The Body Electric - Special Edition

by Beth Revis

  I stare at her blankly. I feel so drained. “The reverie started with a storm,” I say.

  “A storm?”

  I nod. “A cyclone. But seeing as only blood fell from the skies, I’m pretty sure that was linked to how his wife and daughter were killed yesterday.”

  “Oh, Ella,” Ms. White says, wrapping her arms around me. “How horrible.” Her cyborg arm squeezes me even tighter, pressing me close to her.

  I push her away. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to think about the cyclone, the bees, my father. Ms. White looks a little hurt when I distance myself from her, and I feel immediately guilty. Ms. White is here only to help my mom and, after she discovered what I could do, to help the government. It’s not her fault that I’m now starting to question everything, including the government she works for. That I work for, I remind myself.

  At least for now.

  Tonight, I remind myself. I’ll get answers tonight, when I break into Jack’s mind. My skin tingles, and I remember the sensation of a thousand bees stinging and eating me from the inside out. And suddenly I’m terrified. Maybe I’ve lost whatever skill I had in entering other people’s dreamscapes. Maybe if I go into Jack’s mind, I’ll never be able to leave. I’ll be swallowed alive by the bees.

  I will—as Dad said—go mad.

  I bite my lip. Dad didn’t say anything. It was all a hallucination—including him.

  Maybe I’m already crazy.

  thirty-seven

  I’m usually a bit of a night owl, but I start drinking coffee at ten. I don’t want to slip up in front of Jack because I’m sleepy. By the time midnight rolls around, I’m a jittery bundle of nerves.

  I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t let a member of the Zunzana into my home, where Mom is, where Reverie is. I should punch in the panic code of my cuff the second I see his face.

  I should.

  Instead, I climb the short ladder at the end of the hall that leads to the rooftop garden. Mom used to love it here, and filled the terrace with peppers and tomatoes, beans and peas, with climbing yellow roses and sprigs of forget-me-nots tucked into the corners. The garden now isn’t as flourishing as before Mom got sick, but there’s still a few signs of life.

  The bench by the water basin is usually cluttered with a dirty trowel, a few buckets, and a basket I use to collect the vegetables in. Right now, it’s full of Jack. Even though I was expecting him, it feels strange to see him here, this person I associate with terrorism, sitting in the garden on my roof.

  A fat bug flies by my ear and I swat it away violently, jumping from the sound. It was nothing more than a beetle, but my heart’s racing.

  Bees. Bees, everywhere. Crawling under my skin, chewing through my flesh.

  I repress a shudder. “Let’s get this over with,” I say.

  Jack stands up. “So… all it’s going to take is me having a reverie, and you’ll believe me again?”

  Something like that. “Yeah,” I say.

  Jack claps his hands as if he’s just finished building something and is proud of his accomplishment. “Fine! The sooner you start trusting me again, the easier this will be. Although, honestly, I have no idea how you can not trust me. I mean, look at me.” He juts his chin out, grinning. “I’ve got a very trust-worthy face, don’t I?”

  “Remember that time I punched you in front of my father’s grave?” I ask in a sentimental voice.

  “Ye-es,” Jack says warily.

  “You looked good with a split lip.”

  “Shame it healed. Made me look a bit dangerous, yeah?”

  “I can give you another one if you like.”

  Jack throws his hands up. “Oh, no, I couldn’t bear to inconvenience you so.”

  “It would be my pleasure.”

  Jack barks in laughter as we reach the ladder. “Be quiet,” I order.

  He raises his eyebrow. “Don’t want anyone to see you sneaking around with such a handsome devil?”

  “I don’t want to wake my mom.”

  To his credit, Jack sobers immediately. He is silent as he follows me down the ladder. We creep past Mom’s room, through the apartment. The only time Jack shows any reaction at all is when he sees the gaping hole where our interface room once was—the burned-out remains now covered with a tarp.

