Physical Therapy

What were the odds that Jim would be the only survivor of the plane crash, which had not only killed everyone else but left eerily minor wounds on his body? He was found like a mammoth carcass preserved in ice.

What were the odds that the plane in question, which had departed from Newark (a miserable city in a miserable region of the United States) and headed south, would land just outside a village that could not be found on any map known to humankind?

What were the odds that Jim, being the sole survivor of the crash, would be rescued by a race of highly evolved equines whose language and technology struck the man as simultaneously alien and familiar?

And so on.

These questions did not exactly enter Nurse Redheart's mind as she guided Jim out of the hospital in the middle of the night, about one in the morning to be more precise, but she did get this unnerving feeling in her gut that she was dealing with more improbabilities than she knew what to do with.

It was highly improbable, for instance, that, on top of the odds previously mentioned, a pack of reporters would ambush the pair as it was time to move the human, still robed and chronically nauseous as he was, to a new location. The discussion as to when and how the transfer would be conducted occurred between Redheart and her co-workers, and they decided to get Jim's approval of the course of action.

Although, given his state at the time, he couldn't say much more than, "Uuuuuuurgh..."

The uttered non-word was enough, apparently.

"We're very sorry about this, you know," said Redheart, hushed, keeping the front doorway of her house, an unassuming one-floor establishment on the edge of town, for Jim as he pushed himself in his wheelchair.

"Yeah, I've heard that before," he replied. "You don't have to feel sorry about anything."

Redheart turned on the lights in the living room, revealing how dusty and ramshackle it all really was. There was a sofa, appearing big enough to support maybe three ponies or two humans at a time, and it also seemed badly aged, like a tome of poetry in a used bookstore that some old man who use to live down the street had owned. There was a coffee table with some books on it, pressing on its dusted glass, and for some reason they were all ungodly blocks of paper—bricks you could knock someone unconscious with.

A mildly strange smell hung in the air, stagnant, not pungent but noticeable.

Oh, right, Redheart thought worriedly, I missed Cleaning Day again.

"I should feel sorry about this, though, right?" she chuckled awkwardly. "It's kind of a mess."

"It kind of is," Jim said plainly, looking around.

Redheart gave him a scornful glance, her cheeks flushing slightly.

Jim noticed this. "I mean, uh—" He started to get a bit flustered himself. "It reminds me of this girl I used to date. She never lived at her own place, or so I thought. The couple times I got to actually hang with her there it looked just like this."

"Was she nice?" asked Redheart as she headed into the kitchen to get a couple glasses.

"Huh?" Jim paused to think, reaching out a hand to touch the nearest arm of the sofa. "I guess she was. Pretty neurotic, though. She must've worked up to twelve hours a day if she could get away with it, just to keep her mind busy. Was always...?"

"Self-conscious?" as she searched around in her fridge, which was not what we could call luxurious. "What are you feeling thirsty for? Got some orange juice, raspberry, tropical punch, uhhh..."

"Some water would be fine." Jim uneasily raised himself out of his wheelchair, more like someone afraid of puking from dizziness than a case of weak legs, and rested into the sofa's cushion. "As long as it's cold. Some ice?" He pushed the palm of his hand into the cushion and found that, while it was not heavenly, at least it retained some malleability.

"Got it!" Redheart felt a smile creep across her lips as she poured a glass for him, then one of raspberry iced tea for herself. Despite the hour, she did not feel tired, or worn out, like she normally would have. Is this what I get for being a light sleeper? she wondered, and she inevitably returned to that preposterous and yet believable hypothesis that the light sleepers of the world were cursed from birth. Oh, what a deep sleep would be like! She couldn't remember the last time she experienced one of those, and anyway it was not a problem at the moment; she enjoyed the iced tea and the company of her patient as a reprieve.

Carrying each glass one at a time, seeing as how she did not want to stain the carpet even more than she already had on many past occasions, Redheart gave Jim his water. "Feeling tired? Because to be honest with you, I don't."

Jim, in return, gave her a funny look. "Not tired, huh? I thought you would head off to bed at the soonest opportunity." He took his glass weakly in one hand and raised the rim to his lips. "Thanks, by the way."

"Oh, it's okay," Redheart replied. "You're my patient, after all."

"Hmm," he hummed. "You're being paid to take care of me?"

"That's the deal." She jumped up onto the cushion and rested on her haunches, sitting a couple inches from her human patient. "At least for a while. Until you can do more on your own—when you can make some money for me." Her smile widened by an absurd fraction of an inch. "Instead of the other way around."

Jim took a sizable gulp from his glass and reclined back, stretching his back in a way that was almost reminiscent of a cat. "God knows I hate not working." He let out a single chuckle. "I'll get bored of being just a guinea pig for your physical therapy program before long. Gotta spend my time in a productive way."

God, huh? Redheart took a timid sip of her iced tea, her train of thought divided. "Say... what does God know?"

"What?" Jim rubbed his face, the nuances of his cheeks. "I mean... God is supposed to know everything."

"You haven't told me much about him, so I've been wondering about it from time to time." She made a motion with her forehoof. "My line of work leaves me thinking about about a lot of things."

"Same here," Jim agreed. "Although what's happened to me lately—I guess I've been left in the same position. Thinking about everything. Like, okay, for example, about God. Because I raised to believe in God. My parents weren't strict about it, but still, they named me after Pike for a reason. They really respected the guy, and so did their parents. In fact when my grandparents were alive, and they lived in California, right?"

