Lost in the System Read online

  My dad wanders in, swigging from a bottle. “You’ll destroy her, just like you did your mother. She was a looker before you. A body that was divine. Then you came along. You bloated her up and stretched her out. Looking at her made me want to gag. You did that. Chased me away. What man is going to want a woman with a snot-nosed brat in tow? Huge turn-off. Before you, she could have made decent money in the clubs, but not after you ruined her.”

  “No, she loved me,” I say.

  “Pbfht.”

  “She did. I was her favorite boy.”

  “Sure, Smullian. She loved having to lie and cheat just to keep you fed. She loved hustling drunks just to keep a roof over your head. You were a burden and a drain, plain and simple. In fact, she died just to be free of you.”

  “Don’t say that!” I scream. The pain knocks me out of the illusion. I pant raggedly, trying to hold on until the pain ebbs again. “She loved me,” I whimper. No one answers. The specters are gone for the moment.

  The faint hope of light faded long ago, and the darkness is creeping me out. I don’t know if that was a dream or if Davey’s fevered brain produced me one doozy of a hallucination. Either way, it’s time to light that candle. Giggles shudder through my midsection.

  “Houston, I think we have a problem. Neil Armstrong appears to have a bum leg. We may have to scrap the mission.” The giggles threaten to mature into full-on guffaws. I fight to keep them at bay with short breaths. The last thing I want is to expand his rib cage. Hot, stale air hangs in the room. It’s Florida, after all, where sunset does not promise lower temperatures. As I fumble along the ground feeling for the lighter, even the concrete is warm.

  My fingers land on it and, miracle of miracles, it sparks to life with one strike. The candle takes a little longer with its stubby wick, but soon I have the comfort of a weak, yellow, inconsistent flame. In the glow, I notice Madds’ prediction of a smiley-faced lighter for the irony was correct. I wonder if she’ll ever click again with someone like she does with him.

  “Ugh, Smullian. You make me miss vomiting. This teenage brain soaked in dehydration and infection is making you more melodramatic than a South Korean soap opera,” I chide myself. “Seriously, dude. You’re five crackers shy of a loaf.”

  To focus my increasingly confused mind, I pick up the sketchpad again and hold it up to the dim light. As before, I find no clues to where we are. Makes sense. Davey figures whoever finds the pad knows the where; they’d be more interested in the who, why, and how. As I flip the pages, I notice a letter I hadn’t seen earlier in the day.

  Dear Lydia,

  It’s funny to me how many times we drove by these buildings and made up stories about the fairy creatures that lived here and their wars with the mole people. I hoped something magical would happen here and, instead, I got ripped off and trapped in this empty, sad place.

  I knew what you’d have said about the seance. That’s why I didn’t tell you about it. But she knew things, Lydia. She knew. I know what the Bible says about it, but I listened to her anyway. I wanted to believe. Remember that verse in Proverbs that says to stay away from the strange woman. Yeah. No excuses from me. I knew better in lots of ways, but I wanted it to be true so badly. To talk to Mom and Dad and Jesse one more time, to apologize for being such a butt that day. To tell them I loved them. It seemed worth it. Clearly, I was wrong.

  Remember how you say that God doesn’t make bad things happen to us. It’s the result of my poor choices or someone else’s poor choices. Well, I guess me being here is a bit of both. I’m going to go with mostly hers though. Haha. She is the one who pushed me. She’s the one who saw me down here and didn’t send help. You know I spent the first several hours lying here thinking help would be there any moment. That she’d called, and they were on the way. When night fell and the darkness settled in, I realized no one was coming. I’m not sure anyone ever will. I keep hoping, though.

  I’ve spent a lot of time here praying. And I want to ask you to forgive me. I haven’t made things easy for you. I’ve been caught up in my stuff and haven’t thought about how it must be for you. I’ve been a jerk. Worse. I was a thief. Most of that money was yours, and I just took it. Thought I deserved it. If I’d really believed Bronwen was on the level, I’d have brought you too. Didn’t both of us have the right to talk to them? I think way down deep I knew it wasn’t true, but I didn’t want to listen to that voice.

