by Anna Ferrara
How in the world would Paul know what my apartment looked like? From reading my mind? Again? I went to the window and looked out.
We had the view of a wall—the windowless side of the building next door.
I decided Paul was wrong. Room 103 did not feel like home. It felt way better than any place I had ever called home. A room that big and posh, with a window that big, I would never have been able to afford under normal circumstances. Was I actually, really going to get to spend the night in a room as nice as Room 103? Me?
“What are we doing?” I asked. I simply had to know.
“Starting afresh,” Paul replied from the bathroom. “Don’t you want to?”
In this fancy ass place? Hell yes. Seriously, why in the hell not? The place was almost as good as Wonderdrug had been, except...
Except I couldn’t be sure if it was all really real.
Did I really just jump out of a ten-storey window and recover in three days? Had a hotel’s keycard really just flown into Paul’s hand right in front of my eyes? Could those things even happen in real life?
Or... was there something terrible going on within my brain?
I chewed my nails and thought hard. According to Paul, I was out for only five days after the falling incident and for three days after my jump from the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre stairwell. If I could prove her claims to be true, then I could prove all of this to be real, couldn’t I?
I could think of no other way to go about it. I knew I had to see how my body reacted to injuries myself so I searched the room for something to harm myself with. Knives? Fire? Weapons? To my disappointment, I couldn’t find any of those things. A t-shaped wine opener with a sharpish tip was the most dangerous object I could get.
I decided it would have to do.
I brought the wine opener out of the drawer it hid in and sat down at the tin can table with it. I turned my palm up towards the ceiling and brought the tip of the wine opener up in the air.
In one quick move, I rammed the wine opener down onto my palm as forcefully as I could manage. Its bluntish tip tore through my flesh so reluctantly, I had to grit my teeth and push down harder on purpose just to get some blood out.
Two strokes, one down towards the left and one down towards the right. One big bloody ‘X’ and a whole lot of burning pain.
Tears trickled down my cheeks even though I wasn’t in the least sad. The pain in my palm felt so real, I decided there and then that everything that was happening in front of my eyes probably was real too.
Chapter 12
21 June 2030
We woke around 3pm the next day, mutually ravenous. Paul suggested eating at the eatery next to the lobby—now a coloured, video version of the black and white photo we had been creeping through the night before—and told the hostess who sat us to bill the meal to Room 103.
To my surprise, the hostess—a clean-looking, middle-aged white lady with piercings all over both ears and on one side of her nose—obliged with a big smile and little fuss. The electronic device she wore on a lanyard around her neck verified the existence of legitimate paying guests in Room 103 and had no issue with the said guests running a tab, apparently.
Because there wasn’t much of a crowd, we got to have one of the long wooden tables all to ourselves. The table was made of wood from the ceiling of the original factory, a sign pasted on the surface of the table said. The Edison bulbs above our heads emitted a warm orange glow this time, softly illuminating the exposed pipes, wooden floor and red granite wall tiles that seemed to take us back to a time when life was more gritty through and through.
Paul ordered ‘Crunchy Fried Chicken Waffles’ and a ‘Fluffy Vanilla Milkshake’ because there were thumbs up symbols next to them on the menu. There was no Chinese for me to choose from so I reluctantly made do with the ‘Mac and Cheese Explosion’ and an Americano.
I found it hard to believe I was actually still at the Canned Food Factory Hotel. The moment our waiter walked away with our orders, I flipped both palms over to check on the ‘X’ I had made and...
...found no ‘X’ on either palm. None that I could see. Both my palms looked absolutely fine. No different from normal, healthy palms. No scars. No wounds. Nothing out of the ordinary. Why?
“What do you want to do next?” Paul asked in that moment.
I dropped my palms, thought about her question for a bit but couldn’t say for sure. “I guess I could go back to being a masseuse? Or wait tables? I’ll just do whatever I can get, I guess. It’s gonna be tough getting work without ID though so we’ll really just have to take whatever comes.”
