by Andrew Pyper
“I’m Gerald Oliver Quinlan.”
Franny reads his face as if it were the pages from the second part of Jerry’s file. “You hurt someone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought I had a son who died, but I never did. You thought you were a wounded football hero, but you’re not.”
“Shut up.”
“You did something awful.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Hatred. Decisive and boundless. Jerry is capable of it. He shows a flare of it now, directed not just at Franny but all of us.
That’s not all I know now that I didn’t ten seconds ago.
I carry the same rage in myself.
Whatever I was before this, I was a man familiar with violence. Not the controlled kind of surgery, nor the isolated episode of overseas. It happened in my life, gave shape to that life.
I don’t know what side I was on, but I had a stomach for it.
More than that. I was good at it.
54
JERRY SWINGS HIS FIST AT me and misses. My fist does the same. Finds the side of his face, his mouth, his ear.
Bridge and Lauren have to pull us apart. Then the shouting and taunts. The spitting of blood on the rug, the calls for a bandage that Jerry insists he doesn’t need.
It all distracts everyone from the fact that I alone didn’t read my file. It wasn’t intentional. But now that we’re all slumped in different chairs, catching our breath, I decide I don’t want to know.
Franny is the first to speak.
“There’s something more,” she says, rising to pull what looks to be a folded, glossy brochure from her back pocket.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. I took it from the same room we got our files.”
She unfolds the thick paper and smooths out its creases over the coffee table. The cover page has a diagonally stamped DRAFT over its front.
“Why don’t you read it for all of us,” Lauren says.
YOURSTORY
It’s time to be free from history.
It’s time for . . . YOURSTORY.
PROSPECTUS
Overview for Investors
Talk therapies. Meditation. Mood-altering pharmaceuticals.
The demand for a new self—a new future—has never been greater than today. But how do we get there?
The problem is that we always return to remembering who we are.
But what if you could change that past? What if you could trade the life you’ve led for one that’s new?
Yourstory is a memory alteration therapy that can literally change the story of our lives.
And in these challenging times, the market for deleted pasts and new beginnings is unquestionably vast.
WHAT IS YOURSTORY?
FOUR STEPS TO A NEW PAST
STEP ONE: Erase
The first step of Yourstory’s process is what we call Induced Endpoint, or IE. IE is achieved by a surprisingly simple exercise: physician-controlled euthanasia.
Our research has determined that termination of life, combined with a neural protein “bath” of our own patented devising, is the only method that fully erases our connection to the past. But don’t think of it as the End. Think of it as a light switch. Flick! You’re gone. Flick! You’re safely returned to life and ready for a new future.
STEP TWO: Introduce
There are generally two kinds of memories: semantic and episodic. Semantic memories are a baseline of common knowledge, including cultural and historical reference points (how a cell phone operates, who won last year’s World Series, the outcome of the Second World War, etc.). These are preserved in the Yourstory process. Episodic memories are the details of personal recollection (your first love, family experiences, the inclinations and aversions created by emotional response). These are erased in IE.
In the second step of Yourstory, patients are introduced to the new lives they’ve chosen. The physical means by which we achieve this is a combination of cutting-edge technology and ancient meditative tools. Once IE is completed, clients are mildly sedated and placed in specially designed flotation tanks. In this embryonic state of blank—but waking—consciousness, they bear witness to their new lives. Our research has yielded a method of Memory Introduction (MI) that is completely seamless, convincing, and effective.
STEP THREE: Stimulate
The hippocampus. When it comes to memory, this is the control booth of the brain. It’s here that our minds link new information together and encode it into memories. By using various techniques of optogenetics, the brain can be artificially stimulated in the same way it would be if experiencing something new or momentous in “real” life.
To make a memory a lasting one, our brains must be attentive to all the senses. That’s why with Yourstory, while the MI program is underway, the brain is simultaneously stimulated by neural implants to excite our sense of smell or touch, even our emotions.
STEP FOUR: Implantation Erasure
Of course it’s crucial that our clients not be aware that they’ve been the subjects of a therapeutic procedure (particularly one involving a death experience). The fourth and final step of Yourstory, therefore, erases the memory of the process itself.
Fortunately, this is the easiest part. During the IE, MI, and Stimulation stages, the client is kept in a state of semiconsciousness, so that whatever memory she may
“That’s it?” Jerry says.
“There was more, but the pages have been ripped away.”
“They did that to us?”
“Seems so,” Franny says. “Though why I’d pay anybody to change me from a lesbian sound editor into a heroin addict is anyone’s guess.”
“We weren’t clients,” Lauren says. “This brochure or whatever—it was for a stock offering. They were planning to go public but still had trials to do. They had to prove it could work.”
“Not public trials,” I say.
“Experiments,” Jerry says. “Us.”
“Yourstory,” Lauren repeats, weighing the viability of the word itself. “How much you figure people would pay to be someone else? Artificially reincarnated. To die and come back different?”
