‘No Jeremy,’ Agent Bollard said. ‘Unfortunately, the man, Sazyfan, and the corrupted agent weren’t alone. Someone else was involved, who hacked into the servers and erased all the data recorded in the cameras. Those bastards in Invincible Army have their tentacles long way up the ass of the system. Right now, we are completely lost.’
Some other questions followed, which he had already answered in the hospital. Finally, after wasting forty-five minutes of his fresh hours, they stood up to leave.
‘Jeremy, get well soon,’ Mike said, yet another one trying to sound concerned. ‘If you need any help, don’t hesitate to call me.’
‘Sure,’ Jeremy said. ‘I hope that you catch the murderer soon instead of hopping over the same spot.’ First, get the fuck out of my house and do your fucking job!
Once they were gone, Jeremy hurried to the dinner table, where the breakfast was set ready for him. He forced the two sandwiches one at a time into his mouth and chased them down with orange juice. Once he was done with his breakfast, he dialed Adam and told him that he would be at the destined place within the next fifteen minutes.
237/ TERESA STREET (THE DESTINED PLACE)
Jeremy watched as Ethan Pti Holland, his best friend, dropped his cigarette on the ground and walked to Jeremy’s car to greet him. Jeremy observed that he was dressed in his usual black suit, which he had been wearing lately. He accompanied Jeremy to the door and stopped there.
‘Aren’t you going to come in?’ Jeremy asked.
‘No, I shall wait here while you get your work done.’
Jeremy walked into the house to find Wilson Zyb Wilkins bound to a chair with duct tape around his forearms and legs. Adam, his beefy thug with the pierced eyebrow and a limping leg, had the foreknowledge of covering the floor with plastic cover before erecting the chair and Wilson there.
Jeremy turned to Adam and said, ‘You never fail to surprise me, buddy. This plastic cover thing you did shows how much you predict and anticipate my actions.’
‘Jeremy, you bastard!’ Wilson yelled. ‘I thought you were different from your father when you publicly opposed his decision to hand over the Mercupo Islands to those Multi-National Company guys. It made me trust you with the Intel. But, I never imagined this side of you. You’re going to regret this,’ Wilson blared.
‘My biology friends told me something about a Wilson-Blair Medium. This must be it. Cool down old man,’ Jeremy said, reaching out to Wilson’s head with his right hand. Wilson flinched, anticipating Jeremy to hurt him. Instead, Jeremy held few strands of his hair between his thumb and index finger. ‘Grey hair, you just spoke like the rest of the grey-heads, good for nothing bullshit. Give yourself some rest, old-boy. Don’t waste what little energy you have to give me your stupid lessons.’
Wilson shook his chair violently, freeing his hair from Jeremy’s grip. Jeremy raised his eyebrows. ‘You like to protest? Good, I like challenges. Ok, let’s get to business. Who was the other guy you trusted with your Intel?’
Wilson remained silent. Jeremy made a fist with his left hand and released it repeatedly to display his impatience. Wilson did not flinch. Jeremy slapped him hard across his face. ‘You see old-boy, with one proper hand currently, I am able to do this. Then, imagine what both hands could do. So don’t make this hard on yourself. Just give me my information.’
Wilson was silent. He pursed his lips tightly and gazed right into Jeremy’s eyes. The gaze displayed anything but fear. Jeremy stretched his open palm in Adam’s direction. Adam handed him a handgun. But, Jeremy dropped it. ‘I need a knife,’ he roared.
Once the knife was in his hand, Jeremy stuck it horizontally in Wilson’s mouth and its tip met his teeth. ‘Speak!’
Wilson remained silent. Jeremy twisted the knife by ninety degrees and thrust it hard vertically, cutting the flesh of his jaw between the upper incisors. Blood streamed out of the gap between his lips and flowed down his chin into his lap. Yet, Wilson was reluctant to give up. Finding no progress in the situation, he thrust the knife in the gap between the two upper incisors and it pierced the flesh of his tongue. More blood jutted out his mouth as Wilson opened his mouth in response. Yet no words formed.