  Jack opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. He just stares at the destruction, until I pull his arm and tug him to the door and then the lift that leads down to the reverie floor of the mental spa.

  “So, this reverie…,” he says, a nervous catch to his voice as the lift doors slide open.

  “Reveries are easy,” I respond. “As easy as falling asleep.”

  “Oh, I know,” Jack says. “I had one before.”

  I stare at him incredulously.

  “The military has something similar, I mean,” he elaborates.

  “No way, this stuff was invented by Mom; she hasn’t sold her formula.”

  Jack shrugs. “They had relaxation chambers, for after intense training or skirmishes.”

  “This is much different,” I say as we reach the basement floor of the building. “Okay, so, reveries are basically dreaming about memories. I’ll need you to focus your thoughts on memories of me. We have monitors that can indicate whether you’re dreaming about something that really happened or whether you’re making it up.”

  “I could always tell you I’m dreaming about when I met you, but really dream about something else. Then you won’t know if my dream is real or not.”

  I grin at him evilly, opening the door to the reverie chamber. “Oh, I’ll know.”

  Jack jumps into the sensory chair as if it were a lounger and holds out his arm for the electrodes. He doesn’t have a proper cuff, so it complicates the reverie process, but it’s not impossible.

  I lower the sonic hood over Jack’s head and give him a puff of the bright green reverie drug. As he drifts off, I slip silently out of the sensory chamber and into the control room. I bring up his brain scans, and set up the monitor that shows brain activity to record. I want to know if the memories I’m about to spy on come from truth or imagination.

  When I get to the secondary chamber, I work quickly, hooking myself up to the machinery and dosing myself with more reverie drug. It doesn’t matter that I had four cups of coffee—as soon as the green drug hits my system, I’m out.

  I’m overwhelmed by the sights-smells-sounds of everything in New Venice. The lights are brighter, the air drips with the smells of pastizzi and honey rings, the blasting horns and sirens are so jarring that I clap my hands over my ears. I cannot think in this cacophony.

  In the center of the pandemonium is Reverie—but not quite the Reverie I know. The leaping neon sheep is bigger and shinier, the flashing slogan blinks erratically.

  This is Jack’s memory, and to him, New Venice was a swirling mass of chaotic sights and sounds. I wonder how long he’s been in the city at the time of this memory. I wonder if he still thinks New Venice is like this. To me, the city is as comfortable as my apartment.

  Jack starts to enter the Reverie Mental Spa, but he hesitates. He seems scared. He pauses by the window, nervously running his fingers through his hair, trying to smooth it down. He’s wearing a wrinkled suit and recently polished shoes. He tries to adjust his tie in the shiny surface of Reverie’s window.

  And then—

  I walk toward him.

  Me.

  It’s not me—it’s a memory of me. The memory-me is more perfect than the real me. She’s more of what I wished I looked like than what I really do look like. The memory-me is wearing a black tank top and jeans, sneakers, and my fortune-cookie locket. My hair is in a messy ponytail. I think I’ve been doing yoga in Central Gardens—I used to do that, before Mom got worse. Memory-me is pre-occupied with her cuff, flicking through messages.

  I watch, unable to take my eyes off the me of Jack’s memory.

  And then Jack looks up from the window, where he’d been fixing his tie, and he sees me.

/>   The entire city disappears.

  The dreamscape is gray and empty—not barren, just vacuous. At one moment, the city was there, overbearingly present, and the next second, it’s gone.

  It happens so suddenly that I’m left gasping.

  It was true then. Jack really did meet me before. And when he saw me for the first time, everything else in his world faded away.

  thirty-eight

  I can’t really comprehend what I’m seeing.

  I… I had no idea that I’d ever even met Jack. But the first time he saw me, he saw nothing but me. And the me through his eyes—it was the me I wanted to be. He saw me better than I even saw myself.

