“It should—because it is. But you’ll see the differences soon enough, like us waiting for the monorail, for instance. The train doesn’t stop for us; it stops for them.”
“Hello.” A young brunette woman appeared in the aisle next to us. She couldn’t be over twenty, stunning in a white tank top and super short, tight jean shorts. The legs she showed off were toned and tan. Voluptuous, flowing hair grazed her shoulders. She bit her lower lip, looking down on us with an intense, almost hungry expression. “Do you share?” She was looking at me, but I got the feeling her question was directed at Nero.
“We would like to be left alone,” Nero said sternly.
“Not willing to help a poor girl out?” She batted her eyes and bit her lip harder. At first it was incredibly sexy, but then I was almost afraid she’d draw blood. She looked tense and the muscles in her arms twitched.
“Why don’t you go back to your seat so we can continue our peaceful trip into the city?”
“Hi, darling. I’m Anastasia.” She reached an arm over Nero, palm down, with her dark pink nails out. Her gaze was glued to me.
As soon as she’d said her name, all I could think of was Anna.
“Oliver,” I said and shook her hand like I was carefully ringing a bell.
Nero stood up, forcing Anastasia to quickly retract her perfect hand. “Oliver is not interested,” Nero said sternly. “It’s about time you left.”
“I could do wonderful things to you,” Anastasia said to me with a devious smile.
I swallowed hard and watched her walk away.
“That was—uncomfortable.”
“She’s dangerous,” Nero snapped.
The monorail sailed into the city, enveloped by the towering edifices. Upon closer inspection, the buildings still looked the same. They still didn’t look like they were crumbling from neglect or falling apart at the seams.
We reached the central hub and got off. There were so few of us exiting the monorail. That was strange as compared to the regular Provex City. There were only a few of us, but if felt like Nero and I were the center of attention. I saw Anastasia in the distance still eying me.
Nero supported me, but forced me to stumble along much faster than before. We raced to the escalator and continued to walk as if it was just a staircase. Mirrors were watching us from below as well, like they were waiting for us. When we reached the ground level, we barreled through the onlookers and continued down the sidewalk. Hands reached out to me as we passed, hands of men and women, and I shuttered with each groping touch. The sidewalks were much emptier than the Provex City I remembered, but the mirrors here were all looking at us. I had never felt so self-conscious in my life. This was worse than being the center of attention in the fight with Sasha. This was worse than being the center of attention in Level Seven. They weren’t just watching. They were tearing me apart with their eyes. I had to look down.
Finally, Nero couldn’t take my hobbling any longer and commanded me to jump onto his back. He carried me the rest of the way, even faster than before.
He turned into a red building on Alexandria Boulevard. I got an even greater appreciation for how indebted this society was to the Lornes. They were worshipped and untouchable. I cringed seeing Alexandria’s name again on a street sign.
Nero traveled past the elevators and to a small corridor hiding the stairs and carried me up ten flights. With the sizes of these buildings, I couldn’t imagine anyone going up or down hundreds of flights of stairs.
“The upper floors are rarely occupied,” Nero said without sounding winded. He didn’t have to explain; I fully understood why.
We entered an apartment that didn’t look all that remarkable. It looked like an apartment I would be used to, a modest living. The curtains were open, shining light into the open living area.
Nero set me down. My clothes were cold, but almost dry. My hair was frizzy and all over the place, and not in the cool way like Darius seemed to be always able to pull off. Nero disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. I was so thirsty and still felt the ill effects from the drugs, so I downed the entire glass in one long gulp.
“Slow down,” Nero instructed, trying to grab the glass back from me before I’d finished.
I swallowed the last fourth of the water wrong and found myself consumed by a fit of coughing and karma.
“Lie down. A few hours will get the rest of that crap out of your system. Then we can talk about how we’re going to find Desiree.” Nero smiled at me.
I was in no place to argue. Nothing sounded better than a few hours of peaceful sleep. With a rested and clear head I’d be able to make better decisions. Nero and I made a good team.
He led me to the bedroom and allowed me in without following. I felt gross in my green scrubs and blood-soaked and filthy bandages, but the most important thing to me in that moment was sleep. I flopped down onto the bed, asleep before my body even stopped bouncing.
I awoke with my hands stretched over my head. My arms were sore, but that was to be expected. I went to rub my eyes to free them from sleep, but my arms were held in place, with cold teeth biting into my wrists. I was awoken further by the loud clinks of metal rubbing together.
Both of my hands were cuffed above my head, the two chains connected to the black iron head post. These were no kinky toys, but real handcuffs, accented with barbed wire. That explained the biting into my wrists. The bandage on my right hand soaked up the blood inflicted from the barbed wire. Blood from my left wrist stained my pillow. Similarly, my feet were cuffed to the metal foot board. My socks where dark brown from a grotesque mixture of dirt and blood.
I could barely move. And when I tried, the biting deterred further struggling.
There had to be some mistake. Something must have happened to Nero. I was back in the hands of Alexandria Lorne or one of her sinister counterparts. I couldn’t believe my luck. I couldn’t believe what was happening…again.
“Nero!” I yelled, hoping he was all right.