So, he traced the tip of the knife from his mouth to his neck and poked it against his carotid pulse. ‘Don’t waste my time, old man. Speak the fuck up! Whom did you give the Intel about Rochen Fort Blasts Conspiracy?’
Wilson pressed forward and sliced his own throat against the blade of the knife. Jeremy was dumbstruck by the act.
‘Till now, I believed that such things happen only in movies. He must be fucking crazy!’ he yelled.
He stepped back to let his men take control. Adam checked Wilson’s pulse. They lost him within a minute. Jeremy dropped the knife and began cursing. ‘Too bad we had just his body to blackmail him with. He does not even care about his life. He died useless.’
Jeremy moved away from the mess and walked to the front door of the house. Adam came behind him. Jeremy lit a cigarette and said, ‘wrap his body in that plastic cover and dispose it off safely. Remove all traces of our arrival from this place. Thank god, he has no one to care about his sudden absence.’
After Adam left, Jeremy joined Ethan. ‘He died useless.’
Ethan nodded and followed Jeremy to his car. While Jeremy expected any remark from Ethan’s side, only silence welcomed him. When the driver was ready to get going, Jeremy said, ‘We have got to find out whom he gave it to. My future depends on this,’ and hopped into the car.
THE ONE WITH GLIMPSES OF PAST
350/LORD STUART DRIVE-TEN DAYS POST THE JUDGMENT DAY
ONCE BRYCE DROPPED him off at the said location and walked off with his part of the bargain, Daniel walked to the front door of the house. The door had a steel plate with the name DANIEL RYU XAVIER on it. He tried the small key from the bunch and it opened the front door of the house. He wondered if Daniel Xavier noticed the missing belongings, and tried to imagine what he might have decided to do about it. However, the need of the hour was to have something to eat, take a shower and then ponder over the rest.
The house was small with only three rooms. The door led into a living room adorned with a TV, a couch and a small table topped with newspapers. The living room gave way to a kitchen and a bedroom. The small kitchen had a small stove, a sink and some shelves filled with some cups and utensils. The bedroom had a single bed and a wall fixed with a bulletin board, covered with some photos and newspaper cuttings. He had no intention of studying those photos and trying to make any sense out of them, besides exacerbating his headache. The bedroom gave way to a small bathroom, which had all the requisites cramped to fit in. After he had a hot shower, some leftover pizza from the fridge and some coke, he settled on the couch. One of the walls had a calendar, which showed the year 2016 on it. He felt no surprise about it. Since he was an empty vessel, he appreciated knowing something. He looked at the TV and yelled, ‘TV! Yeah, I remember you, buddy!’
He felt very tired and disoriented. The silence around him ignited a sense of distress in him, which seemed difficult to resist. He wondered if it was normal for…amnesiacs to feel like he felt right now. He took the time to think back. All the same, he felt empty, except for the memories he had somehow recollected. He wished for the others too to comeback. He diverted his thoughts from the recollections to save himself from drowning in a pool of guilt for assaulting someone. He stretched on the couch and rested his legs on the table. When he closed his eyes, the visions rewound in his mind and made him uncomfortable. He began to wonder how many days those visions dated back to and what led to those events. Concentrating on them made him even more uneasy.
He rose from the couch and walked into the bathroom. He opened the shelf behind the mirror and found a bottle labeled “Aspirin”. Amidst his disorientation, his instinct told him he needed it now. He took three at a time and chewed them. Then, he collapsed on the bed and tried to get some sleep.
THE NEXT DAY
He woke up with
a startle and was surprised to see the room brightly lit by the sunlight. It was not his habit to sleep with widely opened curtains. He had never slept until late. What surprised him next was the room he was sleeping in. He pushed the covers off him and walked out of the room, with the fuzzy feeling in his mind masking his senses. He was in a completely different house. His head felt like it was tied to a large rock and all the weight of the rock fell upon his atlas. He had to attend the wards before 9 o’clock and the time was 10 o’ clock. When he looked at the calendar, he collapsed on the floor. It displayed the numbers in bold 2-0-1-6.
