Solo

by Mike Kilroy

  Solo pulled his arms to his chest and rubbed his tender left wrist with his right hand. He peered at Dr. Kline, whose pencil moustache curled up into a smile.

  Just as creepy as ever.

  “I know,” the doctor said as he sat on a chair next to Solo’s bed and crossed his right leg over his left. Solo noticed the perfect crease in his khaki pants and how straight his burgundy tie was under his taupe sweater. “You must be awfully confused by all of this. I made a terrible mistake. So complete was your deception. Impressive.”

  Solo reached up and ran his fingers through his nest of tangled hair. He rubbed the growth of beard on his face.

  “Where am I?”

  “In what you call ‘The After.’”

  “How are you here?”

  “It’s complicated. Your memories have returned to you. Such a painful process, I know. But it will—or already has—happened to all of you. Such a shame, too. Things were progressing so nicely.”

  Solo was at a loss. He tried to speak, but it was as if his vocal cords had been excised, as if he had forgotten the skill of speech—along with everything else, it seemed.

  Finally he pushed out, “What the hell is going on?”

  Dr. Kline leaned back in the chair and folded his hands on the thigh of his crossed leg. He had a slight smile again, an almost smirk. “You have a splendidly complex mind, Solo.”

  Solo glared at the doctor.

  Dr. Kline sighed deeply. “Fine, you need to see things for yourself. You always need to know the why of things. Come with me.”

  Solo rolled out of the bed and straightened his white thermal shirt. He pushed his hands through his hair again and rubbed the crust from his eyes as he followed Dr. Kline hesitantly, a few paces behind him. He didn’t trust him, but his desire for answers—real, concrete ones—were too much to ignore.

  Dr. Kline glanced back at Solo repeatedly as he walked, halting his amble several times to allow Solo to keep up.

  It appears the doctor has some mistrust, too.

  They walked on the polished floors, clean and sparkling under the bright florescent light. They passed by rooms that were once alive with patients, but were now just empty tombs, past stations once manned by nurses and orderlies, now abandoned, past offices where doctors once busily worked that were now just empty voids.

  Finally, they reached the common area. The chairs were still organized in a circle, the paddles, one red and one blue, placed neatly on the Ping Pong table. A ball rested secure under the blue paddle.

  A deck of playing cards sat at the table where Solo spent many hours, turning over card after card.

  The television was on and displayed the empty set of a newsroom studio. A graphic that read “Rapture?” emblazoned at the bottom of the screen.

  It was all very eerie and disquieting.

  The doctor cleared his throat. “Do you know what has happened?”

  Solo didn’t acknowledge the doctor. He simply peered, wide-eyed, at his surroundings, trying to make sense of it all.

  He looked for Tom. This was a time when Solo looked to Tom the most, the moments of confusion, the moments when he felt overwhelmed and rudderless.

  Moments like this one.

  He hadn’t realized until this moment how much he had come to rely on Tom, on his guidance and earthy wisdom.

  He could use some wisdom now.

  Solo looked around again, out the window at the gloomy sky, at the puffy flakes of snow floating to the ground.

  Dr. Kline snapped his fingers. It worked as Solo’s eyes quickly turned to him. “Focus. Do you know what is happening, Mr. Faraday?”

  Dr. Kline raised his right eyebrow expectantly.

  “Everyone’s gone?”

  “Well, here, yes.”

  Solo stomped toward Dr. Kline. The doctor stood his ground, even when Solo grabbed two handfuls of his sweater. “Enough with the riddles. Enough with the dancing around the truth. Tell me what is going on.”

  “First, Mr. Faraday, let me go.”

  Solo released his grip on the doctor, who smoothed out his sweater carefully before he spoke. “This is not reality, at least not in literal terms. I have developed a complex simulation that takes memories and blends them into a virtual world. It’s a chance for the criminally insane to experience life and not just incarceration.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “To put it in simple terms, I hacked your brain.”

  “So this—”

  Dr. Kline interrupted. “—Is not happening. not really.”

