Murmuration

by TJ Klune

  “You’re awake, Greg,” she says. “This is real.”

  Greg thinks, What do you know about schizophrenia?

  “Oh I know,” he says with a smile. “I just wish it wasn’t.”

  “We should—”

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “Pardon?”

  She’s deflecting, he knows. “What are you going to do to me?”

  “Do to you?” she squints. “We’re not going to do anything to you.”

  “More than you already have.”

  “Mr. Hughes—”

  “Am I free to go?”

  “Go where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  She frowns. “Where do you have to go?”

  “Someplace that isn’t this damn room.”

  She says, “You were a federal prisoner. Any assets you had were given as recompense in the civil trial. You had nothing left to your name. We took you from an understaffed hospital with subpar care and gave you a chance for something more. Technically, Mr. Hughes, you belong to Project Amorea.”

  “I just want to go home,” Greg says, and he thinks it sounds like Mike.

  “Greg,” she says quietly, “this is your home now.”

  It’s an island, Mike whispers. It’s always been an island.

  Yes, Greg thinks. Yes.

  DR. HESTER says, “You’re looking better today.”

  Greg grins. “It’s a prison, you know.” He’s sitting in a chair next to a window that overlooks a large cactus and not much else. The ground is red, arid. It looks like nothing. Greg likes it. Mike hates it. Greg’s become adept at ignoring him.

  Dr. Hester’s chair falls silent. “How’s that, now?”

  “This. This whole place. It’s a prison. Just a nicer one.”

  “I don’t see that at all. This is a place where we are changing the world as we know it.”

  He cocks his head. “What would happen if I tried to leave?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What would you do if I tried to walk out the door?”

  “Where would you go?”

  “You’ve been talking to Dr. King.”

  “Mr. Hughes, I don’t think you quite grasp the situation that you’re in.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Tell me, doctor. What do you know about schizophrenia?”

  Dr. Hester flinches. It’s barely there, but Greg catches it. “I don’t know if I can apologize more than I already have.”

  “I don’t know that you’ve apologized at all.”

  “Would you have rather us left you there? Where I found you? Neglected and uncared for?”

  Greg laughs but doesn’t say anything.

  “Would you like to go back?”

  He stops laughing. “Back where?”

  Dr. Hester is watching him closely. “Amorea, Mr. Hughes.”

  He thinks Mike is almost gone, because he doesn’t even register a blip. “How?”

  “A medically induced coma. It would be deep, Mr. Hughes. I’m not going to lie. You wouldn’t wake up from it. And in all honesty, I’m not being entirely altruistic. There is so much I can learn from you. From your brain.”

  “Why didn’t you do it then?”

  “When?”

  “When I was waking up? Why didn’t you just put me back under?”

  “Why, that wouldn’t be ethical.”

  Greg snorted. “Somehow, I don’t believe you’re worried about ethics.”

  Dr. Hester doesn’t reply.

  “What would happen to me?” Greg eventually asks. “To Mike?”

  “He’s still with you?” Dr. Hester asks.

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in a while.”

  “You would stay you. How you are now. How you remember. You would be Greg Hughes. You would just be Greg Hughes in Amorea.”

  “And Mike Frazier?”

  “Would be nothing. He’s probably gone now. Consumed by your subconscious. He was always part of you, Mr. Hughes. We just… separated him from you.”

  “And they wouldn’t remember me?”

  “Who?”

  “The people. In Amorea.” Sean, he thinks, but it’s nothing more than a passing thought.

  “No. They don’t remember you. They wouldn’t. It would start from the beginning.”

  “All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again,” Greg murmurs, staring out the window.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No, Dr. Hester,” Greg says. “I won’t go back. I don’t know what you’d do to me. I don’t know what you’d try and make me do.”

  “Think about how many people you could help. Think about the lives you could save if only you—”

  “No. I won’t go back.”

  Liar, he thinks.

  Dr. Hester leaves him shortly after.

  TWO WEEKS later, he’s awoken in the middle of the night by a finger poking his face. He thinks he might be dreaming still (he was lying in a park with an electric blue sky above watching the clouds go by, a hand curled softly in his own, and he felt so, so loved) but then his eyes open and in the dull light, he sees a man standing next to his bed.

  “Hi,” he whispers. “I have so much to show you. But you have to be quiet if you want to see the vegetables.”

  It takes Greg a moment to place him.

  The gardener.

  “What?” he says, voice rough.

  “I can show them to you,” the gardener says. “But you have to come with me now. Shh. Keep quiet. It’s a secret.”

  He thinks, I don’t want to see that.

  He says, “You can take me there?” He doesn’t know why he asks.

  “Yes,” the gardener says. “I can show you. You were one of mine first. And I can show you where you sprouted, little vegetable.”

  HE’S IN a flimsy wheelchair. He can walk now for longer distances before getting tired, but it’d take too long. Or so the gardener says. Greg sits and the gardener pushes and they’re moving down mazes of hallways, places he doesn’t recognize. He tries to memorize the route, but gets lost after the sixth or seventh turn. He still has cognitive issues, short-term memory problems, but they’re getting better. He’s getting better. He’ll probably never be the same and he’ll always look like a monster, but at least he’s getting better. That’s something, right?

