"There's foam on your lip," I said to her, taking a draw from my own pint.
"It's good beer," she responded, wiping her mouth on the back of her sleeve with a comical gesture, passing her entire forearm over her face. I think by that point she was more than a little drunk. If she didn't mind, neither did I.
"What are we going to do tonight?" I asked, setting my glass down on the table and reaching over to pick up my cigarette.
"We're going to quit smoking, I hope," she said, scorning.
I laughed.
"After that, I mean."
"I don't know. Hang out. Make out. Take a tour of Putney."
"All excellent suggestions, lover."
"Thanks! That's why I made them," she said, winking at me. We walked around a lot, in every city that we went to, and it was nice because we never ran out of things to talk about and we never got bored on our excursions. She always had an interesting observation about things or sometimes she'd find an obscure point to debate; just as often, we wouldn't speak at all, content in each other's company. Good silence and the ability to pull it off, that's something that really counts in the end.
Another round of drinks came, followed by conversational rambling and good silence. After the bar had its last call, we stumbled out into the street, holding each other up, a scene from countless movies that I'd seen playing out in real life, right before my eyes as I lived it. Everything seemed like a dream, blurry through my drunkenness. We wandered down the road for a while, eventually coming to rest at a waiting bench near a bus stop. We sat.
"You know," I said to her, "that getting drunk with you and being drunk around you, it's totally different than all those times that I always got drunk before."
"In a good way or a bad way?" she asked, huddling up against me. It was a little windy on that street, and as was the usual in London, everything was wet, which made it seem a little chillier than it really was.
"A good way, a good way," I reassured her. "It's a way that's totally without the pervasive sense of trying to hide from something, to escape, that came hand in hand with all the other times, back home," I said, referring to the days before she showed up. The night before she arrived, even, when I'd tried to drown it all out, numbing everything that might painfully break through. I went on.
"It's really nice, and I know that I'm being redundant when I tell you that, because I tell you how I love you and how perfect things are all of the time, but I feel like I'm just not expressing it on a level like I'm feeling it, because words just aren't the right way to really fully express those feelings."
"I know what you mean," she said, squeezing me. I could feel her fingers gripping my side through the heavy wool overcoat I was wearing. Our breath formed a small cloud of fog around us as we sat. "Even if we never figure out how I got here, or where I came from, or what my lost memories are, I've still got so many things to express to you that aren't easily conveyed through words."
"Words are all we've got for now, huh?" I asked, knowing that she'd agree: We had so much more.
I ordered another drink.
"So someone who went through the process, especially early on, would they be like a kid, still growing up?" I found the idea hard to get my head around.
"They'd be much more stable than a teenager. Don't be silly!" He cracked his knuckles with his thumbs one at a time. They popped so loudly that the bartender looked at us, possibly thinking we were being impatient for the next round.
"You're not really answering that one, though. What kind of behavior changes could a person expect?"
"Well, you might want to talk to some of the research assistants, since they're the ones who spent the most time around the subjects immediately after the treatments. The other doctors and I just compiled information and came up with new theories and approaches. As I said, I've already forgotten a lot of the details. I know that we came up with a technology that was new and that worked… and maybe worked too well." He winked at me. Partain was a lot stranger to me today than the first time I'd met him, when he seemed so composed and in control of the situation.
"And you remember all of this about your time at Synchro, but not enough about the rest of your research to tell me how to fix Cor once I find her, or, at the very least, where she might be," I was still dubious, and it was taking a lot for me to digest the possibility that his words were truth. I needed a new approach if I wanted to find out more relevant leads in my search.
"If there's anything else you'd like to ask, or if you plan on killing me, now is the time to do it," he said, sliding his empty glass away from him and cutting the meeting short. I looked in the direction of the bartender, who wasn't paying any attention to us, and then put Synchro's device back into my jacket pocket.
"Otherwise, I'll continue drinking, now that you've started me on that course for the day," he continued. "You don't mind picking up the tab for me, do you? I'm sure that you can understand that I'm a little low on cash right now, having been recently unemployed and all."
I ignored his sarcasm and placed two twenties on the table.
"That should cover it," I said, placing my hand on his shoulder. "Thanks for the information, doc. I've got to get going, anyway. But humor me for another minute."
He raised an eyebrow but didn't comment.
"What do you think, Dr. Partain?" I asked him. "What happens next? Where do I go from here? Am I searching for nothing? Is she gone for good?"
"You're too fucked up," he said to me. "All this time I've been telling myself it's all a dream, a nightmare, even, and that I'll wake up soon. All this time I've been telling myself that I've lost my grip on reality and that I've slipped into a delusional world that my mind had been creating for me as I've been strapped into a chair in the middle of a padded room somewhere. But there really is a stranger confronting me in a bar, threatening me with a gun while buying me drinks," he laughed after this.
Although he was raising his voice, the few people in the bar still seemed to be ignoring us.