  I guess if I want you to forgive me, I have to forgive her. That’s a lot harder. ’Cause I wanna say what she did is way worse. But sin is sin, right. Well, I’m still praying about that one. I hope you can forgive her too.

  It would be easy to blame God. But it was his voice I was ignoring—the Bible, the Holy Spirit—telling me it wasn’t on the level. You’ve kept telling me that God is with us in the storms; He doesn’t take them away always. Well, I can feel him here. So even if help doesn’t come, don’t worry. I wasn’t alone.

  Love,

  David

  “He’s praying to forgive her? That troll? I don’t understand Lydia and him. They’re certifiable.” A picture of Sharila’s green Bette Davis eyes flashes through my mind. Would I want her to forgive me? Before this week, I wouldn’t have given it much thought. But yeah, I did her pretty dirty, intentionally. It wasn’t an accident that spiraled out of control. Forgiveness would be nice.

  A fresh wave of pain hits me, and I can’t hold back the groan, which in turn riles up the injured ribs. There is no break from this agony. It’s just pain and then stronger pain. Never does it ebb away for a moment of sweet relief. My mind travels, drifts into the fog. The sound of my own heavy breathing takes me back to the hospital room where my mother died. The last days she just slept and breathed. A slow, rhythmic inhalation and exhalation. The nurses had told me it was normal and meant she was in the last stages of life.

  I would try to rouse her and get her to wake up and speak to me one more time. To say my name. To put her hand on my brow. To stroke my hair. I had this crazy fear that once she was gone, I’d disappear, vanish out of existence. Her knowledge of me meant I was someone. Her love somehow kept me grounded in this plane. What if I was her illusion, and when she was gone, I would go too? Every time she said my name, stroked my hair, held my hand she grounded me in this world. What would happen to me if she was gone? In and out she breathed, but never uttered another word.

  I see her there in the dim light. The hospital bed with all its sensors and leads telling me her heart is still beating, but I know it won’t much longer.

  “Smully,” she says weakly.

  “Yes, Mom.”

  She holds out her hand to me, touches my cheek. “You’re a real boy. You know it. You’re a strong boy. I raised you to be one. You can do this. You can. I believe in you.”

  “What can I do? I’m powerless. I’m not even in control of my body. They have it out there tucked away in the future. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t jump out of David and go for help. I’m stuck here.”

  “You care for him. That is enough. You’ll figure out the rest when the time comes.”

  “That sounds good, Mom, but —”

  “No excuses, son. You can do this. I raised you. I know you. You’re a survivor. Be one for David.”

  The fog creeps in again. I rub my eyes, trying to wake myself up. The sting of salt from my hands accomplishes the job nicely. I’ve got to stop sweating. I’m losing liquid, and I don’t have any to replace it. I rub impatiently at my head. The innocent movement irritates my ribs, and I drop my arm still again. The pain is like an itch, compelling me to alleviate it. Sparking my muscles to move and find a position that doesn’t have the pain. But there is no position and moving makes it all so much worse. I brace my arms on the floor and try a gentle shift of my hips because the pain isn’t just in David’s ankle and ribs. It’s everywhere, screaming, groaning for attention, for relief—finding none. I wouldn’t be surprised if David has pressure sores on his back and buttocks. He’s been leaning on this doo
r and sitting on this hard concrete for four days.

  Who am I kidding? Even if by some miracle, and it would be a miracle for sure, someone finds him before he gives his last shattered gasp, he will have a long, painful recovery. An extended hospital stay for starters. Physical therapy for the leg. Surgery. Rounds of antibiotics for the infection. I know he said he wanted to live yesterday, but what about when he’s back in his body tomorrow? Will he want to live then? I only need to look at his drawings to know the answer to that. He wants to live for Lydia and Maddie.

  If it were me instead of him, what would I be holding out for? What spark would keep me going? Last week, it would be nothing. I had no people I cared to see again. No unattained goal to keep me hoping. This week though—this week I have David. That’s some existential head scratching there. I want to stay alive for David while I’m inside David.

  “The hope is in me! Hahahaa.”

