“This name origin stuff isn’t as helpful as I thought it might be. About half of the names seem to mean ‘good’ or ‘pretty’ and it’s one thing for parents to name their precious newborn something like that, but it would be arrogant for me to call myself ‘Agatha’ or ‘Jolie’ or whatever. Not that I like the sound of ‘Agatha’ anyway, but, you know.”

---

Wanderer and Homebody

Part 5 of 6

by Trismegistus Shandy

---

This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's a sequel of sorts to my earlier novel Twisted Throwback, but it should stand alone tolerably well (though it features three characters from Twisted Throwback). Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the rough draft.

You can read the opening chapter of my novel The Bailiff and the Mermaid for free, or buy it at Smashwords or Amazon.

---

---

---

I got over to Mindy and Steve’s house just after eight the next morning, before either of them had left for work, but after they’d showered.

“Good morning,” I said, as Lisa let me in. “Where’s Tim?”

“Cleaning Dad and Mindy’s bathroom,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Didn’t she just clean it yesterday?”

“Be patient with her,” I said, and went down the hall to Steve and Mindy’s room. “Knock knock?”

“Door’s open,” Tim called out, and I went in. The door of the bathroom was open too, and Tim was on her knees scrubbing the underside of the toilet seat.

“Anything I can help with?”

“You could take those towels down to the washing machine,” she said speculatively; “but I guess you don’t have to. They’ve only been used once.”

“I’ll do it if it helps you feel better about the trip.”

“Okay, thanks. Can you get Mom and Steve’s dirty underwear out of the hamper while you’re at it? I already took my underwear and towel downstairs after my shower.”

When I’d taken care of that, I went to the kitchen and said hello to Mindy, Steve, and Emily, who were all eating breakfast. Tim came in while we were chatting.

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I think I’m ready to go. — As soon as the breakfast things are washed up,” she added, looking around anxiously.

“We’ll load the dishwasher before we leave for work,” Mindy said, with a meaningful glance at Steve, who nodded (his mouth being full).

“And I’ll wipe down the table and counter,” Emily said. “You rest — you’ve been working yourself too hard and you’ve got a long day ahead of you.”

So Tim sat down next to me, and we chatted while I ate a bite; but as soon as Steve put his plate and utensils in the dishwasher and left for work, she said: “Oh, I thought of something else,” jumped up and ran out. Moments later she was back with a mop, and she insisted on mopping the floor before we left.

Mindy left for work a few minutes later. “Give me a call at work if the doctors tell you anything new, will you?” she said to me in a quiet voice while Tim was busy mopping.

“Will do,” I said. “Have a good day.”

“You too.” She interrupted Tim’s mopping long enough to hug her and whisper something in her ear, then left.

Emily and I wiped down the counters and table while Tim finished mopping the floor. When we’d finished all that, I asked Tim: “Are you sure there’s nothing else you need to do before we leave? We’ve still got half an hour, but if we leave now and have good luck with the traffic we might can have a sit-down lunch instead of getting fast food to go.”

Tim looked around and poked her head into the den and her mom’s bedroom, then glanced down the hall toward Lisa’s room, into which she’d vanished as soon as she put her plate in the dishwasher. “I guess it’s all pretty much clean,” she said, sounding surprised. “For now.”

“Let’s hope it stays that way for a while.” I knocked on Craig’s door — he’d been sleeping late, but he answered.

“Whassup?”

“We’re fixing to go,” I said, opening the door just a crack. “You and Lisa will be by yourselves for a few hours; your parents may be home from work before we are.”

“Okay.”

“And be sure to clean up after lunch, and make sure Lisa does.”

“...All right.”

A couple of minutes later we were on the road. It was a good thing, too, because I’d been in Austin for four days and if I hadn’t had to take Tim to clinic, I would have needed to get on the road for a few hours anyway. The interstate between Austin and Dallas wasn’t the most interesting stretch of road in America by any means, but it wasn’t totally boring either, and it satisfied my need to be in motion. Once we got into Dallas, I could detour a bit off the GPS-recommended route and satisfy my compulsion to see new places. Tim sat beside me, and Emily in the seat behind me, where she could lean over and talk with Tim more easily.