  Solo backed away. He walked to the Ping Pong table, picked up the blue paddle and swatted the ball as hard as he could over the net. It took a large bounce, ricocheted off the far wall and rolled slowly back toward him, finally coming to a stop under the table.

  Solo set the paddle down and walked back to Dr. Kline. “I don’t believe you.”

  “I understand your skepticism. But I am telling the truth. We’re in the simulation now. And I can prove it.” Dr. Kline closed his eyes for a second and then opened them. “Look.”

  The doctor pointed to the Ping Pong table. Solo swung his eyes to it and felt his heart pound faster as he saw the Ping Pong ball he had just hit again tucked securely under the blue paddle on top of the table.

  Solo fixed his eyes on Dr. Kline, who stood, smugly in front of him with his arms crossed on his chest again. The doctor was proud of what he was doing, boastful and pompous. He had no moral dilemma about manipulating Solo’s mind, inserting himself into his deepest thoughts and tinkering like a mechanic under the hood.

  It angered Solo.

  “Why would you do such a thing, such a terrible thing?” Solo asked, feeling the blood rush and blush his face in fury.

  “I was trying to save you from a life in a box.” Dr. Kline patted Solo on the shoulder, trying to be comforting and sincere. He failed. “Unfortunately, the experimental therapy hit a slight … glitch. I thought I had solved all the issues, but the brain wants what the brain wants.”

  Dr. Kline walked to the Ping Pong table and picked up the red paddle. He examined it intently with a slight smile. “I tried before, you know, with another set of patients. It failed miserably because the world was too mundane, too—how can I put it—boring. They slipped into their old habits and psychosis quickly, even in the simulation. Mar was there. Things did not go well for her there. Not one bit. I didn’t think she would make it, but she did. I thought she deserved another shot. Her mind, so complex, too.”

  Dr. Kline set the paddle down carefully and walked slowly toward Solo. “You inspired me to create this world where almost everyone has vanished with your descriptions during hypnosis. It was almost as if you were going back and forth through time. So exciting! It worked perfectly, until …”

  Dr. Kline’s eyes became large and he looked toward the ceiling. “Oh, dear,” he muttered, scrambling for the exit. “We’ll have to continue this later. Like Mr. Puckett’s house of cards in that dreadful closet, this simulation is collapsing.”

  ***

  Solo reached for the light switch, hesitant to flick it on for fear of what he would see in the light. He heard Eye Lyds scrubbing away at her hands and arms under the running water and he could already smell the death she had caused.

  Solo pushed the switch up with a click, closed his eyes and prayed. He prayed that when he opened them he’d see only a cat or a dog or some other animal on the kitchen table, not who he feared.

  He opened his eyes and saw his parents lying in a pool of blood on the floor. A three iron was stuck in the back his father’s head.

  Solo backed away slowly, feeling his stomach twitch and vomit rush up into his throat. He turned and the contents of his stomach gushed onto the clean living room floor.

  “Eye Lyds, no!” Solo’s voice was loud and panicked. “What did you do?”

  “What do you think she did, dumbass? She killed our parents,” Tom said as he leaned against the refrigerator. “She finally did something she c
an't take back. There’s no hiding this. There’s no getting her out of this one.”

  For so long Solo had fought the monster: his own and his sister’s. It was a battle waged on two fronts. A battle lost.

  He wept for his sister, who hadn’t fully grasped the scope of her crime. He had tried so hard to quell the monster inside her, to explain to her right from wrong, to make sure she flew under the radar of a society that shunned the mentally ill and called them freaks and losers and monsters. He taught her how to fake her way through school and parties and social gatherings, how to act around others, how to think around them.

  Even how to simply laugh.

  It was all undone in the moment it took for the monster to escape.

  “Oh, Eye Lyds,” Solo said as he slowly walked into the kitchen. “What have you done?”

  She turned and leaned back against the sink, wiping her hands with a once-white towel that was now a deep crimson. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

  “Why?”