“A lot,” I say.
“More,” Jerry says. “Everything they have.”
55
SHE TOLD ME SHE WASN’T hungry, but I heat up some fish sticks for bridge and me anyway. We take our plates to the farthest end of the dining table, the others in the great hall so far off they appear as figures on the opposite shore of a lake.
“You want to talk about any of this?” I say, drawing a fish stick through a pool of ketchup.
“I think I’m too freaked to talk about it.”
“We’re going to get out of here, okay?”
“Are you saying that as my big brother? Or just whoever you are?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m saying it. Me.”
Bridge picks up a fish stick. Crams the whole thing into her mouth.
“I remember more than just the dark water from before,” she says after she swallows. “Not dreams. Memories.”
“How can you tell the difference?”
She looks away at some point over my shoulder as if lip-reading someone standing there speaking. “It’s like meatballs,” she says.
“Okay.”
“So meatballs all look the same, right? But if you had two different people make them and put them into spaghetti sauce and you ate them, you could tell they didn’t come from the same place. They’d taste different.”
“You’re saying these thoughts you have from before—they were made by someone else.”
“They weren’t made by anyone. The memories we have now—the cabin at the lake, our Tuesday dinners together—those were put in our heads. But the memories I’m talking about were lived.”
“Homemade meatballs instead of frozen.”
She laughs. A sound that’s so good to hear I almost gasp.
“Yeah,” she says. “Like that.”
>
She clears her throat. The humor replaced by something she’s summoning into words out of the darkness.
“There were soldiers. Police. Or men who used to be police,” she says. “Men in uniforms who came to our school and took some of the kids away. I remember our teacher crying. Everybody was crying.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“No. They asked us questions though.”
“Like what?”
“Like ‘Do you love your country?’ and ‘Where were you born?’ None of it made sense. And they didn’t seem mean. They smiled and called us ‘buddy’ and ‘sweetheart.’ But that just made them scarier.”
For the second time I attempt to eat, but the ketchupped fish stick looks wounded with the others gathered around it in sympathy. I push my plate away.
“Me too,” I say. “I remember the police too.”
“What happened, Aaron? Was it a war? Were we invaded?”
“I think it was us. Us against ourselves.”
“Did we win? The people on the good side?”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty sure, whatever it is, it’s still going on.”
• • •
I’m awake.
I know because Bridge is kneeling next to the sofa. I know because I can smell her fish sticky breath.
“There’s something outside,” she whispers.
I’m on one of the sofas in the great room. All the lights are off, but I can see the outline of Jerry sitting up in the chair closest to the hearth, staring out the wall of glass. I take a quick scan outside but can’t see anything other than the impenetrable tree line.
“What is it?” I ask him.
“I can’t tell,” he says, his hands whitening with his tightened grip at the edges of the armrests. “Something that wasn’t there before.”
As if his words enact an external reality, I look outside again and see something that wasn’t there before.
It doesn’t move. A limbless sapling. A halved flagpole. But those things don’t transport themselves into a place where they didn’t exist before. They don’t watch.
“Go to the bedroom,” I tell Bridge. “Lock the door.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Bridge, I’m not asking, I’m—”
“It won’t make a difference.”
Now that she’s said it, I hear it as something I’ve known all along. The lodge’s open-concept layout, high ceilings, wall of glass. There’s no hiding in Belfountain’s castle.
“Okay,” I say. “Be ready.”
I get up and slide toward the windows. The shape outside detects my approach—I can sense this without it changing position—but even as it comes into clearer focus, it doesn’t reveal itself, doesn’t respond.
“What are you doing?”
Jerry has come up behind me.
“We can’t just wait until there’s nothing left,” I say, and as I do, I realize that what I believe to be outside, the thing I fear most, isn’t the thing standing there, but the forest itself. All of the estate, reaching out from here to its walls as a single organism.
I sidestep to the left, all the way to the wall. Feel for the light switch and turn it on.
The mouth. This comes first. The Tall Man’s lips stretched over gray studs of teeth.
He comes at us.
There’s an apron of grass between the trees and the window that’s been untended long enough that some of it is patches of dirt, some of it grown to ankle height. The Tall Man passes over it soundlessly, a quiet that reaches out from him like an odor.
He comes into the stark illumination of the floodlights and shows himself to be more corpse than phantom, a marriage of decay and grace. And unlike a ghost, he doesn’t pass through the wall of glass but stops at it. His eyes, white and bulbous, moving between me and Jerry.
They only stop when they find Bridge.
I back away from the glass and feel Jerry do the same, both of us seeing what he’s going to do before he begins to do it. The silver hatchet gripped in both of his gloved hands. Its head rising up over the waxy snarl of his hair.
The sound of it comes a fraction before the impact, as if a glitch in the soundtrack. Not a crack but an impenetrable wash of noise. A wave that drives your head into the ocean’s floor.
