Forever Young

A sequel-prequel-companion to The Eternity Garden.

***************************************************

 

I look at her, frozen beneath glass, all the years not on her, her face still a child’s face, a blossoming, emerging young woman. Time having stopped beneath that transparent barrier; time: defeated in that small arena. Victory going to the girl who stands with her arms at her side; a pale, uncertain face and big eyes, chestnut hair that flows down her back and confidently overtakes her waist, tickling her butt, making tiny half-curls at its ends.

She reaches her hand up to the glass.

I reach mine back.

There have been decades since that barrier went up between us, as she froze and stilled, while I lived and was battered, and soared, and fell, and climbed, and struggled, and aged. So very much aged. I look at these two hands of ours, separated only by that sheet of glass, hers young and smooth, mine withered with all those years of working and living and being; a sagging, wrinkled, blemished glove-over-bone.

We’re nothing alike now.

“Hello Lula.”

“Hello Charlie.”

“Thank you for always coming.”

“You know I will.” For as long as I can, for much, much less time than you need someone to keep coming.  Dear God, did we know what we were doing when conjured them up and secured them in here? Did we think?

“I love you.”

“I love you too.” I look into these wild, brown, slightly desperate eyes, and I remember.

#

They covered it up of course. That’s what happens. That’s why we still don’t really know what went down, not even those of us who were right at the centre of it.

So, this is what I remember: home, just sitting around the table, with my mum and dad, my sister, my two brothers. Eating fish and chips on a Friday night, just like any normal family living any normal life. We figured it for an earthquake at first, and just a little one, enough – as it continued – that maybe we should duck under the table, just in case.

But then the ground heated up. And the air started shimmering. I could feel these vibrations running through my skin, I could see my skin rippling beneath them like somebody was applying some massive hair-dryer. Cracks formed in the walls and doors, in the ceiling. The carpet beneath me blackened.

My brothers and sisters were screaming.

I looked up at Mum: WTF?

Dad’s last words: “I think we have to get out of here.”

Before I could move: there was pain. Pain that was like being burnt. More than that, it was like someone tipping broken grass into my veins, following it up with electrical current, and then some lava, even while something clawed and acid-drenched tore at me skin and ripped me wide open. And even that, it’s just a construct: truth on the table: there are no words for what it was like, the ones I’ve used over and over again in interviews, with therapists, in diaries, are just my best effort at throwing letters and syllables around something that’s unimaginable even to those of us who don’t have to imagine.

And I saw: my family disintegrating. That’s what it was, the flesh coming off them in mist, blood starting to dribble from beneath dissolved skin, only to – itself – soak into the air. Mist blackening, as their dust burned. Sparks, ashes, embers. I saw my brother screaming, scrabbling at his leg as it disappeared, trying to cling to it was a hand that was limp and had skin cells flowing off it like steam. I saw my mother’s face implode. I saw Daddy’s teeth fall out and crumble on the floor.

I saw my own skin, cracking, shedding cells.

I don’t remember whether or not I was screaming.

I think I remember the carpet bursting into flames all around me.

Smoke, blackness, unmitigated agony.

#

Then beeping. The steady beeping of those machines that were keeping me alive.

The tightness of bandages that were doing the same.

Burns to 90% of my body. Lung-burns, throat burns. Soul burns. If I couldn’t scream on the outside, I would scream on the inside, I would scream myself raw in spite of the IV painkillers and soaked bandages.

They told me slowly, cautiously, testing my memories before they imparted new information. I pieced it together from the silences before they let the full sledge-hammer hit me in the face. All dead: my mother, my father, my sister, my brothers. I was the only survivor.

The shock ran up against a wall of stone pain – I couldn’t properly feel it against the bodily suffering and the helplessness and sheer confusion. Had it happened? Had I really been there, feeling that? I waited for the world to re-adjust itself and make sense. For the dream to end, for the pieces to fall back into place. It was so hard to grasp and hold onto the understanding that all this had been real.

#

I asked a nurse, “Am I ugly?”

“Oh, darling, don’t think like that.”

“Beneath these bandages, am I hideous?”