  He thinks, It wouldn’t be like this in Amorea. In Amorea, we can be however we want to be.

  He doesn’t know where the thought comes from. He doesn’t want to be someone’s experiment.

  He thinks, Are you sure?

  The gardener says, “You’re the only vegetable that’s left me that didn’t leave me for the boneyard. Oscar did. He left me. Hadn’t lost anyone in quite some time before him. The last had been a woman. I remember her name. It was Nadine.”

  Greg says, “The African Queen.”

  The gardener says, “Well, I don’t know about that. That sounds a little racist. There’s no racism in the Garden, Mr. Frazier.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Of course you aren’t. Now be quiet before you get us caught. Don’t know why you’re talking to me to begin with. Did you know how much security is in a place like this? Very little, to be honest. Only one man watches the video cameras overnight. He’s taking his break now. I gave him a couple of joints I rolled and he’s toking up in a bathroom stall on the fourth floor. No one goes to the fourth floor, Mike.”

  “My name is Greg.”

  The gardener laughs. “It’s all the same.”

  When is a door not a door? Greg thinks. When it’s a Mike.

  They go through doors that require the gardener to slide a card through, a light above buzzing from red to green as the locks click. It takes them almost ten minutes, and Greg’s feeling overwhelmed by how much bigger the facility is than he thought. He didn’t know it extended this far.

  They come to a final set of doors. The gardener stops and says, “It’s inside. All of them. In the Gar
den. They’re sleeping. In their little pods.”

  Greg doesn’t want to go in. He doesn’t want to see them. He doesn’t want to see where he’s spent the last three years. He thinks it will break him or, at the very least, drive him mad.

  He says, “Are we going to stand here all night? Open the door.”

  The gardener laughs. “Vegetables aren’t supposed to be funny,” he says, like he’s scolding Greg.

  Greg feels a trickle of sweat on the back of his neck.

  He doesn’t want to sit for this. He locks the brakes on the chair before pushing himself up. The gardener eyes him warily, but doesn’t stop him. He hands him the cane Greg’s been using on his walks around his room. Greg steadies himself as the gardener slides his keycard through the lock. This door doesn’t buzz. The light just flips to green, and then—

  The doors just… open.

  Cold air crawls out along the floor and up his legs through the thin sweats he wears. Gooseflesh ripples along his skin and he almost turns around right then. Almost says fuck this and leaves.

  He hobbles toward the room instead.

  It’s cold in the room. Almost numbingly so. And the area is far bigger than he thought it’d be, almost as if they’ve stepped into some kind of warehouse. There’s a distant polyphonic ding from a machine that Greg can’t see.

  “They asked me,” the gardener says, walking into the darkened room, “if I could keep secrets. I said yes. Because I knew many, many secrets. They didn’t want me for my mind. No, they wanted me because I could tend to the Garden the way it should truly be tended to. These are my vegetables. I upkeep the pods. I make them safe so my vegetables can grow and dream their little dreams.”

  Greg follows after him. Little lights along the floor illuminate a path to follow. It’s straight, mostly, and leads toward hulking machinery that Greg can barely make out in the dark. Machinery that hums quietly, causing subtle vibrations along the floor.

  “I almost told them no,” the gardener says with a little laugh. “Boy, would that have been a mistake I would have regretted for a long time to come. I didn’t, though. I didn’t say no. And even though I can’t see my family anymore, that’s okay. They didn’t need me. They never needed me. Not like this. Here, I am wanted. Here, I am someone.” He shakes his head and glances over his shoulder. Greg can barely make out his smooth features in the dark. “Turns out vegetables are better company than everyone else. Who would have thought?”

  They walk on for a few minutes more before the gardener comes to a stop.

  Greg can see them, though he’s not quite sure what he’s looking at. Ahead, on either side of them, are rows of… something. There are brightly lit panels that stretch as far as he can see that flicker with numbers and the slow, methodical pulse of a sinus rhythm. There are other lines on these panels, moving lines. Some are stronger than others. Some are almost flat.

  The gardener stands in front of a computer mounted on the wall. His fingers fly over the keys, commands stretching out in bright blue letters against a black screen. He pauses after a moment and looks over his shoulder. “You ready?” he asks, lips curved into smile. “Yeah?”

  No, he thinks.

  “Yeah,” he says and it makes his eyes sting. He doesn’t know why.

  The gardener nods before hitting a final keystroke.

  At first, nothing happens.

  He holds his breath.

  There’s a click.

  The first light comes up on the left, on a pod that’s four or five down the row. The second light comes up on the right, and it’s the pod closest to Greg. Then more and more flicker on up and down the rows on either side. The lights are soft, a pale yellow that reminds Greg of the nightlight he had as a child. The lights chase away the dark, but only just, the shadows held at bay just beyond the pods.

  There are so many of them.