“Have you thought any more about your new name?” Emily asked, after Tim had woken up from her nap.

“A little,” Tim said. “I was thinking about ‘Marissa’ but now I’m not as sure. Maybe ‘Caitlin’ or ‘Amanda’... or after Aunt Rhoda, like Dad suggested.”

“Any of those would be good names,” I put in. “Think about it some more, and if you make up your mind by the time we get to clinic, we can check you in under the new name. But no pressure; they can use your old name and update the records later after you decide.”

“I’ll try to come up with something before we get there,” she said, and was quiet for a while. Emily settled back in her seat and started studying, and I kept my eyes on the road. Tim looked up baby name sites on her tablet, and from time to time she’d share some of what she was reading: “How about ‘Renata’ or ‘Renee’? They both mean ‘reborn’.”

“Either would suit you,” I said; “I think ‘Renata’ is more distinctive, though,” and Emily looked up from her book and said: “Hmm? Were you talking to me?”

“Just thinking out loud,” Tim said. “This name origin stuff isn’t as helpful as I thought it might be. About half of the names seem to mean ‘good’ or ‘pretty’ and it’s one thing for parents to name their precious newborn something like that, but it would be arrogant for me to call myself ‘Agatha’ or ‘Jolie’ or whatever. Not that I like the sound of ‘Agatha’ anyway, but, you know.”

“You could just pick a name based on how it sounds,” Emily suggested. “I think most parents do that with their babies, really.”

“How did you pick the name ‘Emily’?”

“Actually... I got it from a dream I had a few days after my Twist.”

“Oh. I haven’t dreamed anything recently. At least I can’t remember any dreams.”

As we were coming into the suburbs of Dallas, Tim finally said: “Okay, I think I’ve got it. ‘Melissa’ means ‘bee’, which ties in to my arthropod collection, and it’s also related to Mom’s name, which is nice.”

“And bees work really hard, just like you do,” Emily put in.

“And it sounds pretty,” I said. “Hmm. That’s from Greek, right? I think it’s probably related to the word for ‘honey’, too.”

“Let me check,” she said, and was quiet for a while. Then: “It means ‘honey’ too. That sounds like it would be confusing, having the same word for ‘honey’ and ‘bee’.”

“Context,” I said. “You wouldn’t ask a waiter for a jar of bees, or tell a doctor you got stung by honey.” Actually, it had been a number of years since I was in Greece, so my Greek was a little rusty, and I don’t think the subject of bees or honey ever came up. But I had a lot of experience in various languages with words Americans would think are ambiguous and really aren’t.

We arrived in Dallas with time to spare before Tim’s — or rather Melissa’s — appointment, so after exploring the neighborhood around the clinic and negotiating over our tastes, we ate lunch at a Cambodian restaurant. Melissa said she hadn’t had Cambodian since our road trip last summer, and wanted to try it again; Emily wasn’t as enthusiastic but she found something she liked well enough.

And then on to the clinic, a couple of blocks north of the restaurant. Emily and Melissa found seats while I got Melissa checked in; Mindy had given me her insurance cards to use, along with a letter to the clinic.

“I’m here with my daughter, Timothy Darren Harper; she just went through her Twist... we have an appointment at one?”

The receptionist looked Tim up on her console and said: “Yes. Have a seat and a nurse will call you in a few minutes.”

“All right. We haven’t filed the official name change paperwork yet, but she’s going by Melissa now — you might want to make a note of it.”

“Got it,” she said, unfazed. I’m not sure how many Twisted change gender — something like one or two percent, I think — but obviously she’d dealt with cases like Melissa’s before.

I sat down next to Melissa and said: “Have you thought about a middle name yet?”

She groaned. “You mean I have to go through all that again?”

“You don’t have to overthink it,” Emily said. “You don’t actually have to have a middle name, even; not everybody does. But it might help sometimes.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Do that,” I said. “And what about this clinic visit? Do you want me to come back with you for all of it, or just for part of it? I expect they’ll need you to be alone with the psychologist at some point, but I think for the rest of it you could have me or Emily with you if you want.”

