Jane Actually

yourself, Mary. I was thinking the same thing. I despised doctors and dentists, or at least in retrospect I did, and I am sorry you are suffering.”
    “Are you on the phone?” the dentist asked as he returned from taking a phone call himself. “I’m afraid we have a cell phone’s off policy in the office.”
    “No, I was talking to …” Mary realized it was more trouble than it was worth to explain to him that her friend was Jane Austen. She removed the earbud and put it back in her pocket.
    He “harumphed,” which the terminal did not translate for Jane, but she could understand his judgmental look—the look of a high priest who has found a supplicant noisily sucking a sweet during his service. He then lowered Mary’s chair and took a device that looked like a small metal gun, attached to a hose, and quickly applied it to the inside of Mary’s mouth. Jane saw Mary jump in the chair.
    “Oh you’re such a big baby,” he said to her. “That didn’t hurt.”
    Mary had to admit it didn’t, but the sound of the topical anaesthetic sprayed onto her gums had surprised her.
If he’d simply told me there would be a hissing sound, I wouldn’t have been surprised,
she thought.
    “It will just take a few seconds for it to numb up,” he said, and he glanced vacantly about the room while waiting. The dentist’s assistant/receptionist then appeared with a tray, which she handed him. He silently took the tray and put it to one side and then took from it a syringe.
    Jane thought it a rather alarming looking device, far more intimidating than the disposable syringes the medical profession had adopted. It was very large and the overhead light glistened off its shiny metal surface.
    “Open,” he told Mary, who seeing the device approaching her, shut her eyes tightly. “Just relax …”—he glanced over to his assistant who showed him the patient’s chart—”… Mary. You won’t feel a thing.”
    Jane observed Mary try to relax, but as she was in a chair with her feet above her head and awaiting the needle, she failed.
    Jane watched the needle enter Mary’s open mouth and then the doctor’s hands blocked her view, but when she saw the little jerk of Mary’s body …
    And then Jane realized she was on the floor and for the first time since she had died she realized that to all intents and purposes she had fainted. For one brief glorious instant her mind had shut down and now she was back. She slowly rose to her normal level and heard the dentist ask, “Now that didn’t hurt, did it?”
    “Yes it did,” Mary answered back with some vehemence, but she quickly added, “but not a lot.”
    Jane knew from this exchange that her … well, she had to call it unconsciousness … must have lasted only a second, but the experience unnerved her and she left the examination room and retreated to the hallway.
    She had been aware of every second of every minute of every day for almost two centuries and this was the first time a second, perhaps two, had elapsed without her consciousness. It was both glorious and so very frightening. She had heard the stories about the disembodied who had essentially forgot themselves, to have gone beyond the madness caused by their depravation and given up their being. They were anecdotal stories, of course, for like the world before the discovery of the afterlife, such an abandonment of self was a one-way trip.
    She wondered if her loss of consciousness was a taste of that abandonment and what was the cause of it. Was she so concerned for Mary that the sight of the needle caused her to panic? Was this a panic attack or what in her day would have been called hysteria?
    That thought revived her.
I do not suffer from hysteria,
she thought, even though that was arguably what happened.
I ridicule women who do
, she added, and she conjured the image of those characters she had created who loudly indulged in hysterics.
    To soothe herself, she imagined standing and smoothing her dress and feeling the cool muslin beneath her fingers, every wrinkle disappearing with each stroke. Finally she re-entered the examination room, and saw the dentist applying his drill to Mary’s tooth and the fine spray of water and tooth enamel that issued from her friend’s mouth.
    She quickly retreated to the hallway and remained there until Mary emerged a half hour later. Mary looked to her left and right, obviously trying to make contact with Jane, who connected to the AfterNet field.
    “I’m here Mary.