“You just need to concentrate on getting well, love.”

It’s not a skill, it’s not a magic trick. Concentrate on getting well? On lying here and breathing in-and-out, in-and-out, trying to fight the urge not to breath, because breathing fucking hurts, and wanting to hold my breath until not breathing equalises with breathing and they both hurt just as much? That’s where you want my concentration? Even if I had the energy in me to get all those words out: what would be the point? What would they solve? Instead I saved my strength and just used the one word: “please.”

“We don’t really know yet,” the nurse told me, “we won’t know if there’s going to be much scarring until we take the bandages off.”

“But you can guess?”

“There will… be some. Most likely.”

“Extensive?” Bone-mashing deformity, skin like burnt tar.

“Perhaps.  But there’s a lot we can do these days. Facial reconstruction…”

“We can’t afford all that.”

“Oh darling, they fucked up big time. They screwed you all over so bad. There’s going to be compensation. There’ll be all kinds of medical treatment. Everything.”

#

She was right.

Four million dollars doesn’t buy back a family. It doesn’t make it less painful to take a breath.

I was one of twelve survivors out of nine-hundred and six people affected. A near-thousand ordinary people at the epicentre of What-The-Fuck? Whatever we’d been at the centre of, they certainly weren’t about to tell us the truth. It became known as the The Accident. But there was no explanation, no press conference explaining what kind of accident had been involved. And some people said it wasn’t any kind of accident at all, but a weapons test, a proof of concept – now let’s just imagine this spread across a whole city, a whole country.

You get to the point where you have the ordinance to destroy the world a few hundred times over, so what do you do next for kicks?

So, we sat in a hall and let them feed us apologies and bullshit.

I met Derek there.

#

I was eighteen. He was nearly forty.

All we had in common were hideous burns, and pain whenever we moved.

He was suffering from the loss of a wife. And when we fucked, he imagined I was her, and he hurt me as much as I could because he couldn’t forgive her for leaving him alone, and here was this proxy he could take that rage out on.

We lasted just under a month.

#

“We may be able to bring them back,” the man in the suit was saying.

“Huh?”

“Some of the victims.”

“The… dead ones?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Well, this situation… it’s something quite unprecedented, and as such, it leaves us with an unprecedented opportunity….”

Opportunity, read: experiments.

Guinea pigs in life and death.

“… there are things we may be able to do that we’ve never been able to do before…”

“Are they dead, or aren’t they?”

“Yes. Now. But they weren’t at the time.”

“Well…. Nobody…. ever… was…. before…. they…” I didn’t grasp it. Why pretend I did?

“And you’re her next of kin.”

“Her?”

“Charlotte.”

“Charlie?”

“Yes. There was a bit more left of your sister, some fingers, some pieces of skull, some brain matter.”

“You want to clone her?”

“No. She wouldn’t be a clone. She’d be her. She’d be her then, not her now. But still her.”

“Then? In the moment of dying? Of burning alive? But that’s-“

“She wouldn’t know. She wouldn’t know she was suffering. All that pain would be overlaid with something peaceful, an illusion of sorts. She’d be in that moment, but the moment would be disguised. There’d be no pain.”

“I don’t…”

“She’d be alive. That’s what’s important, you’d get to see her again.”

“Mum and Dad? What about Andrew and Liam?”

He shook his head. “There wasn’t enough…”

“I don’t understand this.”

“It’s all right. Just sign. Just sign over here.”

#

She stood behind glass. I stood on the other side of it.

I could walk now, with the aid of sticks, and I’d had a couple of surgeries on my face. I didn’t wear a mask every time I want out anymore, but my face was still evidence of massive wreckage, I was still burned and melted, only just on the right side of recognisable: a Dali painting of myself, a Picasso of a girl.

“What happened to you?” Charlie wailed in horror.

I asked if she would have to be told this again and again. The nurse said she would forget most of the time, she’d be under this illusion, this spray of comforting drugs, these suggestions. She could be brought out of that for a limited time to see friends and family, and her memories would return. But not those memories, the nurse was quick to assure me of that, she wouldn’t remember that.

Remember? Still living it?

