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Ten

“Abigail?” The sunroom was fairly warm and inviting, after the strange coldness of the dining room during dinner the next night. The coldness down there was no more temperature than the warmness in the sunroom was. She was curled up on a couch with her head thrown back to catch some of the sun on her face. At the sound of her name her head lowered and her eyes opened to search the room and find me, fixing on me quickly.

“Call me Abby.” She smiled at me and patted the couch next to her. I blinked, but refused the urge to frown, allowing my smile to return one to her and giving her a small hello wave. “Are you feeling better? I’m feeling better.” She stretched like a kitten, suddenly all limbs and angles. I walked to her and sat down near her, folding my hands in my lap. I wondered about the change in her, change that felt too fast.

“I’m … so the doctors are helping you? Did they give you any good medications yet? I always talk to Doctor West about my medications…” She frowned at that and turned, slugging my shoulder gently.

“I’m not on anything yet, John. Can’t a girl just be happy?” I supposed yes, but somehow I wanted to answer no. She muttered something about her step-sisters and leaned against me like I was a comfortable piece of furniture. How I loved her. Even as everything… the thought stopped me cold, making me go stiff. She felt the change too and pulled away from me. I turned and looked at her face, taking it all in. It was like the world got worse but somehow even as it did she liked me more. There was a word for that. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it existed. “Are you ok?” she asked, carefully trying to lean against me again.

“Hmmm? Huh, yeah. Yeah I’m, thanks, yeah I’m fine, Abby.” The name tasted strange in my mouth, but not a bad sort of strange, the sort of strange of a new flavor of gum that could become your favorite flavor and easily beat out strawberry with some time.

“Good, I was thinking, John, that we should do something tonight.”

“Like what? Ping pong? I like ping pong.” I shrugged and turned to her as she kissed me. So many thoughts swam around my head then at incredible speed, but all of them were chased by or chasing the singular thought that she kissed me. I gave in to it and enjoyed it, not wanting it to end by the time it did.

“Not,” she said softly, “ping pong.” I nodded dumbly but happily and wasn’t really sure what she did mean. Maybe she liked a good game of foosball. “So, John Dillon, what do you think?” I didn’t remember telling her my last name, but it wasn’t hard to find out really. I shrugged and nodded at her again, looking into her eyes.

“Well Abby… I don’t know your last name… I think that would be fun.”

“Lincoln,” My jaw fell open an inch. Now I was hearing things. “My parents thought it was funny, ok? Abby Lincoln, like the president but less male.” I stood up quickly. Everything made a sudden sick sense.

“You won’t, you know.”

“I won’t what?”

“I know!” I knew. She was trying to lure me into calmness to kill me. Abe Lincoln, Abby. It fit. It did. I headed for the door at speed.

“John, you knew what?” she asked, getting off the couch and coming after me. Oh lord she was coming after me. I hit the door with the palm of my hand and ran down the stairs. I could hear her feet slapping the floor behind me. “John! Wait!” I wouldn’t wait. I knew, and everything made sense suddenly.

“No, I know ok? Stop trying to… just… stop!” I didn’t want her to be my destruction made flesh. Such sweet wonderful flesh. She had kissed me; I could still taste her on my lips. I turned back from the door out of the stairway and caught a glimpse of her face, screwed up with passion and anger and resentment and fear. A huge melting pot of emotional breakfast cereal that condemned me and begged me to stop at the same time. I shook my head at her and walked out of the stairwell.

“Damn you, fine. Bastard,” she shouted at me as I left. I felt a tightness in my chest. I loved her, I did, even once I knew she was going to eventually kill me, but I couldn’t let her kill me even if it broke my heart. It felt like she already had killed me.

The new guard, who seemed to not be new, stopped me outside the stairs with a cold smile.

“John,” he used my name instead of trying to be bossy like Clyde, “Doctor Vandrell sent me to collect you. Follow me?” I closed my eyes for a second while I nodded and fell into step behind him. Suddenly Doctor Vandrell felt I couldn’t be trusted to get somewhere on my own and I didn’t care anymore.