She considered that. “I think I want you with me for all except the psychologist. — And the physical exam.”

“Do you want me there for the physical?” Emily asked.

“Umm... maybe not.”

The nurse called us a few minutes later. Emily stayed in the waiting room while Melissa and I followed the nurse to an exam room.

“Your father can wait here,” the nurse said to Melissa. “Come on down the hall and we’ll get your imaging and blood tests done.”

“Have fun,” I said. They returned about ten minutes later, and the nurse started asking a bunch of questions about Melissa’s Twist. Melissa told her how it had happened, and something about her compulsions and changes in her habits; I added what I’d observed, and told her about our impromptu trick testing.

“Huh,” she said, when I described the test we’d done and Melissa tried to describe the feeling she got when I spilled the wastepaper on the living room floor, or when Lisa spilled crumbs on her carpet. “I’m not sure how to classify that...” She typed something on her console and said “You’ll have to talk to the thaumatologist about it.”

“Sure.”

The nurse then had Melissa take a series of psychological tests on the console, while I went back out to the waiting room. She called me back again over an hour later.

“I don’t remember the tests I took being that long,” I said as I entered the exam room, “but that was a long time ago.”

“The tests were over a while ago,” Melissa said, “but then the psychologist came and talked to me. Dr. Schaeffer. He said he’d be back in a few minutes, he wanted to talk to you too.”

“All right. What do you think of him?”

“He seems okay. He asked me how I felt about being a girl, and about wanting to keep the house really clean, and stuff like that.”

“Did he have any advice about keeping your compulsions under control?”

“Not a lot. He said he’d talk more about it when he came back.”

Dr. Schaeffer came in in a few minutes later; we shook hands, and he asked: “You’re Melissa’s father?”

“Yes; she lives with her mother, and I come to visit as often as I can. I’m taking her to clinic because my work schedule is more flexible than Mindy’s.”

“I see. Well, I’m glad to have a chance to speak with you, but I think I need to speak with Melissa’s mother as well, if she’s the custodial parent. I’m concerned about her apparent compulsion to keep her home clean.”

“So am I. I was hoping you would have some advice about keeping it under control or working around it.”

“Well, I’m afraid I don’t have any easy answers. I do have some ideas, but you — or rather Melissa’s mother — may not like them.”

“Fire away.”

“Melissa is fixated on keeping the entire house clean. But she doesn’t seem to transfer that compulsion to other places she visits, at least so far. I think we need to find out if she permanently imprinted on that house when she Twisted, or if the compulsion will transfer to wherever else she might live, and if so, under what conditions — how long might it take for the new place to start feeling like home, for her to feel she no longer has to keep the old place clean?”

“You think we should move to another house?” Melissa asked. She glanced at me. “Steve won’t like that.”

“Hmm,” I said. “That is something we need to find out eventually, but I’m not sure why it has to be done before Melissa goes off to college. Maybe if we rent her an apartment for the summer between high school and college, we can test whether she can stand living in a dorm or if she’d have to keep going home to clean.”

“What I had in mind — it’s just an idea, and I realize there may be a number of reasons why it’s not feasible — is that if Melissa lived in a smaller home, perhaps an apartment, with less furniture and fewer possessions in general, she could keep it clean with considerably fewer hours of labor each week. That would leave her more time for schoolwork and more enjoyable things. Based on her account of the week since her Twist, I’m afraid she won’t do well in school if she’s compelled to spend every minute she’s home keeping the place clean.”

“What do you think, Melissa?” I asked.

She shrank back in her chair. “I don’t want to make Mom and Steve give up a bunch of stuff so we can move into a little apartment. And Lisa and Craig won’t stand for it even if Mom talks Steve into it.”

“Never mind whether it’s feasible to do it right now or not,” I said. “We can figure that out later. First, do you think Dr. Schaeffer’s right, that if you live in a smaller home with less furniture and stuff you’d be able to spend less time cleaning? And is that something you’d want?”

“Maybe? I mean, cleaning the house isn’t a hardship like it would have been before my Twist, I enjoy it, but I’d like to have time for other things too.”

