The Dead Girl in 2A

by Carter Wilson

  One minute.

  I almost came up when the panic began to overwhelm me, that desperate need to breathe, but I pushed a little bit harder. In fact, I pushed all the way through to the other side.

  At a hundred and seven seconds, a calm like I’ve never experienced settled over me. My whole body stopped moving, and I became the water, and if the drain had opened, I’m certain I would have been sucked right down. There was no part of me warning I could die in that moment, no automatic reflexes lifting me to the surface.

  I stopped counting, because seconds no longer mattered. I would do whatever the water wanted me to do, and if it was my purpose to forever exist beneath the bubbles, so be it.

  There was…something.

  Now, as I write and recall this, sitting here in this Aspen hotel, I expected to tell the story of feeling an overwhelming, irrational sense of peace under the water. But I didn’t remember until this moment the reason I returned to the surface.

  There was another memory.

  One that my ten-year-old self had in the beneath, and I’m suddenly having again right now. It’s as clear as watching a movie, and this is perhaps the most vivid memory I’ve had since…well, since the poor people stabbed to death in their bed.

  As with that one, I am a younger child in this memory. My parents are dead, but I am not yet with my adoptive parents. It is the in-between time, the lost time. I’ve been told I was in an orphanage of sorts, but only for a short while. Math dictates it had to have been over a year, and somehow I eventually became fine with the fact my memory of that entire period has ceased to exist.

  I am in a room. A classroom. There are a handful of other children there, but I can’t make out their faces. I look up and see a man. The teacher. On his desk, a name painted in sparkled gold on a clunky wooden block. Black outlines.

  Mr. Müller.

  He walks among us carrying a stack of books, each of them wide, white, thin. Laminate hardcover. He begins handing them out to each student.

  Now he is here, standing over me. Peering down.

  Here is yours, Clara. But before you read it, take your vitamin.

  On my desk, a plastic cup of water and a smaller container with a single, tiny blue pill in it. I don’t want to take the vitamin, but I do want my book. So I gulp it down, its aftertaste familiar, as if I’ve taken many before.

  Mr. Müller nods and smiles. Good girl. Then he hands me my book, and I see it for the first time.

  The Responsibility of Death.

  Mr. Müller continues on, and I crack open my copy to the middle, to a page of overwhelming artwork, a thousand pen scratches forming the image of a little boy and an old man walking through the woods. An owl hoots out from the top right of the page, and the figures hear different interpretations.

  The boy hears Follow the path to your dreams.

  The old man, in a much bleaker vein, hears Yield your space for others.

  “I think they’re all different.”

  The voice comes from behind. I turn, and the boy leans forward and whispers again.

  “What’s yours about?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve only just opened it. There’s a boy and an old man.”

  I stare at the boy seated behind me, searching for familiarity, his blue-gray eyes the color of river rock. Sandy hair, tight little nose, Tic-Tac teeth crooked and white. He’s younger than me, I think.

  “What about yours?” I ask.

  His face scrunches, brows narrow. Leans back into his plastic chair and looks down again at his book, which is open, like mine, somewhere in the middle.

  “It’s weird,” he says. “I think it’s about a painter.” His head tilts in confusion. “But all his paintings seem to be about dead people.”

  Mr. Müller’s voice materializes as if over a loudspeaker, deep and resonant, making me jump.

  “You’re right, Landis. The books are all different. Each one is perfect for its owner, and they are yours to keep and study. To absorb. They might not make sense to you now, but someday they will.” Mr. Müller strolls back to the front of the classroom. “Someday, each of you will do great things. Memorable things, I’m certain. And these books and your vitamins are an important part of that. So, for now, no talking. Everyone read your book all the way through. Just once, and from the beginning. Appreciate how special this is. The first step along quite a lengthy road.”

  The memory-within-a-memory ends there, quickly dissolving. No more schoolroom. No more mysterious books. No more familiar vitamins.

  The next thing I recall, I was above the bathwater, gasping for air. Panting, panicking, unsteady, and uncertain what I had seen. Uncertain how close to death I had been.

  Was any of this real?

  My hand shakes as I write this.

  I look over at the book next to me, the book I’ve been carrying for over a year now, and for the first time, I realize it’s been part of me for much longer.

  Not just me, but others.

  There were other kids, and we were all in that classroom. Not many, maybe three or four more. Just as there were in the bedroom the night of the murders. I think this was the same group of children. The same time period.

  And the boy. The one with the tight little nose and the book about paintings of dead people.

  Mr. Müller called him Landis.

  Twenty-Eight

  Jake

  “I get paid a lot of money,” Elle says as night whooshes by outside the car. “I earn every penny, because I’m good…no, great, at what I do. What I do is find people, then surveil them. You have an ex who’s skipped town? Call me. You have a whistle-blower who went off the grid? I’ll find him. I’ve done some dirty work for dirty people, and I take their money with a smile. My services aren’t hard to find with a search engine.”