  I watch, barely breathing, as the memory-me chats idly with Jack. The world springs up around Jack and his memory of me slowly, but the edge is gone. The lights are dim now, barely visible. The sounds are muted. The scent of lemons and lavender—like my shampoo—is stronger than the smells of the food sold by street vendors, the ever-present saltiness in the air.

  I changed the way Jack experienced the world.

  His memories speed up—as he follows the memory-me into Reverie, he meets Ms. White. They talk—an interview. My eyes dance over a tableau of Jack’s memories in the first days of his job working at Reverie as an assistant to Ms. White. She never let him do anything serious, but he maintained the charts and data, helped her with clients—spa clients, not reveries.

  And, in the background, he watched me.

  It’s weird, now, with me watching him watch me in a memory. Voyeuristic. But I can’t help but see the way Jack thinks of me in his memories. Wherever memory-me is, the world is brighter, sweeter. It’s dim and shadowy outside my glow.

  Jack’s memories slow down soon—probably a month or so after he started working at Reverie. He catches me crying. I remember that night. Not Jack—but I remember crying, on the bench at the roof of our apartment. That was the night Mom’s doctors started talking about end-of-life care, and their treatments were all about making Mom comfortable, not trying to find a cure.

  That was the night the doctors gave up on her.

  I shut my eyes, recalling my own memory of that night. I climbed the ladder to Mom’s garden—woefully neglected at that point, nearly everything was dead and there was algae in the hydroponics system. I sat on the bench. And I wept. I didn’t hold anything back. Even though I was outside in one of the biggest cities in the world, it felt like the most private place I could be—out of earshot from everyone else, in a place Mom couldn’t get to any more.

  When I think of that time, I remember how very, very alone I felt.

  But in Jack’s memory, he’s there. He’d heard me from the street, and he climbed the fire escape ladder. And found me.

  In Jack’s memory, he’s there. In mine, I’m alone.

  Every detail is right. I wore those clothes that day. There was a mustard stain on my pants, right there. That was the summer of my unfortunate bangs, and there they are, flopping in memory-me’s face.

  But Jack isn’t in my memory of that night.

  In this memory, his memory, the one I’m watching, Jack puts his arms around me, and he holds me until I’m done sobbing, and then memory-me looks up into his eyes, and then we kiss.

  I remember crying myself sick that night, then going to bed alone.

  But my lips feel bruised. I touch them now, as I watch Jack and memory-me kiss. I shut my eyes.

  I think I can remember the feel of his lips against mine. The pressure, the taste of him.

  No.

  I open my eyes. This isn’t real. We’re going to wake up from Jack’s reverie, and the screens will tell me this is all in his imagination.

  But a part of me wishes it was real. The part of me that remembers crying, alone. I wish there had been someone there that night, someone to kiss away the pain.

  Jack’s memories progress. In his mind, we became close—closer than I’ve ever been with anyone else in my life, even Akilah. Months pass. I tell him my darkest fears and he whispers his to me. We kiss. We do more than kiss. My cheeks grow warm and my eyes grow wide as I see Jack and memory-me stripping our clothes off, our hands and eyes and lips hungry for more, more, more. I cannot tear my eyes away; I watch it all. I watch him. I watch the way he looks at me, the love in his eyes. The gentle touches. The hungry touches. The way he holds me, the way he lets me soar.

  I swallow hard. I have never… I’ve never done that. Not with him. Not with anyone.

  Lies. This is all lies.

  This is Jack’s sick imagination. His obsession. None of this happened.

  I would know.

  I turn away. I try to build a wall between Jack’s memories and me. No, not his memories, his hallucinations—but either way, I can’t tear myself away.

  The weather gets colder. I can feel it in my bones, even though I’m not really here, it’s not really winter, all of this is happening in Jack’s mind.

  I see Akilah, and I gasp aloud. I’d forgotten the way her tightly-curled hair bounces when she walks, her penchant for too-slick bright red lip gloss. Jack hangs in the background as Akilah tells me she’s leaving for the military.

