Chapter 8

I looked around the generically decorated room. The walls were painted white on the top half, and that sickly shade of green that can only be found in hospitals and very old schoolhouses colored the bottom. I was sitting in one of those chairs that could only ever be found in a hospital. A soft, plastic cushion and a curved, ergonomic wooden armrest. But looking around, there was no bed. Just a tv bolted to one wall, currently off, and vague, nondescript stock art screwed in cheap wooden frames to two of the three walls in my eye line.

This was not the sort of hospital you came to heal after, say, a car crash. It was the sort you came to deal with major brain damage, like the sort that could happen after, say, a car crash. The sort there was little hope of ever recovering from. I ran my hand over my leg, feeling the pot marks and striations under the skin from the countless surgeries to repair it after the crash. I silently willed the useless appendage to move, to twitch, to drum out the beat to a Bryan Adams song with my still painful foot. Something, anything, to regain something of the life I had lost on the night of the crash.

My memory was fuzzy. I remembered some things so vividly that it felt like they had happened mere minutes ago. Waking up with Jimmy and the Doctors in the hospital, being told that Moe was gone, having the full extent of my massive injuries laid out to me in excruciating detail, and then being told that the memory centers in my brain had been shredded by the bone fragments from my skull. That I would never reliably be able to remember anything for the rest of my life. The inability to ever live independently again had seemed more like a vague concept when they had said it, but all these months later, I was still struggling to come to terms with its reality.

Then weeks of surgeries. Vain attempts to repair my shattered legs and broken back. My back had been first and had offered the cruelest glimmer of hope by being a total success. That hope was destroyed when the operations on my legs proved to be abject failures. Not only was neither leg capable of supporting my weight, one of them would never be able to be moved under its own power again. More than that, and in a sadistic twist of fate, the success of my back surgery meant that the pain that the damaged nerves had blocked out was now announcing itself with a vengeance. I was on enough pain medication to sedate a fully grown rhino, and that barely took the edge off.

But it was the brain damage that had ended any prospect of a normal life. Again, the early optimism brought about by my ability to remember things from before the crash, things like the events of that night in the pub and who Jimmy was, suddenly came crashing down as it became clear that my short-term memory was just incapable of working properly. Events happening to me at any one time had less than a twenty percent chance of being remembered a few hours later. Some things stuck, most things didn’t. There were memories in my head of someone not only halfway through a conversation but actually mid-sentence, and me having no idea what they had been talking about.

Then there were the mood swings. Aggressive, violent, seething bouts of uncontrollable anger would just appear out of nowhere. There was a gorgeous blonde nurse in the hospital. I didn’t remember her name, but she was always nice to me. One day, for reasons that completely eluded me, then and now, I hit her. I had hit her hard. There was just something about that look of pity and sympathy in her eyes that I wanted gone, so I used my balled-up fist to get rid of it. I didn’t mean to, it certainly wasn’t intentional. I had never considered myself a violent man before the accident, but now I was constantly aware of the eggshells people walked on around me. Both them, and I, knew that a single wrong look, or a single careless tone, even if it was friendly and humorous, could result in a horrifically violent outburst. I had become very aware of my own loss of control, and that, above all other things, had thrown me into the darkest pits of depressing despair. I never saw the cute blonde nurse again that I know of, and found myself in restraints for a lot of my hazy memories after that.

I didn’t even know if I ever had the chance to apologize.

It wasn’t long after that, that I found myself here. There was a vague, loose sense of the passage of time, but with no recollection of anything at all for days, sometimes weeks on end, I could never be entirely sure how long had passed since the last thing I could remember. I had grown into the habit of compulsively asking the date and time whenever I could, on the off chance that I would remember it later or at least be able to gauge how long it had been since my last memory.

It wasn’t like I was in a drooling stupor between moments of lucidity, at least not according to the few things I could remember my doctors saying. I was always cognizant and aware. I was always coherent and cooperative, I always worked hard in my therapies, and always seemed genuinely motivated to work toward my recovery. I just had no memory of vast periods of time before that session. And with no memory, no therapies could take hold, and no progress could be made.

Apparently, it had been discovered that repeating the same lessons over and over and over again, sometimes for weeks on end, would force it into my long-term memory. It was a technique that promised some results, but the time it would take to see those achievements was prolonged proportionately with the amount of time it took to repeat each one before I remembered it.

Beneath it all, however, were the dreams. And just like dreams, holding onto them was like trying to pin down the tide or hold smoke in your hand. As soon as I felt like I had a grip on the memory, it would be gone.

