk. “You were right, Belle, you’re well. Physically speaking, at least. Heart rate’s good, no fever, no signs of an illness.”
He’s watching her, intently, and she can’t quite meet his gaze. “So what was that, just now, in the operating theater?”
Ever since he nearly lost Belle, Jack developed the habit of pulling skin between his thumb and forefinger whenever he’s anxious about something.
He did it in the moments before they announced the new head-surgeon of the Port Victory Hospital on the town square.
He did it when he visited her the first time after he got bailed out of jail when it wasn’t clear if she’d make a full recovery.
He’s doing it now.
The last thing Belle wanted is for Jack to worry about her.
But now that he’d been there when she had a vision, seen how it affected her, not telling him about it would make things much worse.
And by the look of it, her silence is already doing its damage.
Jack thumbs at the skin of the inside of his elbow, pulls it and releases it, pulls again, so hard that it must hurt, and Belle can see his cubital vein through his skin –
Behind her eyes the picture of before completes itself. The thin blood-filled tube, running towards the arm of a patient, ending inside of it, and a sort of bandage holding it in place.
There’s a voice this time, and it’s so clear as if someone’s saying it into her ear. And still, Belle can only understand pieces of sentences.
Something about antigens and red blood cells, about cross matching and something that’s called rhesus factor. Then letters start to float across the vision–
Belle doesn’t have a feeling of how long she was trapped in her vision, but suddenly Jack’s alarmed voice comes through to her. “ Belle !”
It brings her back to reality with force, and she takes a sharp breath in, clutching at her heart. Two visions within half an hour. That’s a record.
“What was that, Belle? What’s going on? Please , you’re scaring me.”
The look in Jack’s eyes is a million things at once, and Belle knows she can’t run from this anymore.
*
So Belle tells him everything, about the photo of the skeleton, the buzzing and the click, about the blood pouch on the pole, the words she’s heard, the letters.
She tells him everything, unfiltered and without leaving out a single detail.
Jack holds her hands all the way through.
*
“So, what I am hearing is that your… visions are triggered by something I say or do in a situation that has to do with… medicine?”
Belle huffs out a laugh, staring at her shoes. They’re red at the sides, from the blood. “It sounds insane when you say it out loud.”
“Here’s what we’re going to do. Everytime it happens, Belle, you write it down. What you saw, what you heard. As detailed as you can manage. The trigger, if you can identify it. The duration. The feelings you have before, during and after.”
Jack scratches the stubble on his chin. “I will pick up a notebook from the stationery shop. You’ll carry it with you at all times. Wherever you go, bring it.”
Belle’s mouth goes dry when she understands. “You want to see if there’s a pattern.”
*
Eight months later, Belle fills the last page of her fifth notebook.
It’s a sketch of the electrocardiogram . An old white-bearded man in a black suit will invent it. In fifty years from now, in 1902. It’ll measure the electrical activity of the heart.
Every new word she comes across in her visions – prophecies would be the better word, anyway – she writes down in a separate notebook, along a definition.
Belle doesn’t get how the more advanced inventions in her visions work. It’s beyond what the humans of this generation can understand.
Still, she tries.
Next to the term ultrasonic device stands in an elegant handwriting: a map of the body's insides using sound.
Followed by a word-for-word explanation from a nurse for a little boy in a white-walled hospital. The doctors suspect a tumor in his abdomen, and he asks how the device works that they use to examine him.
“You know how when you shout in a cave, the sound bounces back? Well, it's like that, Max, but much more precise. This device sends out sound waves, which bounce off different parts inside your body. By measuring how long it takes for the sound waves to return and how they bounce back, the doctors can create an image of what's inside.”
The more visions Belle has and the more she focuses when they come, the more she can memorize, and then put to paper once it is over.
Sometimes she has a feeling that a vision is near, and she’d experience visual disturbances, like zigzag lines or flashing lights, and the tips of her fingers start to tingle.
On some days she can even tell when she wakes up in the mornings, that something’s afoot. It makes things easier. To have a warning.
And then there are periods of time, the longest has been four weeks, where nothing happens. No new vision, no old one, no bodily signs.
After the fourth month, it’s abundantly clear that there’s no observable pattern, no matter how hard they try to find one. The time between the visions differs and it’s not bound to a place.
It’s not always Jack who triggers a vision, like they thought at first.
It’s all completely random.
The only thing that unites all of the visions – and that’s what they’ve come to understand, what they choose to believe – is that they show medical progress, if not in chronological order.
Some inventions and discoveries seem to be closer to them in the timeline of things, others appear to be so far in the future Belle has no words to describe what she sees.
Then she makes a drawing of what she saw, hoping the vision comes again, so she can understand better. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
One invention she’s seen seven times.
The cat-scan is a hollow cylinder made of metal that rotates around a long table, on which the patient lies that’s being examined. The cylinder starts to vibrate, and things called sensors detect the vibration and create an image, offering insights into ailments and injuries. There’s a soft whirring of gears as the apparatus works and the occasional metallic click.
And then there are other inventions, she has only seen once. Sometimes it’s detailed enough for a written entry, and other times it’s just a sketch that doesn’t show much.