“What’s your name,” I asked him as we walked. I didn’t really care but I wanted to know at the same time.

“Warren.” And that was that apparently. Warren ignored me and kept walking me down to the examination room. The table had been removed and in its place was a large metal chair. The thing had a lot of padding and didn’t look uncomfortable but it loomed there. The table had fit the room; the chair fit some other room that thankfully wasn’t the one I was in. Except I was still expected to sit in the chair. I sat in the chair.

“Thank you, Warren,” Doctor Vandrell said as he slid metal cuffs over my wrists and ankles to secure me. “Now, John, I need you to just relax.” He slid the black rubber mouthpiece into my mouth and smiled at me, but it wasn’t the smile I was used to. Unfriendly and fake, his smile loomed in front of my eyes while he flicked his fingers against a needle and reached down to inject it into my arm.

*****

Somehow fragments stayed with me. Another flash of light, dazzling in intensity but not sunlight. Light from inside me. Interior lighting, self-lighting, that chased away shadows haunting my brain and replaced them with things all its own. A snapping sound, a displacement and I knew, as certainly as I knew that I was still breathing, that something chased me. Lincoln. Not Lincoln, time. Time was chasing me, I was out of time, I was full of time. The clocks knew my name and had my address and they didn’t want to give me a check, they wanted me to check out.

Tick. Tock. Tick-tock. Tock-tick. And the alarms went off.

Bells and gongs and a troupe of truth marched by, leaving me alone with my nothingness. Everything I remembered moved away from me as I tried to hold on to it. I knew I could. I realized I couldn’t.

*****

I came back to my senses in my room. I was sick of coming to my senses; no, I was sick of losing them and having to find them all over again. Each time felt longer and harder, a struggle back. I was in my bed and I laid there, eyes closed, slowly letting feeling come back to me. My toes all wiggled, my ears followed suit and my muscles all ached in the right places as I stretched. Whatever else the ECT did, it beat me up. Then again I also found that I felt broader, not physically but mentally. I was sharper, like the brightness on a television turned up after years of being dim, the greys resolving into images you knew were there but could never quite make out.

As I stretched I realized I was also naked under the sheets. That was new and I had to wonder why they had undressed me, or why I had gone to bed nude. I never slept that way, my pajamas made me happy so there was no reason to. Every time I went through this I came back and things were different. Different in so many ways that I couldn’t even second guess myself and now the blackouts that followed were getting longer and the things I did while my short term memory wouldn’t save seemed to get odder.

I started to get out of bed and heard a noise next to me. Freezing, I thought about it and realized that while I stretched I had felt skin against my own, skin that wasn’t attached to me at all. My confusion level ran up the flagpole right off the scale as I debated turning my head and seeing what I had done.

“Mmm, John?” I didn’t have to turn. I knew that voice, even if I hadn’t heard it filled with sleep before. She was in bed with me. I was naked. I felt her skin against… she was probably naked. She was plotting to kill me! I jumped out of bed, realized I was, as I thought, really naked, and grabbed a piece of clothing off the floor to cover myself. Glancing down at myself, even as she raised her head and propped it up on a hand, I realized I had grabbed her bra and was holding it in front of my crotch. I dropped it and reached down again to grab my own underwear and slip it on.

“Uhhh, Abby,” the name was hard to say, a struggle to get out when all I wanted to do was run, “hi?”

“Hi baby,” she smiled at me, “what’s wrong?” I started to say something, anything, an excuse to leave when she shifted and the sheet slid to reveal her right breast. “John, what are you doing?” I tore my eyes away from her breast and tried to not think about what the two of us in bed, together and naked, implied.

“I should… I should go. I mean, you know, I, we, well, you’re going to kill me.” I nodded and gave her a small shrug.

“Ok, first of all? You aren’t going to leave your room because of me. Second of all we talked about the whole ‘me killing you’ thing and it’s settled. Wasn’t it settled? I could’ve sworn,” Abby sat up and crossed her legs in my bed, the sheets pooling in her lap, “it was all settled before we fucked. You didn’t lie to me just to get me in bed did you?” I sighed, loudly, and pulled my chair out from the desk, sitting in it and facing her.