There were flashes. Flashes of a girl with fiery red hair, of an extraordinary sense of happiness and belonging whenever she would visit my dreams. Another girl with strawberry blonde hair, the feeling of calm and comfort she brought with her. A big man with a tattoo peeking above his collar. Another with an Italian accent. Dreams of places I had never been and would never go. The sun-drenched city, the vaulted halls of some massive church-looking building, and that city. The city of my dreams, bathed in soft light and filled with towering skyscrapers, and that feeling of... home ... whenever I walked its streets. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t hold onto any image or any memory from those dreams for more than a few hazy moments. But they were always there, like a story playing out just beneath the surface.

But then there were instincts; those were the things that scared me the most. The urge to stretch and flex my mind in much the same way I was flexing my fingers against the arm of the chair. The same as the urge to move my ruined leg. The instinct to somehow connect my mind to another ... as if that were even possible. The urge to speak to someone I didn’t know, an aged old man wearing a butler’s costume and a constant look of amusement. The feeling of utter, indescribably hostility I would feel every time the Doctor came to talk to me. I knew he was trying to help, I knew I needed to listen to him and cooperate if I ever had any chance of getting better. But there was something inside me that screamed “Danger!” whenever I saw him. It wasn’t a fear response. I wasn’t afraid of him, just violently, savagely angry. It was the same feeling I had felt when I hit that nurse. I wasn’t afraid of the Doctor, but I was absolutely terrified of the urge to rip out his still-beating heart every time I saw him.

Fuck. I am actually insane! Or at least fucking psychotic.

I frowned again, shook my head clear, and swallowed that almost overwhelming need to kill something. For the time being, I was content to just sit. This chair was comfortable, and without really knowing how, I seemed to understand that ‘comfortable’ was not a position I found myself in too often these days. Something was very wrong with me, and I needed to get a grip if I was ever going to be normal again. I pulled at my arms; the restraints wrapped over the tops of my forearms gave me just enough movement to be able to reach my nose and scratch it. Whatever meds they were keeping me on were keeping me as pain-free as it was possible for me to be and reasonably calm ... or at least lucid enough to be able to control my own emotions.

I glanced up at the door directly in front of me. I knew it would open soon, and the Doctor would arrive. He would smile, ask me how I was feeling, and then start working backward through the therapies we had tried until I remembered something. We would spend the first half of our session finding the point at which we could start it. I knew he was frustrated with the same little dance we performed every day, but I knew his patience was far beyond anything I possessed myself, even before the accident. He would sit on the chair facing me, between me and the door, just far enough away to be able to escape if I broke from my restraints. I’m not sure how much damage I could do without functional legs, but the fact that nobody even seemed to come within arms reach of me if they could help it, suggested that the answer to that was “quite a lot!”

I glanced up at the clock on the wall and sighed. I had no idea if I should be feeling impatient or not, mainly because I had no memory of entering the room and, as such, no idea how long I had been waiting. I could have been here for ten minutes or ten hours, for all I knew.

I suppose I could get a head start and try working out for myself the last thing I could remember.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and cast my mind back.

I could remember meeting the Doctor, a tallish man - although that was hard to gauge when you are constantly in a sitting or lying position - with a thick head of graying hair. His face looked like it had the texture of old, worn leather, and the mass of wrinkles around his eyes seemed like they had been added for effect rather than earned through aging. I remembered a session a while later, maybe a week, where he reinforced all the things that were wrong with my brain and how they were being exacerbated by the problems with my memory.

I remembered being in a diner with the man with the neck tattoo, leaving to go home, pulling my collar up against the cold of the brisk winter sun, and being interrupted by quickly approaching footsteps from behind.

“Excuse me, mate, you left your phone at your table.” a voice had said.

I frowned.

No, I didn’t. It’s next to my hand in my pocket. And considering that my phone is now linked to my computer and knowing what that machine is capable of, I’m not careless enough to let it out of my sight.

I turned to face the voice. “Sorry, it’s not mine. I have mine right...”

My words were cut off in my throat as the owner of the voice held something that looked like a deodorant can to my face and pressed the top down. A spray, or gas, or something attacked my senses immediately, I didn’t even get a chance to cough, let alone react to the attack, as the world around me grew dark and the ground raced up to meet me.

I shook my head hard.

No! That was a dream, the dreams are not real. Fuck, Pete, you are never going to get out of here if you can’t tell reality from delusion.

I closed my eyes and tried again.