“Bridge!”
The wall of glass smashed into diamonds, falling over us, biting our skin. I try to find her but I’m blinking through darkness. I bring the back of my hand up to swipe something sharp from my face and it lets me see. The sharp thing was a shard embedded in my forehead. The darkness was blood.
Jerry is shouting. At once close by and in another world. Trying to ward off the Tall Man who is walking into the castle. I don’t look back but I can hear him coming. The crunch of his feet over the glass.
Bridge is here. Backing away from the Tall Man, the cold air that blows in and brings the smell of the woods with it.
“Run!”
It’s me telling her this, but it’s only my grip around her forearm that makes her move. Pulling her over the shards that reach all the way to the stairs up from the great room.
The lodge’s front door is already open.
Outside, Franny is there, urging us forward. Lauren is there too. Already running, already gone, a few strides ahead of Franny.
Bridge is out first, then me. The hardness of the air holding us back, a freezing weight in our lungs as if we’d taken a breath of lake water down the wrong way.
The last thing we hear before we throw ourselves into the trees is Jerry’s voice. A wordless shrieking coming from inside the lodge. It wavers between a signal of bravery and agony, an unreadable human utterance, animal, prehistoric.
It goes on longer than you’d think a held breath would allow. And when it stops, it doesn’t come again.
56
WE DON’T MAKE A CHOICE to take the red trail away from the lodge. It’s the one we start for because it’s the one that none of the three of us have gone down so far.
The trail curves more than the others. A meandering through the trees that will play to the Tall Man’s strengths. I ready myself for him to plow onto the trail ahead after taking a straight line from the lodge. What will I do when it happens? There must be an attack I could attempt, a self-sacrifice. But nothing occurs to me.
“There!”
Franny is ahead of the rest of us. Now she plunges off the trail, leaping like a deer, gangly and flailing. Bridge goes after her, then Lauren.
I hold my arms up against the thrashing branches, but it doesn’t stop them from cutting into the side of my neck, the sharp ends stabbing at my eyes. Even after I’ve broken through and the cabin is there, I come to the door with my hands up as if in surrender.
Once I’m inside, Bridge locks the door.
The cabin is like the others in layout, though with slightly different furnishings. This one is more committed to a hunter’s retreat theme. A camouflage-pattern blanket laid over the top of the sofa’s back, oil paintings of ducks flying in formation over marshes with rifle barrels poking up from the reeds, the mounted head of a buck over the archway to the bedrooms.
Bridge follows me into the kitchen and watches as I go through the drawers and cabinets. All the utensils, if there ever were any, have been removed. There’s nothing to defend ourselves with any more useful than a salad spinner.
When we return to the living room, Franny is stepping away from the front window. She turns to look at us.
“He’s here,” she says.
A shattering smash against the cabin door.
“Open up!”
It’s Jerry.
“Open! The . . . door!”
I’m not going to. I’m thinking about seeing if Bridge could fit through one of the bedroom windows. I’m thinking about charging into whatever is outside and wrapping myself around it, buying some time. But none of this happens. Because Franny goes to the door and opens it.
“Sorry if I disturbed you,” Jerry says as he strides in
and kicks the door closed with the back of his heel.
“Is he after you?”
Jerry looks at Franny as if this is exactly the sort of question he’d expect her to ask. The contempt that comes from being surrounded by weakness, by an entire world of weakness.
“Why don’t you take a look for yourself?”
Franny doesn’t move.
“What happened back there?” I ask, and Jerry turns his attention to me.
“We had a problem. Which you left me to handle.”
He opens his hands, stretching the fingers as if to crack their knuckles, but it’s only to draw our eyes to his palms. The lines and creases a map of white lines drawn through blood.
“We need to know, Jerry,” Lauren pleads. “Are you saying—”
“I’m saying you don’t need to worry. It’s just us now. Just family.”
His right hand reaches behind his back and pulls something up from where it had been tucked into his belt. A knife. The chef’s blade from the lodge that was among the ones we thought the Tall Man had taken away.
“Where’d you find that?” Franny asks him.
“Where I put it. Along with all the others.”
“I don’t—”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
He trades the knife from one hand to another. There’s an audible click as the handle pulls away from the red glue of his skin.
“That’s why when the shit hits the fan you turn to people like me,” he goes on. “But God forbid if somebody breaks a nail or a skull, you forget that you were the ones who asked for help in the first place.”
“I never asked you to do anything,” Franny says.
“See, that’s what I’m talking about! That’s the kind of thing I’ve heard come out of the mouths of entitled bitches like you my whole goddamned life.”
“You remember,” I say, coming between the two of them as I use my hand at my side to signal Bridge to move away. “Who you were before.”
Jerry sees what I’m trying to do, and he grins his toothy grin at me in mock congratulations.
“You’re no doctor, Aaron,” he says. “But you’re not a total shithead either.”