“No it’s settled, I mean if we settled it we settled it, but the procedure…”

“That thing they take you for?”

“Yeah, it messes with my short term memory. It… it does things like that. So I’m not going back on anything I said or anything we did, ok, I just don’t remember it.” Her head shook, her hair shifting with the motion like hay in the wind.

“You don’t remember talking to me about all of this already?” I shook my head sadly, I wished I did remember it—I really did. “You don’t remember… us… fucking? I mean it wasn’t exactly porn star sex, but forgettable?”

“Abby, I didn’t forget it because it was bad or forgettable; I forgot it because I was under the influence of electroconvulsive treatments. I really don’t think it’s fair to blame me for memory lapses, considering.” She gave a little laugh and patted the bed.

“We can go over it all again then. Are you sure you’ll remember it this time?” I left the chair and moved to sit on the edge of the bed both happily and hesitatingly.

“No,” I said softly, “I can’t promise that. I think I will, but I’m sure that I thought I would before too. I wish I did know for sure, but I don’t.” I looked at her hopefully, trying to hide the underlying fear I had of her, and of what I was sure was her destiny. She shook her head again and put a hand on my knee gently enough that I was able to squelch the flinch I felt building inside of me.

“Ok, John, ok. My parents named me Abigail as a joke, a sick little joke. That’s all it was. Abraham Lincoln isn’t out to kill you and neither am I. I know it’s hard to swallow, but you told me that you loved me more than you thought Abe wanted to kill you, and that you trusted in that.” I wasn’t sure if I had said that. How could I be sure? It felt like something I would say, though, and as she said the words I could feel almost an echo of them in my head. The memories tried to swim back from unknown shores.

“Just for the sake, ok the sake of, you know, argument, ok? You could be making this up. It’s not that I think you are, but you need to see the problem here.” I frowned and considered everything.

“I see that, John, I really do see it. I just don’t know what else to do, what else I can do.” I nodded at her and patted her hand. A small happy smile crept out onto my face by itself and shone towards her. She returned it, adding a sly grin. I liked that grin, the way it played with the corners of her mouth. A mouth I could still taste, and that I was slowly getting hints of memories about.

“So, if I do trust you and you turn out to really be Abe Lincoln out to kill me, then what?”

“I… John,” her laughter was loud but warm, not directed at me but only my words, that much was thankfully obvious, “I don’t even know how to begin to respond to that, dumbass. I guess if this is all a ploy to catch you unaware and kill you, then you’ll die. But you said you loved me, and that has to count too, right?”

“I do love you,” I insisted, “and I guess so. Everything is just so confusing recently and I don’t know why. It’s on the tip of my tongue maybe, but I can’t quite find it.” Something occurred to me then that made me squeeze her hand tightly, “Did you say it back, I mean do you…”

“Love you? I like you a lot, John. I do. Ever since I came into this place and you waved at me in the lobby. When I told you I liked you then, I meant it.” That certainly didn’t match my memory, but a lot of things, more and more, weren’t. “But love? John, I don’t think so, and don’t take it personally.” She exhaled loud and long through the corner of her mouth, “This was hard enough to say the first time. I like you a lot, obviously, ok? I don’t just sleep with people I hate. You can blame it on a bias after you saved me from that Clyde guy when we were in the rec room, but that really only reinforced what I was already feeling.” I saved her from Clyde? If I added up everything that didn’t match my memory of events I would shut down completely and just start drooling on the floor.

“Ok,” I told her softly leaning over to hug her, to take that first move myself; even if it wasn’t a first move to her anymore, it was to me, “ok, thanks for going over it all again. I didn’t mean to sound… crazy, I guess.” She leaned into the hug and buried her face in my neck.

“We’re all supposed to be crazy in here John. Crazy little things, moving like unexpected clockwork until they beat us up, drug us out or lock us deeper away, right,” she asked, muttering the words into my flesh. I held her and we lay back down, curling tightly around each other and falling back to sleep slowly.

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Crazy Little Thing is copyright Adam P. Knave.