VIA MEMORIUS - PARA VERSE
Alyssa watched as Adam paced the living room, concerned for him, knowing that she would have to tell him who she was soon, hating that she hadn't been able to do it before. But it would have been too dangerous, and it was important that he trust her.
Alyssa was a clinical psychologist. She had been trained to provide care and a shoulder to cry on for victims of severe trauma, and, more recently, those suffering from memory loss as a result of that trauma. Logan Cale had asked her, as a personal favour, to take care of a young man, Adam Thompson, which was actually an alias given to a man who was suffering from total amnesia as a result of his trauma. But his request had been a little odd, much different than most requests put in for amnesiacs. He'd told her that she needed to allow Adam's memories to resurface naturally, without the aid of the familiar surroundings and people that were often used for treatment of this condition, nor with the help of hypnosis. Adam would have to remember on his own, and though she was trained to know how to give him the gentle suggestions he needed to cause this to happen, she had prepared herself for a long, slow pocess.
Logan had hoped that she would be able to bring him gradually into it, ease the transition between Adam and the man he'd been before, Zack, to allow for him not to turn into the raging attemptive murderer that he had said he'd been the last time he'd regained his memories. She knew Logan hadn't told Max, Logan's friend and Zack's sister, the one for whom she was truly doing the favour, of her existence. Max thought her brother was out of her life for good, as Logan had explained, and he didn't want to get her hopes up if there was no reason for hope. It had been possible that, without encountering anyone or anything from his past, Adam would never have remember that Zack even existed.
Admittedly, the process was going ahead much faster than she'd thought it would, and she was a bit unprepared for him to regain so many memories so quickly. It was like a domino effect; one memory at her gentle suggestion by asking him about his barcode and all his blocks seemed to be coming down rapidly. Alyssa watched Adam's pacing; he was growing more and more agitated by the second. She took a breath.
"Adam-"
"Zack." he muttered. If she was surprised, she didn't show it.
"Zack," she continued, "there's something you have to know. I'm not who you think I am." Slowly, he stopped his pacing to face her. She swallowed. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to lie to you. I'm a psychologist. "I was hired here not only as a stable-hand, but as someone to help you with your amnesia. I've worked with victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociation, and the like. I was brought here for when you needed help, when you started to regain your memories." He blinked at this revelation, stared at her for a few moments, then resumed his pacing; she watched him desperately. After another few moments he stopped again and looked at her.
"So you're here to watch me?" he asked, cynically, almost icily, his voice not belaying the betrayal he must have felt. He was growing less and less like the Adam she had known for two months by the second, and it frightened her a little because she had never seen such rapid progression before.
"I'm here to help you, Zack. I'm your friend." She said softly. He hesitated.
"I know." he said after a few moments, staring at the horses grazing out the back window. He shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked at the rug. "You've been a good one. I just don't understand." He turned to her. "You know about these memories, what they mean? Why didn't you tell me who I was?"
"You wouldn't have understood. You had to come to it on your own, and I only know some things, not all of it." she reached out a hand and laid it on his forearm gently. "Zack, please try to understand."
"I want to know." he told her. "I deserve to know who I am."
"Yes, that's prefectly healthy. I'll help you. Together we can do this; we can find out who you are." Alyssa was choosing her words carefully, as she knew something had been done to Zack back at that Manticore place which made him want to kill Logan, and that the regaining of his memories could not be allowed to play out the way they did the first time. Soon he would remember those feelings of hatred, if he hadn't already, and she would have to get to him, make him see that Logan was not the enemy. She looked at him. "Together we can do this, Zack."
"'Together we can do this.' Always tell yourselves that. Teamwork is
everything." The man's voice was firm, sure. Zack listened hard, his siblings
sitting, en rapt, in their desks; perfect posture and perfect obedience as they
gazed at their teacher. The man looked directly at Zack. "It is the leader's job
to make decisions for the best and most efficient benefit of the unit. Remember:
there is no 'I' in team."
"Zack?" her voice cut through his flashback. He turned to her.
"If you want to help me, you can start by answering some questions." he said it in a voice that sounded accustomed to giving orders. Alyssa hugged herself in the sudden chilly afternoon and wondered how much of the man she'd grown to know and care about was left inside him now, and how much would slip away in the next few minutes, hours, days.
