(It was interesting how Yune and I (next story down) had roughly the same idea for the last line and thus both had Sci-Fi takes on these lines. We're really finding that we tend to prefer certain themes, over and over.)
There once was a time I was sure of my name, at least; of the faces of my parents, my past lovers, the friendly couple who lived in the neighboring house. (Did I live in a house? Perhaps it was an apartment.) Now, when they ask who I am, I can only mutter the eight digits of my serial number. ("One eight two nine six four eight three.") I have trouble recognizing whether the masked doctors who attend me are the same ones who came and ran tests on me the day before. Does it matter? Each one means the same round of pain and questions.
Pain:
They always want a blood sample.
Sometimes they give me drugs. Sometimes they withhold the drugs until I'm hoarse from begging.
Scans where they fasten my body down with restraints that leave red marks for hours afterward. The indentations are just the most visible of the bonds.
A man once stormed into the room, shouting in a foreign tongue. The doctors tried to warn him about something, but he brusquely ordered them away. He shouted some more, then took hold of my hand and broke three of my fingers before the doctors returned to stop him.
But the greatest pain? Loneliness. They never speak to me unless they have to, or during interrogation. Listen.
Questions:
"Who are you?"
"Serial number one eight two nine six--"
"What is your name?"
"I don't remember."
"Where are you from?"
"Somewhere with lots of sun, where you can smell the sea..."
"Don't fuck with us."
"It's all I remember."
"Why are you here?"
"I don't know. Where am I?"
"What's the last thing you remember before you came here?"
"The silhouette of a dancer."
They don't get angry with me, but they stop and leave after that point. I should feel relieved at the ease of pressure. Instead I feel abandoned.
Only once did they ask,
"How do you know it's a dancer?"
"She's balancing on one leg, leaning forward, her arms lifted in either direction."
She was beautiful. I know this even though I can't recall her features.
#
What does a kiss feel like? Both affection and passion are strangers; the thought of lips to bare lips seems like laying one sheet of sandpaper against another. Rough and full of friction, yet reluctant to be dragged away from the other. I miss textures. I would welcome burlap as much as the softness of a magnolia petal.
The hands that touch me are always gloved and impersonal. They move my body however they will. When they are done, I am exhausted as I lie back in my bed, although I did nothing at all. The muscles in my body do not belong to me, nor my bones, nor any hair or cell. The pain--that, they let me keep.
(Did I ever kiss her? I loved her, this much I remember. Or is it that I love her now, for being my closest memory, my only companion here?)
#
Instead of a doctor, a woman enters the room. Her hair is long and braided around her head, and she has a low, husky voice.
"It's called an arabesque."
I stare at her stupidly.
"The ballet position." She demonstrates. One arm extended forward, the other back, a leg stretched out behind her. "I heard the tapes of your interrogation, and your clumsy description."
"It was you I saw before...?"
"Before you got captured."
"Who are you?"
Something flickers in her eyes. "My name is Lara. We're partners. I should have come for you long ago."
"Why?"
"To get you out of here."
My heart leaps. She needs to say nothing more. The thought of leaving this hell is enough to impel me out of the bed and toward the door.
"Wrong way," she says with a grin.
Despite her obvious amusement, I feel panic beginning to fill me. "I thought you said we were leaving."
"We are. But we're going out the window," she announces. She takes off her backpack and starts taking out rappelling equipment while humming a tune under her breath.
"Excuse me?" I say.
She looks up at me. "We're on the thirty-fourth floor. Once this room is unoccupied, an alarm will go off, and both the lift and the stairs will take us too long." She assembles the equipment with admirable efficiency. "You're too weak to do this, so you'll have to take the secondary position."
She has a lean strength that makes me trust that she can handle both our weights. As she instructs me to, I strap myself in behind her as she stands on the windowsill, and then I hold onto her waist.
She says suddenly, "Can I tell you a story?"
It is so unfamiliar to have my permission asked that it takes me a moment to say, "Yes."
"So my grandmother had one of those pearl necklaces. Someone tried to take it from her one day, but she hung on--and the string broke. All the pearls fell and bounced and rolled into cracks. She was left there with the string because, well, that's what she held onto. The moral of the story is to hold on--" Her hands cover mine for a moment, warm. "--to what you actually want to keep." She shifts my grip to the rappel anchor, gently but firmly.
I think I am blushing. "I'm sorry," I say.
She laughs. "It's not that. Under other circumstances I wouldn't mind. But this isn't the time."
And then she pushes off and we are falling. There is no time to tell her that I was already grasping what I valued more.
Air rushing past me through my hair through my skin sculpting me threatening to rip me out of my shape--
But she is there, a reassuring, solid warmth, and when we reach the ground, I confuse her for a moment with the earth: as necessary a baseline for my existence.
"Come on!" She drags me into one side of a vehicle and runs around to the other side. She guns the motor and then we are racing down a bumpy road.
There are so many new sensations. I gather them up greedily, until I am so glutted that everything becomes one blur. A long while later she stops and we get out. I sway, and she has to support me.
"A helicopter will come to pick you up here, and take you to base, then home," she says.
"What about you?"
"I still have work to do."
"If we're partners, I should help you."
"You've earned a rest." Her eyes are full of the same sadness that I saw when she told me she should have come earlier.
I like her expression better when she is merry. Her laughter, I think suddenly, her laughter and her stories and her singing are what make her beautiful. Her whimsical need to tell me the name of a dancer's pose.
"Will you remember me," she says softly, and it's not a question. It's a farewell.
I want to protest, but then she kisses me lightly, then turns and gets back in the vehicle. I watch her drive off.
My lips burn.
#
Hospitals on either side of the border are surprisingly alike. The earnest man in front of me is another doctor, but I can see his face and I can remember, if I try very hard, that he is on my side.
"You were an experimental test subject," he explains. "Memory enhancement for our undercover agents, and something of a self-destruct in case you fell into hostile hands. We never meant for basic long-term memory to be lost as well, though."
"Is it reversible?"
"We have high hopes. Certainly we've advanced the technology since it was first used on you. The military will, of course, cover all the costs."
I take a deep breath. "Do it."
#
My name is Will Brierley.
#
The doctor leads me to a small office, where a prim woman sits behind a desk. "This is Alice. She'll help you through all the paperwork necessary for your medical discharge and so forth."
She smiles at me with professional warmth. "Please sit down, sir." As I lower myself into the chair, she riffles through a stack of papers, pulls one out, and uncaps a pen. "Now. Let's start with your identifying information."
I watch the tip of the pen, poised above the sheet. "My name is Will Brierley." I savor the words, avidly watch her write out each letter. "Serial number--"
I stop. My mind is blank.
"Number--"
There are only ten possibilities for the first digit. Nine too many.
And I do not know what the dancer's pose is called, and I feel that the time and place and way that I learned it was important.
My lips tingle for some reason. My thoughts are numb.
They gave me back the memories I lost, but they took away the ones I still had, the ones I retained somehow but didn't care enough about to hold onto. And like pearls on a broken string, they scattered, unrecoverable.