The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  “That’s killing people and giving them fake memories.”

  The hand holding the gun stiffens.

  “What is a self other than a past?” she says.

  In the pictures they showed me in the pod, the view outside the bay windows Mom stands in front of revealed a tiered garden leading up to a crabapple tree. Now there’s only the rain forest, thick and close.

  Along with the witch. Staring. She wants in but isn’t allowed, and she holds her eyes on me, dark buttons, empty and shining.

  “It gets rid of the bad things you’ve done—or have been done to you,” I say, forcing my attention back to Mom. “A shame remover.”

  “That’s clever! A stain remover for the conscience. Thank you. I’ll have to remember that for the rollout.” Something rueful passes over her features. “It was always going to be a self-improvement tool. But now, after what’s happened—the clampdown, the internment programs, the whole unpleasant pageant—well, we all have so much we’d like to forget. The things we did. Didn’t do. The things we stood and watched.”

  There’s a creak in the floorboards upstairs. A single crunch from the shifting of weight. Mom (I can’t stop myself from thinking of her as this) doesn’t appear to hear it. Her mind elsewhere, reflecting, self-congratulating.

  “I’ve learned so much these past few days, despite the many difficulties. I’ve learned so much from the difficulties,” she says. “But what genuinely startled me was how few gaps Yourstory left in all of you. Next time I’ll put even less into the MI. Turns out it’s better when what we provide isn’t much more than scant suggestions. And then, once you come out and start to be around other people again, you tell your stories and they tell theirs. Mix and match. The brain is so hungry for memories it’ll take some from others if it has to. Make them up out of next to nothing.”

  “Jerry is the only one who doesn’t know who he was before this,” I say, wagering there’s no way she’d have a way of detecting my lie. “Who was he?”

  “You don’t really want to know that. You want to know why he killed all of you.”

  I note the past tense as well as the inclusiveness—killed all of you—but push it away to pursue my first point.

  “So it was him,” I say. “It wasn’t the man in the woods?”

  “No, no,” she says with what may be a note of sadness. “That’s why I left the lodge. I knew he was out there, and that someone other than him was a murderer. Things were quite far off the rails at that point. That’s when I turned on the fence. And when more of you started to die, I had to secure myself.”

  I’m tempted to ask more, but she’s become distracted by the mention of the Tall Man in a way that threatens to pull her away.

  “What about Jerry?”

  She approaches a chair—a plaid upholstered La-Z-Boy I remember being Dad’s favorite to sit in while hiding behind the newspaper—and I’m hoping she sits in it, perhaps putting herself at a disadvantage. She appears to have the same thought and merely leans against one of its arms.

  “He was what, these days, they call a patriot,” she begins. “Fearful, taste for violence. A deportation squad officer right from the early days. All of which made him a fascinating candidate. Could we cleanse him of not only what he’d witnessed of cruelty but being cruel himself? I honestly thought we’d been successful until—well, we don’t need to be forthcoming about that in the research we release, do we? I mean, who’s going to know?”

  I’ll know, I think of saying but stop myself. I’m probably the only one alive who does, and soon there won’t even be me.

  She studies me as if reading my thoughts. There’s a flicker of something I mistake for pity, but when she speaks, I hear as only her curiosity.

  “Do you know who you really are, Aaron?”

  “No.”

  “Shall I tell you? You’re not a doctor, as you’ve already discovered. Not a runner, either. You—”

  “Stop.”

  “A leader of a kind. Defiance! One of the few who didn’t get scared off even after—”

  “Stop!”

  She raises her eyebrows. The gun too. Aiming it at my head instead of my chest.

  “All right,” she says. “But would you like to know how you died?”

  She takes my silence for acquiescence. Or maybe she doesn’t care what I want to know or not.