"I'll try, of course." she said, sitting on the grass of the yard. He did the same.
"Tell me about the children." She had his undivided attention. "My siblings."
"I don't know a lot about them. I know you loved them."
"I wanted to protect them." his voice was soft, loving. She smiled.
"Yes. You were a very good brother."
"You're a good brother, Zack." Jondy's voice was sweet, loving as they
padded barefoot through the corridors, their siblings behind them. "It's not
your fault."
"I shouldn't have given her that order." he clutched his youngest sister's arm protectively where she stood slumped between them, her body still convulsing slightly. "She wasn't ready." He choked back the tears that were threatening, knowing he couldn't let them see such a weakness.
"Where's Eva?" Jace, another sister, asked as she joined them; her voice was high with fear. "Gone." Jondy whispered, avoiding Zack's eye. The young girl's dark eyes filled with tears.
"Don't worry, Zack, she's in the Good Place."
"Ben, don't." He brushed his brother off for the first time in his life and it crushed the boy. "Don't talk about the Good Place, it's not real. We're not little anymore."
"It's real!" Ben was angry.
"Go back and walk with Tinga." Zack ordered; Ben wasn't mad enough not to follow an order, and turned swiftly, all but stomping to the back of the group. Zack saw tears in his eyes, and a few moments later he felt a small tug at his sleeve.
"What now, Jondy?" he asked, hiding his pain at Eva's death with confusion for her actions.
"Right then, Zack, you weren't a good brother." Her wide blue eyes didn't hold judgement for him, only truth, and that lack of judgement made her pure in his eyes and himself dirty and lowly.
"Ben, come here." he said; slowly, reluctantly, his brother came to walk again at his side. "Tell us a story." Zack said softly, and the boy's face lit up.
"Adam... was he real?" he asked after he'd recovered; Alyssa glanced
away.
"No."
"And Buddy-"
"Buddy really owns this ranch. Mary is really his wife. You were sent here so you would be safe."
"From what?" he demanded. "By who?"
"It's complicated." she said after a short pause. Zack let that go for the moment.
"There wasn't an accident, was there?"
"No."
"How did I get like this? What happened?"
"That's complicated, too."
"I want to know!" he stood up and looked like he was about to resume his pacing. He was like a caged animal. Alyssa quickly rose to her feet and grasped his forearms; he looked at her warily but didn't pull away. A good sign.
"Zack, this has to take time." she said calmly. "You only just started to remember. You have to let these memories sit for a while before you can fully make sense of them."
"I have to know who I am." he snapped, then added in a near-whisper, "I have to protect them."
"Who?" Her brow furrowed in confusion. "Your siblings?"
"Yes. They need me."
"Zack, you're confused." she smiled kindly and squeezed his arm. "They're grown up now. They're alright."
"No, I have to look out for them. They'll try to get them back."
"Who will?"
"The people we escaped from!" Zack was almost panicking now, and it alarmed her. She had to get him to bring his throughts into perspective. He needed a reality check.
"That was more than ten years ago. You don't know what's happened since then." she smiled at him again. "You love them, Zack, that's obvious. But you're only remembering fragments of your life. That's pretty impressive, but-" Zack stopped listening as a barrage of images assaulted him.
"That's pretty impressive... How you got away. I am very proud of
you." A man's voice, crackling from some sort of radio behind him. Zack was
driving a truck, and he was very tense.
"Gee, thanks, dad." a sarcastic voice from the backseat.
"Turn it off." he told it's owner.
"Please, listen to me." The man again. "Brin doesn't have much time." Present-day Zack stiffened. Oh God, oh no, Brin, what's happened? "Help me get her to Manticore before it's too late. I taught you always to have a plan. What's yours? To get her to a hospital? They won't understand what they're seeing. They won't be able to help her. I can have her to Manticore in four hours. There's still time." Half of Zack's memory-self wanted not to face the truth of his words; the other half wanted to leap through the crackly radio and kill him.
Slowly, softly, he breathed to Alyssa: "No, they're not okay. They need
me." He turned from her and hurried into the kitchen.
