Level 2 (Memory Chronicles)

by Lenore Appelhans

  Julian stretches out like a satisfied cat. “Thanks for the offer, but I’d better go. You know, before it starts raining again.”

  He changes back into his clothes, and I let him kiss me again by the door. “I hope we can do this again sometime,” he says as he leaves. I stand in the doorway, rooted to the spot, half-delirious with joy, half-racked with guilt. I can hardly believe Julian has so much power over me that he’s transformed me into someone who’d betray her best friend.

  As I exit from the memory, I can still feel the weight of his lips on mine. It’s revolting. I charge out of the chamber, ready to yell at him for forcing me to relive that particular memory. The kiss that set off a terrible chain of events I’d rather not think about.

  But he’s not here. He’s not in the center area, and unless he changed into a white shift, he’s not in any of the other chambers either. I take a peek into the closest occupied chamber and see the face of a little boy who seems to be about six years old. I bend down to get a closer look, and cover my mouth in shock. The little boy is strapped in.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE BOY’S EYES ARE WIDE OPEN, but he doesn’t react to me, even when I wave my hand in front of his face. His hologram screen casts a strong, unbroken light over his small body, which is taut against its restraints. That familiar glow has never looked so sinister to me.

  I dash from chamber to chamber. They are all the same—occupied by young children who have no chance to get up and move about. It’s perhaps a small freedom, considering we’re all locked in hives, but when I try to imagine being strapped in, I start to panic.

  I return to the boy and poke around the bonds at his ankles, wrists, and chest, looking for clasps or some way to remove them. Though the boy doesn’t stir, his eyes tick back and forth like a metronome, as if in a deep REM sleep. Finding no way to release him, I sink to the floor. What kind of people would do this to children?

  I hug myself into a ball and wish I could weep. I want so badly for the tears to come. For my life that was cut short. For the ocean of loneliness in my heart when I think of Neil and my family and friends. And to express my rage at my unseen jailers. For locking me in a prison all this time, cut off from everything except my memories. For drugging me. For taking Beckah. For destroying my chamber. And for their cruelty to this boy and all the others like him.

  I’m so wrapped up in my grief that I block out everything else. I imagine I’m at home in my bed—not the one in Frankfurt that holds too many nightmares but the one with my first grown-up mattress and the frilly pink bedspread, before sleep became something I preferred to avoid. I can almost feel the bedspread’s satiny softness against my cheek.

  “I see you’ve figured out materialization.” Julian prods my side with his foot. “Way to go.”

  “What are you talking about?” I sniffle, and wipe away tears and snot with the sleeve of my shift.

  “You’re crying.” He says it so matter-of-factly, it takes me a few seconds to catch his meaning. I stare at my now soiled sleeve and touch my face gingerly with my fingers. It’s puffy and wet. I’m crying. I’m crying!

  “But how? I’ve never been able to before.” And I’ve tried. I attempt to stand up, but my limbs flop like jellyfish and refuse to obey. I collapse against the base of the chamber I recently occupied. The one where Julian forced me to relive our first kiss. I glare at him with all the energy I have left.

  “Careful. This whole crying indulgence has already drained you of the bit of power you were able to siphon off for yourself. Now you have to plug in again to recharge.” He curses under his breath. “This puts us behind schedule.”

  He approaches me with purpose, but also caution, as if cornering a skittish animal. “Let me help you back in.”

  “Wait.” I beg him with my eyes. “Talk to me for a minute. Please.”

  He regards me for a few beats, then nods and sits cross-legged on the floor in front of me, his posture so perfect and his body so balanced that he resembles a yoga master. Or a statue of a yoga master.

  “You’re starting to be able to change the code of this dimension. We call it materialization. It’s a good sign. It means you’re strong. It means I was right to come and find you.”

  The confusion I feel must show, because Julian immediately elaborates. “You’ve never been able to cry before because it’s not part of the program.” He sounds bored and annoyed, as if he’s told me this a thousand times and I just haven’t been paying attention. “Whenever you plug in to your chamber, you let the program feed off your energy and your power. That you could cry now means you were able to reclaim some of your power for yourself. You can wield that power to hack the system. You can change things to the way you like them.”