"But I've also learned that what everyone sees as face value is just like the gloss coat on the surface of truth. And the truth is that people see what they want to see and find what they want to find. Reality is just a matter of perspective, friend. The treatments have made me unsure of most everything, but that's the one thing I'm still positive about."
Partain was really losing it. He must have taken the treatment more recently that he'd implied, maybe even right before I found him at the convenience store.
I left him in the booth, mumbling something about a man named Descartes.
She kicked sand up into the air as she put her feet down, stopping her motion abruptly. A quizzical look made its way across her face.
"Why'd you stop swinging?" I asked, twisting the chains of the swing that I was sitting on around and around, waiting to make myself dizzy when they spun around, unwinding. I was staring at the ground around us where cigarette butts were littered across the grass and the sand. I thought that it was kind of funny that there were so many cigarettes in a park where kids were playing. I wondered if it was the kids that were smoking or if the parents were doing so, or if no one really ever went to the park anymore except young couples who had fallen in love.
"I just remembered something," she said, staring off into space. "I remember swinging, like this, at a park, and my dad was pushing me so that I could get higher up into the air. The way my stomach dropped just now, that feeling of free-fall, it just triggered the whole thing!"
She was getting excited, and I was happy to see that she had remembered something, even sometime seemingly inconsequential about her past. I was glad that she had a real history; she had real memories, although they were all locked up somewhere and unavailable to her.
"That's great news!" I exclaimed. I was busy lifting my feet and spiraling around as the swing unwound itself.
"You're going to make yourself sick, stupid," she advised, finally turning to look at me, giggling.
"Guess t
hat means I'll need a kiss to get better," I replied, trying to focus on her as I spun around, but she was gone again, a blur. I tried again on the next pass.
How many dreams do we surpass when we fly?
"Or a knuckle sandwich," she said, holding up her fist. Another thing about her was that she loved to employ silly clichés, and would even go so far as to set up a conversational situation just for a reason to use one. She made a good game of it, and it seemed that I had just fallen victim to one of her setups. I didn't mind.
"Or a knuckle sandwich," I echoed, putting my feet down on the ground. "I feel dizzy!"
"I wonder why memories come back to me so randomly," she said, resuming swinging. "The mind works so strangely."
"Do you think that if you feel other sensations, or see other sights, that it might trigger more memories?" I asked, already feeling that the question had been answered, but curious about what her thoughts were on the subject.
"I don't know. Maybe. The smell of burning toast and newspapers at the deli around the corner, the texture and smell of a warm towel after washing my face in the morning, the feeling in my stomach as I drop for just a second in the arc of a swing, and even the sound that a bus makes as its air brakes release pressure when it stops to pick me up… all of those things have triggered random memories for me – even if the memories weren't nearly as relevant to what was happening as the one I just had. Like the time that you dropped a knife into the kitchen sink and it reminded me of a ghost story that I'd heard once, when I must have been a teenager. Sometimes it's with songs, too. I'll remember an entire song, a little slice of an afternoon in the middle of the wintertime, or the way a story kept me from sleeping one night, all because of the seemingly unimportant and coincidental like the sound of a knife falling against the metal basin of a kitchen sink," she paused for a moment.
"There are people out there that will tell you that memories are all just random chemical coding stored in the nerves inside of your brain and that false memories can be fabricated just as easily as real ones, as long as you know what you're doing. I've asked them," she said.
"Scary thought," I responded, considering that the people she'd asked might be the kind of people that would do something like that, given the right equipment and a willing subject. Once upon a time, I chose to believe that there was something out there, something beyond what was easily explainable. Today, that something meant that a strange girl had become a part of my life and her story was a little beyond what was rational, what was logical, what seemed to be truth… and I caught myself overanalyzing it all, something I tended to do that had broken apart trust in the relationships that came before her, something I had learned to do as an unwilling defensive mechanism as a result of, most recently, the divorce. I trusted her, for whatever reason, and in doing so, I accepted her mysteries as and strange, hidden past as part of the deal.
"I've asked a man to try to help me recall things, you know," she said, standing up, stepping away from the swing. I stayed put, no longer preoccupied with twisting the creaking chains.
"Did it work?" I asked, assuming that they'd followed through.
"He wouldn't do it. He said he might be able to if we were to sign all sorts of releases and contract out with a private lab somewhere outside of the local jurisdiction, because there's some kind of investigation starting up about certain types of procedures his company has been trying out. He said it's not really in the news yet, but that it's about to be. Anyway, he feels that even if we were to make the effort, there's too large a margin of error and that it could potentially do more harm than good, permanently erasing parts of more than just my memory, crossing over into my personality and identity itself."
"A risk you shouldn't take," I finished for her.
"A risk that he's not willing to take, at least not yet. We've only been talking for a few weeks; he's been giving me more time to recover the memories on my own."
