by Gwynn White
“Come back tonight. If there’s room, you can find who you’re looking for and—”
She weakly attempted to pound his chest, to grab the collar of his checkered shirt, to shake him into a confession. Because this couldn’t be happening. People didn’t disappear and not know it. They didn’t walk into a memory and go back to bed.
“Don’t do this, Sunny.”
“How do you know my name?” She struggled to get loose.
“We all have a name.”
“How do you know it?”
His eyes were empty, but everyone was watching. She looked to the ceiling, to the walls. Paranoia seeped through the cracks, empowering toxic thoughts.
She broke away from his grip.
“That was my room when I grew up. My room. That’s the door, the doorknob, the keyhole. And this!” She shoved the music box ballerina at him. “I painted the hair with a marker to look like me!”
“Thoughts can confuse reality.”
“What?”
“You’re tired. You’re hungry.” His tone was soothing. “You’re under a lot of stress.”
“That door is real. You touch it.” She thumped it. “That was my door!”
“Memories are unreliable.”
“I know what I remember. I grew up in a one-story house. We ate dinner on a scratched table with crooked legs. My momma painted my toes. She was there. She was in that room!”
The preacher approached with calming grace. “Where was your house?”
Sunny spun away from him. His back was to the bedroom door now. She rubbed her face, pulled her hair. Where was her house? What kind of question was that? But she couldn’t remember where it was, just the details of her room, the nights of terror, the toys in her closet, hiding under her bed.
Where is my house?
“We only see what we want to see,” he said. “But often what we need to see is right in front of us. It always has been. You’re welcome to stay a bit longer until you’re—”
“What do I need to see?”
The preacher’s smile began to falter. He looked behind her. One of the staff members stopped. Sunny put her back against the wall before someone jumped her. She was a wild animal, hair bristling on her arms, tendons rigid.
“Am I crazy?”
“You’re confused.”
“The door, the room. The memory. Am I losing it, is that what I’m supposed to believe? Am I supposed to run off and fall apart? Go to the police? Talk to my ex-husband? Run in circles until I unravel? Is that what you want?”
“I don’t want anything, Sunny.”
Sunny turned her hands over, stared at the lines in her palms, looked at the stained ceiling where water had dripped from an overflowing bathroom on the floor above it, the scratches in the walls from a fight that expelled both residents.
How do I know these things?
None of this made sense. It wasn’t supposed to.
“How did I get here?” she whispered.
“You’re lost, Sunny.”
“No. How did I get… here.”
The creases deepened in the corners of his eyes. He knew what she meant. She didn’t say the world, didn’t clarify her realization, but he heard it.
The clues were all around, people were telling her. Every day made less sense than the one before it. She couldn’t trust the past, couldn’t trust the future. Couldn’t trust her memories. All of this confusion, this illogical sequence of events, was meant to throw her into madness, to pull at the seams of sanity and unwind her.
I know where I am.
“What time is it?” Russian hat shouted from around the corner. Two volunteers escorted her toward the exit. “What time is it?” she railed.
“How do I escape, preacher?”
“Escape?”
“You’re a man of God, I assume. Help a lost sheep.”
“God helps those that help themselves.”
“If I shove this ballerina up your ass, will God help you pull it out?” She held it like a dagger. A note plinked inside.
“You will be arrested for assault. It’s the way the world works.”
“This world? Is that how this world works?”
“All are God’s worlds.”
“How did I deserve this?” She wanted to bounce the ballerina off his head, open a gash at his hairline and leave a jagged scar. “I just want my son back. I want nothing else, just my son. Keep me here forever, I don’t care. Just give me my son. Please.”
“He’ll have to find his own way.” The smile returned to the preacher, one laced with a whiff of the devil.
“You can help me.” She stepped closer with the ballerina cradled in both hands. “Show me how to find him.”
He closed the bedroom door and paused with his hand on the knob. “It’s time to go, Sunny Grimm.”
The staff had cleared out the shelter. Now they approached. Were they lost, too? Are they even real?
“Perhaps you’ll find what you’re looking for another day,” he said.
The preacher’s long steps parted the gathering crowd of staff members. He disappeared into the big room. One of the women gently reminded Sunny that it was time to vacate the premises, that she could return at dinner.
Sunny clutched the ballerina and looked back at the bedroom door, the details of her childhood staring back.
They walked her outside and gave her advice where she might go for the day. Rain dripped through a rip in the blue awning. A cruel wind blew her off-balance. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.
Mrs. Jones had posed three questions when she was in the café. She said three questions had to be answered to escape this particular Maze. Sunny had now answered two of them. She knew who she was, and now she knew where she was. But she didn’t know why. She thought of a fourth question as she stepped into the rain.
How did I get in the Maze?
24
Hunter
After the Punch
The phone lit up.
Call me now, the text said. It was followed by where the hell are you? There was a voicemail from the main office, too. His superiors were insistent.
