by Ellen Datlow
“You don’t know anything about that,” Weybridge said heatedly. “You haven’t seen bodies lying unburied in an open grave in a field where the humidity makes everything ripe, including the bodies.” He coughed, trying to think where that memory came from. “You haven’t been locked in a stone-walled room with five other people, no latrine and not enough food to go around.”
“Is that what happened to you?” she asked, aghast at what she heard. “Yes,” he said, with less certainty. “Did it?”
“I think so. I remember it, pieces of it, anyway.” He rubbed his face, feeling his beard scratch against the palms of his hands. Under his fingers, his features were gaunt.
“They’ll force you to remember it all, if it happened,” she warned him. “Don’t you understand? They’ll throw you away like used tissue paper when they’re done. They don’t care what happens to you after they find out what you know. Truly, they won’t bother to see you’re cared for.” She reached out and took him by the shoulders. “If you want to stay in one piece, you’ve got to get away from here before they go to work on you. Otherwise, you’ll be … nothing when they’re through with you, and no one will care.”
“Does anyone care now?” he wondered aloud. “I don’t know of anyone.”
“Your family, your friends, someone must be worried about you. This place is bad enough without thinking that…” Her voice trailed off.
“And where is this place? If I got out, where would I be? Don’t you see, I have no idea of who these people are, really, or where we are or what it’s like outside. No one has told me and I don’t remember. Even if I got out, I would have no place to go, and no one to stay with, and nothing to offer.” His despair returned tenfold as he said these things.
“I’ll find someone to take care of you until you remember,” she promised him, her eyes fierce with intent.
“And feed me?” he asked ironically. “Do you have a friend with an IV unit?”
“Once you’re out of here—” she began.
“Once I’m out of here, I’ll be at the mercy of… everything. Where are we? Where would I have to go for the Old Man—whoever he is—not to find me and bring me back? It might be worse out there.” He shivered. “I don’t think I can manage. If I could get out, I don’t think I’d be able to get very far before they brought me back.”
“We’re near a river. We’re about fifteen miles from the capital, and—”
“What capital is that?” Weybridge inquired politely. “I don’t know which capital you mean.”
"Our capital, of course,” she insisted. “You can get that far, can’t you? There are names I could give you, people who would hide you for a while, until you make up your mind what you want to do about… everything.”
“I don’t know about the capital,” Weybridge repeated.
“You lived there, for heaven’s sake. Your records show that you lived there for ten years. You remember that much, don’t you?” She was becoming irritated with him. “Don’t you have any memory of that time at all?”
“I… don’t think so.” He looked at her strangely. “And for all I know, my records are false. I might not have been here ever, and it could be that I haven’t done any of the things I think I have.”
“Well, letting them fill you up with chemicals isn’t going to help you find out. You’ll just get used up.” She took his hand and pulled on it with force. “Mr. Weybridge, I can’t wait forever for you to make up your mind. If they found out I came in to see you and tried to get you to leave, I’d be in a lot of trouble. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I can see that it might be possible.” He tugged his hand, but she would not release it. “Nurse, I don’t want to go away from here, not yet, not until I can get some idea of who I am and what I did. Not until I can eat.”
“But you will be able to if you leave. You’re being manipulated, Mr. Weybridge. David. They’re doing things to you so that you can’t eat, so you’ll have to stay here. If only you’d get away from here, you’d find out fast enough that you’re all right. You’d be able to remember what really happened and know what was … programmed into you. They don’t care what comes of their little experiments, and they’re not going to give a damn if you go catatonic or starve to death or anything else. That’s the way they’ve been treating agents that they have questions about.” She paused. “I have to leave pretty soon. It’s too risky for me to remain here. They’ll catch me and then they’ll …” She turned away, her eyes moving nervously toward the door.
Weybridge closed his eyes, but the dreadful images did not fade. There were three naked figures, two of them women, twitching on a stone floor. They were all fouled with blood and vomit and excrement, and the movements and sounds they made were no longer entirely human. “I’ve been thinking,” he said remotely, his throat sour and dry, “that I’ve been going on the assumption that all the pieces of things I remember, all the horrors, were done to me. But I can’t find more than three scars on my body, and if it happened, I’d be crosshatched and maimed. I’ve thought that perhaps I did those things to others, that I was the one causing the horror, not its victim. Do you think that’s possible? Do you think I finally had enough and wouldn’t let myself do anything more?” This time when he pulled on his hand, she let him go.
“I can’t stay, Weybridge. If you haven’t got sense enough to come with me, there’s nothing I can do to change your mind. You want to let them do this to you, I can’t stop you.” She got off his bed, her eyes distraught though she was able to maintain an unruffled expression. “After today, you won’t have the chance to change your mind. Remember that.”
“Along with everything else.” He looked at her steadily. “If you get into trouble because of me, I want you to know that I’m sorry. If I’m right, I’ve already caused enough grief. I don’t know if it’s necessary or possible for you to forgive me, but I hope you will.”