There was the time the Doctor had explained the logic behind repeating everything until I remembered it, then there were hours - the endless hours - of meditation and memory exercises. With him trying to time how long it was between me seeing something and forgetting it. Apparently, stretching this out was a good start, and we had been making progress, but that had been a few weeks ago, and I was struggling to remember anything since then.

I focused harder.

“C’mon, Pete. Try! Try to remember, or you are going to be stuck in this place for the rest of your natural life. And you know what these places are like. They will extend that natural life for as long as they can get away with to make sure they get paid!”

I took another deep breath and relaxed. Trying to force a memory was exactly the right way to prevent one from surfacing. That was something I could remember. The trick was just to let your mind wander, let the memory surface on its own. If it was an old one, then it could be gently pushed aside until a newer one took its place.

I relaxed into my chair as something seemed to tick in the back of my mind.

For a moment, that city appeared behind my eyes. The girl with fiery red hair, her face a mask of fear and anger, was silently screaming something at me. I could see her lips moving and her hands gesturing wildly, but there was no sound. I frowned as the image flickered. I was suddenly in a different part of the city, on something that looked like a wall. The metropolis was to my back, and out in the fields beyond was a howling, dangerous-looking storm that seemed to threaten everything in sight. Swirling, billowing brown and black clouds blotted out the horizon and towered above us. I could feel the wind blowing out from it as it got closer. Beside me was the Butler, someone I knew I should trust implicitly. He wore the same concerned expression and was also talking, but again, I couldn’t make out anything he was saying. He kept pointing at the storm, then behind us to the towering monolith at the center of my city.

My frown deepened.

“I can’t hear you!” I tried to say, but nothing came out. Only the muted movement of my lips. “You’re not real!” My eyes glanced back up to the storm again.

The illusion was shattered, and my mind was yanked back into the generically decorated therapy room by the opening of the door. I shuffled in my seat to try to compose myself.

“Good morning, Pete,” the doctor smiled warmly. “How are you doing today?”

“I’m doing ... umm ... I have no idea,” I tried to match his smile while I subtly swallowed the ball of venomous bile in my throat and relaxed the furious grip of my hands on the armrests. Jesus, I wanted to rip out this man’s throat just from looking at him. I needed to get a fucking grip! And I don’t mean on his throat. “Why don’t you tell me how I’m doing, Doc.”

His smile faltered, and he sat down with a sigh. “I see we are having one of those days, aren’t we?” He said as he opened the file in his hand and laid it out on the table between us. I didn’t bother trying to read it. Not only was it upside down, but it was also written in doctor’s scrawl and was, therefore, utterly illegible to the rest of the human population. I cocked my head to the side and looked at him inquiringly. “You don’t remember my name, do you?” he asked.

“I ... I don’t, no. Sorry.”

“No, that’s okay, Pete,” he said as that smile returned to his face. “We had been making such good progress. I thought we had reached some kind of breakthrough. But, I can see there has been a significant regression. It’s okay, though. That is why we are here. We try again until it sticks, right?”

“I guess so.”

I knew my answers were coming out as flippant and curt, but it was very hard for me to describe that overpowering sense of rage that was burning in my chest at the mere sight of the man. I had no idea where it was coming from, but I knew it was dangerous. Just like a lot of other people my age, I had grown up in a time of increasingly graphic and gruesome horror movies. The days of Hitchcock’s famous shadowed shower scene with its muted violence were long gone, I grew up with graphic disembowelment being par for the course in any horror movie worth its salt, but there was something about the tales of vengeful spirits, mercilessly and relentlessly hunting down their targets, only to savagely butcher them, that resonated very strongly with me as I looked at the man sat opposite. The worrying part about it was I knew - absolutely knew - that if the Doc removed my restraints and got too close, they were urges I wouldn’t hesitate to act on. I didn’t want to, it wasn’t a conscious choice, but I knew that the inexplicable anger inside me was too much for anyone to control.

I would hurt that man in ways that would make those vengeful ghosts sit up and take notes if I got half the chance.

“You are getting better at fighting the urges,” He said, snapping my attention back to the moment.

“Sorry?”

“The damage to your brain has caused a loss of control when it comes to the violent impulses that plague our species,” He said calmly. “Humans, by our very nature, are an incredibly aggressive social group. It has taken thousands upon thousands of years for our brains to hardwire themselves not to act on those urges. Those parts of your brain have been severely damaged. But that is why we are here. The same mental discipline that will lead you back to being able to use your memory centers will also help you fight those violent impulses. It may not seem like it to you, but you are making remarkable progress. For what it is worth, I don’t take them personally.”

