"You're going to have to trust us, though," she added. Her initial statement seemed direct enough, like she already knew what I was there for, but I also realized that it was just vague enough that it could have been some weird psychology thing, trying to get me to say what I was doing there without actually coming out and asking me.
"What do you mean by 'us'?" I asked, concerned about her referral to herself and unnamed others.
"Synchro Systems, of course. This is a main research facility, as you aware."
"I've had a few doubts. My friends upstairs…" I began, but she interrupted me.
"We are taking care of them," she stated, firmly. She stood up. She was almost as tall as me, easily approaching six feet, not counting the heels that she was wearing. I couldn't detect any malice in her tone, though, so I didn't worry about what she meant when she said that they were "taking care of" Janine and Hunter.
She walked around the desk and approached me.
"Will you come with me?" She asked. "Please," she added as an afterthought.
I remembered what Janine had said about being committed already. I didn't come as far as I had for nothing. All of the late nights, the strange meetings, the weird trails that I'd followed: they all led up to whatever answers the woman dressed in all black was about to provide. She gestured towards the glass doors on the left side of the room.
"What's behind those other doors?" I asked her, not expecting an answer.
"More rooms. A hallway that ends in the same place as the one we're about to take," she said, still gesturing towards the door on the left. "Would you prefer to take the hallway on the right?"
"Actually," I said, "I don't care. I want to know what Synchro's level of involvement in my life has been over the past year. I want to know where my girlfriend is, if you people took her, or if you even know where she is. I want you to tell me how to find her."
"Shall we?" She asked again, her expression still neutral.
"I'm following you," I said, getting the door for her.
We walked to the other end of the hallway, which was about 100 meters long, passing a set of doors on each side about every 10 meters. The hallway ended at another glass door. A larger room was on the other side of the door; inside of it were arrays of monitors, strange, vintage looking dials, keyboards inlayed into expansive workspaces, and most notably, a large glass observatory window. I couldn't see what the observatory window looked out upon from the hallway.
"What's your name?" I asked her.
She paused, looking at me with the strangest expression, as if she couldn't decide how to answer the question. It only lasted a moment, and then it was back to the same neutrality.
"Here's our door," she said, instead of answering. She opened the door immediately behind her instead of the glass door that led to the observatory and controls room. We stepped into a small office. Inside, it was set up quite similarly to a physician's exam room. The kinds of things you'd find inside of an exam room were in there, anyway, and it appeared that there were medical supplies of some sort behind the translucent cabinet doors inside of the room.
"Have a seat," she said, nodding her head towards the exam bench.
"I'll stand," I answered.
"Suit yourself."
"Really. What's going on? I didn't come all this way just for a checkup."
She almost cracked a smile when I said that. I figured that I had a chance to break through her conversational wall, so I went with it.
"What's so funny about that?" I asked.
"You're here to check up on something, aren't you? Or someone?"
I thought about it for a moment.
"You don't talk about it much, do you?" she asked as we sat on the train from Paris to London. We were already underground; the fluctuations in air pressure made our ears pop as we sped beneath the English Channel.
"About what?" I asked, assuming that she was wondering about my former marriage.
"About the times before. About when you were married to Victoria."
Assumption correct.
"Not much to say. We got married, we got divorced, I moved north."
"Did you love her?"
"I don't know," I answered, honestly.
"How can you not know? I hope that you never say that about me!" she replied, and exaggerated look of worry and shock on her face.
"I can assure you that I will never wonder if I loved you or not, and I hope that we never reach a point in which I'd have to question it."
"Then how can you be sure about someone that you were married to? Because I want to know how those kinds of things happen… because maybe they happened to me, too."
"Sometimes more factors come into play than just love," I said. "I think that you and I are pretty lucky to have found each other."
"We are," she agreed, resting her head on my shoulder.
"I thought that I loved her when I married her, of course. Things were kind of crazy back then. I was prone to making decisions based more on the feeling in the moment than considering the reality of situations. Victoria was an addict and I thought that I could save her, or change her. People don't change, though."
She waited for me to continue.
"We had a baby, a little girl. We named her..." I paused. "She died."
She made a little gasping sound and reached over, placing her hand on my heart.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"For a long time, I blamed her for that. It affected everything that I did, and most significantly, it was the final blow that tore our relationship apart. What little relationship we actually had, as I discovered through the course of the divorce."
"What do you mean?"
"When the baby died, there was an investigation. Victoria was at the center of it…" I paused. Changing approaches, I continued. "I just thought that I knew her, and it turns out that all I knew was the character that she was acting out for me, that she was living a lie whenever I was around her and that I never really knew her at all. She was who I wanted her to be, or who she thought that I wanted her to be, but she had this dark side that I never really saw in the beginning. All of that came later on, once the anger began, once the pretense was lost, as soon as she didn't care what happened anymore."
