Regardless, I didn't plan on telling him too many secrets of mine, especially not as I sat in the woods behind the wreckage of an RV while the world outside of us faded into and out of reality. My fading world was a strange place to live in, but nothing appeared different than it had a week ago, or a month ago, it was just that my head and my heart were trying to solve problems that thought I'd never be able to overcome.
I was finding only a few answers to the questions that I had, and I'd only brought misfortune into the lives of the people who became involved with me. The world outside of our little sphere faded more, and I sank deeper into my own reflections, poking a stick into the ground.
We all sat silently for a few moments, warming our hands with the fire we'd built in the middle of our area. Something nagged at my thoughts, and I was waiting for it to surface. It seemed like something basic was missing that I needed to ask, but I felt like I kept forgetting it before I had a chance to speak up. Then it struck me.
"Why don't any of us have cell phones? We could just call a cab to come pick us up instead of camping out in the woods like this."
They looked at each other briefly, and then turned to me simultaneously.
"My phone broke in the RV crash," Janine stated.
"I haven't owned one in a pretty long time," Hunter said. "Hate to get tied down with a bunch of extra technology that I don't really need, you know?"
I thought that was a little strange, but I was tired, so I dismissed my sense of paranoia.
"But where's my phone? I always have it with me… except now. I can't remember what I did with it."
"Maybe you just set it down somewhere or lost it in the wreck," Janine hypothesized.
"No, I don't think so. I don't think that I've had it for a while now." I tried to remember the last time I'd used my mobile phone to call someone, but I couldn't recall a single time. I felt conflicted because I knew that I owned and paid the bill for the phone, but the only phone calls I could remember making had been on a landline at the house. The memory lapse wasn't just over the past week or so, though… I couldn't recall EVER making a phone call with a cellular. That just didn't make sense.
How could I forget having ever used something as common as a mobile phone?
"Maybe the fire extinguisher did more damage to your head than you'd like to admit. Want me to try to round up some aspirin?" Hunter said, glancing back over to Janine. I was definitely starting to become more paranoid, but I didn't want to let them know that I felt like something strange was going on between them. What was the deal with all of the shared glances they were having with each other?
I felt guilty for suspecting that Janine might be hiding something from me regarding the cell phone.
What else had I forgotten?
Feedback loops keep building up with each cycle, amplifying more and more with each reiteration, until at last they become deafeningly loud. My thoughts were doing that, and I needed a silencer for them, a way to break their circular flow. I knew I wouldn't work anything out if I kept dwelling on things that only provided me with inconclusive ideas that made me feel like I needed to question my own sanity and how much I would be able to trust myself.
I felt like I was being too analytical to be genuinely insane. In the rock/paper/scissors argument inside of my head, being slightly neurotic canceled out being genuinely certifiable. But was that just another sign of mental instability?
To answer: I couldn't trust myself anymore, not completely, since I couldn't work out why I'd forgotten a few things. Flawed logic or not, I would have to trust that Janine (most importantly) and Hunter (without a motive for misleading me) were sane, rational, and there to help me. Therefore, I decided to stop questioning inconsistencies in their behavior while I focused on working out my own mental glitches.
"We'll make some more progress in the morning when there's better light out," Hunter stated. "I'm going to get some shut-eye. You should do the same; you're both looking a little worse for the wear. Don't worry about the RV. Someday, I'll buy another one... or maybe I won't. This one was a piece of crap in the first place."
"You're right," I agreed. "My head does kind of hurt. I haven't slept regularly in weeks. It's probably just nerves or something. The phone's probably at the house next to the bed or something."
Janine nodded dismissively.
"I'm really tired, too!" She exclaimed, sounding more eager than I would have expected her to. Maybe she was just ready to curl up in the sleeping bag, since it was getting cold out there. "Let's get some rest."
"See you in a few hours, then," Hunter concurred, reaching for a rolled up sleeping bag.
I followed suit, still trying to work out what didn't seem to add up with my memories. I remembered what Partain had implied back in the bar, but kept the thought at arm's length. I didn't want to get sucked into an even more paranoid thought process and start doubting my own sanity. If Partain had been telling the truth and I'd somehow undergone one of Synchro's treatment processes, then everything was up in the air. Everything. If that was the case, then there was nothing in the world I could believe in any more.
I looked over to Janine and Hunter, who appeared to have fallen asleep already. The fire had died down considerably. I'd been thinking for longer than I realized, but I still couldn't explain the unshakeable feeling that something definitely wasn't right – something even more strange than the reasons that had led us to the bottom of a ravine in the woods, camping out in the middle of the night, waiting to make an early morning visit to an illegal research facility.
I worried for a little while longer. At some point, I finally fell asleep.
I was trying to paint the angel again when she walked into to the room. The canvas always ended up being too contradictory for its own good, so I'd always end up dragging it into the shower to scrub the acrylic off. Whenever the need to create something meaningfully symbolic would arise, I'd do it all over again. It was always this angel showing up, this angel I'd inevitably end up trying to wash down the drain.
