by Xander Gray
“I took care of him.”
“Nonetheless, not lottery odds.”
“I don’t care what you say.” He held up one massive hand. “It’s fate, plain and simple. I’ve been given a chance to make things right.”
“You’re the reason I’m in prison?”
“That’s not what I mean.” He shook his head. “Come on now.”
“Do you need me to give you another one of my famous speeches on the difference between probability and fate?”
He waved his hand, dismissing me. “Fate is a real thing, Holmes. You’re here for a reason.”
Chapter Five
After the fluorescent lights dimmed and the electronic locks banged shut on the cells in GenPop, I lay on my bunk and stared into the corridor. Moonlight, filtering through the high atrium windows, ignited the dust to form blue spires along the walls. Men called like caged animals, their voices echoing from dark cells. I let them fade.
Had McSorley experimented on me? Had my seizure conjured actual memories? The questions formed endless nodes, nested one within another, each pointing toward the Garfield incident. I had told Gar I barely remembered his mindless bullying, but it had influenced the trajectory of my youth, and I remembered it well, if not completely. Gar had been a stocky sixth-grader with a penchant for beating younger kids. I had lost my temper and concussed him with a tree branch. My inability to remember striking him had prompted my mother to have me evaluated.
Lying here in the prison, staring at the moon-washed ceiling, it was easy to fit McSorley’s face into my memory of the psychologist. I let the ordeal play through my mind, and with each repetition the pieces fit more tightly. I could almost feel the fragmented memories of my youth rearranging, pulling apart and snapping together in new configurations. All the while McSorley’s face drew me toward sleep, until finally the memory came flooding back, and my eyes snapped open in the dark.
#
I was eight years old, in third grade. It was recess on a bright autumn day.
I was punching the tether ball, the grating cycle of the chain lulling me into a daze, when Tommy Garfield jabbed me in the back with a branch. He had two friends with him. The teacher was nowhere to be seen.
“Little baby Joshua.” Tommy poked my shoulder with the branch. “Let’s see if we can make him cry.” His friends laughed.
“Stop it.” I backpedalled toward the pole.
“What’s the matter, little baby Joshua?” He poked me again. “Gonna cry? Gonna run to Mommy? I hear you’re a spaz. Is that true?”
Fear seized me. Stand up for yourself, Mom always said, but Tommy was big and had friends.
“Answer me.” Tommy grabbed my shoulder.
If I was stronger or more confident I might have asked why he picked on someone so young. I might have insulted his mother. I might have punched him. But I was neither strong nor confident, and my terror was a concrete block tied to my ankle. I watched in paralysis as he poked my shoulder, each jab harder, until he finally swung the branch like a baseball bat and cracked it into my elbow.
Pain exploded up my arm. I fell, skinning my hands on the concrete. Tears filled my eyes, but I tried to hold them back.
“You think that’ll do it?” Tommy said.
One of his friends laughed. “Give him another.”
As I closed my eyes and wished them away, a bomb of pain detonated in my back.
The dam broke. The tears fell. The boys laughed harder.
“Please don’t hurt me anymore.” I held up a hand. “Please stop.”
“Should we stop?” Tommy asked his friends.
I rolled onto my back. Above me the tether ball was still spinning, an orbiting comet streaking blue light behind it. Wind buffeted my face. I had the impression of being someplace else, of wavering on the edge of consciousness.
Then I was standing. Tommy lay on the ground at my feet, his eyes closed and his face covered in blood. I was holding his tree branch—I had no idea how I had gotten it.
The teacher pushed me aside and snatched the branch away, then she knelt before Tommy, touching his face. "Are you alright? Can you hear me?" His eyelids fluttered open. Fear danced in his eyes.
The other boys told the teacher I had taken the branch from Tommy and savagely beaten him. They failed to mention their bullying, but I filled in those details myself fifteen minutes later when I told the principal it was the only part I could remember.