  “It was for you, Morris,” Eye Lyds said, smiling. “They were going to have you committed because of Tom. But I wouldn’t let them. You’ve always tried to protect me, now it’s my turn. I’m your big sister. That’s what big sisters do, right?”

  Solo’s shoulders slumped as he looked at Tom, who just shrugged and held up his worn and beaten hands.

  Solo pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He tried to hit the numbers, but he was shaking so much he had trouble hitting the 9 and the 1.

  Before he could press another 1, Tom’s voice stopped him. “She’ll never survive in prison, or in a psych ward. You know that. Do you want her little rugrats to know what she is? Can you do that to them?”

  Solo tried to breathe, but was having trouble pushing the air out of his chest. He felt faint. “What do you want me to do, Tom?”

  “What you’ve always done.”

  “This isn’t a cat.”

  “No, but she’s our sister and she needs our help. You’d never stand trial.” Tom chuckled. “Everyone knows you’re the batshit crazy one. Ironically, you’ve never been able to hide it like her.”

  Solo looked at Eye Lyds. She acted as if she had spilled some milk instead of blood. She acted as if nothing had happened.

  A quote from Nietzche popped into his head. He couldn’t remember the exact wording, but it went something like: “Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.”

  Solo pressed the second 1 on the phone and put it to his ear.

  “Yes,” Solo said. “I just killed my parents with a 3-iron.”

  ***

  Solo sat in a wheelchair, his head pushed into his palms. He wept so hard he shook and jerked violently from the sorrow.

  “You remember it all now, don’t you?” He heard Dr. Kline ask, and felt a hand squeeze his shoulder.

  Solo peeled his head from his hands and wiped away the tears. He reached up, rubbed his bald head and felt bumps of raised skin, which were coarse like cactus needles, all over his scalp.

  Dr. Kline sat behind a desk. He no longer had a pencil moustache and his hair was thinner. He looked older—his eyes a bit more sunken, wrinkles a bit more pronounced around his lips and running over his forehead like canals.

  Awards and diplomas speaking of the brilliance of Dr. Augustus Kline hung on the wall behind him.

  Dr. Hu sat next to Solo, squeezing his shoulder again.

  “It’s okay, Morris.” Dr. Hu said in his calming voice.

  Solo held his arms up and examined them. They were thin, with nearly no muscle tone. He rubbed his thin legs that felt week and brushed his hand over his face, smooth and sunken.

  “Is this real?” Solo asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Faraday,” Dr. Kline said. “You have been removed from the experiment.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t belong here. You’re troubled, yes. You need therapy, but you aren’t dangerous to yourself or anyone else.”

  Solo’s lips quivered. “Eye Lyds,” he said with sorrow in his voice.

  “We can help her,” Dr. Kline said.

  “Where is she?”

  Dr. Kline and Dr. Hu shared a look of concern.

  Dr. Kline stood from his desk, straightened his sweater and walked to Solo. “Let me show you.”

  Solo tried to stand, but wobbled and fell back into the chair. He tried to stand again, but failed.

  Dr. Kline picked up the phone on his desk. “I need help in here.”

  Ratched entered quickly. She looked the same as she did Before. Just as surly. Just as gruff, but she flashed Solo a smile.

  It unnerved him.

  I thought she was a robot.

  Solo peered at the doctors and nurses and orderlies as Ratched rolled him down the hallway past them. They stared and gawked at him as if he were a celebrity.

  Dr. Kline looked back at Solo and smiled. “Don’t mind them. They’re just curious.”

  They stopped in front of a set of double doors, the words “RESTRICTED ACCESS” emblazoned in bold, red type across the metal. Dr. Kline swiped a card through a reader. The door beeped and the red light that hung above them turned green.

  The nurse pushed Solo behind Dr. Kline, through the hallways of a ward Solo didn’t remember, through another set of double doors and into a large, circular room.

  In the middle of the room was a plush chair set in front of a row of monitors. A mainframe computer also sat in the middle of the room. Lights on the mainframe blinked on and off in different colors and patterns.

  Doors curved around him, each with nameplates. Solo was able to read the one closest to him: “OLIVIA WILKS.”