I turned to Dr. Schaeffer. “We think her compulsion is to have the house be clean — not necessarily to do the cleaning herself. Do you agree?”

“That seems to be the case, from what I’ve heard. Of course you’re better positioned to tell than I am.”

“Maybe we could get a cleaning service in to do some of the work, to give Melissa some time off.”

“Try that and see how much it helps,” Dr. Schaeffer agreed. “And I realize that moving, even temporarily, may be a hardship; but I think it would be wise to test how strong Melissa’s fixation on that particular house is well before she reaches college age.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe in the summer we could rent a beach house for two weeks, or a cabin in the mountains, or something? Two weeks might be long enough for you to switch your focus from keeping Steve and Mindy’s house clean to keeping the cabin clean.”

“Could you stay at the house for two weeks at a time?” Melissa asked anxiously, and Dr. Schaeffer looked inquiringly at me.

“I have a travel compulsion,” I explained to him; “it’s hard for me to stay in one place for more than two or three days. I can work around it by taking a break to travel for a few hours and then coming back to where I’m staying. If the cabin’s small and doesn’t have a lot of furniture,” I said to Melissa, “we could get it clean enough to suit you, and then we could go on a road trip or a long hike and come back in the evening, every third day or so.”

“Let’s try that.” She smiled.

Dr. Schaeffer cleared his throat. “Well. Aside from this compulsion, your daughter seems to be adjusting well to her Twist, particularly to her change in gender. As far as I can tell from a short interview, she’s had a full change of gender identity, not just a change of biological sex, which is rarer but can be difficult.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “My niece had one without the other; she’s okay now, but it was rough for a while at first.”

“She’s helped me out a lot,” Melissa said.

“That’s good,” Dr. Schaeffer said. “Has she put you in touch with others like you?”

“She gave me the address of a forum for people like me, but I haven’t had time to sign up and read messages, much less post anything. Too busy.”

“Well, hopefully that won’t last, if we can get a handle on your compulsions. The simplest way to control them would be, as I said, to reduce their scope directly — by having a smaller home with less furniture and clutter. If that’s not an option, and we find that your compulsions are causing you a lot of problems — keeping you from focusing on school, for instance — there are medicines we can use to try to keep them under control.”

“I hope you won’t try those drugs except as last resort,” I said, worried. “Wouldn’t they cause Melissa to lose focus on school as much as the compulsion itself? Maybe more?”

“Not necessarily. What drugs are you referring to?”

“I don’t remember the names, but one of my cousins had a dangerous compulsion that they gave him drugs to control. He failed a bunch of classes and had to drop out of college because of the side-effects. And he still isn’t allowed to drive because of them.”

“Was that recent?”

“It was — hmm — when I was in middle school, so almost thirty years ago.”

“We have better drugs now — not perfect, of course, we still don’t use them unless other techniques don’t work. But the side effects are less severe than those your cousin experienced.”

I wasn’t satisfied, and I decided to do my own research about the current drugs used for controlling Twist compulsions.

“What about other techniques?” I asked. “I’ve heard from some Twisted that they’re able to control their compulsions with meditation. It didn’t work that well for me, but it might work better for Melissa.”

“It is a possibility,” Dr. Schaeffer allowed. “It takes significant time to learn, and for whatever reason, there are many Twisted for whom it doesn’t seem to work, or gives only slight benefit. If Melissa’s compulsions cause her serious problems with school, I think we should try the appropriate drugs first, and see how they work while Melissa is learning self-hypnosis or meditation. At worst she could fail a grade in the time it takes her to learn those disciplines well enough to control her compulsions — if they can be controlled that way.”

“Let’s see how things turn out,” I said.

A few minutes later Dr. Schaeffer left, and I took out my tablet and looked him up on the clinic’s site. It seemed he wasn’t purely a Twist specialist; he worked with the Twist clinic on Fridays, and saw other patients in a general clinical psychology clinic the other days of the week. That eroded my trust in him further, and in the Dallas Twist clinic generally — apparently there weren’t enough Twisted in Texas to support a full-time Twist clinic with a full range of specialists, like in Spiral or Atlanta or Chicago. But I didn’t share my concerns with Melissa. She was stuck with him, as far as I could tell, and undermining her trust in her doctor couldn’t do any good unless I knew something really bad about him and had to warn her — and Mindy — about him. The worst I saw so far was that he was (in my opinion) too quick to prescribe drugs.

