Common Experiment #76166
KelsoHe stared down at the grave, watching his bulky shadow disappear into the 6 foot deep hole. The black mutt, some kind of labrador maybe, was laying at his heel, making it uncomfortably warm. In a moment, he would need to move on, but for now, he stared and thought his sluggish early morning thoughts. There was no real need for him to work like this; he had never had much use for money in the old days of working his family farm, and he had even less now, but that was not so for the kid. A few more hours spent in the backbreaking heat, moving the earth and making more 6' deep holes, would ensure the kid had something to eat tonight. Probably, whatever con he was doing today would go off without a hitch, but the gravedigger liked to be sure. His devotion to the black-haired kid's wellbeing was the only thing keeping him from falling to pieces (Maybe literally, he thought with a whuff of laughter) these days. His unnatural body and its scars would ache later (and his bad hand ached now), but that didn't move him.
A movement caught in the corner of his eye, and when he looked that way, he saw a young woman with lovely black hair, dressed in a demure blue dress. She was walking down the dirt road that led to their quaint coastal town, a basket of something on her hip. His heart broke to look at her, and he was grateful for the mask that hid his sudden tears in addition to his ruined face. Was that what she would have grown up to look like, if he had protected her, done his job? All his days were spent missing her, all his insomniac nights spent repenting her death with a monster for company. Two murderers, one by selfishness and one by neglect.
He deserved the aches from a body designed and rejected by men like sadistic children in labcoats. He would happily tear off the strange suit they designed and his own skin with it a million times again just to feel her soft hair and her dirt-smudged face under his huge fingers one more time. To just have cradled her while she died.
Some days, those years under the sea seemed like a dark dream, but never her. She was always more vivid, more alive than reality was for him now. The girl walked off down the road and he watched. He looked up at the sky once, briefly. Saw it was especially clear and blue. His eyes stung. Vaguely, he wished he were dead. Then he looked back down at his work, sniffed. He walked on and the dog got up to follow.
...
On my walk today I had my first encounter with a pair of them... he, a lumbering palooka in a foul smelling diving suit, and she, an unwashed moppet in a filthy pink smock. Her pallor was off, green and morbid, and there was a rather unpleasant aspect to her demeanor, as if she were in an altogether different place than the rest of us. ...I understand the need for such creatures, I just wish they could make them more presentable.
...
He dreamed of the ocean. He saw the moonless night reflecting oily waves, shifting and sliding over each other, slow and timeless and dreamy. It had been many years since he had first been lured beneath those black, those bleak endless depths, many years since he had called that place home.
In his dream, his sister came to him with her dirty dress sliding over scuffed knees. She was shepherded by aging men. Some of them wore white coats. A few of them wore business suits worth more money than he'd seen in his whole life. In his dream, he knew this and discarded it in the same instant -- he would not get angry here. Not with her around.
He also knew that he was cocooned in sheets of metal once again, felt his skin and muscles and blood pulse against it in an ugly rhythm as inescapable and familiar as his heartbeat. And he could feel that, too, resounding against the fetters that encased him, a throbbing tattoo beat out on dirty metallic skin. Though he was smiling (or at least trying to, as the fine muscles of his face no longer felt like his own -- but who could see if he was doing it right anyway?) and sloping his back, trying to look smaller, he could see he repulsed the suits in front of him. They repulsed him too, but it was as hard to really feel that as it was to know what his face looked like. It didn't matter -- the things he felt were blanketed with a hazy, happy feeling at seeing his sister. His senses of self-preservation and self-awareness had been tucked in lovingly by chemical cocktails. He did not understand things like neurons carrying electrons or myosin sliding against itself or synapses firing. The many things he did not know failed to bother him here. Here, nothing hurt. This was unlike real life, both now and in the past, when he had really stood in this room.
The bitter reflection of real life that drifted down to him through countless tons of water made him recoil like a prodded animal, discarded in visceral rejection as a thought not his own. This was meant to be a sweet dream. It was a good memory. She outstretched her arms to him and his heart ached to see pinpricks of red, quickly healing little things. He thought of the time he fooled with a wasp hive when he was seven years old, wanted to smile at the good feelings the memory caused. Then he thought of the people outside the facility. But she was different than them -- she called the people, twisted beasts with revolting faces and sagging, ruined bodies, 'angels'... not knowing that that title belonged to her. She was perfection, the demure, storybook princess. A hazy past memory brought sluggish happiness. She brought a deluge of euphoria.
He wanted to run to her on an unfathomable level. It was wound so tightly into his psyche that he could not tell if it was the doctors or himself who desired that particular response. That was okay. As the days wore on, his individual desires and thoughts, which had never been so clever or worthwhile anyway, were sometimes fading, sometimes melding into the doctors' desires and thoughts. They were just particles of sand washed out with the tide until they could join the ocean. No great loss. He could no longer remember if he had fought them at all, or if he had been clumsily gracious to receive a blessing so perfect as the scabby-kneed, greasy-haired, dirty-faced little cherubim that stood uncertainly before him, all gangly outstretched arms and bare feet and cracked-lipped smiles, wanting to be held. Mussed black hair like his own in a disheveled pony's tail and eyes like the sea on an overcast day. God, but he had never loved anything half as much.
His chest felt heavy, like he needed to sigh. Could he ever have been scared of this, have fought and thrashed like a young buck in spring? This small ceilingless room -- more like a cage in a zoo, where scientists treaded lazily to examine them from far above, unknowable as the face of God -- this room with the grimy floors and tiny beds and air heavy with fear, this had always been home. Hers and his.