Paul narrowed her eyes as I spoke and regarded me with an interchanging mix of disbelief and curiosity. “I break you out of Wonderdrug, grant you freedom, and all you want to do is work long hours for very little money?” she said after some time. “Don’t you want to try every dish on the planet? Explore every country? Learn everything there is to learn about everything?”
I laughed. “Paul, all those wonderful things require money. Simply staying alive requires money. To get money, we’re going to have to get jobs, whether or not you want to. There’s no way around it.”
She raised one eyebrow in response. “Lane, haven’t you seen what I can do? We can do whatever we want. You can do whatever you want. You don’t need a stupid job. Not unless you want one for the fun of it, of course.”
I stopped laughing at once. I didn’t really want a job of course. None of the jobs I ever held were really all that fun at all. Getting to know Arden Villeneuve at The Gentlemen’s Dinner Club had been fun, sure, but the twelve-hour shift and six-day work week that came with it definitely wasn’t. So no, I wasn’t stupid enough to want a job if I didn’t have to get one. But me never having to work for money again because Paul, a former patient of the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre, daughter of a paranoid schizophrenic, had it all worked out? It sounded impossible. “Can I ask you something?” I decided to say.
Paul looked right back into my eyes and suddenly seemed a little nervous. “Of course.”
Hovering all around us were waiters, so I leaned in. “Who are you? How is it you were one thing the day we first met and now, something else altogether?”
Paul heaved abruptly, as if relieved, grinned a little and peeled her eyes from mine. “Well, the person you saw the first time we met was the person I needed Wonderdrug to believe I was. I needed them to have their guard down so I could properly see everything they were really up to.”
I frowned. “And what is it they’re really up to?”
Paul leaned in with a serious expression all over her face. “Wonderdrug Laboratories has a little known classified department called CRO.”
“Crow?”
“Yes, C-R-O, short for Curiosity Research Office. They operate out of the various Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centres around the world. Their mission is to research and utilise women like us. Strange women, as they like to call us.”
I frowned again. “How strange?”
Paul watched my face and a twinkle appeared in her eyes. “Isn’t it obvious? You fell fifty storeys and didn’t die. In fact, by the end of the first day, you were already so much better. That made people talk and that was how CRO came to know of you. They swooped in, found a way to make you look dead, replaced your body with a cadaver and took you in to see how they could profit from your amazing regenerative abilities.”
Paul spoke like she meant every word, as incredulous as it all sounded to me. Two words caught my attention. ‘Fifty’ and ‘storeys’. Not ‘five’ like Dr Clark always insisted. ‘Fifty storeys’ matched my memory of the falling incident, didn’t it? I remembered being on the rooftop right before the falling incident and nowhere else. I closed my open mouth and swallowed hard. “What about you? What do they want from you?”
“I was three, living with my mom at the Manhattan Psychiatric Centre, playing with toys like any three-year-old would, except... with my mind instead of my
hands. People, mostly the sane ones, they were horrified. CRO heard the rumours and ‘killed’ my mom and I like they did you. They wanted to know if my telekinesis had been genetically acquired. My mom gave me the biggest telepathic scolding of my life when we found ourselves trapped in separate wards at the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre. After that, I learned never to reveal any more of my abilities. I started pretending to be crazy and mentally slow just as my mom had been doing for years but it was already too late. I was trapped. Until you came along.”
Telepathy? Telekinesis? I wasn’t sure if I heard her right. “Why didn’t your mother come with us?”
“Because she’s dead now. Really dead. Which is how you would have ended up had I not gotten you out of there.”
A waiter interrupted us by bringing food and drinks to our table. The frying pan he put in front of me was an ‘Explosion’ indeed. Cheesy, starchy goodness crusted all around the edges of the pan. I felt my mouth water and my stomach squirrel but knew there was just one thing I simply had to know before giving myself thoroughly to it.