  “I was confident of Yourstory’s methodology. But it was unproven. And I confess that some of the initial trials were, well, less than successful. Memories are stubborn. Pharmaceutical cleanses, protein sponges. The past came back no matter what chemical manipulation we applied. I knew, deep down, that only a total shutdown would do the trick. Death. But my financial backers were rather nervous about experiments involving, you know, the real thing. Even now. Even them. You should have seen their faces when I brought it up! I knew I would have to proceed on my own. And that called for human subjects.”

  There’s the creaking in the floor upstairs again, directly over our heads. This time Mom definitely hears it too. Her eyes glance up at the ceiling as if it were glass and she’s confirming what she knows to be there. But she doesn’t mention it, only looks back down to the gun, and along its barrel at me.

  “It was essential that all of you be taken at once,” she goes on. “Hiring goons to drive around snatching people—a common sort of crime, but it offered patterns to be discovered. And in any case, it was important that I know who was being taken, to have an idea of their profiles so that I could evaluate the efficacy of their transformation.”

  As she speaks, I feel the cold water lapping against my chin, my lips, as I struggled to stay above the surface. The twins, Bridge, and the others around me doing the same. The alien song reaching up to us from the deep. Not a shared dream, not the sensation of floating in the pods. The last moments of our lives.

  “We drowned,” I say. “You drowned us.”

  “We could have done it a different way, of course. Something controlled in the lab. Lethal injection. But I felt it needed to be organic.”

  “Mass murder isn’t organic.”

  “Really? How do you think you were born, Aaron?”

  I try to think of the answer. Try to envision who my real mother might be, where she delivered me, the faces of those who first blanketed me, held me. Not even the vaguest guess comes to mind.

  “In water!” my false mother exclaims in reply to herself. “The most intimate darkness. I recreated that as best I could. Do you see the circularity? Birth and death? Mother to ocean? No? Well. Perhaps the elegance of it is outside your grasp at the moment.”

  “Why a boat? Why not drown us in a tank here at Belfountain instead?”

  “Missing at sea. One of the last ways to truly disappear. You’ve already been declared dead. A swift turnaround. With an abduction on land? It would take years.”

  Once again her words make my head swim. Declared dead. Which makes me what? An error. A monster. Nothing.

  “How was it done?”

  “The old-fashioned way. A bribe. I can tell you, the whale watching business isn’t what it used to be,” she says, her free hand picking at a thread in the chair’s armrest. “So the captain of one such vessel was quite amenable to a new identity in a foreign country and more than enough money to see him through the rest of his days. Because you’d all booked your tickets in advance, we had time to find out who you were, the broad strokes of your personalities. Then, an hour out—an explosive charge below decks. Enough to sink the ship but look like the engine blew. Our boat recovered your bodies, then revived you on board—a successful process in all cases but one. We sedated you, brought you here. The Coast Guard’s search for survivors was predictably brief and fruitless. And all the while I had you here, becoming something new.”

  “What was the music we all heard? Under the water?”

  “I was interested in that too. I assumed it was some aural hallucination triggered by the compound we administered on the rescue boat. But my subsequent investig
ation suggests that it was something else altogether.” She grins, a pause to lend emphasis to what comes next. “The whales,” she says. “A choir of humpbacks, serenading you into the afterlife. Isn’t that remarkable?”

  I can hear them now. Another true memory, the last of my life. Sounding up from the endless dark.

  “Well,” she announces, straightening. “Perhaps we should proceed to—”

  “What about Fogarty, the lawyer?”

  “An actor. Apparently well regarded in the San Francisco theater community, but I personally thought he overcooked it a smidge.”

  “And the limo drivers? They were actors too?”

  “They were limo drivers.”

  Through the window, the old woman steps closer. At first I think it’s to press her face to the glass, but then she veers off toward the front door. A moment later I can’t see her at all.

  “Were you ever going to let us go?”

  “You know, I hadn’t decided on that. It was possible—well, I certainly liked the idea. A united family, getting together for Sunday dinners and summer holidays.”