Looking down at her, there was a desire that clicked into his head with automatic ease -- dash the interlopers' skulls against the ground, crush their windpipes with his hands (hand, he reminded himself), rip their innards to shreds with his repurposed hand, leave gaping bullet holes in their unprotected guts until they were as formless and sickening as the corpses that littered the streets. It was as automatic as wanting to smile at his sister. He took a step towards her and saw the fear flash in her little yellow-sclera eyes. The scientists stayed fearlessly put, explaining that such reactions would soon be erased; soon, they would work together like a well-oiled machine. He heard them cursorily, but he was focused on her. He knew that he was very big. Chastened, he stepped back and was reminded of being a small boy, above the sea and on his parent's farm, trying to lure stray cats to himself with patience and promised love. He felt a carefully measured dose of happiness flood his nervous system at the memory, so vague it might not even have been his, really. A few years later, they had to leave their farm and the hurt of it killed his mother and the hurt of that had killed his father not long after.
Why were his thoughts suddenly so grim? He had not thought of those days in a very long time. Some days it was hard to remember his parents' faces. Some days it was hard to believe he had ever had parents. He was pretty sure he had been born here, birthed by an antiseptic-smelling metal womb. Wasn't he? The memories were just there to give him some feeling of happiness when he was alone, to keep him from drilling into his own brain. They were as artificial as his feelings. Right? Underneath the layers of metal, his heart pulsed faster. It had never happened like this. Were the walls always this dirty? Had his little sister ever looked so scared?
Thump. Panic was swelling in him, rising like a great tide.
Thu-thump. He was moving now, quicker than his drug-addled brain could really follow. When he was younger, he had once drank so much that his vision went black and he would see in flashes, braying halted laughter to his friends. One moment he was looking into confused faces, and next he was staring at a dirty floor. The world was like that now, rocking aboard a storm-locked ship, while he clung to it, muddled and confused, staring out from his porthole.
...
Thump. The revving on his other hand jarred hard, bucking against sturdily-weaved muscle, stopped by viscera and bone, then spinning up again with renewed vigor. The world was curiously silent. Pieces of labcoat fluttered wildly, red and white birds plummeting from the sky and crashing into reeds. He stared stupidly at them while a cool feeling of pleasure worked its way down his heavily-augmented spine. He was thinking about the first time he had gone hunting while his body did its dirty work. Dreams within dreams within dreams. Feelings layered one on top of the other that poured into his subconscious. Which ones were his?
...
Thud. Sensations rushed in through the cracks in his thoughts. Small, sharp pains, bullet holes, cat claws. Screaming and crying, one parent shaking him awake from a nightmare. A wailing little sister. He was terrified and so was she, blood was running like the first deer he shot and gutted and he wanted only to get to her because the hole they lived in was not for a princess and he knew how it was to be small and to need your family again and he knew how scared she they he were so so scared
....
Plink. Plink. Plink. Leaky roof. Leaky pipe? He sat up slowly, big clammy hands gripping a thin blanket damp with sweat. He felt shaky and ill, but calm. All his emotions had been used up in his latest bout with his vivid dreams. He felt, as he did most days, like the shell of a man who had long since departed. Was he crying? His face felt naked without the mask. It was cold. His lower back ached in conversational pulses, answered by the throb of his bad hand. Good night, good night, good night, they said. He laid on cold, dampish stone and closed his eyes while the time spun out.
...
After he was sure sleep would not come, he thought he should get up and survey the warehouse. Sitting up, he observed the meager smattering of stars through the window. What had he been dreaming of? His nervous system tingled residually. His friend the kid had told him once that even if you lost your hand, you still felt it. Sometimes, it was like it was still there. You couldn't tell whether it was or wasn't until you looked. What did he call it? He wondered to himself, looking at his home blearily. It was all as he had left it, dirty and drafty and oddly homey. Something like ghost...? There were the crates he had stacked as a modicum of privacy. His mask lay discarded on his dusty plaid workshirt, sitting beside mudcaked boots too big for damn near any other man. He grinned listlessly at the thought of the kid wearing his shirt. It would be like a tent. Near there, his overturned wooden milk crate with a book on it. A little heartened, he recalled how his sis- The kid, he reminded himself sharply, the kid had lent it to him, but only if he didn't bend the spine any and only if he held it with clean hands. The kid had shown him the proper way to treat this book and had even gotten him to remove his filthy old work gloves before having him repeat the action, a feat unto itself. He did anything the kid told him to, though. This brought an easy sense of relief, of happiness at following orders, doing what he was made for. Black hair in a ratty tail and eyes so unlike his own dark browns. A memory, a reverie all by itself.
A languorous sigh escaped his chest, still heavy with unremembered dreams. Whatever it had been, it had left him with a small feeling of unease. Still, there was happiness in that dream, too. Had he been remembering better times? His mind sluggishly pondered what "better times" might have looked like, might have felt like; he grasped lazily at tendrils of his past that lurked in the cobweb corners of his head. Content in his memories, he started to rise, to check in on the kid before trying for sleep again. He hoped he might have another dream, or nightmare, or whatever it had been. That feeling of happiness he had grown so dependent on in another lifetime was not with him, never would be again, even though sometimes he imagined it was, pulling him in mysterious ways. A sedated contentedness was as close as he ever typically got, brought on by doing as he was told or getting in a fistfight or recollecting some old scrap of a memory. He got by okay without that old happiness most days, though, he thought proudly to himself as he gained his feet. He started to walk around his crates at the exact moment that a ragged pinstriped business suit with a withered monster inside it stepped around the corner.
His heart skipped a beat. Still dreaming. Am I still dreaming? His mind went blank with animal fear.
Plink went the monster's cane on stone floor.
Phantom pain was what he'd called it.
...
I hear her voice everywhere...
Even in dreams, she is there
I'll search forever, 'til the day I die
And somewhere
Someday
...