"What do you mean when you say that she was the character that you wanted her to be?" She asked, understandably wanting me to clear it up for her.
"I don't even know you," I said to her, still preparing to have to fight her to leave. Everything courteous and correct went out of the window for me. I had never been involved in a physical altercation with a woman before in my life, but I'd also never been cornered in the basement examination room of an international research facility with a stranger preparing to inject me with something that she said was going to put me to sleep.
"That's true. But really, it's just sleep," she said, raising her eyebrow again. "And besides, you're already committed. You didn't come all this way for nothing, did you?"
Fuck it, I thought. She was right.
What was the point if I didn't try every option that presented itself? I had to find her. I didn't want to live without her.
I held out my arm.
The woman in black nodded her head, stepped towards me, and carefully took me arm into her hand. I noticed that her fingers were very soft. My skin felt cool when she touched me. I wondered if she had done this before with anyone else. I felt the prick of the needle in my skin.
Eyes: blue.
And then:
Black.
We booked a flight back from London to Atlanta, with plans to make a road trip up the eastern coast, returning to home in a rental car, taking our time by becoming tourists in our own country.
"There could be others like you," I suggested, ripping into the bag of salted peanuts, scattering them across both of us and onto the floor.
The flight attendant gave us a disapproving look, I waved to her, and I started to pick up the peanuts.
"Your girlfriend's getting mad at yo
u," she replied, nodding towards the attendant. It was an inside joke that we shared with each other: we'd refer to third parties as our girlfriends or our boyfriends, kind of making fun of the third party and kind of making fun of ourselves. It was a way of stating to each other that we were both comfortable with each other, that we weren't afraid of being silly, and that we weren't particularly worried or jealous of the attention that both of us sometimes got from other people… even if the current attention we were the subject of was that of the scornful flight attendant.
I was still picking up the peanuts when I continued.
"What I'm trying to say is this: If you were a test subject, we could look your doctors up again and get them to give you another one of their treatments. They could reverse any procedures they might have tried on you. If they've got the technology to rearrange people's memories, then it only stands to reason that they've got the technology to make backups – in case they screw something up in the operation."
"If someone screwed up, why would they reveal themselves to us? What's in it for them? If they're covering their tracks, even now, it's going to get progressively harder to find them, and even if we do manage to track someone down who worked for Synchro, they won't be able to access their equipment anymore. The government's shut them down during all of the investigations," she replied. "Most days I don't think that you even want me to remember who I used to be."
"I can't deny that," I said, mulling it over a bit. I was done picking up the peanuts, so I started lining them up in rows of five on the tray in front of me.
‘The chances that anyone from Synchro doing anything to help anyone out at this point are astronomically against us. I'm already very lucky that I ended up meeting you and that you are the wonderful person that you are."
"Thanks," I said, growing warm in my cheeks. Things like that made me feel kind of shy.
"More than one in a million. One in billions upon billions, probably," she said, opening her own package of peanuts with much more grace than I had. She dumped a couple into her hand and tossed them into her mouth.
"What did you say your doctor's name was?" I asked, worried that she'd think that I hadn't been paying attention. It wasn't something we talked about very often, though. As she said, most of the time I wanted her just as she was; I constantly worried that she'd leave me if she remembered her old life. "We could start by trying to find him."
"Funny," she said, tilting her head to the side. "His name won't come to me right now. You know, it's on the tip of my tongue. I'll remember in a second."
Was this lapse related to her greater disorder, or just one of those moments that happen to us all, when you can't seem to recall information on demand for whatever reason? I wondered if all the answers might be related to slips like that.
I reached over and took her hand again, squeezing it.
"I love you," I said.
"I love you, too. What brought that on?"
"Just thinking it."
The sun set over a broader horizon than we were accustomed to, and above, the stars came out, clearer than they'd ever been.
The wings rocked, and home we flew, memories and moments all bundled up in a pressurized cell, miles above the world, the oceans below.
I didn't realize that I'd fallen asleep until she tugged on my sleeve a little while later, staring in amazement through the window at the billowing clouds below us.
"It's beautiful! And you can see the ocean, so far below us!" she said, pressing her face against the glass. I looked past her and noticed that the wings were still moving, ever so slightly, and it made me feel a little nervous, even though I knew that things like that were totally normal. When I was a kid and I was on an airplane, I'd pretend that the heavy turbulence was just the wings of the plane flapping like a bird, getting us to wherever it was that we were traveling to a lot faster. I'd seen too many newsreels since then of plane crashes, and even though it defied logic, I felt a sinking in my stomach at times that was caused by a deep-seated, suppressed fear. I remembered having the same feeling at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, when my knees involuntarily buckled beneath me and I fell to the walkway, reaching instinctively for the rails so that I wouldn't fall off.