The nurse edged toward the door, but she made one last try. “They might have given you false memories. They’re doing a lot of experiments that way. Or you could be someone else, an agent from the other side, and they’re trying to get information out of you before they send you back with a mind like pudding.” She folded her arms, her hands straining on her elbows. “You’d be giving in to them for no reason. Hostages, after awhile, try to believe that their captors have a good reason to be holding them. That could be what you’re feeling right now.”
“Nurse, I appreciate everything. I do.” He sighed. “But whether you’re right or not, it doesn’t change anything, does it? I can’t manage away from this … hospital. I’d be worse than a baby, and anyone who helped me would be putting themselves in danger for nothing. And if you’re trying to get me back to the other side, who’s to say that I’m one of theirs? Perhaps they want me to do more than has already been done.”
She opened the door a crack and peered out into the hall. “I’ve got to leave, Weybridge.”
“I know,” he said, filled with great tranquility. “Be careful.”
“You, too,” she answered. And then she was gone.
Weybridge lay back against the pillows, his emaciated features composed and peaceful as he waited for the needles and the chemicals and oblivion.
Short stories are experiments, at least when I write them. I’ve said that before and it’s still true. So here are a few notes on this particular experiment.
Amnesia and related memory failure have always intrigued me. How much of a personality is, in fact, memory? And what happens when memory is damaged or manipulated? How much of personal integrity is a product of conditioning and experience, and how much is bred in the bone?
In this story another factor that interested me was the predatory feeling many helpers have toward their helpees. There is no consensus about who Weybridge really is or what he has actually done, and only his assumption that he was the one perpetrating the terrible acts he may or may not remember gives him the serenity to face oblivion. Everyone else has a per
sonal agenda where Weybridge is concerned; Weybridge, without real knowledge of himself, has no such agenda. For him, it is easier to face extinction than self-knowledge.
There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
TRUE LOVE
K. W. Jeter
K. W. Jeter’s short stories are more explosive than his novels—perhaps because of their compression. He writes about archetypical relationships (in Alien Sex, a young man’s first sexual experience with a prostitute; in A Whisper of Blood, the daughter-father relationship) and gives them a horrific twist.
By perverting normal relationships—those between adult and child and father and daughter—Jeter creates another shocker.
The brown leaves covered the sidewalk, but hadn’t yet been trodden into thin leather. She held the boy’s hand to keep him from slipping and falling. He tugged at her grip, wanting to race ahead and kick the damp stacks drifting over the curbs. The leaves smelled of wet and dirt, and left skeleton prints on the cement.
“Now—be careful,” she told the boy. What was his name? She couldn’t remember. There were so many things she couldn’t forget…. Maybe her head had filled up, and there was no more room for anything else. The mounded leaves, slick with the drizzling rain. Her father scratching at the door, the word when there had been words in his mouth, the little word that used to be her name…. The boy’s name; what was it? She couldn’t remember.
The boy had tugged her arm around to the side, not trying to run now, but stopping to press his other hand against one of the trees whose empty branches tangled the sky.
“You don’t want to do that.” She pulled but he dug in, gripping the tree trunk. “It’s all dirty.” His red mitten was speckled with crumbling bark. A red strand of unraveled wool dangled from his wrist.
You do want to … That was her father’s voice inside her head. The old voice, the long-ago one with words. She could have, if she’d wanted to—she’d done it before—she could’ve recited a list of sentences, like a poem, all the things her father had ever said to her with the word want in them.
“There’s something up there.”
She looked where the boy pointed, his arm jutting up straight, the mitten a red flag at the end. On one of the wet branches, a squirrel gazed down at her, then darted off, its tail spiked with drops of rain.
The boy stared openmouthed where the squirrel had disappeared. The boy’s upper lip was shiny with snot, and there was a glaze of it on the back of one mitten, and the sleeve of the cheap nylon snow jacket. She shuddered, looking at the wet on the boy’s pug face. He wasn’t beautiful, not like the one before, the one with the angel lashes and the china and peach skin.
“Come on.” She had to bite her lip to fight the shudder, to make it go away, before she could take the boy’s hand again. “It’s gone now. See? It’s all gone.” She squeezed the mitten’s damp wool in her own gloved hand. “We have to go, too. Aren’t you hungry?” She smiled at him, the cold stiffening her face, as though the skin might crack.
The boy looked up at her, distrust in the small eyes. “Where’s my mother?”
She knelt down in front of the boy and zipped the jacket under his chin. “Well, that’s where we’re going, isn’t it?”There were people across the street, just people walking, a man and a woman she’d seen from the corner of her eye. But she couldn’t tell if they were looking over here, watching her and the boy. She brushed a dead leaf off the boy’s shoulder. “We’re going to find your mother. We’re going to where she is.”
She hated lying, even the lies she had told before. All the things she told the boy, and the ones before him, were lies. Everything her father had ever told her had been the truth, and that was no good, either.
Her knees ached when she stood up. The cold and damp had seeped into her bones. She squeezed the boy’s hand. “Don’t you want to go to where your mother is?”
