Ruby’s face was a mask of fear. She tried hiding it with her grim impassive “boss” face, but it wasn’t working.
“You’ll be all right, Wool?” she asked pitifully.
“Yeah,” said Woolly. “I will, Ruby.”
We went out of Ruby’s tent and were crossing camp in the cold darkness when Woolly said, “Wait.”
“What is it?” Chase asked.
“I think it’d be better if Arie went first. I think it’ll sit better with Ruby. And she really would be lost if something bad happened to me.”
We returned to Ruby’s tent. She and Arie were sitting there in silence, their faces stony. But when they saw Woolly, it was almost as though they knew what had been decided. Arie sat up straight and Ruby’s face brightened.
“I think you should do the honors, pal,” said Woolly to Arie.
Arie stood up and smiled. “Really? You sure?”
“Yeah. You got more to remember,” said Woolly, tilting his head in my direction.
We took Arie to his own tent. He was packed up for the move, too, like the others, but his tent was still standing, serving as a storage place for the important and sensitive supplies that awaited transport to the vehicles. Arie made up his bed and shed his winter clothes until he was wearing only long underwear and socks. I stoked the small stove until the tent was nice and warm. Then I brewed the tea according to Peter’s instructions.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked.
Arie nodded. “I’m just trying to remember this moment right now,” he said. “What it feels like to not know your past.” He looked at me. “It really works?”
I smiled. “It did for us.”
He nodded and took the tea from me.
I walked toward the tent door, then paused and said, “See you on the other side.”
He was staring into the mug as I walked out.
Chase and I slept in the command tent that night, but I kept waking up and getting out of the bed and looking out the front door of the heavy canvas tent to see if there was any sign of change in Arie’s tent.
“Al,” croaked Chase in a groggy whisper around midnight. “Come back to bed. You’re letting the heat out.”
I wanted to be the first one to talk to Arie when he emerged. I peered across the darkened camp, but the night was too dark to clearly see Arie’s tent. The candle inside was out now; probably it had guttered and gone out by itself.
“Al!” hissed Chase.
“Okay, okay.”
I checked maybe five times throughout the night. Once I even considered getting my boots on and going over there to investigate, but Chase convinced me not to.
I may have fallen into a light sleep for a couple hours, but as soon as the sky lightened with the dawn, I was up and dressed and had had two cups of tea before I heard anyone else stirring. I put on my coat and boots and wrapped a scarf around my face, and then I took a chair and went out to the central fireplace, where I could sit and watch for Arie.
But he didn’t come out. The others awoke and joined me, but there were no sounds or signs of movement in the tent.
“I’m going to go check on him,” I said as the sun rose over the mountain ridge.
“Can ya do that? Is it safe?” asked Ruby.
“There really weren’t any procedures,” explained Chase.
Arie’s tent was only thirty or so yards away. I got up from my chair and faced the tent. The others watched me. Pine knots popped and cracked in the firepit.
“Go ahead, Al,” said Ruby.
“Yeah, Al,” said Woolly. “Go check on him.”
As I strode down the trail to Arie’s, he emerged. He’d slipped his boots on but was still in his long underwear. Around his shoulders he’d draped a sleeping bag. He had a contented smile on his face. His breath smoked in the cold.
“Arie,” I said quietly. I felt almost unable to breathe out.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” I replied. “How—how are you feeling?”
“Well,” he said uncertainly. “I feel refreshed. I feel good. I slept really good. Had a wild dream. It was good, though. Yeah. I feel good.”
“Do you—?” I began the question, but I couldn’t finish it.
Arie looked at the ground, and then at me. “Do I remember anything? Anything new?”
“Yes,” I said, exhaling in a sort of laugh.
But Arie frowned. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”
CHAPTER 61
Chase and I had taken two cups of the tea before our memories returned, so we didn’t panic right away. But after two days and four cups of tea, brewed at various strengths ranging from “just a sprinkle” to “this is totally disgusting,” Arie’s memories had not returned.
“Maybe there was some additional ingredient that this friend of yours used,” suggested Woolly. We were seated around the fire on the third night. Woolly had made a soup of roots and grain, but I ate little.
“No,” I insisted. “Why would he send us off with some different version of the tea?”
“Why wouldn’t it work the same for Arie as it did for you?” Woolly countered.
“I don’t know,” I groaned. “I don’t know.”
Chase stood by the fire, arms crossed tightly across his chest. He stared intently into the fire.
“Chase?” I pleaded, “any ideas?”
“Maybe we got lucky,” he said. “Maybe it works on some people and not others, and we just got lucky.”
The lack of memory restoration was only part of the problem. Arie said he felt disoriented after so many doses of the mushroom’s compounds.
“I can’t do that again,” said Arie, as he came down from the effects of the tea. “At first it was amazing. I had all these wild thoughts about ideas and concepts. Like I had a dream about how to make a longbow and arrows. What trees to use and how to contour the wood and laminate it and how to make a string from sinew and cotton twine. And I really think it’d work. In real life. I want to try it. And I had these ideas about myself, about understanding who I am and what I’m like. But now—now I just feel like I’m in a permanent fog. I spent an hour just now trying to zip up my coat and put on my gloves. I couldn’t decide which order to do it in, so I kept starting over.”