  Each is at least the height of Greg, and the width of two or three of him, when he was at his biggest. They’re egg shaped, the fronts made of glass slightly frosted over. They’re perched on flat metal platforms, with dozens of wires and tubes coming out the rear, trailing off into the shadows.

  He thinks, My god.

  The gardener says nothing, just watching his reaction.

  He starts on the right.

  He can see them, the people inside the pods. They’re positioned so they’re sitting, but reclined back at an angle, arms and legs propped up, head kept facing straight on either side by a padded support. There’s a headband on each of them, attached to wires that lead behind them to the back of the pod. Their skin is pale, almost ghostly so. Their cheeks are gaunt. Their arms and legs twig thin, some more so than others.

  There’s vague recognition for some of the people, names on the tip of his tongue that he can’t quite remember. It itches at the back of his mind, but he doesn’t push.

  He walks slowly down the row, glancing side to side.

  He stops when he sees someone he remembers.

  He says, “Mrs. Richardson.”

  She looks ancient in her pod. Preserved.

  “Ah yes,” the gardener says from right behind Greg, causing him to jump. “Her. She’s… intricate, I think. A marvel. Her name is Tia Piper. She was in a car accident seven years ago. Killed her husband and her child. She’d been drinking. Apparently, she did that quite a bit. They were the only family she had left.”

  Her minions are spread out on either side of her.

  Greg doesn’t know what to say.

  He moves on.

  Doc is next. “Barry Davis. He was a doctor in real life too,” the gardener says. “Though he’d lost his medical license toward the end. Writing scripts for prescription narcotics that he would later sell, the poor man. Tried to hang himself rather than facing charges. Didn’t quite work out the way he wanted. His body lived. His brain, not so much.”

  Donald. “Edward Johnson. Drowned. Well, not on his own. He was actually planning on raping a woman after he’d dragged her off a running trail toward a river. He didn’t know her boyfriend had been trying to catch up with her and had seen him attack her. He stopped it, just in time. Held poor Edward under water until he stopped kicking. No one even thought to send the boyfriend to jail. They called him a hero. Turned out our dear Mr. Johnson had raped seven other women over a period of four years.”

  Calvin. “Arthur Hill. Trailer park fire. Smoke inhalation. See those burns on his hands and arms? They cover eighty percent of his body. What a tragedy. Then again, maybe he shouldn’t have been making dirty bathtub meth, you know? Or, at the very least, learned to make it right. The fire spread rather quickly. Killed six people, including two children.”

  Happy. “Stephen Scott. Nice man he was. Had a stroke. They didn’t find him for three days, because no one cared enough to check on him. His dog had begun to eat his toes. Rather odd, that. But it wasn’t the most shocking thing they found. No, the most shocking thing they found were the hundreds of Polaroids in a safe in the back of his closet. Polaroids of naked kids, if you can believe that shit.”

  Walter. “Kenneth Trueman. One of my favorites. Had just tried to rob a convenience store. He shot and killed the clerk who refused to give up the thirty-seven dollars he had in the register. He didn’t get the money. Took off on foot. Made it onto the street when he was struck by a delivery truck on its way to the very same convenience store. Karma is a very strange and wonderful thing, don’t you think?”

  Greg doesn’t know what to think. He knows these people, flashes of them bursting in his mind. They’re little pulses of clarity coming in through the haze. He can remember the way they sounded. The way they laughed. The way they spoke to him, clapped their hands on his shoulder, tipped their hats when they said good morning. Donald and Happy and Calvin, sitting at the lunch counter. Happy singing about pizza pies and amore. Walter slinging hash on the grill, Donald cutting his hair. Calvin rolling his eyes as Happy leaned drunkenly against him. Mrs. Richardson clicking her tongue at him, telling him he couldn’t
possibly consider wearing that, my word, you’re not a heathen, Mike Frazier, so stop dressing like one.

  He hears, Hey, big guy.

  There’s a stutter in his heart.

  He knows that voice too. It should mean nothing to him.

  It doesn’t.

  It doesn’t.

  It—

  “Where’s Sean?” Gregory Hughes asks.

  The gardener smiles. “I noticed it first, you know. The two of you.”

  “I didn’t….” He stops himself, because he doesn’t know how to finish that sentence. Instead, he says, “Noticed what?”

  “Your hearts. Your brains. Always in sync. Always finding a way to match up with each other. Tell me, Mike. Good old Mike. How did you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The gardener frowns. “But. You have to know.”

  I’d follow you anywhere.

  You would, wouldn’t you.

  Yeah, Sean. Where you go, I go. We’re best friends.

  And something more.

  And something more.

  Then yes. Yes. Saturday. You and me. It’s a date.

  “Where is he?” Greg asks.

  The gardener eyes him warily, but continues on down the row. They pass more and more faces that Greg recognizes, but nothing as clear as the others. He can hear their voices in the back of his mind, and they’re saying Good morning, Mike! and Looks like it’s going to be a scorcher, don’t you think? and Hey there, Mike! Good to see ya! Say, have you gotten in the latest Marlowe mystery? I heard it’s a real blast!