I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “That’s good to know,” I said, consciously trying to sound a lot calmer than I felt and being surprisingly successful in the attempt. “So, what’s the plan?”

“Well...” he said slowly, looking down at his notes, “ ... in our last session, you were telling me about your ... dreams.” There was something about the way he said that last word as if it wasn’t his first choice to describe them. More than that, based on how I was feeling at that moment, talking about my insanity didn’t seem like the best way to get the fuck out of there. If anything, it seemed like the last thing I would choose to do. At any rate, I had no memory of that whatsoever. So, I decided to play dumb.

“Dreams?”

He nodded and set his folder back down, keeping it open on a different page than the first time. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that he had refrained from reminding me of his name, but for the moment, I just sat back and listened to him. “Your’s is a very complex case. Usually, the loss of memory is universal, but in your case, the creative parts of the brain, the parts responsible for your ... dreams ... seem to still be able to communicate with your memory centers. I had hoped to use this as a means of gaining access to them through art, or something like that. You could possibly remember an event because you had drawn it, or painted it, for example. It is fascinating how your memories of your dreams, no matter how faded and vague they are, have been more constant than your memories of reality.”

“That’s ... good?”

“It’s ... something we need to be careful about. Pete, would you mind if I spoke frankly?”

“I’d actively encourage it.”

“Dreams are a way of allowing our subconscious mind to process and analyze the world around us. But in your case, with your lack of memory of your experiences, they are only serving to reinforce themselves. They are running the risk of becoming full-blown delusions. Losing yourself to them can potentially lead to an acute psychotic break from reality. If that were to happen, your chances of recovery would be almost nil. In our last session, we talked about the logic of your delusions. How your mind came up with this elaborate scenario as a way of protecting itself, and you, from the sudden changes in your reality. In these delusions, you are a member of a superhuman race with powerful abilities that not only let you completely heal yourself, but they made all of your wildest dreams come true. You didn’t really assault that nurse; she was enthralled by you and seduced you. You didn’t just go back to your old life once you were healed, but you got the apartment you had always wanted. You gained the knowledge to ace your course. You got the girl ... or girls. But you weren’t just a member of this all-powerful race; you were the most powerful of them all. You were the one capable of fighting off the enemy when no others could, it was you against the world, and you were winning. These illusions of grandeur, this sense of being invincible, run the risk of adversely affecting your recovery. It is a dangerous ... fantasy ... to lose yourself in because, without the ability to reliably form new memories, it can be hard for you to judge the amazing progress you have made. And without that perspective, and with these delusions being the only constant in your mind, I am concerned that you may allow them to ... take over.”

“Well, that sounds ... shit.”

“It would be less than ideal,” The doctor smiled.

“So, how do we, like, not let that happen?”

“This is where our last few sessions have been making such good progress. You had accepted that by talking about them and seeing the psychological meaning behind each aspect of each delusion, they would lose their power over you. For example,” he looked at his notes again. “I was fascinated by the imagery and metaphors of your dream city. The walls being literal constructions that protect your mind from harm was an amazingly insightful piece of information. That tells me that your sense of self-preservation is still entirely intact, which in turn means that you are able to see the danger and the implications of a psychotic break. Today, I wanted to talk about the people in your dreams.”

I winced against another deafening tick in the back of my mind, and for a moment, I was back in the city of my dreams. The fiery-haired girl was still screaming, her hair being blown around wildly by the winds of the storms that raged on the other side of those enormous walls. I couldn’t tell what she was saying, there was still no sound, but she was shaking her head violently, throwing her hands back and forth, and waving her fingertips at her neck.

“The man with the tattoo on his neck was one I was particularly interested in,” The doctor said, yanking me back into the room.

I frowned at him. “I ... umm ... I’m not going to lie, Doc. It’s all really hazy. I can barely remember this city you were talking about. I can sort of see it, but ... there isn’t any detail.”

“Hmmm,” he nodded, “You said his name was Uri?”

Did I? How the hell did I tell him that? I didn’t even know that, so how could I have told him?

I frowned at him. The man with the tattoo was not one I could remember clearly, but I knew that of all the characters in my delusion, he was perhaps the least important. I couldn’t even begin to understand why the doctor found him so interesting.

“Okay,” The doctor smiled, “let’s try something else. I would like to talk about your parents.”

