Ashes of Foreverland

by Bertauski, Tony

Gramm nodded.

  “Why would he be doing that?”

  “I...I don’t know. I suggest we stop them both.”

  “Stop them?”

  “Permanently.”

  “You want to terminate them?”

  Gramm raked his hair and stammered. “We don’t need them. Keeping them alive can only be trouble. Cynthia is, you know...contaminated.”

  Tyler watched the former chemist pull the stray hairs from his fingers, watched his lips silently count. Uncertainty pained him. He was a scientist at heart; he liked control. Having the ability to eliminate Danny and Cynthia at will was too much temptation.

  Tyler knew better.

  Those two kids had potential. They couldn’t host a Foreverland like he and Patricia wanted—certainly not like Alessandra—but they were not useless. And despite Tyler’s willingness to sacrifice with callous decisiveness, he was not a cold-blooded murderer.

  “No,” he said. “We’ll not end them, Gramm.”

  That moment of compassion would eventually be his undoing.

  “Where did you find Danny?”

  “He arrived in the States undetected,” Gramm said. “But we located him at Reed’s last known residence.”

  “Interesting. Why is he searching for Reed all of a sudden? Why now? Why in secret?”

  “He spent an hour and a half inside the apartment. When he came out, he began driving and hasn’t stopped.”

  “How do you know it’s Minnesota?”

  “He programmed Cynthia’s address into the GPS.”

  “Where’d he get her address?”

  Gramm stuttered without an answer.

  Tyler turned at the sound of thunder. The skyline was hazy. “He found something in the apartment,” Tyler muttered. “Has he been in communication with anyone?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. Every email, text and phone call has been verified, nothing to suggest a secret code or otherwise.”

  “Reed?”

  Gramm hesitated. “Reed is gone, sir.”

  He wanted to say more, to argue there was no way Reed could be behind this. They knew that the boy named Reed, the one that took Tyler’s son’s body, no longer existed. Reed was dead.

  Tyler had the proof.

  The sinus on the right side of his face was beginning to throb. He was already feeling the euphoric effects of the new seeding. His thoughts felt crisper, his body thrumming with good intentions.

  “Someone is guiding Danny,” Tyler said.

  “There’s no evidence—”

  “He leaves his home, breaks communication with Santiago and goes directly to Reed’s apartment? That is all the evidence we need; someone is guiding him. The young man does not take an interest in a long-dead friend out of the blue.”

  “We need to stick with facts, sir. Reed is nonexistent; we have verified that. There must be another explanation.”

  “Or we’ve missed something.”

  Underestimation was not the mistake Tyler wanted to make. It seemed impossible that Reed was alive, but so did hijacking this entire prison. My people.

  “Why would he go to Cynthia?” Tyler mused.

  Gramm offered suggestions, but the old man wasn’t interested. This hardly seemed threatening. It might even be beneficial. Cynthia was the girl that survived Patricia’s Foreverland; she had trouble acclimating to normal life. Danny might be exactly what she needed. Maybe she would become an asset after all.

  Still, why is he going? Why now?

  Tyler started for the exit.

  His newfound stamina was not to be wasted on pointless arguments. They would watch Danny and Cynthia, not let them out of their sight again. But now, real work needed to be done. Gramm followed him to the elevator.

  They descended to the basement.

  15. Cyn

  Duluth, Minnesota

  Cyn didn’t open letters.

  There was a stack next to the coffee machine and another in a wicker basket. The bills were taken care of through a trust fund established by the Foreverland Survivor Fund, assets acquired from the old women that kidnapped them.

  Cyn wasn’t a survivor. She was a fighter.

  But she was tired of bleeding.

  The curtains were drawn, blotting out the afternoon sunlight. The television droned in the background, electric light dancing on the ceiling. She hardly watched the programs, just wanted the sound to drown out the chatter in her head.

  Not chatter. Just a voice.