  “I’d like to set these kids free,” I rasp.

  Julian shakes his head. “That would take a lot more power than you have at the moment. Besides, the guardians here have an excellent reason for keeping these kids strapped in.”

  “You’re defending them?” I’m incredulous. I suspected Julian was heartless. But this is madness.

  “I’m not defending them.” He raises his voice just enough that I know I’ve hit a nerve. “I’m merely pointing out the obvious. They’re too young. These kids don’t have the capacity to plug themselves in and roam the net. They go through the memories of their lives in sequential order, over and over again. It is not like they are suffering. They have no idea they are here.”

  “But they shouldn’t be locked up by themselves,” I say. “They should be with their parents. So they can be held and know they’re loved.”

  “Everyone needs that.” He shifts his weight forward, and reaches out as if to caress me, but I flinch. Bare my teeth.

  “Don’t! Just don’t.” How dare he? Does he think if he touches me, I’ll give in? Tell him it’s okay that he’s a monster?

  He puts out his hands in a gesture of surrender and rocks back into his rigid pose. “Okay, calm down. I will not touch you unless you ask.” His eyes glint with mischief. “Unless you beg.”

  I choose to ignore this additional provocation, and change the subject. “Materialization. Is that why you have hair and eyebrows and normal clothes?”

  “Exactly!” Julian smacks his hand on the floor, startling me. “Now you’re getting it.” He winks. “Watch this.”

  Julian shimmers before my eyes, and his T-shirt and jeans ensemble is replaced with my dad’s GWU sweatshirt and jogging pants. “What do you think?”

  I shudder. “Ugh! No! Anything but that.”

  He grins wickedly. “If you say so . . .” He shimmers again and is left in nothing but a Speedo, smooth chest and washboard abs glistening with water droplets as if he’s just stepped from a pool.

  “Julian!” I gag. “Stop fooling around.”

  “Fine,” he says, his tone now serious. He shimmers again and materializes back into his normal outfit. “I see you’re still uptight.”

  “I’m not uptight,” I protest.

  “Yeah, I know. You’re conscientious.” We trade venomous stares. “Is this little powwow done? Can I help you plug in so we can get on with it?” He says it like he’s a babysitter and I’m his bratty charge who has stayed up long after her bedtime.

  “Can you tell me one more thing before you do?” I don’t wait for him to answer but press forward. “Why can’t I ever seem to remember much that goes on here? Is it the drugs you were talking about?” I feel unbalanced, unmoored. Must be withdrawal symptoms.

  “Good guess. You’ve heard of the Lethe?”

  Lethe. It sounds familiar, but I’m not recalling its significance. Not that I’m going to let Julian know that. “The Lethe. Sure. What about it?”

  “The guardians use a derivative of the water from the Lethe to hinder people from remembering much. It keeps everyone from getting too attached and from forming plans. And it makes the memory chambers all that more attractive and addictive . . . Hey, are you okay?” His eyes widen in alarm.

  My bod
y is shaking convulsively. “Nooooo . . .” My voice is no louder than a whimper.

  Without asking like he claimed he would, Julian scoops me up in his arms and transfers me quickly to the chamber. He places my hands into the grooves, and I feel better the instant my finger pads connect. This time he doesn’t force anything on me but retracts his hands politely. I don’t care about Julian anymore, though, because the sensation of being in the chamber is so ambrosial, it crowds out everything else. But I’ve held on to one word. “Lethe.” I languidly pull up my tags and find one mention of “Lethe.” I surge in.

  Ward, Felicia. Memory #31725

  Tags: Ohio, Neil, School, Mythology, Lethe

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  The bell signaling the start of fifth period echoes through the deserted hallway as I unfold my new schedule in front of my locker. Late again. But I don’t care. In my whole school career, up until today, I was never late once. Never allowed myself that sort of slipup. Being on time, sitting in the front row, writing copious notes, none of it matters anymore. I have one semester before I graduate, but I’m merely going through the motions. All my dreams, if they really were my dreams at all—of getting into an Ivy League school, of being a diplomat or a politician or secretary of state—are impossibly out of reach now. I still need to put in a minimum of effort to graduate, but my fire to succeed, to exceed expectations, has been irreparably extinguished.