#
My mother led me into the pediatrician’s office. “Stop fidgeting. It’s a consultation. The doctor will ask questions, but won’t give you any shots.”
She wanted a normal child, a child who could focus, a child with friends.
A young doctor wearing a crisp lab coat stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “I’m Doctor McSorley.”
He did not look friendly. I disliked him at once.
My mother clutched her purse. “Nice to meet you, doctor.”
McSorley flipped through a chart. He didn't look at either of us. “Did my assistant explain how this works?”
“You’re doing research,” my mother said.
McSorley pushed his glasses up. “We’re developing a model of synaptic and neural activity in the brain. The implications are far reaching, but not immediate. In exchange for participating in our study, we’ll provide your son with counseling. That should provide a more immediate benefit. Now if you could, please step up here.”
I realized he was talking to me.
McSorley motioned toward a white pod at the back of the room, shaped like an egg, roughly the size of a car. A patient table extended from the pod, a halo of blue lights on a metal arm encircling the head rest. I had never seen anything like it. It looked like a space pod from a movie.
I glanced at my mother for reassurance. She nodded. I climbed onto the platform, staring at the circle of lights.
“This won’t take long.” McSorley slid out of sight alongside the machine. “You’re going to hear buzzing. The ring will rotate over your head. Lie still.”
“What does this do?” asked my mother.
“Takes pictures of his brain.” McSorley retrieved a syringe from the counter. “Totally painless.”
My eyes fixed on the syringe. “Mom, no shots!”
“Just a slight pinch,” McSorley said, and slipped the needle into my arm.
The ring overhead began to rotate, the pinpricks of light spinning faster and faster until they blurred into a continuous blue line. The world collapsed into that line, every memory a shadow, every thought a ghost, until a bright slash of blue neon was the only thing left of me.
Finally, like a dying carnival ride, the spinning ring wound to a halt. McSorley loomed over me. “You’re finished now, subject 49. We’ll know soon enough if you’re our first success.”
McSorley’s eyes flashed purple. I told myself it was an illusion, an after-image of the spinning blue lights. I sat up on the table. “Where’s my mother?”
McSorley motioned toward the door. “I asked her to step outside.”
“Why?”
He steepled his hands beneath his chin. “We had complications, but everything’s fine now. Your mother’s in the lobby.”
#
I lay in my bunk as rain tapped the prison roof and McSorley twisted through my memory. Pyxis’ claims were true—McSorley had experimented on me. I had never put much stock in the notion of repressed memories, but there was no denying I had forgotten key elements of my childhood.
Wind howled beneath the eaves of the cell block, rain swept along the roof, and I buried my head in my pillow. I sensed a mountain of childhood history lurking beneath the surface, but teasing the memories out accelerated my pulse until I could barely stand it.
I pushed harder. An image surfaced. I saw a little girl lying in a hospital bed adjacent to mine, reaching out to me. She was scared. A sticker on her shirt displayed the number 58 in black marker. We were the only children McSorley cared about, the only ones with prom
ise.
I rolled over in my bunk, trying to excavate the memory, but the rest of the details remained hidden.
A horrifying thought arose. If I had forgotten these things, could I have forgotten more recent history? What if I had shot McSorley during a trance? What if I really had accidentally killed Helena Isaacson?
What if I deserved to be in prison?
Chapter Six
I first met Crystal back in high school, during a seizure. Apparently, I climbed on top of a table in the school library, grabbed her sweater, and shouted something cryptic about broken time. Later, of course, I remembered nothing—but within three weeks, she was hanging around my grandmother’s farm, pestering me about my condition. I didn't mind the attention.
My grandmother had a lake just off her property, bordered on one side by a forty foot bluff. On one particularly beautiful day, Crystal was balancing along its edge, picking her way forward like a tight-rope walker. Her arms were spread for balance; her toned body teetered over empty space. “What do you see when you hallucinate?”