The doorway across the room was opaque, but Nero stepped through the door without it fading, holding a tray of food. “Oliver, you’re finally awake,” he said with a wide smile.
I looked at him puzzled for a moment while he placed the tray on the nightstand and checked my restraints.
“Is this your idea of a joke?” I demanded. “Because it’s not funny.”
“No, Oliver. This is no joke.” Nero sat beside me on the bed. “This is my reward for all I’ve had to endure.” He took a plate from the tray with a half sandwich cut like a triangle. “Come now, eat. You must be hungry.”
I had been, but my hunger was swiftly overtaken by nausea. He brought the sandwich to my lips and I shook my head in protest. Tremors worked their way up his arm as he pulled the sandwich from me.
Nero’s expression looked crestfallen and he dropped the plate with the untouched sandwich back onto the tray.
“You’ll have to eat to stay strong. You need to stay well.” Nero took a bite from the sandwich he’d offered me. Both arms shook like he was nervous or receiving electrical shock treatments. “See? No poison.”
I turned my head to look out the window on the far side of the room. Across the street was a blue building, hoarding the entire view. The windows on the building across the street were dark, overshadowed by the glow of the building. I could see nothing inside.
Nero offered me a glass of water. I refused to turn my head toward him and refused his nourishment. He took it away, gathered the tray and exited the room. The items on the tray clanged against one another as he couldn’t seem to hold his arms still.
I pulled at my restraints and winced at the pain as the wire dug into my wrists. The teeth around my ankles bit through my socks. I closed my eyes and pictured my arms and legs passing through the handcuffs. He had seen what we’d done to get out of the asylum. How did he plan to keep me locked up with a few handcuffs?
“You can’t pull through those,” N
ero said, walking back into the room. “Things don’t work the same here.” He rolled in a metal post on wheels with what looked like an IV bag hanging from a coiled arm.
I closed my eyes again and tried to prove him wrong, but my wrists and ankles couldn’t seem to escape the teeth.
“If you fight, you will just end up hurting yourself more,” Nero said calmly.
“Which will hurt you. So that’s worth something.”
“Not here.” He backhanded me across the face—hard.
Why do people keep doing that?
“See?” He smiled. “I’m fine.”
But Nero didn’t look fine. He wasn’t visibly injured by the slap, but he continued to shake, seemingly more uncontrollably than a few minutes earlier. His skin had grown more yellowish and hung loosely from his bones. His radiant looks were draining.
Nero placed the metal post next to the bed and removed a clear tube and roll of surgical tape from the nightstand. He connected one end of the tube to the bag hanging from the outstretched coil, and a small needle to the other end.
I’d had enough with needles.
He brought the needle to my left arm and pushed it in without hesitation. I cringed at the new invasion into my body. Nero cut a few pieces of surgical tape and stuck them over where the needle entered my tender skin.
“Was everything you said about saving me and helping me and helping me find Desiree—was it all a lie?” I asked. Nothing he could say would provide an acceptable excuse, but I had to ask the question.
“Shh.” He put a finger to his lips. “Don’t talk. Save your energy.”
The metal post had a small mechanical box attached to it at Nero’s chest level. He flipped a switch and fiddled with the dials on the box. A soft hum emanated from it, reminding me of the hum in the asylum from lockdown. The sound and association sent a shiver through my body.
Blood began to pull through the tube connected to my arm, slowly traveling like liquid sucked through a straw, and dripped into the bag hanging from the post.
There was another wound tube laying on the nightstand. Nero hooked one end of it to the blood bag, right next to the tube connected to me. He pulled it with him so he could sit in a cushioned chair on the far side of the nightstand. Another small needle was attached to the end of the tube he clumsily held in his hand. He balled his right hand into a fist causing the veins in his arms to pop. But his arm continued to shake violently. Nero stuck the needle into one of the palpable veins on the inside of his forearm just below his elbow. Blood slowly drained from the bag and traveled down the tube connected to his arm.
When my blood reached his arm, his whole body quickly slumped, and his arms collapsed dramatically into his lap. He let out a long sigh. The shaking in his body subsided within a minute as he sat, head propped against the wall. The yellowish color of his skin faded and its radiance returned.
I, on the other hand, felt my own life being sucked out of me. There was no other way to describe it. I felt weak and dizzy, so very tired. It was sickening. I could barely lift a finger, move a muscle, or keep my eyes open. If the cuffs weren’t holding me to the bed, my extreme fatigue was. Nero could release me from my chains and I would still be lying helplessly on the bed with no strength or ability to escape.
“Oh my God, that feels good,” Nero whispered, standing up and shaking his body out like he was about to go for a run. He had a grin so wide it nearly split his face in half. Pulling the needle from his arm, he licked the end of it clean and stared down at me. “Your sacrifice is much appreciated, my brother.”
He shut down the machine, detached me from the tubes, and walked into the dark bathroom. I never heard the sound of a faucet running, only the sloshing of water like the sink or tub was already full. He returned moments later with the tubes cleaned and coiled, and placed them back into the nightstand drawer.
“Rest, Oliver,” Nero said, touching my arm gently, and left the room.