  She flinches at this. A flare of discomfort that comes from a place she normally has safely contained. But only for a second. She arches her back in a yogic pose of strength.

  But it lets me see something. We weren’t the first prisoners at Belfountain. There had been others before us. Two of them.

  “Who is the Tall Man?” I ask. “The old woman outside?”

  “I admit that working mostly on my own, as I was forced to do, led to a number of mistakes. Not anticipating the danger Jerry brought, for instance,” she says, nodding to indicate that she’s heard my question but that the answer must be approached indirectly. “Also leaving the key to the lab in the shed—I’d simply forgotten about that one. So many stages to the construction, so much Here, you’ll need this. And yes, the escapees. The ones you call the Tall Man and the old woman.”

  She sighs at the thought of them, wistful and strangely girlish, as if at the memory of some lost intimacy.

  “You haven’t told me who they are.”

  “Who are they now? Failed experiments,” she says. “But before that? They were my only family. My mother. My son.”

  The sound of a foot coming down at the top of the stairs. From where I stand, I’ll only be able to see who it is when they’ve completed the descent, but there’s no question that it’s a person up there, deliberate and slow.

  “Over the time I was developing Yourstory I was losing them, bit by bit. My mother to Alzheimer’s. My son to—well, they gave it a number of different diagnoses,” she continues, louder than necessary, before pausing with a sigh. “Acute bipolar disorder. That’s what most of them hung their hats on. But what’s that mean? A defective mind. Faulty wiring. True for both of them. It’s why I rushed my work so much at the end. I thought I could save them. Wipe their bad brains clean and reboot them. A second chance at sanity for my son, at memory for my mother.”

  “Your family,” I say, catching up.

  “Yes.”

  “We thought they might have been ghosts.”

  “We’re the ghosts, Aaron. Sentimental hangers-on, wishing we could go back to the good old days. Ghosts are my prime market.”

  Another step on the stairs. If I turn my head, I might be able to see the legs of whoever it is, but I sense that to do so would be the end of the agreement I have with Mom to not shoot me dead here and now. She’s pretending not to hear the person on the stairs. So I must do the same.

  “Every obsessive is motivated for personal reasons, and I’m no exception,” she says, as if in reply to a point I’ve made. “My father left when I was a child, which perhaps explains why the one I created for you was such a cold spot. But you must believe that I wanted you to have a father. Everything I’ve done here—it’s always been about family. I tried to save my own because I loved them. And after they slipped away, I loved the memory of them. I still do. Because memory is all there is.”

  The weight on the stairs seems to be actively growing, now sounding great enough to crack them. To fall through the floor altogether.

  “I wanted to be your mother,” she says to me, blinking. “Wouldn’t you agree that, in some sense, I always will be?”

  The steps reach the base of the stairs and pause.

  “Steven?” Mom says. “I’d like you to meet someone.”

  I look. The Tall Man doesn’t appear to hear her or understand her words if he does. He doesn’t move other than his heaving torso, as though he’s drawing breath through a hole in his back. He’s without the silver hatchet. Stooped and bleeding. His mouth pulled open in silent agony.

  “Aaron, this is my son, Steven,” she says, and steps closer to him.

  Whether it is to embrace the Tall Man or guide him over to shake my hand or whisper her command for him to attack, I can’t say, because in her approach she lowers the gun a few inches, momentarily forgetting it’s there at the end of her arm, and I’m rushing at her, leaping into the space between us even after the crack of the shot.

  59

  SHE’S SO LIGHT. BIRD-BONED. AND like a bird, she flies.

  Her head hits the window behind her. At the impact, she utters a single grunt and lands on the floor, arms crossed over her chest as if a stubborn child refusing to play a game.

  Seeing Mom there delivers two pieces of information I hadn’t grasped the second before.

  The bullet missed me.

  She’s not holding the gun anymore.