What the…
He felt confused. He looked around the house for his phone, but it was nowhere. He looked around to find any clue of what he was doing there. Nothing from the house provided him any clue as of why and how he had ended up in that place. The big trouble was with the year. He had to be in April of 2012, not in September of 2016. Something was terribly wrong. He settled on the couch and held his head in his hands. The scar behind his temples ached. He traced the scar with his index finger.
Realization dawned upon him as if the pain flipped a switch in his memory box. He closed his eyes and let his mind relax as everything made sense. The events of the previous day rewound in his mind. The hospital…the injured in the hospital…the car…the stranger’s house. Everything made sense. For clarity, he checked the papers on the table. They dated back to 9 September 2016.
He had been in an accident. The vision of an assault by the woman replayed in his mind. The recollection shocked him, not because of the assault, but because…Margaret Qyx Aniston, his girlfriend, whom he had intended to marry, was the woman who assaulted him. Just as he began taking hold of the situation, it seemed to slip out of his hand. He loved her very much. She was the solo love of his whole life, his first love. Her assault on him made no sense. Something happened in those four years he lost, which must have triggered the event. There was no recollection of anything after the day he came back from the trip to Mercupo. Only blankness welcomed him.
As he over-thought, random images flashed in his mind, and in one of them, he saw Donald Jol Miller, a prominent candidate of Fremian National Party. But that was not part of his concern. He was the man he had shot in the other vision he remembered when he woke up the previous day. He sensed his control slipping. He felt like he was going to snap under all that stress. He feared that he might have reached the limit of his sanity. He sensed the rising desperation to find out the day’s date.
He switched on the TV and found a news channel.
‘It has been eleven days since the assassination of Prime Minister Donald Jol Miller. The military has taken control of the country, emphasizing their motto to establish the lost order of the society,’ the voice in the background said, as the screen flashed various images of the scenario of the country. ‘But, in their endeavors to establish the order, the military has deprived the people of their freedom and fundamental rights. Is it reasonable to do so?
‘There was no delay in using their newfound powers to suppress the people’s rights. The military encountered the protesters with brutality. People were fired upon. In these ten days, about twenty people lost their lives and more than hundred were injured. And the yesterday’s incident was no exception. Ten people lost their lives yesterday when one of the officers used a grenade on the crowd.
‘Now, we have certain people from our society, who would like to share their views about this issue.’
The visuals returned to the newsroom, where the famous reporter, Karl Sla Rogers, introduced the assembled guests to the audience. Only one person caught his attention. It was Dr. Margaret Qyx Aniston. The sight of her itself set his heart racing. If there was anyone who could fill the void in his memory, it was Margaret.
He composed himself and looked around for the car keys. They were lying on the table. After completing his bathroom activities, he picked them up and stormed out the door to the car. He got in and got onto the road. He knew very well where the channel office was. It was like a race against time for him. The road was swarming with army trucks and military personnel in camouflage uniforms. The military had setup check posts every few blocks and halted people whenever they had to make way for the trucks.
The military rule did not strike him as strange as his own condition. The last thing he could remember, Forsyth Vab Kingston was the Prime Minister of the country. However, the news-channel made him aware of Donald Jol Miller becoming the Prime Minister. The thought of the dead Prime Minister brought back his visions, which made him uneasy. If he killed the Prime Minister, the cops or someone had to be behind him. A prison sentence or a death sentence seemed trivial compared to his anguish. He kept it aside and concentrated on the matter at hand.
The blazing on the radio irritated him. He would have turned it off if not for the man quoting- “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power”. Daniel felt confused if the quote intended to praise or defame the military, which was already receiving negativity from the masses.
Only John F Kennedy knows, he thought before the man announced that it was a quote by Abraham Lincoln. Daniel questioned himself for misattributing Lincoln’s quote to Kennedy, and attributed his faux pas to his unsound memory and mind, and the similarities between Kennedy and Lincoln.
