Hannah awoke and for a moment she thought she was in her bed at the boarding house back in Memphis, back in 1880. It took a few blinks for her to realize it was 1984 and she was in a tent near Glady Fork in Glades Wildlife Management Area, a remote wilderness in southwest Virginia.
At least, she thought, she was—of a sort—in a medical field.
She had graduated from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1880 and corresponded with City Hospital in Memphis where she would have been a doctor. Only after arriving there did they realize her name was Hannah, no Hannan and that she was a woman.
She had taken a job as a burlesque dancer as she tried to decide what to do. Then, on June 14, she went to sleep normally. She woke up 104 years later in Syracuse NY sleeping in a dorm room.
The details of her first few panicked hours were fuzzy, but by and by she realized where she was and that it was 1984. And that she was supposed to be an engineer, not a doctor. And that she was supposed to go to NYC where she had a paid summer internship waiting for her. She was to report on July 9.
She found papers explaining she had to move out of the dorm by the end of the week. Other papers indicated her home address in Scranton, PA. She also found a ring of small keys.
Shock had washed through her at that moment. She knew what they were though she had never seen them. She knew they were to her car, though she had no idea what a car was. And she knew where to find it, though she had never been to that place before. Something in her mind had left a memory, even, of how to fundamentally operate it—enough to get her to Scranton.
There, she met versions of her parents. They attributed her confusion about almost everything to anxiety about moving to New York, and she played along as well as she could.
She planned her move to NYC; something compelled her to believe that was what she was meant to do.
But, she had no idea what to expect, once she got there.
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