  “I don’t doubt any of those things.”

  “This quirky guy named Landis gives me a call,” she continues. “Says he hears I know how to locate people. I say, sure, yeah. That’s what I do. Who do you need me to find? And then he says there’s more than one. There are four. That he needs these people found and monitored. So I listen to this, take it in, decide the guy has no idea what he’s doing, and I don’t want to waste my time with amateurs, so I quote him this crazy fee. Like, crazy fee. And you know what he says? He says, ‘Money is no object.’ Who says that? It’s not a real thing, right? Only in movies. So I start laughing, and he just sits there in silence. When I’m done laughing, he calmly asks for my retainer amount and wiring instructions. I tell him, and we hang up. Two hours later, I get a wire notice from the bank. The next day, the money is in my account.”

  The same method Eaton used to engage my services, I think. A willingness to pay an outrageous fee.

  Elle continues. “Like most clients, Landis isn’t real forthcoming to me about the why of what he’s doing. But he’s got to give me as much information as he can in order to help with my search, and it quickly becomes clear this isn’t some run-of-the-mill search for people who owe him money.”

  “How so?”

  “I’ll tell you how so. I’ll tell you exactly what he told me, right after he made me sign a confidentiality agreement. I’ve already broken the agreement by talking to you, so I may as well tell you everything.” She stares straight out the window for a moment, seemingly collecting her memories. A few moments pass, then she says, “Landis said he had an old journal that belonged to his father, and this journal documented some kind of psychological experiments being carried out on a group of children. The names of four children—the subjects of whatever experiment it was—were in the book. These are the people he wants found. Landis say the names were written down in the early nineties, and that most of the people now should be in their midthirties. Last names likely changed, as well. Your name was on the list. And Clara’s.”

  “Early nineties,” I
say. “I was in an orphanage then. I don’t remember any of it.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Not an orphanage, Jake. A school.”

  A chill worms through my guts.

  “A school?” I ask. “What kind of school?”

  Elle shakes her head. “A school consisting mostly of orphans… That’s all he said. I figured if the journal belongs to Landis’s father, then his father must have somehow been a part of it all. I think Landis himself was even there.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  Elle nods. “Oh, I asked him lots of things. Because I’m thinking maybe this guy is actually out of his mind, and that’s obviously something I would want to know if I’m getting into business with him. I asked him where the school was. What did it look like? How were the students chosen? Etc., etc.” She’s getting more animated, speaking with one hand off the wheel at a time. “But here’s the thing. He doesn’t know anything, Jake. He says he doesn’t remember. All the information he has is from this journal.”

  Landis doesn’t remember. Just like me.

  “So why the hell does he want to find us?” I ask. “I mean, what’s the point?”

  “The most he said was that the program was incomplete. The program. That’s what he called whatever experiments were being done on the children. He said if he could find the children from that school, he could continue his father’s program. That his father was working on a medical breakthrough that could… How did he say it? Create exceptional people. He said even as adults, the program could still work, but it had to be done only with these four specific people.”

  “Wait,” I say. “You said you think he was at the school too. Which would mean Landis would’ve been a little kid at the time, just like me. You even said he doesn’t remember, which is the theme here, right? I don’t remember. Clara doesn’t remember. Landis doesn’t remember. So why isn’t Landis going through this program himself? What does he need us for?”

  “I have no idea, Jake. Maybe he is.” Then she looks over with tightly drawn lips and narrowed eyes. “Or, think about it this way,” she says. “What do researchers do when they’re developing a new drug? Before they try it out on people?”

  It clicks in place. “They test it on animals,” I say. “Fuck. That’s what you meant when you said he was experimenting on us.”

  “Right. Maybe all of his promises are rooted in truth,” she says. “Maybe the program can work. But what if he doesn’t know for sure? I sure as hell wouldn’t want to take a chance with my own life, and maybe neither would he. Not when he can find some lab rats.”

  “Have you seen this journal?”

  “No.”

  “What happened to his father?” I ask.

  “Dead,” she replies. “Not sure how.”

  “Okay, so Landis hires you to find us. What then?”

  “Then it only gets stranger,” she says. We are now well past Denver, which glimmers in the distance in my side-view mirror. We’re climbing into the mountains with no destination that I’m aware of. “I’m able to locate all of you—which was no easy feat—and then he pays me to keep tabs on you all. Very light surveillance, just making sure I’m aware when you’re traveling, that kind of thing. He even pays me to help lure you into his clinic.”

  The clinic in Boston, I think. A few plants, barely anything on the walls besides the lab name and logo, and no other employee besides Landis.

  “How did you help?”

  “Those flyers you received every day? That was me.”

  “Did you understand the…the meaning of the flyers? The picture?”

  “I asked Landis. He revealed a little more to me after I’d been successful in locating all of you. He said the program was a mix of different types of stimulus. Visual stimulus…the books. Chemical stimulus…the pills.”