  As long as we’re doing stand-up, I want to stay alive for Lydia—a girl who doesn’t know what I look like and has only had Cyrano-style conversations with me. She knows nothing of Smullian O’Toole. I mean nothing to her, yet I am drawn to her like a moth to flame. She is light in a dark world, and I want more of it. Like a plant stretching beyond the canopy for a few rays, I crave her smile. Her sweet face. I have got to make it through today, for David, for me. I can’t help but feel that saving David will somehow save me. That this will be the thing that redeems me—pulls me up out of the pit of isolation I’ve dropped myself in and drags me out into the world.

  “Dude, stop with the melodrama. This ain’t a gothic romance. It’s life, and life sucks for everyone. No one gets a break in life. Orphans are made and then more flarp happens to them. Nobody is getting saved here. Not David and sure as heck not me.” I lean my head back and sigh. Hope is a dangerous drug. I learned that a long time ago. This day will end. Tomorrow will be just as fruitless, and David will die here. Alone in this dank, dark nowhere of a place. It’s funny that David and Lydia dreamed this was a magical land with fairies and rainbows, but they were wrong. It’s an oubliette. A place to be forgotten

  “What a fantastic metaphor for life. You believe it will be beautiful but instead it’s a pit in which you’ll be forgotten. What a lie we tell ourselves. Here we are, David, you and me, the forgotten. Here we’ll rot.”

  “Is David forgotten?” A man stands in the blackness, yet I can see him perfectly well. He is tall with silver and white hair. His pants and jacket are a matching silver gray. Underneath the jacket is a white shirt with a precisely knotted silver tie. His skin is pale, but not white, and it lightly shines as if dusted with luminescent silver. His nose was very straight and set above two thin, almost gray, lips. He stands with his fingers loosely laced in front of him, as if he were at a board meeting. He’s not familiar to me, and I’m great with faces.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Is David forgotten?”

  I shake my head. “Not now, but he will be. Lydia will remember, of course. Maybe Madds will have a fond memory of first love. Burnsey might remember that kid, but once they’re gone, no one will know him. No one will ever speak of him or think of him, yet his bones will still be here. Alone.”

  “I sustain him. I know his name. I am eternal.”

  “Sure. I must have drummed you up from Davey’s brain.”

  “Are you forgotten?”

  “Okay. I’ll play along. No one remembers me. It’s kind of the point. I slip in, do the con, and slip out. I’m a ghost. Heck, I’m a prisoner in the most sophisticated penal system in the world and even they have forgotten me. It’s been four days, and they haven’t figured out I’m missing. Out of the loop, as it were.”

  “I have never forgotten you. Even here in this place I am with you as I have always been.”

  “Yeah, you’ve always been with me. Where were you when my mother died?”

  “I walk that corridor with you. You chose to leave.”

  “I chose to leave, and so my life sucking is my fault.”

  “Your choices determine your path. However, I walk it with you.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks for all you did for me.”

  The slightest upturn reaches corners of his lips. “No, son, it is not what I do for you. It is what I keep from befalling you.”

  Suddenly, my mind floods with images of all the near-misses I’ve had in my misspent youth. Times which would have been catastrophes but weren’t. The sex trafficking ring, for one. The time I barely ditched those meathead bodyguards on Theta Outpost. Another where a partier died from bad jawa, but I didn’t take enough for it to kill me. Made me sick enough to never use again though—I look up at the gray man.

  “Still doesn’t make any sense you sending a felon like me to help David.”

  His perfect teeth actually shine in the smile this time. “Smullian, child, I didn’t send you to help David. David is helping you.”

  PART FIVE

  GRUDGING ACCEPTANCE

  The air reeks of alcohol and antiseptic. It triggers my daily retching.

  “He’s purging,” someone yells.

  Rough hands roll me to my side as I empty my stomach and what may still be lurking in my upper intestines. I did it! They found Davey. Finally. I did something right. The retching subsides, and the same hands right me.

  “Ugh, that’s a mess,” someone remarks, a lower voice than before.

  My eyes aren’t working right. All I can see is brightness and shadows moving in my periphery. I try to lift my head and look around, but my neck muscles rebel at the motion. My heads flops back down.

