by TJ Klune
It only takes minutes.
It feels like hours.
There’s an empty pod. The panel next to it is dark.
“This is where you were,” the gardener says solemnly. “Where you slept before they took you away. I tried to stop them. After all, I was the one that pointed out to them when your heartbeats matched. When your brainwaves matched. They came down after that. Did all these tests. They did electroencephalograms. EEGs. They didn’t understand their own results. They said, maybe it was just tiny seizures. Or tiny strokes. Maybe it was proximity. Maybe it was ADHD or epilepsy. They went in, after that. Just to see. And you know what they found? Do you know what they saw, Mike? Mr. Frazier?”
“What?” Greg says hoarsely.
The gardener smiles. “They saw what it really was. They saw it was love. They didn’t believe it. They are scientists. Therefore, they’re cynics. It’s how the world works. There’s an order to everything. They thought they’d taken away everything that made you who you were and built you from the ground up. They didn’t realize they couldn’t stop you from being human, no matter if you were Mike Frazier or Greg Hughes.”
“They could have made him”—me—“feel that way. They could have manufactured everything.”
The gardener shook his head. “They could take away your memories. They could make you forget who you were. They could make you into something else. But they could never make someone love you. They could never make you love someone else. You can’t manufacture that.” He sounds irritated now. “No, you did that all on your own, didn’t you, Mike?”
And he steps aside.
Greg thinks maybe he should turn around. Maybe he should just walk away. Demand the gardener take him back to his room. Forget about all of this. He’ll get stronger. Better. He’ll demand they let him leave. If they won’t, he’ll find some way to escape. He doesn’t know where he’ll go after that, but he’ll find somewhere. He can do this. Maybe he can have a life again that’s free from this prison. That’s free from this island.
He’s about to do just that when he steps forward instead.
There’s a man in a pod that looks nothing like the man he knows in his head. Sean Mellgard is happy and healthy and whole. He’s unconventionally handsome, with wide, expressive eyes and a devilish smile on his face. His nose is a little crooked and his eyebrows a little bushy, but it’s endearing. Greg knows this. He knows this, even if it’s not his to know.
The man before him is not Sean Mellgard.
“Drugs,” the gardener says. “Heroin. He was an addict. Nathan Powell. Parents died when he was seven. Tossed around from foster home to foster home. Dropped out of school. Committed petty crimes. Fell in with the wrong people. Got hooked. Sold himself for money. For drugs. For a place to sleep. He was nineteen when he overdosed in his car. They tried to save him. He died twice, but they brought him back.”
“Maybe,” Greg chokes out. “Maybe he can wake up like—”
“Oh no,” the gardener says. “No, no, no. You see, you were a special case. The waves in your brain were always a little… different. They brought it out in Sean. In Nathan. When you synced up. But see how they are now?”
He does. On the panel, there’s barely a ripple.
“He won’t wake up,” the gardener says. “Ever.”
Greg tries to look away.
He can’t.
He’s thinking of that day at the park. Lying on their backs and watching the clouds. Hands joined. The smile Sean gave him.
No, he thinks. Gave Mike.
Mike, who no longer exists. A dream, just like the doctor had said.
That Sean is not this Nathan.
This Nathan is frozen, skinny to the point of being gaunt. His skin is pale, tinged with the barest hints of blue. There are tattoos up and down his arms, skulls and flames and birds. He wonders if they hide the track marks, scars from repeated injections. He thinks they might.
He looks like a mummy, preserved for all time.
They all do.
“This isn’t an island,” Greg whispers. “It’s a tomb.”
“No,” the gardener says. “It’s not. It’s neither. It’s a vegetable garden. It’s my vegetable garden.” He laughs nervously.
Greg reaches up and touches the cold glass separating him from Sean. He thinks about how bright his eyes were. About his just-for-Mike (Greg) smile. It wasn’t a bad life. From what he can see, from what he can remember, it was actually pretty wonderful.
Maybe—
No.
He can’t.
He can’t.
Right?
XXIII
MIKE’S GONE. Greg’s sure of it.
He doesn’t even feel him buried underneath all that… everything.
But his memories are still there. These shadows that stretch over everything.
He remembers his life. Before. And he’s starting to remember more and more about how Jenny came for him with bright eyes and a knife. All the things that followed. Being questioned. Being arrested. Being tried. Being found guilty. Going to jail. Getting the shit kicked out of him.
Part of him wants to see that video, see the video that Jenny made, where she pretended to be scared, where she said she’d always feared Greg. It doesn’t take much to put the pieces together. She made that with the intention of killing him and then using it as self-defense. Saying he’d come after her. He was angry. Everyone knew he had a temper. But no one could know just how far it went.
He doesn’t ask to watch it. He doubts they could get a copy even if he wanted it.
Is he angry about it?
Oh, sure.
He’s fucking furious.
IN FEBRUARY, he looks into a mirror for the first time.
It’s both better and worse than he thought it would be. He doesn’t have a full beard; they shaved it after he was beaten within an inch of his life. It is easier upkeep, he was told by one of the nurses a couple of weeks after he’d woken. “You can’t see sores or lesions if they’re covered by a beard,” she said with a wink.