As Arie’s mother, it pained me to hear all of this. How could I keep subjecting him to this? The anguish must have shown on my face.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t cry. I’ll be all right. I’m sure I will. It’s just—that stuff is powerful.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Arie sighed and said, “I’ll drink some more if I have to, I guess. I volunteered to be the test subject. So, I’ll do it.”
“No,” I said. “The test is over. No more tea.”
“Was it something I did wrong?”
“No,” I said. “You need to rest now and just feel better. Ruby needs you. The camp needs you.”
“Okay,” he said.
I helped him back to his tent. He sat on the bed. I hoped he would sleep it off and feel better soon, but I didn’t know.
“I know you don’t remember me as your mom,” I told him, “but it’s painful for me to see you in any kind of discomfort or trouble.”
He blinked sleepily at me. His eyes wandered, trying to focus.
“You know, there was this one time,” I said, noisily sniffing back my tears, “back in the back before. You were seven, and you had walking pneumonia. You missed school for a week, and our doctor was thinking about hospitalizing you. It was serious. We were worried. Kids can die of pneumonia, you know. So, your grandma came to stay with us; your dad took days and days off work. On day ten, I think it was, the doctor said that if you weren’t any better by morning, we had to bring you in. So I put you in bed and you were so miserable and uncomfortable. All I could do was sit by your bed and watch. You tossed and turned and moaned and groaned.”
Arie narrowed his eyes and listened. Sitting on the edge of his cot, he leaned
forward.
“So, I was changing the cloth on your little forehead. I had a damp washcloth to try and keep you cool, and as I lifted it up, I could tell that your fever had jumped up again. You were burning up. It was one-oh-five! We called the ER and they contacted our doctor. By the time they called back the fever was up to a hundred and eight—very dangerous. It was a twenty-five-minute drive to the ER from where we lived, so the doctor said to put you in the tub and splash you with cool water until an ambulance could come get you.”
Arie swallowed, as though very concerned for his past self.
“Your dad and I put you in the tub and filled it with a few inches of tepid water, which of course to you probably felt like ice. You bawled and bawled and squirmed and kicked and your eyes were so glassy and sad. We almost quit, almost just wrapped you up in a towel and waited for the ambulance, but we stayed with it while you howled and shivered, and within about twenty minutes, your temp was down to one-oh-two, and you settled down and fell asleep right there in our arms, right there in the tub.”
“Then what?” said Arie, his eyes blazing.
“Well, we put your pajamas back on you, and your coat, which wasn’t easy because you were as limp as a rag, and the ambulance came. We checked you in and you stayed overnight, and the whole ordeal cost a fortune, but the fever had broken. They let you come home the next afternoon. Two days later you were back in school.”
“Wow.”
“Anyway, that’s what all this reminds me of,” I said. “Making you miserable by trying to help you. I’m sorry it didn’t work. You should rest now.”
“Okay,” said Arie. “But tell me something. I’m not sure where I am. I mean, I know where this is.” He gestured indefinitely at the tent around him. “I’m just not sure if I’m here. Am I here? Are you here? Where are we?”
This broke my heart to hear. My heart had been broken by this damn world so many times, and just when I thought I’d found a way to be whole, once and for all, it went and crushed me again. I put my hand on Arie’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze.
“A really wise man explained something to me,” I said. “He said this universe of ours is so big, just so unbelievably vast, that worrying where you are really doesn’t make much sense. It’s so big that it doesn’t matter if I’m here in your tent, or just outside the door, or clear across the world. Relatively speaking, we’re both here, and we’re together. I’ll always be with you, no matter where we are, Arie.”
A look of dawning realization fell across Arie’s face, probably a lot like it had when Peter had explained his epiphany to me that day in his tee-pee. Arie pressed his lips together and nodded slowly.
“You really should go to sleep,” I said.
“All right,” he said, slipping his legs into his bedding.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I said. And then I left him.
CHAPTER 62
“Al, I want you to know I don’t blame you,” said Ruby the next morning at the firepit. “I still believe it happened to you an’ Chase, and a’course I can’t say why it didn’t happen for the kid, but I want you to know I know you come here thinkin’ this would work.”
I didn’t know whether to take her words as a comfort or a condemnation, so I said nothing. Woolly and Ruby and Chase and a few other members of the upper leadership talked through the morning about what to do next. Woolly was hesitant about taking the tea now—with Arie incapacitated it wasn’t wise for someone with so much institutional memory to be incapacitated for even a few days. Word had gotten about that Chase and I were back in camp and that we had our memories, but this information had metastasized into a rumor that the medicine that we brought had caused Arie to lose all of his memories. To further unsettle matters, a long-range patrol had checked in the night before and reported spotting vehicles eight or ten miles off. And of course the entire camp was halfway packed and halfway not. Ruby’s camp members were tripling up to sleep in the remaining tents, living off cold rations and growing confused and nervous.