  Solo pushed himself out of the chair, balancing himself precariously on his wobbly legs. Finally, he summoned enough strength to take a short step forward, then another, then another, toward Suicide Girl’s door.

  He peered in through the window at her. She lay in a bed with an IV in her arm, a feeding tube down her throat and a black skullcap on her bald head with wires snaking out of it like a web to another mainframe computer that sat on the wall to her left. There were computer screens lining the wall to her right, monitoring her every vital sign. One displayed her brain activity, which had lines rising and falling haphazardly.

  Solo turned away from the window to look at Dr. Kline, who stood with his arms crossed on his sweater and a smug smile on his thin lips. “She is well, Mr. Faraday. We are taking good care of her. In her world, she is living as if she didn’t kill anyone in a fire she set. She is at peace, once I made a few modifications.”

  “She remembered. I was there. She remembered what she did.”

  Dr. Kline lowered his head and sighed before raising it again. “Yes, sadly my latest attempt at hacking didn’t go as planned. Trial and error. That’s how it goes. Trial and error. Relapses are inevitable.”

  Solo slowly ambled to the next door. He read the nameplate. “MARGARET LOGUE”

  Solo pressed his face to the glass of the window and saw Mar lying in the bed, her eyes fluttering wildly under the lids, tears escaping and rolling down her cheeks. Her lips mouthed something he couldn’t make out and the screens that monitored her every vital sign displayed frenzied lines.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She thinks you’re dead. Had to be done for it all to make sense to her.”

  “That’s cruel.”

  “She’ll get over it. Strong, that one.”

  “She’s beginning to remember, too.”

  Dr. Kline nodded. “I know. Unfortunate. So unfortunate. The experiment can be reset. We’ll solve these anomalies.”

  Solo wondered how the doctor could be so cold, how he and his colleagues could be so obtuse? How Dr. Hu, as kind and as caring as he was, could let this happen? These were lives he was manipulating. Sure, flawed and ill lives, but lives just the same. The thought was good: eliminate the pain by eliminating the memory, putting lost souls in a world where they can live their lives without knowing what they h
ad done, freeing them from their pain and torment.

  But it couldn’t be that easy.

  Solo told the doctor as much. Dr. Kline nodded.

  At least he acknowledged the harm he had caused in pursuit of the good. “I don’t claim this is perfect. But you’ve come to know these people, interacted with them. You know their disease and pain runs deep. You know there is no coming back from what they have done. We are trying to give them a life, something other than four walls in a cell.”

  Solo turned and looked through the window at Mar again. She was calmer now. That put him a bit more at ease. “How long will they stay like that?”

  “We can keep the simulation going indefinitely. Once we work out the wrinkles, that is. We underestimated the sheer power of the will and the sense of identity.” The doctor sighed again. “The brain wants what the brain wants.”

  The brain wanted to remember, just as Solo wanted to remember. No matter how many warnings he received from Tom, no matter how many pitfalls Dr. Kline placed before him, he searched for that truth.

  When the truth came to him, it washed over him like a wave, a gush he could hardly brace against. He didn’t want Mar to feel that same shot of truth as he stared at her, his breath fogging up the window, and felt remorse for her.

  He feared she had experienced the same wash of truth. He wanted so for her to forget the regret.

  It wasn’t possible for me.

  Solo shuffled to the final door in the circle and read the nameplate: “LYDIA FARADAY.”

  He pushed the crown of his bald head against the window and sobbed.

  “Once we discovered that it was your sister who really needed our help, we acted.”

  Solo lifted his head and peered through the window at his sister. She looked so peaceful now, so protected, from herself and from Tom.

  “Can you keep Tom out of her head?”

  “I can try,” Dr. Kline said.

  “As long as he’s in her head, she will never find peace, no matter where she is. He was in my head in there. Promise me you can keep him out.”

  Dr. Kline sighed. “I can try. That’s all I can promise.”

  Solo nodded.

  It’ll have to do.

  “What happens to me?” Solo asked.