"Zack!" she called after him desperately, but he didn't listen to her. She followed him and found him pacing once again, around and around the island in the centre of the kitchen. She took a seat at the breakfast nook and simply waited, watching him.
"What the hell are you looking at?" he asked after a short time, his voice agitated. He came to a stop in front of her; she didn't answer and he resumed walking back and forth, irritated though he knew it wasn't her fault, clenching and unclenching his fists in frustration. Finally, he slowly stopped and sat down across from her, holding his hands stiffly on his knees. As if she had been waiting for a silent cue, she turned around and took out a few blank sheets of paper and a pencil from the counter behind her and laid them in front of him.
"What's this for?" he scoffed, regretting it for a moment but not belaying this as he stared at her. She smiled.
"I want you to draw me a picture." she told him, and he heard himself laugh, though it wasn't the happy, carefree laugh he'd had that morning in the paddock, before he remembered who he was and his responsibilities.
"What do you think I am, a child?"
"If you want to be."
"What?"
"You can draw as you are now or as you were when you were a child. It doesn't matter. Just draw me something."
"I can't draw."
"How do you know?"
"They didn't teach us that kind of stuff in-" he broke off, momentarily taken aback as he recalled the name of the facility he and his siblings had lived in. He swallowed hard; he wasn't ready to think, let alone speak, the name, though he'd heard the man say it only moments before in his last flashback. Alyssa looked at him expectantly, so hopeful, that he slowly reached for the pencil. He stared at the paper.
Zack was in Seattle, he knew somehow, approaching a telephone post. He
grabbed a piece of paper off the post, looked down at it. The girl of five years
old who he'd lifted to see the dogs, the girl of nine who had watched Ben's
shadow puppet shows, his littlest sister all grown up, stared back at him, with
the words REWARD and $50,000 standing angrily out against the white paper.
Zack took the pencil firmly in his hand and made a few harsh lines, then
as he got more into it, his expression turned to one of deep concentration.
Alyssa waited patiently, and within a few minutes, he finished and set down the
pencil, pushing the paper toward her, all business again. She hadn't seen him
smile since they were out in the paddock, and it made her a little sad. She
pushed the thought away and looked down at the drawing he'd made.
An oval was drawn in the dead centre of the paper, with huge block letters reading MISSION written expressionlessly below it. Inside the oval was the silhouette of some sort of creature, its tail coiled and its claws beared. It vaguely resembled a lion, except for the profiled face, which seemed almost human; this made Alyssa shiver. Over the beast was what looked like the outline of a mountain or a smokestack, two lines jutting up to meet with a dip in the centre. Under them, a half-circular object with orbital lines around it and a hooked outcropping on the bottom, left-hand side of the half-circle. She looked up at Zack.
"What is this?" she asked.
"Don't know." he said, not wanting to look at it now that it was done. He felt as though someone else had drawn it, committed the hideous thing to paper. Not him. "It's something."
"What about this?" Alyssa pointed to the last image on the picture, in the bottom right of the paper, barely there; a shadow of something.
"One of Ben's butterflies." Zack almost smiled. "He made them for my sisters because they didn't sleep."
"You mentioned." she said, nodding.
"Why did you make me do that?"
"It's called art therapy. Sometimes it helps focus the mind, calm the patient." she explained. He nodded.
"Makes sense." After a moment, he asked uncomfortably, "So where do I go from here?"
"I'm here to help you work that through." she reached out and put a hand on his. "It's going to be tough sometimes, Zack. In time, we'll work through everything you remember, piece by piece. We're going to get through this. Don't worry."
"Don't worry." Zack took the hand of his youngest sister; he was
twelve years old again. She was nine, and terrified, her brown eyes staring into
his, her fear searing into his soul as her body convulsed in her bed.
"We can't let them see her like this." Jace; she was scared.
"They'll give her to the nomlies." Ben agreed, looking to Zack for answers. He turned back to gaze into his brother's eyes, and something inside him hardened.
"No." he said. "I won't let them. We're going. Now."
