Persistence of Memory

Part 2-1

Part 2

My mind is a fury of white noise, a buzzing like bees encircling my brain, stinging at my thoughts and leaving them numb and swollen and useless. I don’t know if it’s the voice anymore or if the sun has anything to do with it, beating down on me through the thinning trees until all I hear is a high-pitched hum, all I see are white spots. I stumble along, hoping I don’t fall because I don’t have the strength to get up again. I feel nauseous, the pain eating into my stomach, making me swoon.

Did I go through everything for this, just to die here in this heat, amid these trees? If I fall, at least I’ll die free. At least there’s that.

When the sun starts to sink in the sky, I trip out of the woods and find myself on a road of sorts, crumbled asphalt buckled into wrinkles like corduroy. The chunks of black rubble cut into my thin boots and each step aggravates my hip, so I stick to the edge of the trees, just out of sight. I can duck out of the way if a patrol passes by, and if I keep to the stunted grass, I won’t cut myself on the asphalt when I get too delirious to continue on and fall.

Because the sun rose in front of me this morning, I put it to my back now and follow the road as it stretches away to my left. I figure the sun will set over the facility—to the right leads back there, and I didn’t come all this way to walk into their open arms. How far is the nearest city? I try to recall my teachings but the voice is screaming at me now, not offering any help whatsoever, and I can’t remember the maps of the area I once knew as intimately as the tattoo on the inside of my wrist. Most of the cities have been destroyed, shaken apart by the last war, years before I was ever born—those who aren’t culled live in sparse towns or sprawling farms, in shanty homes and dingy shacks. They keep to themselves, away from each other in a vain attempt to keep beneath the government’s notice.

But that doesn’t stop the cullings. The soldiers come—they always come. Into the makeshift towns to round up the strong, the smart, the ones who threaten them the most. I can’t imagine I was threatening, whoever I was before, but I was among those culled somewhere near here, in one of these little farming communities. For some reason, I was deemed scary enough to wipe clean. They inserted a new memory into me, turned me into one of them. A killing machine. Even now the soldier they created me to be registers everything my conscious mind barely notices—all possible hiding places, all angles of trajectory, all flight paths, all escape routes. The soldier refuses to die to the whine inside.

I only hope the person I used to be is equally as strong.

* * * *

My throat is raw, my feet blistered, my face burnt by the sun, now a flame against my back. My left side is completely numb from my toes to my fingers, but where the bullet scraped into me, my body buzzes in time with the noise in my head. I can’t go on much longer. I can’t.

Just when I’m about to sit down and let death have its way—I can’t walk anymore, I just can’t—I see a house. Almost nothing but a shadow in the dying light, the rundown shack is surrounded by meadowfoam in full bloom, low white blossoms that stretch from the road across the flat fields to edge the trees. There’s a light on in one window, and near the road, a man bends over the crop, his back to me, a small scythe in one hand. He wears nothing but a pair of denim dungarees cut at the knee. His muscular back is tanned by the sun, his shoulders strong and thin, his waist narrow. A fine dusting of dark hair crosses his lower arms.

As I approach, I gasp out, “Please.” He’s the first person I remember ever seeing who isn’t a soldier or guard, who doesn’t have a tattoo on his wrist or scar behind his ear, and I don’t want him to run. I want, I need his help. More than anything else, I want him to turn and see me.

And he does. His hair is a close thatch that hugs his scalp in burnished copper twists bleached from time spent in the fields. He scowls at me for a moment, trying to see me against the sun, the expression in his deep blue eyes unreadable, unfathomable. I think of films we saw at the facility, movies about oceans—his eyes remind me of those stormy waters, they’re that dark, that wild. There’s something about the way he stands slowly, the scythe forgotten in one hand as he stares, that tugs at my memory. I feel like I should know him, as if we’ve met before, but I can’t remember when or how or where.

Then he frowns, his eyebrows furrowing together, and the scythe falls from his grip. “Joah?” he whispers.

He knows me. Somehow he knows me.

Before I can reply, the noise in my head grows deafening, my vision clouds, and I fall to the ground. My name in his voice is the last thing I hear before the world goes black.