“Excuse me—” I said to the waiter, right as he put the last of our drinks—my Americano—between us.
“Lane, no—”
“—what’s the date today?”
The waiter—possibly a college student doing the gig part-time—raised his eyebrows at me and smiled. “21 June.”
“Of which year?”
“20… 30?” He spoke the digits slowly and turned to Paul with a curious glance when he was done.
She smiled at him in a way that didn’t look entirely natural and thanked him to make him go away.
The moment the waiter went out of hearing’s reach, Paul’s smile dropped.
“Lane, there are things you must never do if you want to remain free,” she said with a sternness I’d never thought I’d ever see on her face. “Talking more than is necessary, in a way that will make people talk about you, is a big no. CRO’s definitely looking high and low for us right now and they’re going to figure out where we are if people start texting their friends about all the strange conversations they’ve been having with two strange women. Do you understand?”
I nodded but all I could really think about at that point was the waiter’s reply. 2030. The year was 2030, not 2033. Paul had been right about Dr Clark lying, which meant everything she had been telling me about Wonderdrug was possibly also true! It meant I wasn’t a crazy person and that I hadn’t wasted three years of my life in a coma! It meant I was a woman with a superhuman gift—the ‘X’ on my palm probably healed overnight—and, more importantly, I was never going to have to get a job ever again! My heart banged hard against my ribs as my mouth curled upwards into a huge grin, even though my brows couldn’t stop falling into a frown. “So... what are we supposed to do with ourselves then? Use our powers for good? Save people and stuff?”
Paul snorted. “Of course not. I spent my whole life institutionalised because people want my ‘powers’ for themselves. They don’t deserve to be saved, so, no. We won’t be saving anybody.”
“Okay. Then... what do we do?”
Paul smiled and a strange look—maybe excitement?— appeared in her eyes. “We enjoy,” she said. “Everything the world has to offer, we will enjoy.”
I felt joy rush through every pore of my being when I heard those words. Suddenly, being on the run with a patient from the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre didn’t feel all that bad at all.
We spent what was left of the day trying to explore as much of Brooklyn as we could on foot. I was as much of a tourist as Paul was because, despite having lived in New York all my life, I never once made a stop at Brooklyn, believe it or not. My life had been all about commuting to Manhattan from Queens and back, over and over again. Not being in either Manhattan or Queens for once felt like a breath of fresh air. I felt as if I was away from my place of origin, out in the world on an adventure. I popped in and out of shops with my index fingers flying and my mouth wide open. Paul did too. There was just so much to see and buy. So many things to do and try.
Brooklyn was like an industrial-chic amusement park full of young metropolitan adults out for the purpose of seeing and being seen with people as cool as themselves. Almost everyone out on the streets had shades on and an overpriced drink in hand. Almost every building near The Canned Food Factory Hotel had been repurposed for commerce. Former rundown factories and abandoned office buildings were now inhabited by shops, clubs and cafes of all sorts. Historic buildings and former colleges had been turned into museums, performance venues and fine-dining establishments.
To my relief, Paul hadn’t been bullshitting me about the money. She had stacks of notes stashed all around her new backpack and felt comfortable enough with the amount she had to be giving it to cashiers for the most frivolous of items. She bought a $300 block of chocolate carved in the shape of a bear, a digital painting that didn’t look digital and would change in accordance to the day’s weather, a $2000 watch that did nothing but tell the time, and a heavy brass sculpture of a male hand making the a-ok gesture. Totally unnecessary items but she didn’t even care.
She gave me a couple of hundred dollars to spend on whatever caught my fancy too. I bought expensive soaps with the money; flavoured cigarettes, cigarette cases, hand-crafted lighters, nail polish, scented candles, all the sorts of things I never once considered buying back when the money came from my own long hours of hard, laborious work.