"Now?" Jace looked concerned. "We were going to wait until-"
"I know." Zack snapped. "But we can't risk it. You know what happened to Jack." He let go of his sister's hand and waved the others over. He gave them several hand signals, telling them what to do without words, as they'd been taught to do. Get outside and then regroup inside the forest, he told them, by the old fallen log where I used to take you to play when we were very small. They nodded, then he motioned for Jondy to help him with their littlest sister, who was still shaking. Then they waited for the guard to come, and for the rest of their lives to begin.
Zack swallowed hard.
"I'm here to help you." she said. "Please let me." He let out his breath slowly.
"I know." he said. "It's just that all this kind of came out of nowhere." He ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair, tried to get a handle on his emotions. "I need some time." His hand came to rest at the base of his neck, and he touched the barcode he knew was there.
Alyssa lowered her voice and said softly, "Of course. Whenever you need me, I'll be here."
"I'll be here." a man's voice said. Zack was in a very nice apartment,
looking at the back of a man in a wheelchair, who sat in front of a computer and
had just hung up the phone he'd been talking on. Zack felt overwhelming
hostility toward this guy, but wasn't sure why. Then the man turned around and
suddenly, the hatred wasn't only that of his memory-self, but present-day Zack
as well. Somehow he knew: this man was bad, heinous, evil, a traitor, someone
who wanted to kill Zack and hurt the ones he loved. Or, more specifically, a
certain one he loved: the brown-eyed child, his littlest sister.
"We've got a lead." the man was saying. "My contact's got to confirm some details, get back to me." Ther was a pause. "Risky piece of business grabbing Lydecker."
"Lydecker." the name so distracted Zack from his thoughts on the
blue-eyed man that he was pulled out of his reverie. The man teaching the class;
the man on the radio. He hated the man Lydecker.
"What?" Alyssa's confused voice asked.
"Lydecker. That's him, the one who we escaped from, back at Manticore."
"Manticore." she stated, emotionless. This was going much more quickly than she'd thought it would. Or wanted it to.
"Yes, you know, the place where they had us." he was annoyed, impatient. "The military school or whatever." he looked at her. "Tell me about it."
"Manticore?" she took a breath. "From what I understand it was some sort of military project focussed on genetic engineering. They wanted to created a perfect soldier. It's gone now." She hesitated, not knowing how much she should tell him, then decided it was important above all else that he trust her. And if she hid information from him that would never happen. "You were one of many they created before the facility burned to the ground. A lot of them weren't successful. Thirty or so were. Even more after your escape, but those ones were different."
"Thirty?" Zack breathed; he'd remembered fourteen children- fifteen, including himself and the boy he'd never seen, Jack. Where were the other fifteen?
"Two groups, called X5. Raised apart. You were the unit leader of one; your subordinates were who you call your siblings." Zack flinched as a new barrage of images assualted his senses, this time with no help from her words, but completely spontaneous and seperate from external stimuli.
"She's getting weaker." A young woman's voice said softly from behind
him. Zack was driving a car; it was night, the stars were out. It was raining.
He could feel anger deep in his bones, but realized only when his tears started
to fall that it was actually a deep sorrow... and a feeling of helplessness that
he hadn't been able to identify because he'd never felt it before.
"We're together. Right now that's all that matters." he said to the girl behind him, not turning around. His words were harsher than he'd intended.
"We can't just let her die." The girl's reply, soft with tears as well.
"Anything is better than going back. You said so yourself." Present-day Zack knew that his memory-self believed this, fully and unflinchingly, and he felt peace in his sense of confidence.
"I don't want to die." a tiny, strained voice, full of innocence and the embodiment of everything Zack believed in: family, life, freedom, love. "Please..." the voice implored; he recognized it. Brin. "Don't let me die." Slowly, as they reached a red light, Zack turned in his seat, his tears flowing freely, and met the eyes of the onwer of the first voice, a girl holding the frail and aged Brin from the jail cell in her arms. Immediately, he recognized her.
"Dogs." he told the younger version of the woman, who'd come to stand
with him, looking out the barracks window. The brown-eyed child, five years old,
came to stand next to him; he lifted her soft body into his arms. "Look," he
said, and pointed out into the yard at the German Shepards being exercised.
"There."
"What are they for?"
"I don't know." he answered honestly, gazing at her. "Maybe a new training exercise for us. Maybe looking for something."
