Clamminess.

Fifty minutes into the lecture. It had something to do with renal failure.

Headache.

The lecture hall was poorly ventilated, growing stuffier by the minute, and my face had turned clammy under my N95 mask. A musty aroma, faintly suggestive of cheese, or possibly unwashed socks, hung heavy in the air. Harsh overhead halogen lights illuminated the front of the hall and nothing else. The professor’s mouth continued to move, making sounds I knew to be words, but I had long since stopped making sense of them. Soon, even the steady drone of speech receded into the haze beyond the horizons of my awareness, and I was left adrift in a glow, a suffusion of undulating whiteness.

Numb. Very numb. Can’t move fingers. Paralysis. Don’t fight it. Just let it wash over you.

A timeless interval passed, and I became aware of a pulsing brightness differential, which very gradually unblurred into a suggestion of shapes. The abstract dance of unfocused light increased in intensity, which I registered as a figure approaching. At last the waves of alternating light and dark subsided into a low-contrast wash, and the figure resolved itself into a small, mousy-haired fiftyish woman.

“Lauren?” she said.

I found that I could speak. “Hello?”

“How very nice to see you again! It’s been years, darling.”

“Who are you?”

Her face crumpled into a pout. “You don’t remember me?”

“No?” But something about her was familiar….

“It’s Mary, darling,” she laughed. “Come give me a hug!”

She drew closer, but I kept my distance. Somehow in this space I could will her away from me, but she was pushing back, mounting a malevolent pressure on my mind.

“Where do I know you from?” I asked, stalling for time.

“Where do you know me from?” she echoed, in a more sing-song voice. “From here, silly! You used to visit me all the time!”

OH. Undergrad. I’d had visions of her sometimes, when I drifted into this liminal state, suspended between wakefulness and slumber. We’d pass minutes to hours down here, exchanging conversation and theories and stories and gossip, whiling away the time I spent sitting through all those interminable biochem lectures. It was all swimming back into my consciousness. “Let me take your place!” she’d always cry at the end. She’d lived countless aeons of life down here, waiting for a visiting host to latch on, to switch bodies and ascend up to reality and live my life while I took her place in her dream-prison. “I deserve to live!”

Then I cracked under the sheer weight of the headache, and she broke through the mental barricades I had erected. Within seconds she had me locked in her hug to begin the transfer.

Come on! Sheer willpower! Full awareness!

I struggled against her suffocating embrace, but the balance shifted and I felt the arrangement of heat begin to alter, winds coursing violently through my arms. With the rest of the willpower I could muster, I screamed at eternity.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHH!”

Kidneys projected on slides. The lecture hall!

But the professor had stopped lecturing, and now all the other students were staring up at me as my shriek reverberated off the walls and hung in the mungy air. Then a horrible wave of laughter swept the room.