I paid extra to get my hair done by a world famous stylist who taught me how to put it up into a big messy updo that was apparently in trend that season. The new look made me look much younger and fresher so I obliged when he insisted I buy a whole basket’s worth of hair products to keep my hair up that way.
We picked out more new clothes—plunging little black dresses, insanely high heels, jewellery, little cocktail bags, fake eyelashes—and eventually, when the sky turned dark and the city’s lights came on, found ourselves in a magazine-recommended restored 19th century carriage house enjoying octopuses, old-fashioned steaks, red velvet cheesecake and two bottles of wine in candlelight.
By the time we got back into The Canned Food Factory Hotel’s cage elevator, drunk as lords, after having stumbled back arm in arm the whole way, I was buzzed from the day of fun and madly grateful.
The moment the elevator’s doors closed, I put my lips on Paul’s and pressed my body up against hers.
She was startled at first, and a little tense, but when we pulled apart, I saw the way her eyes sparkled and just knew, from experience, that Paul wasn’t a worm-throwing child-woman disinterested in romance any longer.
Back in Room 103, Paul backed into one of the wallpapered walls and eyed me with anticipation. I thought she looked a tad afraid so I approached slowly.
When I was close enough to smell her newly applied perfume and warm, sweat-covered skin, I reached out and pushed hair out of her face. “May I?” I whispered, our faces just a couple of inches apart.
She gulped, took in all of my features, then nodded. Her eyes shimmered in the dim light of the room’s bedside lamps.
I brought my lips onto hers and grazed them lightly but found her tongue curling against mine shortly afterwards. I responded with slow, gentle kisses but Paul picked up the pace and kissed me back with a fervour that fired up my senses. Her hands travelled down my back, past my hips and pulled all my clothes up above my arms.
“They let you have sex at Wonderdrug?” I asked breathlessly as my bra and dress hit the floor in a crumpled heap. I couldn’t believe how good a kisser Paul turned out to be. She was one of the best I ever encountered and I had encountered quite a few before her so that was saying a lot.
“No,” she replied and peeled every article of clothing off herself. “But I’ve read enough minds to know what works.”
“Wait, you mean you’re—”
I stopped short and gasped for Paul had sunk downwards and was sucking my breast with such finesse, I felt as if I we
re going to orgasm there and then. When she straightened out and kissed me in the mouth again, I forgot all about what I had been wanting to ask and could think only of how I wanted her to feel.
One of my hands took her breast while the other moved over her clit. I moved my lips over her ear and thrust my tongue in and out in accordance to the frantic beating of my heart. Paul threw her head back against the wall, closed her eyes and moaned. Her body arched against my hands while her hands ran into my hair and panties.
I gasped when she began doing to me exactly what I was doing to her. Every stroke she made brought me sheer pleasure. It was as if Paul knew precisely where I wanted to be touched and how. I repaid her efforts by increasing the speed at which my hand moved against her flesh and began teasing her nipples with my tongue.
“Yes…” she puffed. “Yes.. yes!” Her clit rammed itself against my hand as her hips began to rock. Her free hand dug into my back while the preoccupied one began moving more energetically underneath my panties.
Pleasure engulfed my groin and made my legs go weak. My body began lurching towards Paul’s as soft moans escaped my mouth. She was good. Very good. I could feel myself almost going to—
Paul began gasping in pleasure herself. She grabbed my shoulders. She grabbed my hair. Her knees wobbled. Her cheeks turned red.
I moaned and tried to hold myself back. I wanted Paul to experience hers first. I responded to her gasps with persistent, intensifying strokes of the hand until her gasps turned into shrieks and moans then finally, unrestrained exclamations of sheer orgasmic pleasure. A powerful explosion of orgasmic delight engulfed my groin right as her body jerked up against mine. My body began throbbing from head to toe as a delightful orgasm spread across all of my nerves. We crashed against the wallpapered wall, screaming in unison for a good minute until eventually, both of us melted down onto the carpet, winded and moist.