"Well, I for one am glad that you're taking more time to remember things instead of going with such an invasive approach. I really enjoy it when you're around and would hate it if you wiped your mind clean and forgot all about me, too!" I said, watching her as she walked around, circling a park bench.
She smiled and kept orbiting.
"What's his name, anyway?" I asked, out of curiosity.
"Partain. Dr. Evan Partain," she said.
Chapter 08
"There's a trucker's rest stop off the highway about 20 kilometers from here, but I think that it closes at dark. Maybe we can get a ride from a freight driver there or from someone who's parked their car there for the night."
We couldn't take her car because she'd let her boyfriend borrow it for the week to go see his parents, who lived a few states away.
"Janine," I said. "Can't we just buy a map?"
She opened her eyes and sourly glared at me.
"I've been following you around all day. In addition, don't get me wrong – I don't mind! But I'm trying to remember how to get to this specific truck stop, because there's a very specific diner next door, and last time I checked, it wasn't listed on any map."
"Why does one truck stop or diner matter over any other when we'll probably pass five others on the way?" I asked, not following her logic.
"Just trust me on this one. I've hitched rides out of this particular one before, and I know that it's much safer there, where the people can be trusted," she responded as if she were stating the obvious. "And they've got great grilled cheese sandwiches," she added.
"Even though we're going in the opposite direction than we need to be?"
"The trail isn't going to get much colder than it already has, so just relax. We'll find her."
I didn't believe that at all, not for a moment, but Janine was too helpful to me to let her walk away because I couldn't restrain myself from mouthing off to her about how idiotic this detour was. So I stopped arguing and let her think about where it was that we were to next.
"The facility that Partain worked out of was north of here, on the outside of the city perimeter, but we'll only be able to reach it from certain access roads since the main roads leading to it have all been closed off. If I can talk to the right people, they'll be able to tell me everything that we need to know about every route, even if none of it's on the map. People off the grid know about places that are off the grid," she informed me. "After that, we can take a cab, even, hitch a ride, buy a tank, whatever."
I hoped that we wouldn't need a tank.
We made it to the rest stop a few hours later, where we found that the diner next door was still open and was relatively empty.
"Aren't you hungry?" Janine asked, heading straight for the door. "I'm starving!"
I followed her into the diner, where we sat down at a booth against the wall, in the corner, away from any foot traffic that could possibly have arrived at such a late hour. She ordered some pancakes, a grilled cheese, and two slices of apple pie, and I ordered a cup of coffee. The waitress seemed disinterested in us, bored even, and that was encouraging. At least we didn't appear to be lunatics on a delusional quest, which was how I was starting to feel.
The food came quickly, and since I'd already finished the first cup, I ordered another.
"Long night ahead of you?" The waitress asked through a mouth full of chewing gum, filling my cup up.
"I expect that it will be," I answered.
Once she'd left the table, I brought the abduction up again.
"Why would someone abduct her?" I wondered out loud.
"Maybe someone needs her for something, for some sort of plan."
"Well, they obviously know more than she does, if that's the case. If they know who she is and think that her memories can be recovered, does that mean they're going to do more tests on her? Does it mean they're going to conduct more experimental treatments that might hurt her? We need to find them and put a stop to it before they can do any more damage to her than they've already done."
"Maybe she doesn't want us to f
ind her."
"If someone knows how to unlock her memories," I said, a chill passing through me as I thought of the possibly terrible methods that the hypothetical doctors we were discussing might have had at their easy disposal for extracting information from subjects with memory problems. "Then they can make her forget all about us."
When I said us, I really meant me.
The waitress dropped off the food, along with a fresh cup of coffee for both of us. She raised an eyebrow when she realized that Janine planned on eating everything that we'd ordered.
"Here you go," she said, wiping her hands on her apron.
"Thanks," I answered, and she walked back into the kitchen.
Janine took a sip of water and looked right at me.
"Are you really willing to go wherever you have to so that you can do something about this?" She asked in a serious tone that was unusual for her.
"Of course I am."
"There's no question, then, no doubt in my mind that I am willing to do the same thing for both of you. You guys are about the only family that I've got."
"Thanks. This is all too big for me to really understand," I said, putting my face into my hands. Normally, I wasn't spending the day dealing with things like kidnapping, brainwashing, and corporate espionage. I didn't even know where to begin figuring out the scattered trail of clues filling up the space all around me, or whose information was legitimate, or where I could find my heart. The most in depth decision that I'd made in weeks had centered on which digital merchant I wanted to shop my music out to, what royalty rates they'd be able to provide to me, and how long it would take to propagate through their retail outlets. All of those types of decisions were already a world away from me and growing more distant every minute.
"All things that really matter are," Janine said, reaching for my cigarettes.
"You really shouldn't smoke," I said, allowing the subject of the conversation to shift. Changing the subject was another bad habit of mine, I suppose; I tended to do it whenever I felt uncomfortable or felt I was getting too deeply involved in things that showed emotional weakness or vulnerability on my part.