He turned off the radio and gave attention to his unsound mind. When he first heard of Retrograde Amnesia in Physiology during his first year and examined some subjects during his ward postings in his second year, the ailment sounded interesting. But he never expected to become its victim.
When he reached The Gulvin Junction, he turned left, which led to the channel office, fully aware that going straight would lead to his house. It was the house, which he and his mother inhabited for over ten years, which he inhabited alone after his mother’s demise in January of 2012. The memories of his mother welled up his eyes with tears. He suppressed his sorrow and concentrated on the office building, which emerged in front of him. The building invited Margaret into his mind. But he doubted very much if she still loved him, especially after recollecting that she had shot him. He knew that there was a chance she might try to kill him again, which his mind felt reluctant to accept. Deep in his mind, her thoughts stimulated happiness, which prodded him that he still loved her as much as he always did.
THE MEMOiR
I met her first during the first year of my medical school at Kraminko Medical College. When people say things like love-at-first-sight, I took it as nothing but bullshit. When I first saw her, during the rehearsals for our duet performance, she did not catch my attention. She just seemed like any other girl in my class, nothing special. A senior introduced us to each other. She is Margaret Qyx Aniston. Our performance spanned over thirty seconds altogether, since there were eight pairs in our performance. So when I was chilling out with my friends while the seniors took care of the arrangements for our Fresher’s Party, one of my friends quoted about her, ‘She looks like a Barbie Girl.’
That was when I contributed my complete undivided attention to study her. She stood little over five and a half, with brown eyes, a perfect nose and jet-black hair. Yes, she was cute, rather than beautiful. And the way she wore few strands of hair over her forehead reminded me of my mom in her marriage photos, which induced a sense of familiarity.
As the days went on, it became the talk of the college that she had a striking resemblance to one of the seniors. Yet I do not remember the senior’s face and name. I have this thing with faces. Sometimes, no matter how hard I try I don’t remember some faces. After being attracted to Margaret, I did not take a second look at any other girl in our college.
She was my first love and I wanted her to be my last too.
On the day of the Fresher’s Party, I was unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of one of the seniors, who had already troubled me on my first day. He and his accomplices caught me while I was making it to the changing room. Physical abuse was the last of thei
r choice, so they had to make do with psychological. I was not a fearless lad. So it began. It started with simple questions like what my performance was and finally ended up with forcing me to drink beer from one of their cans, before my blackouts rescued me. Blackouts are not so common for me, but they emerge during cases of extreme psychological stress. I usually wake up with no memory of what happened during that time window. But I believe that they might be stored somewhere deep in my memory, where they are inaccessible as of now.
When I woke up after some time, Margaret was in front of my very eyes. I thought I was dreaming. She and another girl, whom I have not had the privilege of noticing, helped me onto my feet.
‘Daniel, are you alright?’ she asked.
I felt short of words. I mustered up the energy to speak to her for the first time. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘Can you perform for the event?’ she asked, with her eyes speaking along with her lips.
‘Yeah, these blackouts are common. I can take care of it.’
‘OK, then, get ready for the performance. We must rehearse it again after changing,’ she said and left.
As days and months went by, the conversation between us on the day of the Fresher’s Party persisted to be our first and last conversation. I was surely attracted to her, but I could not call it love. I believed that love is not what you feel based on external beauty, but considers something invisible and more powerful than beauty, understanding.
But in those days and months, there were many instances, which insisted an inevitable connection between us. There were some similarities and dissimilarities. All those things formed a combined force that made me realize that I loved her. Instead of feeling happy about the revelation, I felt endangered. The only person I loved was my mom. The idea of inviting someone into that circle increased my sense of vulnerability. I feared that I could not love my mom as much as I did after having someone else in the same circle. Moreover, I did not intend to curb my education, immersed in her thoughts. She was, until then, my crush, who served as a motivation to attend classes regularly with the idea of seeing her, and getting noticed in the class for all the good reasons. But, promoting her on my priority chart stimulated a sense of insecurity.
The Memoir Page 3