The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer Read Free Book Online

procedures can be hard.”
    “Everything is changed.”
    “The doctor said you might not remember. Don’t worry about that now.”
    “All right,” I said. I am not one to spoil an enchantment. I looked down at my left arm and saw it was in a plaster cast. With my other hand I touched the cool surface. I could feel the break inside it, and let out a gasp of pain.
    “What is it?”
    I looked into his face, so altered by this clean, smooth jaw and close haircut and whatever life he’d had in this world, and yet instantly him, instantly the headstrong Nathan. I said the obvious: “I’ve broken my arm.”
    “Yes,” he said. “There was an accident.” I tried to lift my body. “Don’t try getting up,” he said, taking my shoulders in his hands to place me back in bed, but I flinched from his touch; I felt I would die if he touched me like that, after all this time.
    “Don’t,” I said. “Something’s changed.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’m not from here. I’m not who you think I am.”
    “Darling, I know you’re confused,” he said, sitting down.
    But I was no longer listening. For out the window I saw there was a change to my view. A billboard, set on a rooftop, whose message never existed in my world.
    “What year is it?”
    He tried to keep the concern from his face as he squeezed my hand. “I have a sleeping pill in the other room, the doctor said it would be harmless—”
    “Nathan, what year is it?”
    “It’s nineteen forty-one, darling. November first, nineteen forty-one.”
    “Of course,” I said. “It’s all coming back to me.” And as he stroked my hair I tried to smile. I looked out at the billboard with its man-high, looping mint green letters:

    N INETEEN FORTY-ONE—A WORLD of other choices, other chances! With antique taxis honking in the streets, and brass-buttoned policemen shouting from Sixth Avenue, and giant women’s hats floating by the gate of Patchin Place like jellyfish, army boys shouting at girls, the smell of cigarettes and roasted chestnuts, with factory smoke thickening the air—here it was, Manhattan of another time, and not only had my Nathan never left me in this world. Here, he had married me.
    So there were at least three lives to lead. A life in 1918, with a husband away at war. A life in 1941, with him here by my side. There was no question it was the procedure that had brought this impossibility about, but how could I get back? And would it last only as long as the electricity did? Or would I leap every night, from star to star, until I reached a beginning? Or an end?
    “It’s all coming back to me,” I said. And as he stroked my hair I tried to smile. I struggled to right myself: 1941. Be here , I told myself. Be this Greta .
    There had been a car accident, he told me. Almost three weeks before. This Greta I was inhabiting, she had broken more than her arm; she had broken her mind as well, I understood, had become a sad and hysterical wife to this Nathan, dressed in his army doctor uniform. A psychiatrist had been called in, a friend of Nathan’s—a Dr. Cerletti, of course—and with hushed tones and drawn curtains had administered a “procedure” to help me back from the darkness. Of course this was how it went. Of course this was how our minds had connected, in that blue electric flash of madness, across the membrane of three worlds so we switched places, two Gretas and myself, and awoke to different lives.
    “The doctor said your memories would come back, but slowly.” He reached to the table beside me and produced a flat engraved silver case, which he clicked open like a compact to reveal a row of cigarettes as white as teeth. He took one and lit it.
    “You’re a smoker,” I said.
    Nathan squinted at me queerly and stroked my forehead again. “You just rest.” As he moved, its lavender smoke wrote in cursive all around his body. His whole body tilted over me and—dear God!—I could smell some old-new-fashioned cologne, and the