“A man with no face.” I was shocked at the ease of the admission. “No eyes or nose or mouth, just skin. It ripples all over.”
“It ripples?” Crystal looked confused. “You mean like this?” She toed a rock over the edge; it fell for a full second before plunking into water.
“Something like that.” I pulled her away from the edge and found myself staring into eyes so deep I thought they might swallow me. “The doctor gave me an EEG when I was a kid and said I had epilepsy.”
More specifically, he had diagnosed me with occipital lobe seizures, characterized by auditory and visual hallucinations and often accompanied by irrational fear. Most people with the disorder experienced visual bursts of gibberish, but I suffered a rarer pathology frequently mistaken for mental illness.
Instead of dissuading her, my disorder fascinated her. “You’re an interesting guy, Joshua Briar.”
I pressed my hand against the small of her back, pulling her into me, aware of her curves, my breath catching in my throat. “You may be the only person in the world who finds my condition interesting.”
“That’s because I’m an interesting girl.” She winked, and then she kissed my cheek and pirouetted away.
My stomach dropped. “Do you have to stand so close to the edge?”
“Oh, stop trying to save me.” She smiled, brushing her hand through the auburn waves of her hair. “I’m not a damsel in distress.”
Truer words had never been spoken. When authorities arrested me twenty years later, she insisted on representing me. Yes, she was a great defense attorney and the only one who understood my struggles with lost time, but she was also fearless and tough and would fight to the end.
The prosecution's story seemed to ignore the laws of physics. They claimed that the shooter had fired a single bullet at Edward McSorley, but the bullet had ricocheted off a metal plate in McSorley’s head and struck an innocent woman named Helena Isaacson, killing her instantly. If that had been all they'd had to go on, we might have stood a chance—but there was a mountain of additional incriminating evidence. We couldn't overcome the witnesses, the ballistics, or the surveillance footage. As unlikely as the physics were, the alternative seemed even less probable: that someone who looked just like me had stolen my wife’s gun, driven one hundred miles to Pine Bluff, strolled onto the Walton campus in broad daylight, and committed a murder culminating in the strangest trial ever broadcast on Court TV.
Crystal was a great lawyer—she wasn't God. After three days of deliberation, the jury convicted me of murder and sentenced me to life in prison.
After sentencing, two guards hauled me down the stairs to a holding area beneath the courthouse, searched me, confiscated my possessions, and threw me into a cell with five other guys in various stages of the legal process. Eventually they moved me to a cramped room with a desk and two chairs where I was allowed to see Crystal one final time prior to transfer. If she hadn’t been my lawyer, I wouldn’t have seen her at all—I would have sat in holding until a bus carted me to prison.
“I’m so sorry.” Tears streamed down Crystal’s face. “I failed you.”
My heart could sink no lower. I was already facing a life of violence and subjugation, but seeing my wife devastated was too much. “Please don’t cry. I can’t take it.”
She wiped her eyes, but still the tears came. “I should have focused more on that damned autopsy.”
There had been two different autopsies conducted on Helena Isaacson. The notes from the first suggested Helena’s brain had been missing. Not stolen after death, but actually missing from her skull upon dissection of the cranium. The body was immediately examined by another doctor—one from Walton University instead of County—who proved the brain had been present all along, causing the first doctor to retire in disgrace.
I put my hand over hers. “The jury knew the first doctor was old and suffering from severe dementia. It wasn’t his first screw up, but it was his worst, and the jury understood he should have been forced to retire years ago. What more needed to be said?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not your fault we lost.”
She scoffed. “I'm your attorney. Of course it's my fault.”
“No, it's not.” I kissed her hand. “I don’t believe in fairy tales. When I was a kid, Mom told me I could move mountains with a mustard grain’s worth of faith—the Bible said so. But no amount of faith stopped bigger kids from terrorizing me in grade school or made my seizures go away. Even the medicine couldn’t fix my seizures. And when I got older, I learned that nothing in the physical world—no bully, seizure, or court case—changes without true physical causation, and all causation is subject to the statistical odds of the natural world. In short, you tried your damnedest, but the odds were against you. The kind of luck necessary for an acquittal in this case. . . it just doesn't exist.”