I wondered what else their trick specialist did on their other days if they only saw Twisted patients one or two days a week. Soon enough, a tall Hispanic woman came in and introduced herself as Dr. Martinez.

“I’m a thaumatologist,” she said; “I specialize in the tricks some of us Twisted have. Ms. Varney told me you’ve already discovered your trick, Melissa?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of lame. I know when something is messed up and needs cleaning, even if I can’t see it.”

“Can you explain further?”

We did, and told her about the testing we’d done.

“Fascinating! Have you felt this anywhere else besides your home?”

“I think maybe I felt it at the taqueria on Wednesday? I’m not sure, maybe it was just general anxiety about the house not being clean enough yet. But when I got home and we were sitting in the driveway I definitely felt like the kitchen needed work, and I saw what was wrong as soon as I walked in.”

“Hmm. I mean, have you felt that feeling about the other places you’ve visited? Like the kitchen or restroom at the restaurant weren’t clean enough, or that anything is amiss here at the clinic, or anywhere else?”

“No, just at home.”

“Hmm. And this ties into your compulsion, doesn’t it — your home is the only place you feel compelled to keep clean?”

“That’s right.”

“Fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trick like yours, a sensory trick focused on one particular place, though I’ve have read about one or two that were similar. There was a boy who could read the emotions of his family members, but not anyone else, for instance. And since your home is two hundred miles from the clinic, doing further testing may be difficult... but... hmm...” She was silent for a moment. Then: “Mr. Harper, could I speak with you alone for a moment?”

“Sure,” I said uncertainly, glancing at Melissa. I followed Dr. Martinez out of the room.

“Is anyone at home? I mean, at Melissa’s mother and stepfather’s house?”

“Her step-siblings Lisa and Craig were home when we left, but they might have gone out. I could call them and check... I think I see what you’re going for.”

“Yes, I want them to help us test Melissa’s trick if they’re home. Will it work when she’s hundreds of miles from home?”

I called Lisa’s phone, and got her.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Lisa, this is Jack. You remember how, a couple of days ago, Melissa somehow knew you’d gotten crumbs on the carpet? — Tim’s decided on a new name, by the way, she’s going by Melissa now —”

“What is it this time?” she burst out. “I swear I cleaned everything up after lunch, and I haven’t done anything else that Tim could complain about.”

“No, don’t worry, you haven’t done anything wrong. Melissa’s not been having that feeling like something’s wrong at home. No, we’d like your help testing her trick, to see if it still works at this distance. Do what I did yesterday, pick a room of the house at random and dump some waste paper on the floor, then ten minutes later pick it up. We’ll see if Melissa can sense that or not.”

“Oh, okay. Um, how about the den?”

“That’s fine. Message me after you clean it up, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks — bye.” I hung up, and Dr. Martinez and I rejoined Melissa in the exam room.

“I’d like to suggest some other tests you could do when you get home,” Dr. Martinez said, not mentioning my conversation with Lisa. “Your earlier tests involved crumbs on the floor in one room, and waste paper on the floor in another, correct?”

“Right,” Melissa said, “except the first one wasn’t really a test, it’s just how we figured out I had a trick.”

“Let’s try some tests with tiny amounts of other kinds of debris — just a single bread crumb on the kitchen floor or counter, for instance. And let’s try introducing some small disorder into the collections of things you’ve been organizing — putting a whisk in the knife drawer or a pillowcase in the towel closet, for instance...”

While she was talking, Melissa started fidgeting. She looked distracted, and I thought I could figure out why.

“Are you okay, honey?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s just — I think Lisa or Craig must have dropped or spilled something in the den.” Then her eyes got wide, and she asked: “Did you tell them to do it?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “Don’t worry, she’ll clean it up again in a few minutes.”

“Okay... I guess. Um, what were you saying, Doctor?”