  She had thoughts that she called her own. But she also had someone else’s thoughts in her head. That was the voice she was attempting to mute.

  She dropped her foot on the floor, a sandbag thudding on the carpet. It took a minute to pull herself out of the swishing slumber. The cracks of light streaming around the front door told her it was daytime. The clock told her to get going. A meeting started in twenty minutes. And if she wasn’t there, someone would come for her.

  It was better, she learned, to act like a normal addict than someone with a special affliction—an identity crisis that no one would understand, that no one knew existed.

  Then just kill yourself, the voice told her.

  Cyn pushed her short hair from her eyes. In the dusty light, it looked more muddy than blonde. She shoved a magazine off the low table, found the plastic prescription bottle under a newspaper and tapped out a white pill. A tiny pill.

  A voice-dulling pill.

  Shut up.

  The voice had a name. It wasn’t a name Cyn gave it because it wasn’t just her imagination. The voice was someone that had a name, a name Cyn refused to acknowledge. She tried to ignore the ghost that lived in her subconscious, the identity that, without the pills, would rise to the surface like a leviathan, an old woman distorted by her nightmares, a demon with a massive maw, with row after row of teeth that wanted to devour Cyn whole.

  I have a name.

  Cyn wasn’t bipolar. Not crazy, not unstable. The voice in her head was the old woman that kidnapped her, that dragged her out to the wilderness to steal her body.

  Barbara.

  It was bad timing that put the old woman in her head. But Cyn was a survivor.

  Barb, Barb, Barb.

  Living in the ashes of Foreverland.

  The chalky pill stuck to her tongue. She washed it down at the kitchen sink.

  “Now shut up.”

  She pulled the towel from the window and squinted in the daylight. The postal truck was at her mailbox.

  The pill bottle slipped from her fingers and bounced on the linoleum. She bent over and picked it up near the oven, the glass door covered with three layers of wax paper to obscure any reflections.

  Pull the paper off, Barb whispered. Her voice was fading in the pill’s haze. Look at my reflection.

  Her arm ached to rise; her hand itched to do what she said. Cyn never did, but hated the compulsion to do so. Barb was confused. The old woman thought this was her body.

  Cyn’s cell phone vibrated somewhere in the front room. She found it beneath a pizza box. A text from Macy.

  Meeting in 20. Picking up in 10.

  Cyn chewed at the side of her thumb, nibbling off a fresh lump of skin before working on her fingernail, staring at the text. The prescription haze settled around her, picked her up and carried her to a place where she didn’t care about anything.

  A place where she could survive.

  Where she didn’t hear Barb.

  She could stand there for a half hour if she let the haze have her, until she was ready to sleep again. But then Macy would knock on the door, force her way into her life and save her again, like she did six months ago.

  And then she’d have to explain the pills.

  She’d have to explain she wasn’t really clean, that she couldn’t live without the little white saviors, the slayers of Barb. She would have to explain something that no one would understand.

  I don’t hear voices. I have an old woman inside me!

  She chuckled, despite the fog.

&
nbsp; Quickly, she picked up the empty sacks and pizza boxes, filling three trash bags that went out the back door. She went to the fishbowl and noticed Teddy doing the backstroke.

  Teddy got flushed while the shower ran.

  ——————————————

  The water pushed away the fuzzy veil.

  If she could live in the shower, where the guilt would be washed away, where her tears circled the drain, she would never step out. She would let her skin pucker, she would scrub away her sins, let her mind be clean.

  New again.

  But nothing is ever new again.

  ——————————————

  The doorbell was ringing.

  Cyn watched the last of the water seep into the drain, listened to the showerhead drip. The ringing turned into thumping. Cyn stepped out, her flesh soft and pink. She dried off in front of the sink; three towels covered the mirror.

  Teddy was still floating. She forgot to flush.

  “Cynthia?” The voice was muffled.

  More knocking.

  “Coming!”

  Cyn answered the door in a robe, hair still dripping. Sunlight knifed across her face. Macy was on the front step, arms crossed, skin as black as her tightly cropped curls.

  “You just wake up?”

  “Shower. Be ready in a sec.”

  “Better make that half a second. I don’t like being late.”

  “Sorry.”

  Cyn left the door open and ran to the bedroom to get dressed, pulling clothes from a pile. She pinned her hair on top of her head and brushed her teeth, bending over a small corner of the exposed bathroom mirror, where she saw her teeth.

  But not her eyes.

  She walked out to a bright front room, sunlight streaming through all the windows. Macy pulled aside the last curtain, her black skin flawless, smooth.

  “What’d I tell you about the windows? Relapse lurks in dark corners.”

  There are other things in the dark.

  “Your mail.” Macy tossed a bundle in the wicker basket. She palmed a glossy flier and shoved it in her back pocket, sort of hiding it. Cyn didn’t need to see it to know what it was. The same flier came every week. And Macy took it every week.

  Biomites.

  The evil advert for biomedical technology, here to cure hormonal imbalance, heal your pain. Here to save the human race.

  Biomites, the scourge of addicts everywhere.

  Feel how you want to feel? Think how you want to think? That’s just another drug, Cynthia, only this one is on the inside, one you can’t turn away from. This one turns you into a drug.

  Live life on life’s terms, Cynthia.

  Let go. Let God.

  There were a hundred more lines she could quote from the Big Book—Macy beat them into her head like ten-penny nails—but none of that wisdom could exorcise the demon from her head.

  Can biomites make you new again?

  Cyn knew the answer.

  In the spring, she’d gone to New York City to find out. She’d been invited to participate in the new healing at the Institute of Technological Research. She didn’t remember much about the trip; those were the using days, soaked in alcohol and popped by pills. She got so hammered that she’d fallen off a curb and cut the back of her hand. Blood was dripping off her elbow. The people at the Institute took her to the hospital and got her stitched up.

  She didn’t remember much of that either, but the scar on the back of her hand was proof. She did remember the biomites, though. They had those. She didn’t get any, but they had them.

  That was almost five months ago.

  She remembered that because the day she got home was the first day she went to a meeting, the day she got clean, the day she met Macy.

  The first day of the rest of her life, Macy told her.

  Macy held the door, tapping her toe, staring at her blank wrist because late addicts were relapsing addicts. Cyn grabbed a banana, noticing the envelopes in the basket, the one written in green ink. She hardly noticed the name on the front. It wasn’t addressed to Cynthia.

  Later, when Macy dropped her off, she would scramble to find her pills when she picked up the thick envelope and read the name no one had called her since leaving the wilderness.

  Cyn.

  ——————————————

  Recovery happened in the back of a bowling alley.

  When addicts opened up their lives, displayed all the warts, the wars, the bleeding souls and unhealed wounds, they did so to the rumble of pin setters and rolling thunder.

  Cyn swam to the front row.

  Macy took one look at her and whispered, “We got to talk.”

  Her eyes couldn’t hide the pill’s haze. Cyn was drowning in it. How could she explain the pills weren’t the water filling her lungs, they were the lifesaver she clung to.

  Cyn. It was addressed to Cyn.

  It was a bulky envelope containing more than a message. It was thick and round, maybe a DVD. But she didn’t find out. It went straight into the trash.

  She received another one a week later. A third one arrived a week after that. Both of those went into the trash, unopened. She doubled down on the pills to dull the voice, but the little white saviors couldn’t stop the envelopes from arriving.

  Let go. Let God.

  ——————————————

  Several regulars of the bowling alley AA meeting told their war stories about the days in the trenches with the drink, the drugs, the high. They listened without response, nodding as the details rolled out. They all knew how the stories went. And how they ended.

  Cyn nodded, only to blend in.

  She often made up reasons for why she turned to drugs and alcohol, things like abusive parents and uncontrollable boyfriends. Maybe they weren’t too far from the truth, she didn’t really know. She didn’t really trust her memories. Maybe what she remembered really did happen to her.

  Maybe not.

  Didn’t matter.

  The pain was real. And that was what she talked about, the pain. That was what everyone nodded along with.

  The ache.

  That was real.

  “Anniversaries?” Josh took the podium. “Anyone?”

  Macy raised her hand, waving it on her way to the front. Maybe she didn’t know about Cyn’s pill haze that day. If she did, she wouldn’t be holding an anniversary chip, wouldn’t be smiling down on her.

  “I want to recognize six months, y’all. Six haaard-earned months to a brave girl that fights the fight each and every day, here and now. Eighteen years old, you’re the youngest recovering addict in this room, congratulations, girl. Six months.”

  Macy started the applause.

  The room joined in.

  Some stood up.

  The love cut through the numbing pill haze and reminded her why she got up every morning, why she fought the fight, that when clouds covered the sky, there was still a sun behind them, shining its light on everyone. The good and the bad. The unclean.

  The broken.

  You should kill yourself, Barb whispered in her head.

  Cyn took the chip, squeezing it like a lifeline, clinging to it like a rope dangling over a pit that had no bottom. Drugs and alcohol had thrown her into their depths once before, plunged her into the cauldron of despair.

  It was these people, this chip, her loving sponsor that reminded her pain was inevitable, suffering was optional.

  If only Barb would die.

  I die, Barb whispered, you die.

  “Anyone else?” Josh asked.

  Cyn didn’t hear the next round of applause, just realized the world was out of focus from tears burning her cheeks. She wiped her eyes to see the newcomer.

  “One day clean,” Josh said, shaking the boy’s hand. “Looks like Cynthia’s no longer the youngest.”

  Long red hair, the body of a skater.

  “How old are you, Danny?” Josh asked.

  “Sixteen.”


  “Welcome to the rest of your life.”

  There was a standing ovation, a long line of recovering addicts shaking his hand, hugging him, patting his back. The boy was all smiles, the glowing grin of newfound redemption. She remembered what that was like, the smell of hope, the promise there was more to life than the high.

  Fred, the three-hundred-pound security guard, a longtime sober member of the bowling alley chapter, applied his welcome hug: a vicious embrace that lifted the new member off his feet amid a chorus of laughter and good cheer. He squeezed the chip from Danny’s hand.

  Fred dropped him. Danny bent over to pick it up.

  Cyn froze.

  She had stood to welcome him in a much less dramatic fashion than Fred when the long red hair fell away from the back of Danny’s neck.

  A lump over the fifth vertebra.

  The plastic chip dug into her palm. She backed away, resisting reaching up to massage the lump on her own neck, the same size and shape that covered the fifth vertebra. It could be coincidence, but there were no accidents in this room. Everything happened for a reason. That lump could only mean one thing.

  Through the pill haze, through the love, through all the happiness in the room, a cold chill filled her legs.

  He’s been to Foreverland.

  ——————————————

  The leash.

  The clamp, the lump, had been surgically installed to bite the nervous system should any of the girls go where they didn’t belong. It was an invisible fence for humans.

  The doctors said they couldn’t remove it, that it was too risky. But it was safe; it was deactivated. Nothing would happen.

  Except remind her of the wilderness for the rest of her life.

  ——————————————

  Cyn stopped going to meetings.

  The windows were covered, the doors locked. Macy called, texted, hammered the windows. Cyn feigned illness, insisted she hadn’t relapsed.

  Just pills. But I need these. You don’t understand.

  The days were bleached in the haze. She stopped checking the mail, but Macy left it on the front step. Through the window, she could see the green ink, the name on the envelopes that kept coming.

  You should kill yourself.

  ——————————————

  Meeting adjourned, Cyn watched the bowling alley chapter leave through the back door.