Hunter had been due back weeks ago. He had texted at some point that he was sick, got the flu, was going to ride it out at the hotel and didn’t know when he’d be back. Someone had called every day since, but he didn’t answer because he was sick.
I’m incurable.
The itch had become a full-grown dragon.
For decades, he’d kept his addiction hidden, protected it, and fed it. What choice did he have? If he told someone what he was doing, he never would’ve gotten a job. He had to pretend to be normal, pretend he loved his wife and his house and his dog. He was the poster child of what was possible after tragedy, that a wrecked past could be left behind.
He had to keep it secret.
No one could blame him. Foreverland was a tattoo that faded over time but never disappeared. It was a mainline of heroin that ignited pleasure centers that never forgot. Deprivation of that beauty transformed into a brain worm that crawled around in his skull in search of gratification.
The old men had planted the itch. They’d marched him with the other boys and tempted them to reach for the needle with pain and suffering. Once he saw where the needle took him, a beautiful alternate reality, he didn’t need to be coaxed anymore. He reached for it on sight. He was a kid.
It’s not my fault.
There were people that tried to help when he was younger. There were doctors that wiped his memories after being rescued from the island, deleted the worst parts of his life, told him that he was safe now, that he wouldn’t go back. He could start over, start fresh.
But they couldn’t erase everything.
He maintained fragments of the island, little sections of memory like he was reading about someone else’s life, like he wasn’t the one running on the beach. He wasn’t the one that saw the chimney smoke when another boy had been deleted. It wasn’t him that saw the old men col
lapse en masse when Foreverland died. Sometimes he wondered if he actually saw the Coast Guard arriving on saving day or just remembered someone talking about it.
But the body remembered.
It knew the damage done, even if the brain did not. His adoptive parents were happy to have him back when he was rescued. They were thrilled to receive compensation for his pain and suffering, the Foreverland fund that supported the survivors. But in his late teens, it was clear he hadn’t completely escaped. That was when the brain worm had grown from an annoyance of facial tics to a creature of panic disorders and hallucinations.
At night, he scratched until his scalp bled. Scalding showers sometimes worked long enough to sleep a few hours. He turned to cutting tiny red lines that let the worm breathe. He started on his arms then moved the razor between his toes, behind his ears.
It worked for a while.
The Foreverland fund put him through years of cognitive therapy, mindful awareness and psychotropic remediation. All of it helpful. None of it the cure. Hunter was still a minor, but he knew the root of the problem. No one would believe him if he told them, but he knew deep down what the worm wanted.
Foreverland was calling. It wanted him to come home.
After all the touchy-feely nonsense had failed, he found a way to quiet the compulsion. He had searched for a way to do it so that when he turned eighteen years old, he moved out and took the Foreverland fund with him. He would use the money to quiet the madness.
The procedure was experimental and, of course, illegal. The needle had been declared a felony, thanks in large part to the island. It was nearly impossible to find a way to awareness leap through a needle, but not where third-world governments took a cut.
The needle accessed the front lobe through the forehead, which left a noticeable mark, one that was hard to hide. He already had the stent and there were prosthetics to camouflage it, but he wanted a permanent solution, one that he could hide.
A true addict.
It happened somewhere on the other side of the world. He didn’t speak the language, but his money answered all the questions. He was alone when they wheeled him into an open surgical room. A goat was bleating in a far corner. People were weeping behind curtains.
He was awake for the procedure, heard the saw open the back of his skull and stared at the lights as the men behind masks spoke another language, the tone a bit too conversational for his comfort, the laughter too genial. When they were ready for the insertion, the surgeon pulled out the sleeve that would put a dagger through the worm.
They showed him a graphene stent.
It was the size and shape of a straw, the barrel several inches long. When they slid it between the left and right hemispheres of his brain, positioning it in the exact location needed to access the frontal lobe from the back, he distinctly remembered smelling popcorn and seeing the color blue.
Then they revealed the dagger.
The needle was encased in a tube of gel. A thin wire ran to a bank of computers in another room. They waved it in front of his face, then carried it out of sight. When they broke the seal, the translator explained it would be inserted into the graphene stent.
He knew exactly when they did it.
It went in like an icicle. The worm that had been rooting through his brain all those years suddenly vanished.
Somewhere behind him, the translator relayed questions. The temperature fluctuated. Colors broke across the room, faces and balloons and animals came out of nowhere. The sound of an ice cream truck was under the table. A clown hung from the ceiling.
“Where you go?” The surgeon’s English was broken behind the mask. “You choice.”
Hunter knew how this worked. Visualize your destination and the needle would take you there. That was how Foreverland worked, how all alternate realities worked. The universe wasn’t even your limit. Your imagination was.
Only one destination would cure the itch, one that had followed him most of his life, one that demanded he return.
Do I have a choice?