Now his face was all confused. He looked away from her, down the long street, and she was afraid that he would cry out to the people who were walking there. But they were already gone—she hadn’t seen where. Maybe they had turned and gone up the steps into one of the narrow-fronted houses that were jammed so tight against each other.
“And you’re hungry, aren’t you? Your mother has cake there for you. I know she does. You want that, don’t you?”
How old was he? His name, his name … How big, how small was what she really meant. If he wouldn’t move, tugging out of her grasp, wouldn’t come with her … She wanted to pick him up, to be done with saying stupid things to his stupid little face, its smear of snot and its red pig nose. Just pick him up and carry him like a wet sack, the arms with the red-mittened hands caught tight against her breast. Carry him home and not have to say anything, not have to tell lies and smile …
She had tried that once and it hadn’t worked. Once when there hadn’t been any other little boy that she could find, and the one she had found wouldn’t come with her, wouldn’t come and it had been getting dark, yet it had been all light around her, she had been trapped in the bright blue-white circle from a street lamp overhead. And the boy had started crying, because she had been shouting at him, shouting for him to shut up and stop crying and come with her. She had picked him up, but he’d been too big and heavy for her, his weight squirming in her arms, the little hard fists striking her neck, the bawling mouth right up against one ear. Until she’d had to let him go and he’d fallen to the ground, scrambled to his feet and run off, crying and screaming so loud that other people—she had known they were there, she’d felt them even if she couldn’t see them—had turned and looked at her. She’d scurried away and then started running herself, her heart pounding in her throat. Even on the bus she’d caught, she’d known the others were looking at her, even pointing at her and whispering to each other. How could they have known? Until she’d felt a chill kiss under the collar of her blouse, and she’d touched the side of her face and her fingers had come away touched with red. The boy’s little fist, or a low branch clawing at her as she’d run by… The tissue in her purse had been a wet bright rag by the time she’d reached home.
That had been a bad time. The little boy had run away, and she’d been too frightened to try again, scared of people watching when it had gotten so dark, so dark that she couldn’t see them looking at her. She’d had to go home to where her father was waiting. And even though he couldn’t say the words anymore, to say what he wanted, she knew. One or the other, and the little boy had run away.
She’d stood naked in her bathroom, the tiny one at the back of the house, her face wet with the splashed cold water. She’d raised her arm high over her head, standing on tiptoe so she could see in the clouded mirror over the sink. A bruise under one breast—the little boy had kicked her; that must’ve been where she’d got it, though she couldn’t remember feeling it. Her father couldn’t have done that, though her ribs beneath the discolored skin ached with a familiar pain. He wasn’t strong enough, not anymore. …
“Where are we?”
The boy’s voice—this one, the little boy whose mittened hand she held in her own—brought her back. They were both walking, his hand reaching up to hers, and the streetlights had come on in the growing dark.
“This isn’t my street. I don’t live here.”
“I know. It’s okay.” She didn’t know where they were. She was lost. The narrow, brick-fronted houses came up so close to the street, the bare trees making spider shadows on the sidewalk. Light spilled from the windows above them. She looked up and saw a human shape moving behind a steam- misted glass, someone making dinner in her kitchen. Or taking a shower, the hot water sluicing around the bare feet on white porcelain. The houses would be all warm inside, heated and sealed against the black winter. The people—maybe the couple she had seen walking before, on the other side of another street—they could go naked if they wanted. They were taking a shower together, the man standing behind her, nuzzling her wet neck, hands cupped unde
r her breasts, the smell of soap and wet towels. The steaming water would still be raining on them when he’d lay her down, they’d curl together in the hard nest of the tub, she’d have to bring her knees up against her breasts, or he’d sit her on the edge, the shower curtain clinging wet to her back, and he’d stand in front of her, the way her father did but it wouldn’t be her father. She’d fill her mouth with him and he’d smell like soap and not that other sour smell of sweat and old dirt that scraped grey in her fingernails from his skin …
The boy pressed close to her side, and she squeezed his hand to tell him that it was all right. He was afraid of the dark and the street he’d never been on before. She was the grown-up, like his mother, and he clung to her now. The fist around her heart unclenched a little. Everything would be easier; she’d find their way home. To where her father was waiting, and she’d have the boy with her this time.
Bright and color rippled on the damp sidewalk ahead of them. The noise of traffic—they’d come out of the houses and dark lanes. She even knew where they were. She recognized the signs, a laundromat with free dry, an Italian restaurant with its menu taped to the window. She’d seen them from the bus she rode sometimes.
Over the heads of the people on the crowded street, she saw the big shape coming, even brighter inside, and heard the hissing of its brakes. Tugging the boy behind her, she hurried to the corner. He trotted obediently to keep up.
The house was as warm inside as other people’s houses were. She left the heat on all the time so her father wouldn’t get cold. She’d found him once curled up on the floor of the kitchen—the pilot light on the basement furnace had gone out, and ice had already formed on the inside of the windows. There’d been a pool of cold urine beneath him, and his skin felt loose and clammy. He’d stared over his shoulder, his mouth sagging open, while she’d rubbed him beneath the blankets of his bed, to warm him with her own palms.