Dr. Martinez resumed talking about disorganizing things and seeing if Melissa could detect that. But Melissa couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying until Lisa cleaned up her mess a few minutes later.

“Well,” Dr. Martinez said, “we know that your trick works at a distance of two hundred miles. Next time you travel, if anyone in your family is staying at home, or if you have a neighbor you can trust with a house key, you should test it at greater distances and find out what the range is. Meanwhile, try those other tests I suggested.”

“What about getting her trick, and her compulsion, to focus on a different place?” I asked. “A vacation cabin or an apartment or a dorm room?”

“That’s something you should test when you can,” she said. “I don’t expect you to be able to test for it right away.”

“I mean, do you have any advice about how to get her trick to focus on where she’s living — permanently or temporarily — instead of where she was living when she went through her Twist?”

“Hmm. No, I’m not sure I do. I suppose it might hinge on where you think of as ‘home’, Melissa — and I remember, when I moved out of my parents' house, how long it took before it stopped feeling like home. It wasn’t until I was out of the dorms and had my own apartment, my third year in college, probably.”

“Oh,” Melissa said. “Thanks anyway.”

“Maybe this is an area where meditation can help,” I said. “I’m not the one to teach you — I’ve tried learning it, and I just don’t have the patience for it — but I’m sure your mother or I can find somebody local.”

“That’s a good idea,” Dr. Martinez said. “Do you have any other questions?”

Melissa and I looked at each other. “You said this was a new sense,” Melissa said, “like seeing or hearing? Could I learn to like close my eyes on it, or put my fingers in my ears, so I can’t tell when the house gets messed up?”

“Ah. Perhaps so. Most sensory tricks are always-on, at least by default, and don’t seem to come with ‘eyelids’. But it’s worth a try. Let’s try that. Relax, close your eyes; imagine that you’re looking down at your house, but the walls are transparent. You can see everything inside, you can see whether everything is in place; it’s all just as it should be, isn’t it...? Relax and keep looking at the house for a few more moments. Now imagine you have a second set of eyelids; you close them, and now the house isn’t transparent. You have a third set of eyelids; close them, and you can’t see the house at all.”

Melissa sat back in her chair, her eyes closed. Dr. Martinez beckoned me out into the hall, and we left the room quietly.

“Call your stepdaughter again, and have her make a small mess like she did before,” she whispered. I messaged Lisa and Craig, instead of phoning, and went back into the room with Melissa.

She sat quietly for a while, and Dr. Martinez and I did our best not to disturb her; I didn’t look at her straight on, but out of the corner of my eye. Then Melissa started fidgeting, and squirmed a bit, and opened her eyes.

“It didn’t work,” she said. “It’s — it’s not like I’m really seeing the mess Lisa made in her room, it’s like her room is an extra arm or leg and it’s suddenly started itching.”

“Interesting,” Dr. Martinez said, making notes on her tablet. “Don’t give up after one try. Keep trying that exercise from time to time at home, especially after you start learning meditation and self-hypnosis. And feel free to vary it to fit the way you perceive your new sense — maybe you could imagine your extra arms and legs, the various rooms of the house, all going to sleep?”

“I’ll try that. Thanks.”

“If you have no more questions, I’ve got one for you. Would you be interested in participating in a study? It would involve coming to the clinic once or twice more in the next few months, and exercising your trick while you’re under a specialized scanner — we can’t do it today, I need to schedule time on the equipment in advance.”

“I’ll talk to Melissa’s mother about it,” I said. “Can you send me the information about the study?”

“Of course. And please keep me informed of Melissa’s progress in getting control of her trick. Anything else...? Then I’ll leave you for now, and someone else will be with you shortly.”

A while later Mr. Isherwood, the social worker, came in; after making delicate inquiries about mine and Mindy’s income (I had to guess at Mindy’s), he gave us advice about applying for a grant from the Nia Clarence Foundation to help pay for Melissa’s new wardrobe and any renovations to the house needed to accommodate her Twist compulsion. Then we left the clinic, rejoined Emily in the waiting room, and walked back to my rental car.

---

---

Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon