Incarnata

by Brandon Faircloth

  “Ok. I guess that makes sense. What’s the second reason?”

  Aller chuckled again. “Why, the money-back guarantee, of course. If you are not completely satisfied with your Tier One experience, you will get a full refund of the money your friend paid for it.”

  I gave a nervous laugh. “What’s to stop me from liking the treatment and still asking for a refund?”

  Aller gave a slight smirk. “Well, that’s your prerogative, of course. Normally our clientele is not concerned with how much it costs or getting the money back,” he glanced around my apartment, “but I understand not everyone is in the same financial position. Rest assured, if you complete Tier One and want a refund, you will get it, no questions asked.”

  My head was buzzing as I asked the next question. “How much money did Terry spend on this?”

  The man shrugged lightly. “I believe it was $600,000.00.”

  ****

  and it's wond'rous when it sings,

  The following week I was in a coldly-beautiful clinic in rural Iceland. The flight and accommodations were part of the service, I learned, and as I was ushered to my room, I found myself amazed by my surroundings. Everything was so white and clean, but more than that, I almost felt like I was on a spaceship from the time I stepped into the lobby of what could have just as easily been an exclusive, ultra-modern hotel.

  Soft light emanated from the walls and ceiling, and nearly everything seemed to be seamlessly automated and voice-controlled. Ambient music played quietly in most of the halls, and underneath that, the almost inaudible hum of something that vibrated the air like a distant heartbeat. Over the next day, I was treated to wonderful food and strange but comfortable surroundings. The next afternoon it was time for the treatment.

  I was taken into a room with a large padded chair, and while I saw several machines and banks of electronics along one wall, I had no real idea how any of it worked. I had been assured that the treatment required no surgery or physical implant, but simply amounted to the right combination of chemicals and the manipulation of electromagnetic fields. I was strapped down, but they said that was only to keep me still in case of mild muscle contractions.

  Several people clad in white made preparations around the room as I was given multiple injections, and within a minute I felt myself beginning to fade out. I felt a last moment of dim panic, and found myself focusing on a dark spot on the otherwise pristine far wall, willing myself to stay awake and see what they were actually going to do me. I knew the thought made no sense, and within moments I was waking up back in my room. I looked at the clock and saw that actually six hours had passed.

  It was then that I saw the guitar propped against the far wall.

  I had picked learning the guitar for both sentimental and practical reasons. Terry and I had always talked about learning to play, but I could never afford lessons and I always suspected he avoided learning because he understood that and knew I wouldn't accept help from him either. I also thought guitar was a good idea because it was a relatively small addition to my brain if it worked and easier to argue for the refund if it didn't, assuming they were being honest.

  I sat up and then stood slowly, gingerly testing my feet as I stepped toward the instrument. I felt fine. More than fine. I felt better. And I knew as soon as I touched the guitar that I'd be able to play it.

  Within two hours my hands had come close to matching what my head already knew. I played songs of all kinds as easy as breathing, tears of wonder in my eyes as I strummed the guitar. I could never have imagined being given such a gift, and when I finally slept, it was the best sleep of my life.

  ****

  I woke with a start to find Mr. Aller sitting at the foot of my bed. When he turned to look at me, his face was unreadable.

  “Good morning.”

  “What? What are you doing here?”

  He glanced down at his hands. “Well, there's a small accounting manner we must attend to.”

  “Accounting?”

  He puffed out a discontented breath. “Yes. When your friend procured this…gift for you, we placed a customary hold on his bank account in the amount of $600,000.00. The sum was not withdrawn at the time, as we do not withdraw payment until the service is rendered.” Clearing his throat, he went on. “Yet when we went to withdraw payment this morning, we learned that the account has been closed. We contacted the bank as a courtesy, and were informed that the account was set up as a limited trust that was liquidated upon Terrance's death.”

  I felt my mouth go dry as cotton. “What does that mean?”

  Aller's eyes were hard when he turned back to me. “It means you owe us the money, of course.”

  I let out a burst of nervous laughter. “I can't pay that. I can't afford a new car, much less this.” I gestured toward the guitar lying next to me in the bed before looking back at him. “You have to know that.”

  The man's lips twisted slightly. “Nonetheless, we must be made whole. But we aren’t unreasonable. You can either pay the sum owed in full or, in the alternative, bring us two new clients of equal or greater value. One or the other, within one week.”

  I felt myself growing angry. “Listen. I didn't ask for this, and your agreement isn't with me. I'll talk to Terry's family, but I make no promises, and honestly, it’s your problem more than mine.”

  Mr. Allers let out a dry laugh. “You think so, boy? Do you think we can only give you pleasant memories?”

  Standing up, I began backing away in fear and frustration. “You're insane.”

  He stood and met my gaze steadily. “Do you want to have memories of a childhood where you were molested? Or perhaps the guilt of drowning a baby sister that never existed?” He gave me a contemptuous last look as he walked past me towards the door. “One week. Then we come for you.”

  Part Two

  There’s a worm living in my head,

  I was on a flight back to the U.S. that afternoon, but it took two days before I was able to track down Hannah. She had moved out of Terry’s house after the funeral, the property apparently being absorbed into the family’s wealth much as his bank account had. Her new apartment back in her northwestern hometown was a big step down from the beachside mansion she had spent the last three years in.

  In fact, it reminded me a lot of my own place.

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I fucked up. I fucked myself and now I’ve fucked you too I guess.”

  The girl sitting in front of me was a ghost of the Hannah I knew. She was cooperative enough—I’d half expected her to hang up on me when I finally got her on the phone, but she’d told me where she was living and agreed to meet. I was up there the next morning, and I had to work to hide my shock when I saw her. She looked like she had lost weight and hadn’t bathed in days, her hair hanging in greasy strings around her pale face. But worse, she looked like something inside her was missing. Like some spark, maybe the will to live, was either guttering or already gone.

  Sitting in Hannah’s bare and dingy living room filled with boxes she hadn’t bothered unpacking, I felt sympathy for her, but it was being overridden by my fear and anger. “Just tell me what happened. Who these people are and how I can stop this.”

  She let out a dull laugh, her eyes flicking to meet mine before falling away again. “You can’t stop this. Neither of us can.”

  Trying to keep my voice even, I tried again. “Just tell me.”

  ****

  When I first met Terry, it was like a dream come true, you know? He was like a prince in some kind of fairy tale, coming to take me away from my boring life and make small-town Hannah his princess. I know that might sound like I was in it for the money, but that isn’t true. I didn’t care if he was rich or poor, though I admit that in the beginning I liked the perks of being the girlfriend of someone that could go anywhere and do anything.

  Still, I came to hate the money over time. It tied him to his family, for one thing. At first, I liked them. They were always nice, treated me well, didn’t act s
tuck up or anything. But once I stuck around for a while, once they saw I might become a part of the family permanently, things started to change.

  It was little things. They would talk about some expensive trip they took to some fancy place and then ask if I had ever been, knowing there was no way that I had. They would talk about some obscure thing they learned at their Ivy League schools and then apologize to me. Tell me they were sorry, and they were happy to talk about something I was more familiar with. As though they were doing me a favor by lowering the conversation to my level.

  Passive-aggressive shit like that. Stuff that was small enough that I’d look insecure and petty bringing it up to Terry. And at first, I just laughed it off and tried to ignore it. But as I grew to love him more, I found myself caring more, even though I knew it was stupid and I shouldn’t care what they thought. I started becoming insecure—more awkward when we went out to a fancy place or on a nice trip. I started thinking I wasn’t good enough for him.

  When he proposed to me, I panicked. I was in a bad place at the time with all this stuff, and I almost turned him down. Told him he could do better. But I loved him too much for that, to let his shit family psyche me out or let my own weaknesses keep me from the man I loved. So I said yes.

  Less than a month later, a friend from high school contacted me. Told me about a clinic they had went to in Iceland. Bear in mind, when I knew this dude, he was huffing glue behind the bleachers and getting Cindy Palino pregnant. But apparently he had gone on to become a semi-successful real estate agent in Seattle. I didn’t know why he was contacting me or telling me about this place, but he was a good enough salesman to keep me on the line.

  It was a place where they could give you new memories and knowledge. Totally safe, and really amazing stuff like something from a sci-fi movie. He said they had very flexible financing and had actually done his treatment in exchange for an old speedboat he’d had for years. That now instead of sucking at the financial side of his business, he was able to handle complex accounting like he had been at it forever.

  Long story short, I wound up doing it. Terry had given me a car for my birthday the year before, and I gave that to them. Made up a story to him about going to visit my sister and the car getting stolen while I was actually away at the clinic. In exchange, they gave me what they called their “higher education and culture package”. Two weeks later, we were at a family dinner and I was the one doing the apologizing and telling them that we could talk about something they knew more about.

  It was wonderful.

  A few days later, the man I’d first met from the clinic, Mr. Aller, contacted me. He said there had been problems with the trade. That the service I had received was actually far more expensive than the worth of the car. Instead of being worth $75,000.00, it was actually worth $3.2 million.

  I didn’t have any way of paying it. Even Terry would have had trouble paying it without tons of questions from his family, as almost everything he had was controlled by the trust. And I wasn’t going to involve him or them in it anyway. I wasn’t going to prove his family right by asking for money like that.

  So I argued with Aller. Told him it wasn’t my mistake, a deal was a deal, and he could fuck right off. He told me that I had a month to reconsider and either pay the money, or recruit someone else to take the treatment. I said sure thing and shut the door in his face. Tried to forget about it, figuring he was full of shit.

  A month later they came for me. I don’t remember much about it, but when it was done, I was sitting outside our house on the driveway. It was early morning and it was cold, but I barely noticed. I was too busy thinking about the two years I had spent trapped in a basement being tortured when I was a teenager.

  The funny thing is, there’s some part of you that knows it’s not true, right? Especially that first bad memory. They alter it a little, make everything seem a little off. In that first bad one, everything was red. Like a camera with a red filter on it or something. They do it on purpose. Call it a “tint marker”. A way of letting you know it’s something they added. And a way of making you understand that it doesn’t matter if you know they put it in you, it still hurts.

  I walked into the house, expecting Terry to be terrified with worry. The love of his life had been abducted for several days, right? Except no, he thought I’d gone on a sudden trip to visit my sister again. Because apparently I had texted and called him about it. I didn’t remember any of that, of course, but I was starting to get how little that really meant.

  Now I understand more. They don’t care about the money. That’s just a trick to make you think you are dealing with a business, dealing with something normal you can fight against or bargain with. I think they do want the new customers, though I don’t really know why. What I do know is what happened after I gave them you.

  I hated to do it. I’ve always liked you, and Terry loved you like a brother. Hell, way more than he loved his actual family. But after he died so suddenly, I was broken and desperate. They left me alone for a while after that first bad memory, but then Mr. Aller contacted me again, telling me that “my obligations were still not fulfilled.”

  So I lied to you. Tricked you into going. Probably damned myself by betraying you and the love Terry had for you.

  The next weekend I woke up screaming, remembering how I was driving the car that killed my mother and father last year.

  I checked, and my father really did die last year. The records say he died of a heart attack while having surgery. There’s no indication that he was in a car wreck. There’s also no indication that my mother died at all.

  See, I haven’t seen my mother since I was six. She was a junkie, and when she started using around me, my dad threw her out. She could be dead for all I know, but I don’t have any other memories of her since then except for the night that I killed them both in that wreck.

  That’s the trick of it, you see. I know logically that the memory has to be false. Has to be implanted. But my brain and my heart don’t really believe that. The memory is too strong and feels too real, especially without any of the “tint markers” the first one had. I feel like what I know has to be true and what I know is true are two different things. And that difference is tearing me apart.

  ****

  “The only thing I can suggest is running. They will probably still find you—they somehow found me even though I was hiding out after setting you up—but it’s worth a shot I guess.” I could tell from her weary expression that she knew it wasn’t worth much at all.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police or something?”

  Her mouth split into a terrible grin as she stared at me in disbelief. “You don’t think I tried? Why do you think you haven’t called someone? Try it. They put all kinds of stuff inside you. You can’t tell on them.” She lowered her gaze again. “You can’t even kill yourself.”

  My eyes widened. “Hannah. You didn’t.”

  Shaking her head, she stood up. I thought she was done talking, but she paused before walking away.

  “Before they’re done with you, you’ll try too.”

  ****

  and it tells me terrible things.

  I’d like to tell you I found some way to get the money or to fight them. Some way to trick or outsmart them. But in the end, I ran. For all her past deceit, I knew Hannah had been telling me the truth, or at least the truth as she knew it to be. And I had no way of winning against something like that, so my only hope was that if I disappeared, they would leave me alone.

  Ten days after I learned to play the guitar, I learned that I was the one that killed Terry.

  The memory was strange and slightly surreal, with everything tinted a deep blue. But despite this, it was very detailed and real to me. I remembered calling him up, asking if it was okay if I visited him in a couple of days, but to keep it just between us that I was coming. That I met him out in the parking lot of our old school, now closed and scheduled to be renovated into some kind of group home the following spr
ing. I remembered his confused laughter when I pulled the knife on him and how he started to squeal and beg as I began to hurt him.

  I remembered it all and knew it was true, even though every bit of it was a lie.

  Because Terry had died of a sudden stroke while he was playing golf and I was over a thousand miles away. By the time Hannah had called me, he had already been declared dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Blue “tint marker” aside, there was no way that I could have killed him. But despite that objective reality, I could feel the weight of murdering my best friend crushing me.

  No one even bothered contacting me again, either to shake me down for money they didn’t really want or for “new recruits” that I had already decided I would never give them. I wouldn’t make the mistake Hannah had made, dragging down someone else as I drowned in the sea of horror they were slowly pouring into my head.

  Maybe they somehow knew I wouldn’t help them. Either way, two weeks later, I woke up in a strange motel room in Nebraska. Now I knew how I had always loved torturing animals since I was a young boy. How excited it made me, even now. I wanted to deny it, to say it went against everything I thought about myself and other memories of my life, but I was beginning to appreciate how little those internal protests actually meant in the face of the thing poisoning my mind.

  Like Hannah, I tried repeatedly to tell someone, anyone, about what was happening to me. But somehow, I could never get the words out. Like she predicted, I tried to hang myself in the closet of that same Nebraska motel room with a drying cord from the dirty bathroom. But my hands wouldn’t cinch it around my neck. The following day, my feet similarly betrayed me, refusing to step out in front of a passing concrete truck.

  Three days ago, I was taken again, though this time I actually remember some of it. I remember waking up to people surrounding me, and the low drone of the plane’s engines while we were in flight. I remember being taken back to the clinic, not through the beautiful lobby, but through some dark service entrance that sent back the lonely echoes of our footfalls as I was pulled back inside. Yet even then, I was surprised at how little I struggled, at how few noises I made. I could see and understand everything well enough by that point, having woken from whatever stupor they had induced, but I still found it hard to do much other than look around blandly while my insides felt like they were dissolving in an acid bath of terror.