He closed his eyes and felt the sand on his toes, the salt on his cheeks. He returned to the island of Foreverland, the place of promises and horrors, where the old men stole their bodies and erased their minds. He went back to the place that took his childhood, a paradise he swore he would never see again.
Until now.
All these years later, he sweated through a hotel bedspread. The worm had matured. Now he floundered under the weight of a dragon. Nothing had been solved, the addiction not satisfied. He could only manage it by feeding it, which had only served to fatten it.
Do I have a choice?
He reached for his luggage. Quivering, he arranged his pillow and broke a new needle from the vial. Face down, he felt along the back of his head until his fingertips touched the hidden stent. Parting his hair with two fingers, the tip of the needle hovered near the opening. In one fluid motion, he stabbed inward.
The needle’s kiss.
His awareness was yanked from his body like a log chain ripping a tree from the earth. He dreamed a dream and for the thousandth time felt sand beneath his toes, salt on his cheeks. The laptop was hardly enough to support the alternate reality he craved—he couldn’t walk around, couldn’t explore—but he could sit on the dune. And that was enough.
The dragon would sleep for a little while.
He was a victim of greed and the long shadow of abuse. Hunter couldn’t trust his thoughts and memories, and perhaps that was the deepest wound struck by the old men. That lash separated him from his own self. Now he lived for the needle to survive. What choice was there?
If there was a way to slay the dragon, he would pay the price. If Dova could do so, he was powerless to stop her. Foreverland wasn’t of this world. And he lived his entire life as if he belonged there, not in this life, not in this skin. He would pay any price to get off this wheel.
That scared him more than anything.
25
Hunter
After the Punch
The old woman was in the office.
Hunter quivered with déjà vu. She had been there on the day he arrived, sitting in the detective’s office, and now she was there again. And Freddy wasn’t.
His phone buzzed. Who is this?
It had been a while since he’d gotten one of these cryptic texts from the same number he’d blocked a dozen times. How is this prick doing it? The phone number seemed familiar. There were a lot of things he didn’t care about anymore. That number was one of them, familiar or not.
Your mother, he typed back.
“Can I help you?” a young officer asked. He was handsome, hair as black as his pupils. His shirt was tucked in, belt buckle shiny and Gutierrez was on the ID around his neck.
“I have a meeting with the detective,” Hunter said.
“He got called out, be back in an hour. He expecting you?”
Hunter had spoken with Freddy on the phone, told him he was still in town and had a few more questions. Freddy wasn’t thrilled, sighing long and hard into a stretch of silence before agreeing to meet with him.
Hunter had moved to a hotel on the other side of the city and checked in under an assumed name. No one would find him. Not his employer, and not Dova. He needed to get his head right, get control of the situation like he’d done for the last fifty years. But the stent was beginning to ache. He was using every day now. Something had to change and he didn’t want it to be Dova’s people.
“You can wait,” Gutierrez said, “or leave a message up front; he’ll call you back.”
If Hunter went back to the hotel, he’d go facedown. At least outside, he broke the ritual of pulling the drapes clothes and indulging.
“I’ll wait.”
Hunter remained standing, briefcase over his shoulder, looking much the same as he did the first day he arrived. And she was there.
He’d seen the old woman before, and not just in Freddy’s office. The more he thought about it, she was at 511 when he first m
et Dova. And she was on the veranda at the lake house while Dova smoked a clove cigarette.
She’s following me. He didn’t expect an old woman to spy on him, to find him at the hotel, watch him eat breakfast, learn where he was going. She had to be working for Dova.
She always gets there first. How does she know where I’m going?
He sat on the corner of an empty desk, arms crossed. Folders were spread over a keyboard with papers spilling out. One was labeled Foreverland. The cops were doing research. Why would they have information sitting out like that?
They’re all watching.
He realized the absurdity of that paranoid thought. There must’ve been more than ten thousand old women with white hair in the city. And everyone knew about Foreverland. But he was looking for a reason to explain this city and what was happening to him. Everything had fallen apart since arriving.
It was the same report on Foreverland: the advanced technology, the sophisticated network, the kidnappings. They’d been printed right off the Internet. A list of victims was paper clipped to one of the folders. It was long and alphabetized. Hunter pushed the other pages around, expecting to see his photo or name, a background check or something. There were plenty of photos, but none of them were him. His name wasn’t even on the list of victims.
“Weren’t you here a ways back?”
Hunter had been caught reading the file, but Gutierrez didn’t seem to notice.
“FBI, right?” he said. “Looking for the Grimm woman. Sunny Grimm, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You find her?”
Hunter shook his head.
“The city has her now,” Gutierrez said. “Stay here long enough and you learn that. People come for the bright lights and just melt away.”
“I didn’t realize giving up on a missing person was police procedure.”
“I get it.” He nodded along. “You think we don’t care, right? But hang around, you’ll see. People are going to do what they want; you can’t stop them. Some, they don’t want to be saved. That’s why they come to the city.”