  “He told me he was a doctor,” I say.

  “Which I’m sure you were happy to believe. Predisposed to believe, even. But no. He said probably none of you would remember the school or your time there, but you’d all respond to the images on the flyers. That was why it had to be you four specifically. Those images were somehow meaningful to you, even if you couldn’t remember them. You each had your own picture book, which was integral to the program. A book that would create a positive response in you.”

  “You said the pictures were algorithms,” I say.

  “That’s what Landis told me. Each book was apparently tailored to just one individual.”

  Hearing her fill in these pieces stirs even more angst in me, because I still can’t put the whole picture together.

  “So you just helped him pretend to be a doctor and sell some bullshit story to us?”

  “Yes, Jake, I did. I won’t deny it. But you did walk into his clinic. All four of you. Willingly. It was bizarre to watch. And you all agreed to be in the program.”

  “I didn’t…not really.” My defensiveness comes off as weak.

  “You did. Eventually, you all did. Which brings me to Kate and Raymond.”

  I want to know about them just as much as I don’t want to know. “Okay.”

  “Kate was the first one I found,” Elle says. “Followed by Raymond. Landis approached them first. Or, I should say, got them to approach him. And things worked just like Landis expected. They each went to visit him in a makeshift office he put up, and he put them in his ‘clinical trial.’” She air-quotes those two words with one hand. “He had me keep loose tabs on them while I worked to find you and Clara.”

  “And what then?”

  “Then, nothing,” she says. “At least for a while. I thought the whole thing was pretty ridiculous, but it was a very well-paying kind of ridiculous, so I was happy to keep doing the work. After I located each of you, none of the rest of what I had to do was all that difficult. But then there was an incident about a year after all this started.”

  “What incident?”

  She takes a moment before answering, and when she does, her tone is flat.

  “Kate blew her fucking head off.”

  Twenty-Nine

  “Suicide,” I say. “Just like Clara.” God, how awful. Maybe The Responsibility of Death isn’t a book teaching self-actualization. Maybe it’s an instruction manual.

  “Clara’s going to kill herself?” Elle asks.

  “She told me on the plane to Denver,” I answer. “We had a connection. A sense of knowing each other. We tried to figure out where we knew each other from, but couldn’t. All we really found we had in common was we were both orphaned at a young age, and neither of us have memories from back then.”

  I don’t like the progression here. Each of the other three people Landis inducted into his program has either died or is planning to. I’m the fourth on the list.

  “Did she say where she was headed?”

  “The Maroon Bells,” I say. “Near Aspen.”

  “Good, that’s a start. That might be enough to find her.”

  “If she’s even alive.”

  Elle says nothing to this.

  “So Kate killed herself because of the program?” I ask. “She didn’t have depression or anything?”

  “As much a happy soccer mom as you can imagine, up until the moment she sucked on that gun. My money says it was related to the program.”

  “Did you confront Landis?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “And?”

  “He’s the one who told me she’d been making good progress, as far as he could tell,” Elle says. “He said he’d anticipated behavioral changes with all four of you, but the program was designed to effect positive changes. Increase your emotional intelligence, unlock potential, and restore your long-term memories.” She looks over. “Did you have any of that?”

  I think about that. “I didn’t start taking the pills right away. And once I did, I didn’t have any
memories of my past.”

  Except for that horrifying one in Eaton’s apartment, I don’t add.

  “In fact, I even started losing some of my short-term memory,” I say. “As for emotional intelligence? That’s true.”

  “How so?”

  “I could read the sadness on you even before you told me a single thing,” I say. “The moment I met you, I saw it. All that stuff you said about being lonely? I had an immediate sense of it. Before I met Landis, I don’t think I would have noticed at all. But I can read people’s… I don’t know. Energy is probably the best thing to call it. Is it a positive change? Yeah, I think it is. It’s caused upheaval, but I also feel more certain about who I am.”

  “That’s pretty vague.”

  “Maybe. But in terms of unlocking potential, I can give you a concrete example. For the first time in my life, I know I’m supposed to a writer. I mean, I’ve always had a knack for it, and I certainly have improved with years of practice. But ever since I’ve been part of whatever all this is, I know writing is what I was meant to do. There’s even a novel that I’ve been thinking about for years and have barely written any of it. Just a few months ago, the entire plot came to me. I mean, entire plot. All the details. I haven’t even written it down yet, but it’s clear in my mind every day.” I lean back against the leather and think about all the things I’ve felt since Landis came into my life. A desire to kill myself hasn’t been one of them. “I suppose Kate never had that kind of epiphany.”

  Elle shakes her head, her curls jiggling in the light of the dashboard. “Landis called it ‘an unfortunate and unexpected side effect.’”

  “Jesus. And what about Raymond?”

  I can sense her tense immediately. Can almost hear her gripping the steering wheel tighter.

  “What Raymond did was worse,” Elle says.

  “Worse than killing yourself? How bad?”