  I remember this, too. The moment when I realized my friend, my last friend, my very best friend, was going away. I had been so upset that I didn’t eat for days.

  But in this memory, Jack’s there. He cheers memory-me up with stories and jokes, distractions to pull me out of my funk.

  Winter Festa. I remember going out, alone, and coming quickly back home. A festa is no fun without people to share it with.

  Jack remembers it differently. He remembers going with me, sharing a honey ring and warm, sweet-roasted walnuts and fizzy spiced cider. We watched the parade together; he gave me the luminescent plastic snowflake he caught from one of the floats. We watch the fireworks, and we gasp in awe as the memory tree is lit in the center of Central Gardens.

  I choke back a sob. I can’t take much more of this. This… this is a life I wish I could have had. This is a life without the loneliness, the aching longing for someone, anyone to understand me.

  This is a life I’ve never had, that I’ve always wanted, and it’s painted so vividly here that I could almost believe in it. That’s what hurts. Seeing it, and knowing it isn’t true.

  Something changes.

  A different sort of cold.

  Darkness. The blackness of void.

  Raised voices.

  My voice.

  I can’t hear the words. Just the tones, the sounds.

  And they are furious.

  And then, in the foreground, I see two long, rectangular shapes emerge. Everything is darkness now, but the black of those rectangular boxes is like a black hole, sucking away light and turning everything into nothingness.

  With a sickened twist in my stomach, I realize what those black, rectangular boxes are.

  Coffins.

  There are no lids. I creep forward in Jack’s memory, and peer down at the faces of his parents. I remember the obituary I found before, the one that lists his parents, both workers in the UC, killed in a car crash in Gozo. They are bloody and mangled here, barely recognizable, with a sheet covering everything below their chests. This is the last image he had of his parents, when he identified their bodies in the morgue, mingled with the day of the funeral, when their coffins must surely have been closed.

  I look up and see memory-me and Jack, both dressed for the funeral. He wears a black suit and black shirt; I wear a dress I do not recognize, one made of black and silver.

  “We are done,” memory-me says. “I never want to see you again.” Any doubt that remains that this could be real is gone now. I would never have done anything so callous as to break up with someone at his own parents’ funeral.

  “What—why? Ella, why?” Jack’s voice is a plea, and it quivers. With fear, I think. Or sorrow.

  The next words mumble and fade. Jack doesn’t remember the exact things we said, just the fight.

  Then one sentenc
e rises from the chaos of sound.

  “They deserved to die, and so do you!”

  And then.

  Silence.

  It’s over.

  thirty-nine

  I wake up.

  My eyelids feel heavy, and when I touch my cheeks, my fingers come away damp from tears.

  I stand, my body still shaking.

  What was that?

  That last memory, when everything went black.

  If all of Jack’s memories of me are false, why would he create something so horrible?

  I rip the electrodes off my skin. I feel wobbly on my feet, but I cross the chamber quickly. I have to see it for myself, confirm the truth I know. The door slides open and I push past it, dropping into the chair in front of the control panel. I swipe my hands along the monitor recording Jack’s brain scans.

  My world bottoms out.

  Jack’s memories came from the place of truth.

  None of it was his imagination.

  The memories are real.

  “Impossible,” I whisper. None of that happened, none of it. And especially not the end. I would never do something like that. I know what it’s like to lose a parent. I wouldn’t… I couldn’t…

  But his memories were real.

  But my memories are real.

  I close my eyes, my fists curled up under my chin, pressing into my chest. I feel hollow inside, as if there’s a black hole where my heart was, as if I am caving in around myself.

  “What’s impossible?” Jack stands in the doorway of the sensory chamber, watching me. His face is somber; he just woke up from that last, horrid memory too.

  I look at him, and I find I’m unable to hold anything back. “You… you have memories of me. Real memories. But… I never met you before this week. How is that possible?”