I had to stifle the groan that automatically rose from my chest. They were the last people on earth I wanted to talk about. Fuck! I could almost see the look of disdain on Debbie’s face when she learned of my condition. I could almost hear Phil saying something about how they wouldn’t have a cripple in the family and that I was probably making it all up for attention.

“Now your mother has told me about your childhood, how close you all were, and their regular visits here have been something you have looked forward to since your arrival.”

Wait ... WHAT? Back the ever-loving fuck up!

My mind started to race. My hostile - to say the least - relationship with Phil and Debbie, also occasionally referred to as my parents, was not a product of my delusional mind. That was a reality of my life long before the accident. Even if I had imagined the altercation with them at the hospital after I woke up, the rest of my life with them was as clear in my long-term memory as everything else was. Hell, all I had to do was to look down at the back of my left hand to see the circular scar on my skin where my prick of a father had put a cigarette out on it when I was seven years old. It was still there, as clear as day, and if that was there, then my memories of abuse and torment at their hands were exactly that.

Memories.

Not delusions!

The parents I knew would never in a million years visit their brain-damaged son in a hospital like this. Even if they cared, which they absolutely did not, it would be an embarrassment. It would be the sort of gossip that spread around the country club like wildfire, and that was one thing neither of them would tolerate. I spent my entire life being subjected to their wildly unrealistic ideas of what the perfect child was meant to be, and any disparity between that idea and my actions was punished ... violently, repeatedly, and without the slightest shred of mercy.

The cigarette on the hand incident had come after I sneezed in the same room as them when they had friends over. I had learned to swallow my drinks silently before I had learned to count past 100 because letting them hear me drink usually led to some sort of beating. The notion of me being anything less than perfect was utterly rejected by those two animals, and when I inevitably failed to live up to their impossible expectations, they pretended to their social circle that I didn’t exist. The thought that my condition, as bad as it was, was anything more than a source of shame for them was so far beyond preposterous it was almost funny. The abuse I suffered at their hands was the sort of thing that gets people put in prison and gets social workers fired these days.

But the doctor was implying that they not only cared but had visited?

Nope, Sorry Doc, but I’m calling bullshit on that one!

That was all it took.

In that one sentence, the Doctor completely destroyed any hopes of maintaining the illusion that he had clearly been trying so hard to build.

“Jeeves, what the fuck just happened?” I said as I appeared on top of the wall, casting a quick look out at the ominous-looking storm. “Where the hell have I been, and how long have I been there?”

My aged butler, the representation of my subconscious mind, didn’t take his eyes away from his task as he answered me. He was holding his hands in the air and funneling a huge amount of power into the massive shield that now extended far above the walls. A lightning bolt slammed into it. That one bolt looked and felt powerful enough to do a serious amount of damage to my city. “The gas that man sprayed you with contained some sort of powerful hallucinogenic. Once you were unconscious, he took control of your hallucinations to create the psychiatric hospital you found yourself in. That was about four hours ago. I have been trying to neutralize the drug, but as soon as you ‘woke’ in the dream, he launched his attack. Sir, he is extraordinarily powerful. If you hadn’t snapped out of it when you did, I’m not sure we would have lasted much longer.”

Four hours? I understood that I had been in a form of the mindscape for all of the time I was in that room, but I still had the slowly fading memories of months of treatment bouncing around inside my head. It was extraordinarily disorientating.

“Alright, where is he?”

“He is making his way toward your westernmost power plant, Sir.”

“Alright, time to kick some ass.”

“No!” the butler barked unexpectedly at me. “Sir, I need you to listen very carefully!” He cast me a glance to make sure he had my full attention. I nodded urgently for him to continue. “He is powerful, but just like all other Evos, his power limits are finite. He is currently using a lot of power to maintain the illusion he has you in and a little more trying to sneak into a power plant to siphon off more. As far as he is concerned, you are still in the illusion!”

“O ... kay...”

“It took us too long to get you out of there to be able to combat him head-on now. If he realizes you are out of there, he will focus everything on his attack. This storm may not be powerful enough to break down your walls now, but if he throws a little extra energy into it, that could change quickly. It would need both of us to hold them together. While we are doing that, he will get to your power plant and draw out more than enough of the energy he needs to finish you off! He will kill you, Sir!”

“Fuck! Alright, what is your plan?”

“We need to beat him at his own game. I can hold the wall for a little while longer. It is going to take him at least another twenty minutes to get to his target. He is moving slowly; he still thinks we haven’t spotted him. Faye can track his position. That will free up a little more power for me to use here. In the meantime, I need you to do what he is doing?”