I tended to take on projects, and once every month or so I'd get interested in something new, and the month that she'd arrived was the one in which I had decided that I was going to learn how to paint. Plans of painting thousands of masterpieces filled my head; I dreamed of gallery showings where demand for my work exceeded my ability to supply, providing limitless funding for future endeavors. I had a desire for the approval of interesting and intelligent women; I wanted former friends and my current peers to look me up and envy me. I kept trying to paint this angel as a female with wide eyes similar to that of the anime style. She had broad, pointed wings and short hair with jagged cuts on the edges. I was getting frustrated as I felt that I was coming to the close of another failed attempt at painting this character when she walked into the room. She passed me, heading for the balcony, where she sat down.
She was eating a celery stick and her hair was up in a sideways ponytail, meaning she was in a hurry at some point or that she didn't care too much about it at another. She was talking on the telephone while she was chewing and I couldn't hear a word that she was saying. I'd go deaf when I'd been thinking too hard, setting the volume of the world all the way down to zero so I could focus my thoughts.
Her toes were curled under her feet and her knees were drawn up to her breasts. She was sitting on the balcony, leaning back in a green plastic patio chair, staring out at whatever the kind of things were that she'd see in the sky at night. I leaned to the left a little, just in time to catch her scratching her head just above her right ear. Her nail polish was chipped, but the nails were painted the color of Arizona mesas at dusk. The color of fading anger or a blow to the head, the dark red that comes after a bright flash of white. I touched my face, near my eyebrow, sore but not yet bruised.
Simple words always lead to terrible impacts.
I wondered what would happen to us, to those days, to the world. I wondered if she really would ever become just another series of words to me and if I
'd be even less to her. If she'd ever become one of those stories that gave me the scars to prove its truth. If she could ever be less, and if my heart would explode for loving her more. I wondered if she'd be the one who made me say those rarely final words: I'll never love again.
Why would I?
She came back into the room, just as I was giving up for the night.
"Why do you keep washing it off?" She asked, referring to the fact that I kept taking the canvas to the shower. I'd even taken it out onto the sidewalk and washed it off with a garden hose a couple of times. "Why not just get a new canvas? You put more effort into erasing the stupid thing that you do into painting it. You must hate that angel more than you love her."
I sighed.
"I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the image, really, but it keeps coming up. I think that it wants to be created; I think that she wants to be seen. At least that's what I want with the angel, I guess," I continued, spinning myself in circles on one of the barstools I kept in the living room. I made myself feel a little bit dizzy.
She was standing at the bookshelf, so she selected a disc from her collection and loaded it into the player.
As the bluesy ragtime narrative began, I scratched my head.
"It's weird that you like this so much," I said.
"Why? It makes me happy. That's what music is supposed to do," she answered, stepping closer to me and placing her hands on my shoulders.
"It's alright, I suppose, just not my favorite," I said, relaxing as she began to work at the knots of tension in my shoulders. It seemed like I'd never get away from those knots in the muscles of my back.
"You're trying too hard," she said. "You should just let the painting create itself. Let you hands wander."
"It's easier said than done."
"I know. Sometimes you just have to put the brush down and realize that you're not meant to paint anything at all, at least not today. Sometimes you try to be a painter when you should really be doing the dishes or grocery shopping… or dancing with your girlfriend."
The song changed to a more upbeat number, as if she'd cued it, but I think her conversational timing had more to do with the fact that she knew the order of the tracks on the disc.
"They call this guy the Champion for a reason," she said, stepping back. She began a small dance move. "Because he's the best. Some of his songs are sad, some are happy, but the man knew exactly how to let the music just write itself, wandering all around. He let the music lead him."
I had to admit that the song's progression was making me feel a little bit better. She spun me around on the barstool.
"Kiss me," she demanded, and I complied. She raked her teeth across my lower lip. "Let's dance."
I stood up, took her left hand into mine, and placed my free hand on her hip. We began dancing our own version of the waltz, since I didn't really know how to dance in the first place. I'd never taken dance lesson and spent as much time holding the walls up at any function that I'd ever been to that required dancing as I did exhibiting my less than stellar moves. I'm not even sure that the way we were dancing would even be considered an acceptable form of any type, as I stepped on her toes every couple of steps. I lost count with the music, concentrating more on staring at her than maintaining proper cadence. She didn't seem to mind, so I didn't either. We continued for a while without speaking, until a slow song came on, and then we just stood there, holding each other, rocking in time to the music.
"Do you think we can stay like this forever?" she asked.
"I hope so," I answered.
"I never want to go home, you know," she said, holding me a little tighter. "Whatever it is that I forgot, whoever it may be that I've left behind, however it is that things were... they couldn't be like this."
I didn't say anything. I just listened to her, trying not to dwell on the implications, the likelihood, that there really was someone that she had left behind, someone who might possibly love her as much as I did. Someone who would come looking for her someday.
"Nothing, anywhere, could be like this, except for you and me, right now."
"Then don't ever leave," I suggested. "We can stay here or we can run away somewhere together. We can get away from today, climb in a time machine, and go back to a simpler time than now," I said, fantasizing out loud. It seemed like a good idea.