"Right." Redheart still didn't know much about California, from what Jim had told her in their talks at the hospital, but it sounded like a horrid place. But she supposed she had enough of a picture of it.

"Right. So my parents and grandparents are liberal types: they went to church, they read from the Bible, and they respected Pike as both the Episcopal Bishop of California and as a generally cool guy. So it was like a generational thing that rubbed off, from my grandparents to my parents to me. This reverence for Pike."

It was a happy accident, if anything, that Jim's father's surname happened to be the same as Pike's. Aside from that, though, Jim Pike and James Pike, the Episcopal Bishop who claimed to have contacted the ghost of his dead son (his son had committed suicide, unfortunately) and who had eventually died himself while visiting Israel one day in 1969, had a pretty tenuous connection with each other.

Up until recently.

Now jim was here. But where was "here?" It certainly wasn't Earth. But it wasn't the afterlife either, was it?

Redheart gave the human a sad look, like she what he was thinking, like she knew that, for better or worse, Jim had narrowly and impossibly conquered death, unlike the man whom he got his name from. "You ever thought about becoming a religious guy like him?"

"Part of the clergy?" asked Jim, coming out of his introspection. "No. I guess it wouldn't matter if I did anyway, being where I am now..."

"Hey," Redheart said with sympathy, "you're here now, which is better than dead, right?"

"I like to think so." Jim poured the rest of his water down his throat in one big effort, as if he were stranded in the middle of a desert for a week and had just rediscovered that sublime liquid which gives all of us life. "What about your name, though?"

"Huh?"

"Since you're still curious about mine. I never asked about yours, I think. Which is weird—you ponies have pretty odd names, ya know? But that's coming from me."

"Oh." Redheart considered this. "You know how the nurses you've met so far have 'heart' in their names? As like a suffix. Hearts are visualized as red, and though it sounds redundant to have my name be 'Redheart,' I think it says something about how big my heart is."

"Literally?" Jim raised an eyebrow.

Redheart faux-pouted at him, but her smile wouldn't go away. "No—figuratively. I'm..." Her cheeks began to flush more, and she knew she couldn't hide her blush with her coat being the color it was.

"You're a big softy." Jim grinned devilishly, picking up one of the monstrous books on the coffee table and flipping through its pages in his hands rather absent-mindedly. "You like reading love stories?"

"No!" she shouted unexpectedly, but not too harshly. "I mean—well, actually, maybe the second part is true."

"But you're not a softy." Jim glanced at her skeptically.

"Correct." She sighed heavily, wanting to get some hot air out of her lungs, and the first signs of exhaustion made themselves known to her. "I like reading love stories. Or stories involving love, come to think of it."

"Not romance novels?"

She sighed again, starting to frown. "No. I tried, and they make me too sad."

"Why's that now?" Jim looked like he wanted to touch her shoulder, to caress it with the care of holding an infant, but he refused to go through with it.

"Because... in a romance novel, the main couple is too happy. Or maybe their relationship is dramatic, but not in realistic ways. They don't have realistic fights, fights that are like wars of passive-aggression; they don't deal with all the banal crap that comes with maintaining a day-to-day relationship with somepony you love; they don't doubt themselves like real ponies in love sometimes do." The muscles in her face tensed up. "Even at their worst, they have it all too good. They fight like they're on a stage, then they make up with some gifts or some sex and that's it."

As Redheart was saying all this, Jim was examining the book he had in his grip, and he realized at some point that it was a bastardized (ponified?) version of a novel he knew quite well: it was Anna Karenina, or rather something very much like it. A book of healthy romances and unhealthy romances.

The ending was bittersweet, to put it one way.

Jim had to concede, if only to himself, that the most realistically portrayed romances tended to be the ones that ended badly. Or at the very least they failed and ended peacefully, like in Annie Hall.

"Are you feeling okay?" he asked after Redheart finished, feeling a little unnerved and a little stupid. "Needed to get that off your chest? Or... actually, I don't know if I should call it that."

"I will." Redheart finished her drink like a calm before a storm, or maybe the aftermath. "It's just fiction, after all. Nothing to get too stressed about." Then, "And you can say 'chest,' by the way." Her cheeks remained almost crimson; an image of a pair of perky nipples flashed in her mind.

"You sound like you put a lot of stock in fiction."

"Maybe." She rubbed her eyelids. I need some physical therapy too. "It's pretty late, huh?"

Jim nodded in agreement, then let out a near-silent yawn. "Should I sleep on the couch?"

"Oh yeah," she responded. I forgot about that. "You fine with that for now?"

"Sure," said Jim, drained. He needed his rest for tomorrow.

She knew she had to get up early if work was to get done, but still Redheart could not fall asleep in her own bed, not too far from where she knew Jim was slumbering.

It must have been almost three now. I hate this. She hated a lot of things, truth be told, when she was like this, struggling to put her brain out of its misery. Redheart had a long history of insomnia, or what many folks without medical degrees would call insomnia, but it would be more accurate to say she was rarely ever contented enough to get those decent hours in. No, she could not get more than perhaps five hours of rest at a time.

What a lousy business.

She thought about the girlfriend that Jim mentioned—the human girl he said to have dated. Am I neurotic too? she wondered. Of course she was. It was plain as day, was it not? And to think that for a moment she even thought that Jim was referring to her instead of that girl.

Not like that meant anything. Jim was her patient, albeit of more intimate acquaintance than most.

"God..." she grunted to herself, not knowing who this God person was but wanting to have a word with him nonetheless.

God?