Her sobs had quieted. “You’re always so rational.”
“I have my moments.”
She chuckled, wiping the last tears from her eyes. “We tried so hard.” Then she frowned. “We have thirty days to file your appeal. I started on it weeks ago.”
“Saw the writing on the wall?”
“Hoped for the best, planned for the worst.”
“See? You’re a pragmatist too.”
“I like to pretend I’m not.” She stood and hugged me, then stepped back and looked into my eyes. “If they offer you something to eat, take it. Who knows how long you’ll be sitting out there before they transfer you.”
In a rare stroke of luck—if you could call it that—I ended up eating two dinners that day, once at the courthouse and once at my new permanent home, the Gasconade County Correctional Facility. We locals referred to the prison simply as The Gas. In addition to the obvious reference to its proper name, the nickname alluded to the gas chamber, which is how screws here had executed prisoners in the years before lethal injection. The old death row—a two-story building with a limestone façade and a covered porch that had once housed the gas chamber and a handful of cells—had since been gutted and turned into a storage facility. Some of the men claimed it was haunted, said they saw shapes moving in its dark windows, but I had never seen anything moving beyond that fence except the guards on the catwalk, high above the old death row’s roof.
Six months after I transferred to The Gas, Crystal took me into a private room and showed me the appellate court’s decision, the word affirmed in all caps in the header, and I felt my last remaining glimmer of hope slide into the dark.
Now the glimmer had returned. With enough new evidence, Crystal could pursue a re-trial, but I knew it had to be the kind of evidence a judge found persuasive—a smoking gun, preferably in the real killer’s hands. We had a collection of seemingly random clues and a few newly mined memories, but we needed more. For the first time in a long while, I could feel an accurate explanation of the crime lurking just out of reach. If I kept digging, I would une
arth it, expose it to the light, and prove my innocence to the world.
Chapter Seven
I pushed the polisher back and forth over the tile in the medical entry foyer, hypnotized by the whirring pad. A familiar feeling rose in my gut, like I had done this before, like my life was a loop. That was life in The Gas: unrelenting routine, stretching one life out so it felt like a million. Sometimes I wondered if even death would free me. Maybe my spirit would just roam here forever.
It drove some men crazy. They provoked officers just to feel the impact of a baton in their ribs. They smoked meth or black tar heroin to escape. They ganged up on the weak, the new fish, and shook them down or raped them. Sure, some had started as sociopaths, but others had been driven mad by the machine.
“Feeling better today, Briar?” Officer Slaven stood in the hallway, one hand on his baton.
“Yes sir.” I turned off the buffer and squirted soap on the tile.
He tilted his head. “What do you suppose the odds are of a bullet bouncing off a metal plate in someone’s head, ricocheting twenty feet, and killing an innocent bystander?”
The odds. Everybody wanted the odds. Just because I had written my doctoral thesis on the probability distributions of subatomic particles did not mean I wanted to spend my free time calculating odds.
“What an interesting way to kill someone.” His eyes searched my face, waiting for me to take the bait.
I flipped the switch on the polisher—its electric motor whined, pad spinning on the tile.
Slaven frowned. He didn’t like being disregarded. For a moment, his irises flashed purple.
A trick of light, I thought. A micro seizure.
He turned away from me and walked down the hallway.
I waited for him to vanish around the corner and then I turned off the polisher and followed him to an open exterior door. I squinted into the sun, my eyes adjusting.
The old death row building stood sixty feet away from me, two stories of crumbling limestone veneer and weathered wood trim. A pair of officers in white stood on the catwalk high above the building, rifles slung over their shoulders. Slaven was out there, pacing on the front porch, seemingly talking to himself.