"This is the perfect time. Right now," she stopped moving and leaned back, looking up into my face and smiling. "Right now," she said.
And inside, I knew that it was.
Inside, I knew that she was right.
Chapter 11
I stood up, stretching my stiff limbs, and yawned. I watched the fog on my breath and immediately I felt colder as I moved away from what was left of the fire. It was still dark out; it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the sky as I looked up through the trees above me. I recalled the countless times before that we had done the same thing together, under very different circumstances.
I searched for firewood through a small clump of trees, selecting some substantial branches and limbs that had fallen to the ground. I gathered them into a pile so that I could scoop them all up and carry them back all at once. That made it easier to search around for other branches, since I was unencumbered by all the bulky sticks we'd need if we wanted a fire before we headed out.
I felt a little sick, and then, without warning, I vomited. I keeled down onto the ground, retching up the remains of the microwave dinner I'd eaten just a few hours ago. It was a good thing Hunter hadn't had much to eat; otherwise, it would have been wasted all over the forest floor. I worried about the reality of our situation. The Synchro Systems research lab we were looking for was supposed to be near a mountain trail that was over 3000 kilometers long. If she had chosen to vanish into the wilderness, we'd never be able to find her. I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and made my way back over to the meager pile of firewood and kindling that I had collected, hoping for her safe return.
After a few more moments of searching, I returned to the fire pit. The others appeared to be sleeping fitfully, so I added some of the branches to the flames, watching them smolder for a few moments while the water evaporated off of them.
The absurdity of the entire journey was becoming overwhelming as I recalled the events of the past week. If I had forgotten something as simple as using a telephone, I rationalized, then it had to be a possibility that I had also forgotten other critical elements that would have made the answers to my questions easy and apparent. Following that train of thought, I did begin to question my own sanity, debating the legitimacy of my perspective in the situation at hand. Maybe I didn't know what was going on any more because I was crazy. Maybe she'd left me and I'd blocked it out, not wanting to go through it all over again, and my ridiculous quest was the final sign, physically manifested, of my psychological break. It has to be a possibility, I said to myself. I can't rule anything out.
I looked over at Janine, still sleeping silently on the ground across from me, and then checked Hunter, who was snoring quietly. It was too cold out there for there to be a lot of insect noise in the woods, unlike what you'd hear in the summertime, when a wall of organic sound would surround you, singing in your ears like nature's lullaby, whispering you back to sleep if you woke too soon. Instead, there was a peaceful and strange silence, broken only by the sounds that we made at our temporary camp in the ravine's bottom. The fire crackled. Hunter snored. Janine rolled over in her bag.
It was all too real, though! I wasn't imagining it.
I wasn't charismatic enough, no matter what, to convince Janine to come along with me if it was a ghost chase, especially after everything we'd talked about over the past few weeks. She came along with me because something really was going on that wasn't easily explained. Removing Janine from the equation didn't change the fact that Hunter believed me and had extended an offer to help find Coren at the Synchro labs. I didn't think it was possible that we could all be suffering from the same delusion; the odds in favor of
that had to be astronomically high. But how could I forget something as obvious as a cell phone?
Bad thoughts drifted down from the treetops as the dawn slowly crept in on us, interrupting my hopeful reflection on the progress I'd made in at least discovering what had happened to her and where she might have headed to if she wasn't kidnapped. Everything was pointing us in the direction of the labs nearby.
I realized that I had been drawing spirals in the dirt, circles within circles, strange whirling designs and patterns carved out of nothingness as I focused on connecting the dots of information that Partain had given with the fragments the informants and research agents had filled me in on. I was trying to add all of that to the information I'd figured out in my own research into Synchro, and then add all of that to what she'd said to me in our time together about her own treatments for memory loss.
I looked back to Janine, still sleeping soundly in the grass, curled up in a ball.
"I guess we should start putting it all on the table," Hunter said, to my surprise, sitting up and stretching.
"What makes you think that we haven't already?" I asked him, raising my voice a little. Janine stirred but didn't wake up.
"It's not that I don't trust you guys, but you've gotta keep in mind the circumstances in which we met. They're, uh, a little questionable," he said as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He put his glasses on and looked at me, continuing. "A couple of hours ago, we were in a car chase. Somebody was shooting us. I need to know why they were chasing you. Or why they were chasing her. Or if you have no idea, then I need to know that as well. Because they could have been chasing after me, man." Hunter was a morning person, I guess, because it seemed like he had a lot to talk about right after he woke up, especially opening up with a loaded statement like that. I didn't say anything, waiting.
"I know you guys are trying to rescue your girl from this place down the road that's done some things to her head, and you apparently can't go to the cops about it because the company's somehow in league with them, and that's cool. But I just met you guys last night and I already feel like I've been sucked into this thing in a way I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with!" There was a twinkle in his eyes as he said it, like he was almost to the point of crying, and I wasn't sure if he was upset or overjoyed, but perhaps it was a bit of both, though I couldn't begin to imagine why he'd be either.