But it’s growing back now, even if it’s coming in in patches. There are dark circles under his eyes, bruised blue and purple. He’s still skinny, far skinnier than he’s ever been as an adult, but he doesn’t have the g-tube in his stomach anymore and is working his way up to more solid foods.
The rest of his head, though.
It’s terrifying.
His hair is much like his beard in that it’s growing back in patches, some of it brown, some of it auburn. It does nothing to hide the scars, and he doubts it ever will. They crisscross over his scalp, a roadmap describing the brutality of what happened that day in the prison showers, a stark reminder of an event he wishes he could not remember. The large scar, across the side of his head where the crack in his skull was the biggest, is white and raised, its ridges bumpy and puckered. The rest are jagged, like his skin was sliced with a small blade. There’s a single scar on his cheek, an inch or two in length, curling around his nose. His neck is similarly marked on the left side. The right is almost unblemished, like he was on his side while the blows came down on him, curled up to try and protect as much as he could.
They had to remove a testicle. He was told this the day the catheter was taken out. One had been squashed beyond repair. He limps, given the damage to his legs and knees, and probably always will, even if he gains even half of his former strength back. Which, as it turns out, he might. Being frozen apparently slowed the body’s degradation, preventing muscles from becoming more atrophied than they were.
I’m alive, he thinks.
He stares at his reflection. He sees the cracks within himself lying just near the surface.
His eyes are dull and lifeless. He looks haunted.
I’m alive, he thinks again.
In Amorea, I could be—
He stops himself before the thought completes.
DR. KING says, “You look well. Better, even. Like you’re healing.”
He grins
at her and thinks, What do you know about schizophrenia?
HE DREAMS about being Mike. About living in Amorea. He’s not sure whether these are memories or desires, but he’s walking down Main Street and he’s saying hello and good morning to everyone he passes. Everyone is happy to see him. He goes into a diner (the diner, he thinks) and people shout out his name as a bell rings out overhead. They wave at him, and he smiles back, and there’s three guys sitting at a lunch counter. One is a rapist, another makes dirty bathtub meth that explodes and kills children, and another’s dog ate his toes as he lay on the floor of his apartment, face slack, drool running down his cheek, pants filled with piss and shit, kiddie porn locked away in a safe. A man behind the grill waves at him, flipping eggs and bacon like he’s never robbed a store and then been run over by the karma train.
And there’s one more person there. One more person, and he gives him a just-for—
Mike
—Greg smile and it’s warm, and inviting, and everything he could ever want. His heart trips all over itself, and he doesn’t even think about the track marks that should be running up and down the crook of his elbow or between his toes. He doesn’t think about this guy on his knees in dirty jeans, sucking off some out-of-town businessman in Detroit for a conference for ten bucks, that if he can do three more in the next four hours, he’ll have enough for his next fix. He doesn’t think about him parked under that overpass, needle stuck in his arm, choking on his own vomit, a mixture of bile and a day-old plain hamburger he’d gotten for fifty cents at some hole-in-the-wall burger shack.
He says, “Hey, big guy.”
Greg/Mike says, “Hey.” That one word sounds so fond that he’s almost embarrassed for himself.
Sean’s lips twitch, like he knows what Greg/Mike is thinking. “You good?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“Yeah,” Sean says, like it’s a joke, like it’s a secret just between them.
“DO PEOPLE ever get sick in Amorea?” he asks Dr. Hester.
“No,” Dr. Hester says. He sounds like he’s choosing his words carefully. “Not really. Nothing major. Nothing that can’t be fixed. Or controlled. Like migraines.”
“Huh,” Greg says, but he’s distracted, because in his dream last night, Sean kissed his cheek. He can almost feel the warmth of him standing so close.
“Why do you ask?”
Greg says, “Just thinking out loud.”
Dr. Hester nods. “I do that too. While I still can. It helps.”
“With what?”
“With everything.”
Greg asks, “Are you ever going to let me leave?”
“Where would you go?” Dr. Hester asks, just like the first time they did this little dance.
“I could be someone. I have… experience.”
“You have a body that is just remembering to function on its own,” Dr. Hester says, “and a mind that still has cracks in it that you fall into. You’re not ready. I don’t know if you ever will be. Mr. Hughes, in the eyes of anyone that matters outside of these walls, you murdered your wife.”
“I didn’t.”
“You remember?”
“Yes. No. Not all of it. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’m not like that.”
“We don’t know what we’re like, Mr. Hughes, until we’re called upon to show our true colors. For all you know, you could be remembering things a certain way because you want to remember them that way.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Greg says. He knows this. He knows this. “Not like you think.”
Dr. Hester doesn’t respond.
“WHAT DO you know about schizophrenia?” he asks Sean as they watch the clouds pass by overhead. They’re lying side by side, arms brushing together, fingers intertwined.
“Not much,” Sean says, and he sounds amused. “I’m just a waiter, after all.”
“You’re more than that,” he says, squeezing his hand. “You always have been. To me.”