  I take a deep breath, slam my locker shut, and drag myself toward Mythology, room 112, Mrs. Keats. The door is still open when I get there, so I slip in and scan the room for an empty seat. I see a familiar face. Neil. He smiles and waves me over, but before I can claim the seat next to him, Mrs. Keats asks for my schedule.

  “Ah, Felicia Ward.” She reads my name off the now crumpled sheet of paper. “Nice of you to finally join us. We were expecting you more than a week ago.”

  My classmates laugh. I clear my throat and offer a mumbled apology but no explanation. Mrs. Keats dismisses me with a sigh, handing back my schedule. I beeline to the back of the class and sit next to Neil.

  “You weren’t at church on Sunday,” Neil says. “We missed you.”

  “Grammy wasn’t feeling well. I didn’t want to leave her.”

  “Can we get started now?” Mrs. Keats raises her voice to silence the smattering of conversations still in progress. “Thank you.”

  I turn my attention away from Neil and do my best to focus on what Mrs. Keats is saying.

  “If you did your reading last night like you were supposed to, you know we are going to talk about the underworld today. Now, in Greek mythology the underworld wasn’t hell. It was a place all souls went to when they died.” Mrs. Keats goes on, detailing the various realms of the underworld: the pit of Tartarus, the Elysian Fields, and the rest of the land of the dead, which was ruled by Hades. Occasionally I halfheartedly scrawl a key word into my wire-bound notebook.

  Soon she’s waxing poetic about the five rivers of the underworld: the Styx, the Acheron, the Kokytos, the Phlegethon, and the Lethe.

  “Who can tell me what the purpose of the Lethe was? Alyssa?”

  A pert, pretty girl in the front row answers, and I can tell she’s the type who always raises her hand. Who is always right. I can tell because she’s the girl I used to be. “The Lethe was the river of forgetfulness,” she trills. “Dead souls drank from it to forget the worries of their earthly life. It was ruled by the goddess Lethe, who offered oblivion.”

  Lethe. I write it down. Underline it. Circle it. Stab at it with my fluorescent orange highlighter.

  “And the Phlegethon?” Mrs. Keats asks.

  Alyssa again. “The river of fire. Dead souls who swam there boiled with rage.”

  “Well, I am pleased to see at least one of you came prepared,” grouses our teacher.

  She goes on with her lesson, peppering her lecture of the rites and traditions of the underworld with occasional questions, the majority skillfully answered by Alyssa. But I allow my mind to wander, to daydream about what it would be like to lie down on the banks of the Lethe and drink just enough to make me forget about the past few months. The thought is undeniably appealing.

  The bell pierces through my daydream, and students stream out of the classroom in a cacophony of slammed books and displaced desks.

  Neil hovers over me. “Which way are you going?” he asks.

  I consult my schedule as I stand up. “Physics. Room 163. Mr. Howe.”

  “That’s in the science wing, near the auditorium. I can walk you. We have choir practice there today.” He grips his binder tightly as we exit the classroom and enter the mob of fellow students hurrying to their next class. “In the auditorium, I mean. Not the science wing.”

  I have to laugh. “I’m sure you could raise all those formaldehyde frogs from the dead with your singing voice. It’d be quite a sight to see.”

  Neil ducks his head, blushing. “I’m better at raising spirits than souls,” he jokes.

  “Do frogs even have souls?” I look up at him. “Do you find frogs in the underworld taking sips of the Lethe to forget all those times they ate rotten flies or fell off their lily pads?”

  “I don’t know, but it seems like a good question to ask Pastor Joe. We could ask him together,” he suggests shyly. “You know, if you’re there next Sunday.”

  “We’ll see how Grammy feels. Dad’s looking into getting her a part-time nurse, but it’s so expensive. . . .” I trail off. “She is ninety-one years old, after all. She’s going to have some bad days.”