  It’s there on the floor where she dropped it when I connected with her, just beyond her right foot. I’m bending to pick it up when she sees it too. But instead of reaching for it she starts screaming.

  “Help me! Steven!”

  Her voice unlike any of her previous tones, frantic and shattering. The strangeness of it prevents me from understanding its meaning.

  “Steven!”

  I feel the Tall Man moving. The vibration of his bulging feet on the shoddy floorboards. One more step and he’ll be on top of me. If I look, I can confirm it. If I look, I won’t move before he’s here.

  The gun is there and it’s the only thing in the world.

  I fall onto my side next to it and pick it up at the same time that Mom pushes away from the wall and stretches out her leg, kicking my face. But it’s something I’m barely aware of. There’s only my hand slipping around the gun, lifting the gun, raising the gun to my right, and firing once, twice, a third time.

  The Tall Man attempts to close his mouth. To speak? To spit? It doesn’t work, whatever his intent. The gray lips shiver and fall open again, his eyes not on me, but on his mother. There’s no recognition in them. There’s nothing I would identify as emotion. It was her voice he responded to, not her, and now that he can’t hear her, he topples onto his back, his spine and knees locked so that he comes down like a felled tree.

  “What did you do? What did you do?”

  She’s getting up. I figured she’d broken something. Maybe she has. But it doesn’t stop her from rolling onto her knees, reaching for the arm of the recliner, fighting her way to her feet.

  “Don’t move,” I say, and point the gun at her face.

  “You hurt him. You—”

  “I didn’t hurt him. I shot him. Now don’t fucking move.”

  She stays where she is.

  Her eyes dart over to see whoever walks in through the front door. Soft padding over the carpet, the steps tentative as a child’s.

  I try to find whoever is there in my peripheral vision but the angle won’t allow it. It requires me to look away from Mom, though I keep the barrel trained on her.

  The old woman. Peeking around the corner from the front hall, her eyes flicking from the body on the floor, to Mom, to me.

  By reflex my arm swings the gun over and aims at her.

  “Don’t,” Mom says.

  Pleading. Not as startling as her shrieked appeal to the Tall Man yet it’s the most genuine sound I’ve ever heard her
make.

  “She doesn’t know She doesn’t know.”

  I don’t understand what she means and for a moment I consider firing if for no other reason than she’s asked me not to. Then I see how the old woman looks at me, confused but seeking approval, the wish to not cause any harm, to please. She doesn’t know.

  “I’ll take you to them,” Mom says.

  60

  MOM GOES FIRST.

  As she passes the old woman, there’s the briefest glance between them I worry might be some kind of secret signal, and I stay back another stride in case one of them comes at me.

  Once Mom is out the front door and down the porch steps, I look back at the old woman. Through the semidarkness of the hallway, her eyes glint at me like black pinheads pushed into a dried apple.

  “Don’t come after us,” I say.

  Her head lowers an inch in the way of a dog disappointed to be told it won’t be coming along for a walk. Other than this she doesn’t protest, doesn’t advance or retreat. I pull the door shut, and there’s only the pinhead eyes, as empty of the future as they are of the past.

  • • •

  I tell her to take me to Bridge and Lauren first. Then she has to turn off the electrical charge to the fence and open the gate.

  “This way,” she says.

  At first I think I can figure out where she’s going, a backtrack toward the lodge that takes one variation, then another, each successive branching off the trail we’re on more abrupt than the last. Soon I’m turned around so completely I’m free of even a guess at which way we’re headed. Not that it matters. Either Mom is taking me to where I have to go or she’s not. To be freed from choice is a liberation, and I can feel the lightness of it now the way I suppose it is with soldiers following orders.

  “How far is it?” I call ahead to her.

  “It’s here.”

  And it is.

  We come out of the cover of trees and into the shaggy yard around another suburban home in the middle of the woods, this one a boxy split-level with a rooster weather vane on the rooftop. The Kirkland house where the second Quinlans believed they grew up.