“Yeah?” Sean asks.
“Yeah,” he says, just to make Sean laugh.
He does. It’s predictable, but he doesn’t care. It sounds so good to hear it.
“I think,” Sean says, tilting his head so their foreheads are almost touching, “that it’d be like having a storm of birds in your mind. But a controlled storm. Like with a purpose. It’s there, and it’s chaos, but there’s order to it. It won’t make sense to anyone else, but it does to the person that has it.”
“A murmuration?” he asks.
“Exactly,” Sean says, and he’s leaning in, like they’re going to kiss, like they’re going to—
“CAN YOU do it?” Greg asks, voice low. “Can you get me in again?”
The gardener frowns. “To the Garden? Why would you—”
“I need to see it.”
“I took you there once, Mr. Frazier. I showed you where you’d come from once. I don’t think I can do it again.”
“I need to see it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m….”
Out of control.
Out of my mind.
Out of sync.
“What do you know about schizophrenia?”
The gardener grins sharply. “More than you could ever know.”
HE’S IN front of the cryogenic pod belonging to Nathan Powell.
The gardener is off in the distance, tinkering, always tinkering.
He doesn’t know why he’s here. There was this longing burning in his chest, just for a mere sight of this man, this wasted drug addict who may as well have condemned himself to death. Before everything went to hell, before the baby and Jenny and all the shit slung at him, he never paid much attention to people like this. Because he knew it was a choice. Much like he chose every day to hold back the onslaught of rage that coursed through his veins at even the littlest things, he thought these people made a choice to stick that needle in their arm. They chose that, just like he chose to curl his fists at his sides rather than lash out. He wasn’t his father. He chose to be better than that. People like Nathan Powell could have chosen the same.
After the baby. After Jenny. After that shitstorm. Well. Nothing much mattered after that.
If anything, he thinks, he should have reverted to the way he was before. Having the barest amount of pity mired in disgust for people like Nathan Powell.
But he doesn’t.
Not really.
It’s all sorrow. That’s all it is.
He thinks, I could have you. If I really wanted to. If I really thought about it. I could go to Amorea. I could make you mine. I did it once. This body did, anyway. I could do it again. You could love me, just like you loved him.
And on and on it goes.
“HE CAN’T force you to do this,” Dr. King says. “No matter how much you think he can. You don’t owe him anything. I don’t know what he’s told you, but you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Aside from the ethics violations alone, it’s dangerous. There are no guarantees. About anything. Do you know how long people last in comas, Mr. Hughes? Not long. Stories you hear about people waking up twenty years later are mostly fairy tales. Even in stasis, the body is not meant to last. It’s not a permanent fix. One day, and one day soon, you will die. Everyone you think you love in Amorea will die. Only you won’t get a chance to mourn them, because you won’t have even known they existed. Is that worth it to you? Not to mention the stress that this will put on your own body. This isn’t normal stasis. You are not an astronaut. In order to reach the depth you’ll need for Amorea, you will need to have next to nonexistent neurological activity. That means to return, you would need brain damage. And no one, not me, and certainly not Dr. Hester, would be able to say with any amount of certainty that this would work. He’s a brilliant man. A brilliant mind. I am honored to have known him. To have studied under and with him. But he is drowning in his own mortality. He knows that he doesn’t have much time left. That the clock is ticking down to the point where he’ll tip over into his dementia
and won’t be able to come back from it. His speech will go. His mental faculties will go. His mind will go. He’s not doing this for you. He’s doing this for himself. Because if it’s successful, if it works for you, he can do it to himself. Amorea isn’t real. You said it yourself. It’s an island. A prison.”
“You’ve never been there,” Greg says. “Have you?”
She looks startled. “No. But I understand it. I understand the attraction. Greg, you can’t just—”
“How is it different than here? I’m a prisoner here.”
“We can figure out something. You won’t have Mike’s life. You won’t. Mike is gone. He was a part of you that you have absorbed. The people there won’t love you, not like they did him. We can do many things. We can make Amorea. We can put the people there. We can make them better parts of themselves. We can take everything away. But Greg, we have never been able to make them love. They will not love you. They will not know you. Mike was there for three years. You don’t know if you’ll have that much time. For anything.”
“You don’t know that either,” Greg says.
“You can’t do this for him,” Dr. King says. She sounds like she’s begging. “For Sean. He loved Mike. He synced with Mike. I can’t make you Mike again. Not without destroying every part of who you are.”
Good, Greg thinks. Because I don’t want to be him. I want to be me. And he’ll love me for me. I’ll make sure of it.
Gregory Hughes says, “I don’t want to be Mike. He’s not who I am. I would just be me. Besides, I haven’t decided anything.”
Except that’s a lie, isn’t it?
HE DREAMS of a town nestled in a valley, surrounded by snowcapped mountains. There are trees that change a brilliant red and gold in the fall. There’s a hill that they sled down in the winter. In the spring, the birds sing and the flowers bloom. The town explodes in Technicolor in the summer, and there are barbecues and reading favorite books in the park.