“I’m sorry, everyone,” said Ruby, “but we gotta finish loading the vehicles and get started. This just ain’t the time to try this out. We’re scattered all over hell, Arie’s been asleep for goin’ on sixteen hours, I got reports of vehicles sighted on the plains, and it keeps gettin’ colder every day. Maybe in a month, when we’re settled in a new place and back on our feet, we can talk about givin’ this mushroom tea to a new test subject.”
I nodded indifferently.
“Well,” said Ruby, eying me cautiously, “let’s get back to work, then. Woolly, you’re gonna have to take over Arie’s task list. Either that or go wake him up and see if he can work. Meet me in the command tent when you figure out which way it’s gonna go.”
Woolly slapped his knees and stood up. “I’ll go see how he’s doing.”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
Woolly nodded and headed in the direction of the command tent.
Again, I arose and started down the trail that led from the firepit to where Arie’s tent stood, dark and still.
Again, Arie swept aside his tent fly and stood in the snow in boots and long underwear with a sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders.
“Morning, Arie,” I said.
He took a step and let the sleeping bag drop. “Mom!” he yelled, scooping me into an enormous bear hug and squeezing me so tight, I thought he’d never let go.
CHAPTER 63
I knew Arie was my son, but hearing that word, “Mom,” addressed to me, “Mom,” melted me. But it restored me, too. My heart, cracked and fractured as it was, seemed to pull itself together. No matter how many times love gets knocked down, it will always get back up.
Arie kept his arms around me, and I gave him a little squeeze.
“You drank another cup,” I said.
“I did,” he said. “After what you said, I figured I needed a little more cold water splashed on me. And I think it worked. Finally. I remember that night. When I had the fever. I wanted that stupid Winnie the Pooh Bear in the tub with me.”
I laughed and squeezed him tighter. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”
“I don’t remember the ambulance,” he said.
“You slept right through it.”
“Hey,” he said, pulling back so that he could look into my face.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for being my mom. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Son.”
There’s more to the moment, but it was more of the same. Tears, laughing, embracing. But we couldn’t stand there forever in the cold. Besides, no one had to be told what had finally happened in Arie’s brain, and they gathered around us, smiling, spilling tears of their own. And so Arie and I wiped our faces, promised for a long session of catching up and trading memories, and went to find Ruby and Woolly. Once Ruby saw that the treatment had worked on Arie, she reconvened her leadership by the firepit and proceeded to tell us that she and Woolly had already drawn up a plan to administer the treatment to the rest of the camp—in stages, but as rapidly as possible.
“We give the tea to ten people,” said Woolly. “The people who successfully regain their memories will then be employed to help others. Like a game of Follow the Judge. Anyone who gets their memories will become a member of the tea team, until we treat everyone. We’ve got everything lined up. Who goes first, who helps who, everything. And we need to start right away.”
“Are we sure we don’t want to wait until after the move?” said Chase. “I mean, I know I’d want to try the treatment as soon as possible, but, the added delays, the weather, the long-range patrol reports—”
Even though I could hardly wait for every single person to take the tea, I couldn’t help agree with him.
“Chase,” sighed Ruby, “I think you’re right. It’s risky, probably a dumb thing to do, but, this may be the only chance we have to do this. Who knows what’s gonna happen when we move? Who knows what the Agency is up to? If you two have brought us a way to re
member everything, seems like giving everyone a shot at that is the ethical thing to do. You said you can get more, right?”
Chase and I nodded.
“Then I think we should give out what you’ve brought, give everyone a chance at remembering the whole sh’bang, and then move the camp.”
We all traded looks, nodding tentatively.
“Sides,” said Ruby, “there’s another possibility here.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Tell ’em, Wool.”
“I had a thought,” said Woolly. “What we’re dealing with here is a psychedelic, which were used in the back before to treat all kinds of conditions. Depression, anxiety, addiction. What if this treatment doesn’t just reverse the amnesia that the Agency serum induced? What if it makes it harder, or even impossible, to scrub us in the future?”
An excited murmur made its way around the fire.
“This stuff may give us partial or total immunity to whatever the Agency has been using on us,” he concluded.
“I have some thoughts, too,” I said, raising my hand. “Something about the tea.”
“Go ahead, Al,” said Ruby.
“I think the reason the tea worked on Chase and me so quickly is that our minds had been prepared,” I said. “We spent more than a week with Peter in a very secluded and low-stress environment. A very thoughtful environment. There were lots of discussions, talking, thinking. We knew what we wanted—our memories—and the tea simply opened the door for us to reconnect with them. Peter told us that the tea was not a medicine, not a cure. It’s not even really a treatment, not technically. Peter said it’s a guide, and that the effects were a journey—you find what you want to find. I think that everyone who gets the tea should spend a day thinking, meditating if possible. They should talk to someone close to them, talk about what they know, what they remember, what they’d like to remember. And they should only take the tea in the clearest and most relaxed state of mind. This might add time to each individual’s experience, but I have a hunch it will actually speed things up.”
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 28