  “Hold tight, SO51399. You haven’t fully integrated. Keep still.”

  “Wait,” I try to say, but my vocal cords don’t seem to be working either. I shake my head and try to sit up.

  “Whoa, SO51399. I said to be still. You’ll be fully integrated in a moment.” Integrated? Doesn’t make sense. Why’re they calling me that number? My name’s David.

  “Heart rate is stabilizing.” I hear someone say behind me. My eyes may not be able to see, but my ears are having no trouble. There are several people in this room, moving about, their clothes swishing like paper. I hear beeps and a distant intercom although I can’t make out what it’s proclaiming. I’m in a hospital, definitely, so I must still be David. But why is that guy calling me SO51399? Did they find him as a John Doe? Why not call him that? The light is blinding…it hurts. I close my eyes. It makes sense. David’s been in near darkness for days.

  I’m edgy. There’s too much activity in the room, coming from directions I can’t see. Faceless people are pushing me, attaching leads, saying things I don’t understand. The sounds assault me. My eyes burn. I can’t see. What’s happening to me? My breath comes in rushed, ragged heaps. I have to sit up. Things will make sense if I can just sit up and look around. Orient myself. My exhalations and inhalations tumble on top of each other. Voices swirl in circles around me. My clothes shrink; my hands want to claw them free, but can’t. I need to sit up. I force myself upright and hear a gasp. Hands are on me again, shoving me down.

  “SO51399, be still. You are not fully integrated, and you could hurt yourself.” Behind this female voice, I hear a male voice.

  “I hate these emergency reintegrations. We don’t have time to prep the body. They should have given us a few hours’ warning.”

  “Orders are orders.”

  “Don’t listen to me; I’m only a highly trained medical doctor, but you know better, government bean counter. Would a few hours have really made a difference in this inmate’s case? A few hours so we can do this right.”

  Vomit bursts forth from my throat without any warning. I’m rolled on my side again. My heart pounds wildly.

  “He’s seizing,” someone yells as my body takes on a life of its own. My back arches with such severity that I think it might snap. My hands and feet clutch into fists, and the rest of me waggles and jerks like a fish on a line. I feel a sharp stab in my upper arm, and everything fades. Just
as the world goes dark, it hits me. He said inmate.

  I come to again. The light still glares, but not painfully so. I can hear the drone of machines, but no people.

  “Hello?” I call out weakly.

  Squelchy footsteps approach from across the room. Icy fingers grasp my wrist, checking my pulse.

  “How are you feeling, SO51399?”

  “Thirsty.”

  “I’ll get you some water. You threw up quite a bit earlier. I imagine your throat is burning.”

  It’s not that. David’s dehydration still inhabits me. The pain is gone, but I still feel the compulsion, the utter need for water. She slips a straw into my mouth, and I suck down the cool liquid. SO51399 is my ward number. Someone earlier called me inmate. Is it possible I’m back in my own body?

  “When am I?

  “You’re back here in the good old twenty-fourth. I heard there was some kind of error in your programming. Don’t worry, they’ll get it all fixed up in a jiff. Meanwhile, I’ll bet you’re happy to be back in civilization, if only for a little while.”

  “No, I need to go back.”

  “Well, I don’t know about any of that. Someone higher up will come in and talk to you about those logistics.”

  “You don’t understand. I need to be put back in now,” I urge, grabbing her arm.

  She snaps it free. “If you want to go back, you need to behave yourself while you’re here. Now drink all your water, like a good patient, or I’ll have to have a say with your Life Modification treatment specialist.”

  “Bring her down here now. And the warden. It’s a matter of life and death. I need to go back.”

  “You know policy. You cannot speak with anyone until you are cleared medically, which you are not. Sit back and relax or your heartbeat will never regulate.” She about-faces with a sharpness that a Nazi would admire and marches off, warning me the conversation is over not just now, but permanently. She vanishes, and I’m left alone, trying to figure out what to do next. Except I can’t, because they pumped me full of some pretty strong drugs. One moment I’m awake, the next—