Aren't we all afraid when it is time to soar?
"Very humbling!" she added, putting her hands under her chin.
Her hair was pulled into pigtails on each side, so I kissed her on the back of the neck and then leaned back in my chair. All of the peanuts had fallen off of the tray onto the floor and underneath my seat. Her pigtails triggered a memory of the first days after she'd arrived, and I closed my eyes again.
...Shadows
Chapter 13
White.
The ceiling, maybe? Where am I?
I'm not sure.
It's not uncomfortable. A bed?
No.
Been here before?
I don't think so.
Get up. Lying down.
Searching for something? What was it?
Or who?
It was a person.
She.
Headache.
It's almost cold in here. Not quite, though. I shiver.
I check myself. All clothes intact. Where are my shoes?
How did I get here?
A couch. Whose couch?
The room is nice, anyway. Nicer than home.
Where is home?
I should remember things like this.
A hangover?
I don't think so.
It's different from that. More… natural. My head hates me. I need a drink. A glass of water is on the table beside the couch.
Mine?
I drink it. All.
Wait. I should have smelled it first. Something's not right.
I shouldn't be HERE. I should be… where?
Thinking for a moment.
Underground?
Not dead, though.
The basement?
The water tastes good. Is there more of it? Sadly, no.
What time is it? I check my watch.
Good idea!
My watch is not working. The battery is dead. Why?
My headache is subsiding, though. Quickly.
Strange.
What's going on here?
I collect my thoughts and look at the room around me. It appears to be a study of some sort, traditional. Someone's home, even, though that person must be much wealthier than I am. A small library of leather-bound books is neatly organized on the shelves that compose most of the wall across from the couch where I awakened. Trinkets and other antique looking figurines are tastefully arranged on different shelves. There is an old phonograph player in the room. I wonder if it works.
I recall the lab. I recall allowing the woman in black to inject me with something. I'm not sure how I arrived here. I'm not sure if I'm still at the Synchro Systems research center or if I've been relocated, as the woman suggested would be the case. I wonder what kind of examination the mysterious doctors have conducted on me, but only briefly. I notice the glass wall overlooking the valley below us.
Somehow, I'm higher up the mountain. I walk over to the windows, checking to see if I can get my bearings. It seems that I'm too far away to see the city, and I can't find the labs in my initial scan of the landscape around me, though I do make note of the beauty and serenity of the world outside of this room. I feel calm, and wonder if I'm in a relaxed state because of whatever it is that she injected me with.
With an unusual amount of clarity, I realize that things are completely out of my control, and I accept it without hesitation. I must be under the influence of whatever the drugs were, I decide, since something like that would usually provoke a stronger reaction of some sort, at least, in me. It's not surprising to me, though, that I've been given a tranquilizer. For a moment, I'm most interested in why I allowed someone I don't know to inject me in the first place. How long did I sleep for?
I return my attention to the room around me, searching for s
omething to drink. I finished the glass of water that was on the small table beside the couch before I'd really come to. Someone had to have placed it there. Where are they now?
I decide to examine the book collection, but I don't get that far, because an older man enters the room and introduces himself... kind of. He's tall and thin, but still formidable for his age, and he looks like he is in excellent shape. I note to myself that I've made a habit of sizing everyone up as soon as I see them, realizing that I've only recently started doing it.
"I give you my sincerest apologies for not being present when you woke up. I live here," he says to me, extending a wrinkled hand in my direction. I take his hand into mine, out of habit, and shake it. "My name is Mr. Yamamoto, and the people close to me sometimes call me Daisuke. You can call me whichever is most suitable to you." He smiles at me and releases his grip.
"Where are we?" I ask him, turning back towards the windows.
"Beautiful view, isn't it?" He asks as a way of answering. I nod my head, agreeing wordlessly. "Let's take a walk through the winter garden," he suggests, sliding the window open and stepping out onto the small walkway that is on the outside of the house.
I follow him out of the window, and he closes it behind me. It's cold out here, but I realize that the walkway leads to a set of stairs, and beneath us is a walled garden area, and my curiosity about the house overrides the sensation of the cold. There is a fountain in the yard. There are wooden benches and large, smooth stones scattered around the place. The stones must have been brought on site at great expense, for they are huge and obviously not naturally occurring on the mountain.
"The wind won't be so bad once we make it down the stairs," Daisuke says to me, already taking a few steps down. "It will feel warmer there."
I follow him down the stairs, and then we began to walk along the pebbled pathways that weave through the garden. He points out various plants to me, stating why they are unique and the reasons that they thrive in the winter months, but I ignore most of what he is saying. I'm still very relaxed, but I'm not interested in plants or gardening, especially when none of the questions on my growing list are being answered.