  “Ninety-one! I never realized.”

  “Don’t worry. No one ever thinks she’s that old. My dad was a late-in-life miracle.” I look away, pick up my pace as we round a corner. “And I was a late-in-life accident,” I say bitterly, under my breath, my mother’s ultimate rejection slashing at me all over again.

  Neil matches me footstep for footstep, but he stays silent, as if allowing me to compose myself. Either he doesn’t know what to say or he’s perceptive enough not to say it. As we walk, he’s greeted by classmates and teachers, and he has a smile for everyone. By the time we reach my physics classroom, the hallway has cleared, leaving only a few stragglers.

  I try to put on a cheerful expression to mask my distress. “Thanks for walking with me.”

  Neil doesn’t seem to buy my sudden brightness. “Look . . . I know we just met, but if you ever need someone to talk to . . .” His eyes shine with sincerity, warmth, kindness. All those sentiments I haven’t gotten nearly enough of lately.

  I take a deep breath and ask him the question foremost on my mind right now. “Do you think it’s weird to want a little taste of the Lethe? Just enough to go back to a time when things were less complicated?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s that weird. I mean, everyone has bad experiences, right? We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t.” He shifts his weight from one leg to the other. “I don’t think I could go through with it, though. Because, you know . . . even those things—maybe even especially those things—make us who we are.”

  The school bell rings. I’m late again. Six for six today. And not only that, I’ve let my new lack of ambition for being on time affect Neil, too. “Uh, sorry for making you late.”

  “Hey, no big deal. Choir can’t start without me anyway.” From anyone else that statement might sound cocky, but not from Neil. He even seems slightly embarrassed.

  A man who must be Mr. Howe approaches, looking as though he’s eager to close the door and get started. “I better go in,” I say to Neil.

  He gives me half a wave and heads off down the hallway.

  Mr. Howe takes my schedule and indicates that I should sit down. I do, once again in the back row.

  My new physics teacher starts his lecture, but I find it hard to concentrate on elementary particles and instead ponder what Neil has said about not wanting to forget his troubles. He seemed sincere, but then, t
he couple times I’ve talked to him, he’s never been less than peaceful and content. It’s hard to imagine he’s ever gone through something terrible. I’m sure if he had, if he truly knew what pain was, he’d want a gulp of the Lethe water.

  I cross my arms on the desk in front of me and lay my head down. In the dark cocoon of my arms, I close my eyes. But the familiar flashes of my bed drenched in blood force me to sit up again. My stomach rumbles, and I raise my hand for a hall pass. Mr. Howe grouches, but I don’t care. I rush to the restroom and make it just in time to throw up today’s lunch of ham sandwich and blueberry muffin into the toilet.

  I hear a whapping noise and look up with a start. I’m no longer in the girl’s restroom, puking out my guts. I am in the memory chamber, and Julian has a pair of drumsticks he’s beating on the overhang above me.

  When he sees my eyes have opened, he tosses the drumsticks and they disappear into thin air. “Great! You’re up. You look refreshed. Time to get moving.”

  I slide out of the chamber and examine the sleeve of my shift. It’s clean and pressed, without the merest hint of my recent bout of tears. Damn, these chambers are better than a dry cleaning service. “I’m ready.”

  Julian gives me a once-over and then does his tapping trick at the wall to make the door open. I’m going to have to get him to teach me that. He peers into the corridor and then motions for me to follow him.

  Our journey is almost identical to the one we took before. Same monotonous scenery of hive after hive. Same wall of silence between us. The only difference is that now we have to keep ducking into alcoves to avoid the scanner drones, which come two or three at a time.

  Finally I falter, and Julian scouts out the nearest hive while I work at staying upright. “That one is full.” He checks out several more, shaking his head each time he emerges. “They’re all full. We’ll have to do this the hard way.”

  He pounds out his secret code on one of the hives to make the door open and leads me inside. A quick scan reveals that all the chambers are indeed full, and the figures inside are much larger than what I am used to seeing.