I thought back to Darius telling Desiree and me about the rare eyewitness accounts of the symmetric reality and the name Antonio something came to mind—the man who escaped the other side after 200 plus years of imprisonment.
Is that what I have to look forward to?
Well, the supposed eyewitness accounts were wrong about what the symmetric plane looked like. But could that length of imprisonment actually be possible? I couldn’t fathom the hell of feeling the way I did now for the next week, let alone 200 years.
I tried pulling at my restraints again, but my efforts were so weak, I was moving more in my mind than in reality, which made me think of Mr. Gordon and his lesson on telekinesis. Desiree was light-years ahead of me, like usual. Then I pictured Desiree chained, in a similar predicament to myself. She had been through so much with TJ; I couldn’t even imagine what she’d be feeling at this point. I just wanted to find her, to see her, to hold her again.
I was reminded of my last conversation with Blaine—back to that afternoon in the bathroom when he showed me the last stall and described the shell of a person TJ had become near the end of his life. The hopelessness utterly consuming him.
My room.
Now, this was my room. I scanned the walls and could see it with TJ’s graffiti from the bathroom stall. I could feel what he had felt. Hopelessness. And I couldn’t do anything about it. If the razor was still in my sock, it wouldn’t do me much good now. Frolics was placed on a dresser across the room, sitting in front of a flat screen television and facing me—his expression saying, don’t you dare.
I uselessly pulled at my sharp shackles again.
TJ & Desiree (G)
TJ left a majority of the test blank. He was the first student to stand up and turn it in to Mrs. Watson.
“Are you sure you don’t want to finish this?” she asked, browsing through the half-empty pages.
“I answered what I could.” He returned to his desk and put his head down.
“Can you stay and talk with me after class?” she called from the front of the classroom.
“Sure thing.” TJ didn’t bother raising his head. And when the bell rang, he was out the door with the rest of his classmates.
Blaine abruptly stopped him in the hall.
“Hey, man. I haven’t seen you like all week. What’s up with you?”
“Nothing. I gotta go. Third period calls,” TJ said abnormally loud and left Blaine standing alone in the middle of the hallway with hordes of students pushing past him. Blaine yelled after him, but didn’t chase him down.
TJ left the humanities building and floated out into the quad. His next class was all the way on the other side of campus and it just seemed so far away. His energy was draining. He locked in on Desiree’s friend, Anna, walking with someone a few hundred paces away. Seeing Anna only made him think of Desiree and how their relationship had imploded after prom. He hadn’t seen or talked with her in several weeks. After the exchange in front of her house, he was afraid to even walk down that side of Wheeler. Her mother had sounded serious about getting the police involved. And who knew what she would tell them. Who knew what she had already told them. What had Desiree told her mother? Or a teacher? Or her other friends?
TJ ducked into a nearby bathroom and locked himself in the farthest stall. He sat down on the toilet and placed his backpack on his lap.
There were two guys standing at the urinals, talking about girls they’d hooked up with at a party over the weekend. Drunk girls. Party girls. Good lays.
Were these girls generally easy hook-ups or only after so many drinks? Were these guys any different than he was, besides bragging about and ranking their latest conquests?
TJ covered his ears and did everything he could not to picture Desiree. But the more he tried not to think of her, the more she showed her pretty face. The more that night returned. He saw her in the purple strapless dress. He felt her kissing him. He remembered how it felt fervently pulling her dress down and eventually off. It wasn’t anything he wanted to share with anyone other than her.
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The two guys left and TJ found the bathroom eerily quiet. The bell rang, signaling the start of third period. It didn’t matter. Nothing did anymore.
TJ looked around the stall—his new room—the only one he still deserved. It was covered in writing and etchings, everything from gang affiliations to phone numbers to apocalyptic prophecy. He had already flushed so many things away. He could sit here forever and just continue flushing until there was nothing left—until he was completely empty.
TJ took a pocketknife from his backpack and began adding to the art on the walls. My room. He looked at what he had etched into the metal and it felt so appropriate. So he etched it again into the other wall. My room. It felt good to destroy something. He cut into the walls over and over, in blank spaces and over other writing, until it lost its appeal: the cutting into metal. The rush had faded and TJ fought to get it back.
He skimmed the blade of the knife with his thumb, scratching lightly across his skin. Then he looked down at his bare arm resting atop his backpack.
The first cut into his arm was the worst. It wasn’t deep so it took a moment for the blood to pool. The second was a little deeper and afterward the rush began to return. It felt good to destroy something, especially something so personal. He had carved four letters into his forearm, the “o” looking more like a diamond, when the bathroom door opened. Blood was pouring all around his arm and dripping onto his backpack and clothes. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Nothing did.
There were several guys talking.
“Get out!” TJ yelled.
The bathroom became silent.
Then one of the guys shot back. “Who’s gonna make me?”
TJ’s self-induced rush was peaking. He stood up, simply let his backpack fall to the floor, and opened the door. My room. He stepped out of his stall and stood before three upperclassmen. His left arm was covered in bloody letters, dripping down to his hand, and he still held the open pocket knife in his other hand.
The three guys stumbled over each other on their way out the door.
SUSY Asylum Page 31