"They're scary." she said, laying her head on his shoulder.
"Don't worry." His voice was soft, consoling, protective. He loved this child; he wouldn't allow any harm to come to her. Not to any of them.
The same girl, his littlest sister, nine now, lying on her stomach two
beds down from his, watching their brother's shadow puppet show and smiling.
"She's already been shaking all day." Ben said, looking at the nine-year-old. "We don't want what happened to Jack to happen to her." His sister's concerned brown eyes turned to Zack for answers.
"It's okay." he promised. He would make her safe. All of them; get them out of there, stop them from having to shed a tear or be afraid again, ever.
"Zack! A voice, high with fear and gentle with love at the same time.
Though he sensed that his memory-self did not, present-day Zack made the
connection immediately: this was the voice of the woman in the cell and later
the car with Brin, the grown-up version of the girl he'd consoled and kept safe
in the barracks and had been shaking the night he got them away from Manticore.
Zack was in Seattle again. He was holding a young man up in the air by his throat; something was oddly familiar about him, though his memory-self did not think so. The Zack who was remembering the event studied the man's face even as he choked him. No, it couldn't be... was it... Ben? He felt his memory-self turned and pulled a gun out on his littlest sister and back in the kitchen with Alyssa his heart quickened with fear. The young woman's face was that of the girl on the wanted poster; she was beautiful, and he loved her, though his memory-self did not because he did not recognize who she was. "Zack." his sister spoke his name again, not showing any sign that she found it odd for him to be pointing a weapon at her. Present-day Zack didn't understand; why didn't he recognize his sister, and why was he choking his brother? "It's me," she said. "Max."
"Max." Zack's voice was excited as it cut through what Alyssa had been
saying.
"What?" she asked slowly, cautiously.
"Max! That's my youngest sister." he sprung to his feet and Alyssa climbed quickly to her own. "Her name was Max!" Happily, he reached out without thinking and pulled her into a swift embrace, smiling with the excitement of a small child who has just won a spelling bee. She smiled; Adam was still there. Or maybe it had been Zack all along, simply uninhibited by past burdens that were now coming back and so changing him.
"Max." he repeated, slowly lowering her back to the ground. "Her name is Max." He recalled the memory again, saw her face, her smile as she looked at him. Felt the shape of the man's- Ben's- neck in his hand. He'd been killing. He was trying to kill his brother. Why? Max had stopped him, but he had not recognized her. And his face...
"God!" he exclaimed suddenly, smile falling away, hand going to his smooth cheek. "What did they do to me?"
"What? Who? Manticore?"
"They hurt me. They made my face into something... grotesque. Ugly." his voice shook slightly and he swallowed hard at the memory.
"Hey." Alyssa laid a hand tenderly on his and squeezed his shaking fingers. "You're beautiful, Adam." He broke out of his trance and stared at her.
"Zack." he said, a little more harshly than he'd intended.
"I- I'm sorry. I forgot." she flushed slightly. "Of course I meant Zack." He stood up from the table.
"I have to figure this out, find out who I am. Your way sounds too damned slow. I'm sorry." He clenched and unclenched his fists a few times, not looking at her. "It's not your fault, but I have to get out of here. And you're coming with me."
"I am?" Alyssa's voice came out more nervous than she'd intended.
"Yeah, so can help me out, you know, be there for me and all." he said it in a way that was between sarcasm and meanness. "Come on."
"Shouldn't we pack?" she asked even as she followed him to the front door of the ranch-house. She was a little nervous and a little excited at the same time.
"No, we won't be gone long." he said, coming to stop beside the red pickup truck and opening the driver's door. Buddy smiled at them from the side paddock where he was leading a young filly.
"Doing that run now, Adam?" he asked.
"Yeah." Zack said, smiling. "Alyssa's going to come with me."
"Sounds good." Buddy said. Alyssa climbed into the passenger seat of the pickup.
"Where are we going?" she asked, buckling her seatbelt. He hesitated for a moment, uncertain. Then, as the answer came to him, he turned to her.
"Seattle." he said, starting the car and gripping the steering wheel determinedly. "I don't know why yet, but somehow this all leads to Seattle."
