The Third Memory

The guard left and I heard the door close. I didn’t hear his footsteps move away… this place had some impressive soundproofing. All I could hear was my own breathing.

For the first hour, I tried to keep myself awake. It was hard… I didn’t remember anything. I reviewed what little I knew of the Underground, the barracks, the Pit… then I quickly tried to forget the Pit. That one glorious night with a beautiful girl in my arms… it had been a sham.

I tried to exercise. I was shackled to the wall so my movement was limited, but I could still move a little. I tried some isotonics, tried jumping in place, but I made little progress and the shackles chafed my wrists.

After a while, I got too tired and gave up. I pressed my feet to the floor and leaned back against the wall, using my own bone structure to keep my body upright instead of hanging from the chains. I was already shivering despite the exercise and I felt my head starting to cloud up. Hypothermia was setting in… I doubted I would last the entire twenty-four hours.

General Case had ordered that I be monitored but Lieutenant Beta had run off so fast, she hadn’t relayed that order. I wasn’t going to make it.

Leaning my head back, I closed my eyes and decided to try to make sense of the weird dreams I’d had. Something that seemed to come from my childhood… I had the feeling that if I could just remember where I was… and what had happened… I could get my memory back. I needed to… the story about me bumping my head was a crock. That was obvious. I was a newbie, which meant I’d been somewhere else, doing something else, before I’d ended up here.

Crispin… and the Chair… those words meant something, but I wasn’t sure what.

I started to drift. It was hard to stay awake down here. I wasn’t sure if I should, or if I needed to sleep to conserve energy. Frankly, I doubted it would matter. If I didn’t die in the Box, the captain would find some other way to end me. If I made it out of the Box alive… I had to escape… or I was a dead man…

*     *     *

I was in a dark, quiet room with machines all around me. I had tubes all over my small body, inside of me, one stuck down my throat… it choked me so I started to cough and gag, but my arms were strapped down so I couldn’t pull it out.

I heard a loud beeping… the door opened and people came inside, hands on me again as the tube was quickly removed. I still felt dizzy and sick… and terribly weak. Not to mention scared out of my head. Where the hell was I?

These people were strangers. Not the people Grandfather worked with. I couldn’t see him in the group… was he strapped to a strange bed like me? Weak and tired, with tubes pushing air and liquids into him… and back out of him. This was my first experience with a catheter, and it wasn’t comfortable. Even worse, I could swear I wore some kind of diaper or something around my backside. It was humiliating.

The strangers tried to explain but I was too foggy to focus and too terrified to try. Eventually, the man in the middle, the one everyone called “Doctor Hansen”, told me that I should just sleep and they’d try again later. The one thing they got through to me was that Grandfather was alive.

Nothing else.

I slipped in and out of consciousness for what I was later told was several days. My level of coherency varied widely; I was never awake long enough for them to actually explain anything. I wasn’t sure if I kept sleeping because I couldn’t wake up, or if I was too scared to face the waking world.

Finally, one day, I woke up completely and was able to stay that way. My head still hurt but the fog was gone. I felt a tube wrapped under my nose with air coming out of it and into my nostrils, but most of the other tubes were gone.

I looked around… sitting in a chair in one corner was a girl, only a few years older than me. When she saw that I was awake, she hurried out the door, returning with the crowd of people. The doctor was the same, I wasn’t sure about the others.

“Toby, can you hear me?” he asked gently.

“Yeah,” I rasped. “Where am I?”

“You’re still at Central Control, but you’re in the medical wing. Do you remember what happened?”

I thought about it… and nodded, a few tears coming to my eyes. “I’m sorry… I shouldn’t… have…” I trailed off, too weak to continue.

He seemed to understand and he held my hand. “You’re right, you shouldn’t have, but you’ve already paid dearly for your mistake. They’ve all agreed that you don’t need any further punishment. No little boy should have to go through the hell you’ve been put through just for simple curiosity.”

A question floated to the front of my mind. “Grandfather? Is he okay?”

“He suffered the same thing you did… an interaction of chemicals in the mind-scanner bay. That wasn’t supposed to happen… it was an accident. We nearly lost both of you, but you were definitely worse off, being so small. He’s mostly recovered, mentally, but he’s still too weak to walk. I’ll have him brought here to see you, he’s been worried sick.”

“How long?”

The doctor looked nervous, glancing at the others, who just shrugged. “You don’t need to worry about that, you just-”

“How long?!” I demanded, squeezing his hand as hard as I could.

He sighed. “You’ve been in here for almost three months.”

Three months. I’d somehow lost three months of my life? That scared me more than anything. “I want to go home!” I cried. “I want my mom!”

“I know, Toby, I know you’re scared,” he said, using that voice grownups use when they know something is very wrong but don’t want a kid to panic. “But you can’t leave yet. You’re still very sick. You need to stay and let us help you get better. It will take some time, but you’ll be all right.”

I wanted to be reassured… but I was scared to death. I continued to cry and a bunch of alarms went off. I felt like I couldn’t breathe again… the doctor grabbed a mask off of the wall, removed my nose tube, and strapped the mask to my face. A rush of air hit my nose.

“Make a note… we’ll keep him on the bi-pap for an hour until he stabilizes, then supplemental again,” the doctor told the others. “Keep an eye on him, that left lung wants to collapse again…” I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said.

“Understood,” said one woman as he left. She turned and spoke to the girl, who was curled in her chair again, watching me. “Keep an eye on him, Mirele. We have work to do, but we’ll be back, okay?”

The girl nodded. “Okay.”

When the room went quiet again, I stared up at the ceiling. Did my family even know what had happened? Why wasn’t my mom here? Or Dad, even? Why was I with all these strangers?”

Punishment… this was my punishment for going where I wasn’t supposed to. But the doctor was right, this seemed harsh. I was so scared… from the way he was talking, it sounded like my body still wanted to die. Part of me wished it already had.

I felt the tears come again but I was strapped down. I couldn’t wipe them away. I heard steps… the girl appeared at my side with a tissue, wiping my face. “Hey, it’ll be okay,” she said softly. “My dad is the best doctor in the whole world. He’ll make you well again, I promise.”

I wanted to believe her. She had such a nice voice… and her eyes were a pretty green, just like my mom’s. I was still scared. She sat with me and kept talking, kept encouraging me. Eventually, I fell asleep with her at my side.