One is of a flat rectangle container with about thirty individual see-through compartments, containing white small beads, and a few yellow ones. They are arranged in rows. Written above each compartment are the days of the week.
After this vision Belle was left with an incredible feeling of empowerment, the feeling of having a choice, and to her, that was enough.
*
Belle barges into Jack's office without knocking, without telling him she’d come see him today, in the exact moment when Jack dips the feather quill into the black ink pot on his desk.
If Belle wouldn’t have almost died a year back, he would have said that day she’s given him the fright of his life.
Her chest is heaving with exertion, having run all the way from home to the hospital. She’s wearing a cute light blue dress and a couple of strands of hair have fallen out of her bun.
The black ink spills all over the paper, a medical form Jack was just filling in for a patient, making it illegible in a matter of seconds.
“Belle!”
The dark liquid runs to the edge of the desk, trickling down on the floor. Jack scootches back with his chair just in time for it to not stain his trousers.
Some of it did get on his fingers by accident, and on the palm of his hand too, and he holds them away from his body, instinctively, trying not to ruin the sleeves of his shirt.
Belle sees it, feels sorry for a fraction of a second, then remembers why she’s here, starts grinning and blurts out, “Oh, my Goodness, Jack, you won’t believe what will happen in 1954!”
Jack looks at her with big, expectant eyes.
She grins some more. “Come on, have a guess.”
“I don’t know– God, you startled me, Belle. Want me to give me a heart attack one of these days? I am only 29. This better be something good, darling.”
He gestures helplessly at the papers, which are now more black than white, and the ink that seeps into the wood of the desk.
“I will have to start all over again. And you know, I’m still not good at writing and all that.”
Belle waves it off. Jack will forget all about that medical form once she tells him about what she just had a vision of. “I promise I will help you with it later. But I think you want to hear this first.”
“So?”
“Organ transplantation. Kidney.”
Jack gets up from his chair quickly, as if a hundred bees at once stung his cute arse, running his ink-stained hands through his hair, instantly turning some of the strands black.
Belle is so in love with him.
“That is the first thing on my list. Not the kidney, but it makes sense since we have two–”
Belle can’t contain her happiness anymore, runs into his arms, and he wraps her hands around her, the black ink on hands be damned. “It is,” she whispers into his neck. “It does."
The day Belle told Jack about the prophecies of the future, Jack stayed up all night and wrote a list.
A list that he’d kept in his breast pocket as a lucky charm for weeks, until Belle found it by chance.
A list in messy handwriting with spelling errors in every word and a sentence structure that was none at all.
A list of ideas, of things he would want to do as a surgeon if he had the means and the knowledge of a future medic.
And the first thing that came to his mind that night was the wish to give a human whose heart was failing the one of another who didn’t need it anymore.
“What use is a perfectly good heart in the body of someone who is gone if it could save the life of another? I thank the stars everyday that you lived, Belle. But not everyone, certainly not in this era, will be as lucky as me.”
*
On a beautiful spring day, the sun casts a gentle glow through the oak tree's leaves, creating a dappled pattern on the ground below.
A knitted blanket is spread out underneath the branches of the tree, and Jack and Belle sit side by side. The temperature is just right – not too warm – with a gentle breeze that ripples the water of the lake.
Scattered on the blanket is what’s left of lunch, empty plates that held chicken and egg sandwiches not long ago, a half-full bottle of lemonade and a handful of grapes. Some have been stolen by a flock of ducks that waddled over, and sneakily took them in their little beaks, when Jack and Belle were distracted by kisses and wandering hands.
This morning Belle has finished writing another chapter of her book. The papers are tucked underneath the woven picnic basket to keep the wind from carrying them away. “Will you read it to me, darling?” Jack asks, turning his head to Belle, who braids violet hyacinths into the flower crown she just made.
Belle smiles, gently putting the flower crown next to the blanket in the grass. She reaches for the papers, pulls them from underneath the basket and carefully unfolds them. Jack lies his head into Belle's lap and closes his eyes.
“London, St. Mary Hospital. September 3rd, 1928,” Belle begins, running her fingers through Jack’s hair while holding the papers in her other hand. “In a laboratory a medic in a white smock, and a black bow tie, just made a revelation that would forever change the course of medicine. I stand beside him, in awe of mother nature revealing a secret right in front of my eyes. The man has no idea I’m there, because in reality, I’m not. He picks up a black device from his desk, a so-called recorder, and makes an entry:
There, amidst my experimental chaos, lay a seemingly forgotten petri dish teeming with Staphylococcus bacteria. Yet, something peculiar had occurred—Penicillium notatum mold had intruded upon the bacterial colonies. In a moment of curiosity, I observed an unusual phenomenon: a clear ring surrounding the mold where the bacteria failed to thrive.
The name of the medic in this story is Alexander Fleming,
and he just discovered Penicillin.”
*
They don’t know what they are, or why they happen. But Belle’s visions, her prophecies , have become a beacon of hope, if only just for them.
That medicine will continue to progress, that inventions will make the lives of doctors easier, that discoveries will save lives.
Time will make it happen.
Belle and Jack won’t live to see it all, as much as they’d want to,
but what they can do is pave the way,
for the humans that come after them.
*