I only thought I knew how this was. A dome filled with a damp, top-secret atmosphere, electrical currents pumped through it. High security. “Yeah,” one of the other eleven said to me, “yeah, this is terrestrial technology. Sure, it is. Yeah, fucking right. What sort of morons do they take us for?”

#

Then along came Jayden.

He only wanted me for my four million dollars. I knew it. He wasn’t subtle, he was always asking me outright to buy him things, and pointing out that I was rich and he was poor, so it really just made sense. Once he told me how lucky I was, to have all this un-earned money just dumped in my lap. How unfair…

I was halfway out the door before he finished what he was still saying.

#

And then Brody, who was the worst of the lot.

Brody, hurting from his own stuff, I guess.

But there was no controlling his temper. He was all fists and threats. Making love was never optional.

And I knew the whole time: abusive, dangerous, violent. I knew inside and intimately the situation I was in, all the names for it, and all the complicated ways in which it was wrong, and bad for me, and even bad for him. But I was paralysed. Sure, I wanted to walk out, to be done with him, to move on and live a proper, real life. But a part of me was as frozen as Charlie, as trapped in that moment of burning-dying-pain, as unable to live past it and go on without it as she was. The shade of me that’d died in that ‘Accident’ was still lying dead on the floor of that ruined house. She couldn’t get up and leave Brody, because she was too dead to move.

It shames me to have been left by him – it should have been the other way round. And to have gotten pregnant to him. To feel this sad, powerless relief, that at least this pregnancy had driven him off. I was less than human, less than nothing.

A vessel to be fucked, to have been fucked, and now cast aside.

#

“I’m going to be a virgin for life,” Charlie complained to me once.

Remembering Brody: “That’s not necessarily so bad.”

“If you’re fifteen going on thirty?”

“Your situation… it’s… special. It’s…” I hated to use the suit’s words: “unprecedented.”

“Well, it sucks,” she insisted, chafing at her eternal adolescence.

“So? There must be boys there. In the… garden.”

“I’m not horny when I’m in there. I’m not really anything at all.”

“You’re alive,” I kept echoing the suit.

“Alive and not alive. Schrodinger’s teenager. Lucky me.”

Ungrateful? Was it wrong for me to feel as if she should be thanking me for her life? For that piece of paper I took those three seconds to sign?

“I’m glad you broke up with Brody,” she said.

I’d told her it was me who dumped him. And I found the courage in that moment to add: “Well, he left something behind.”

#

I had the baby. I kept the baby.

I didn’t know, myself, if it was going to be the right thing to do.

But then I met her. My Katy. I met a blue-and-bloodied, ugly little screaming rat of a thing, but as soon as I touched it the ice around me melted, flowers bloomed all over me, the pain in my skin became something else, a kind of stinging but comforting proof-of-life. I was here. I had survived. I was a mother now, and all the world was different because of that.

“It’s going to be all right now, Katy. I’m going to teach you to be human. I’m going to make your world a special place, and you and me, we’re going to be okay.”

#

I introduced her to her aunt.

A tiny lump of flesh held up to the glass for Charlie to see. But I saw Charlie’s big eyes, the tears that formed. I saw the love that wafted out of Charlie towards the tiny, blanketed thing I offered her. I saw how unimpeded it flowed through the glass.

And I watched her grow up, while Charlie was still and static.

I watched her as she crept up on Charlie’s height, as they stood at the glass, eye to eye, facing off against each other. The way they could talk, kid to kid, about the things that really mattered to them. The generation gap meant nothing. They were two fifteen-year old girls from different times, but they shared such a commonality, something so universal and age-old. I felt as if I understood something new about humanity, just seeing the two of the together.

Well, dragons live forever, but not so little boys…

The same is true for little girls I guess, and their immortal aunts.

Katy surpassed Charlie. Katy grew up, grew older, had boyfriends, and jobs, and dreams and ambitions. Katy had a life. And she told Charlie all about it, and Charlie lived vicariously through her like she had once through me. But it wasn’t the same, I know it and I knew it. I thought to myself that we had tried to give Charlie back the life that’d been taken from her, but we failed, we only ever gave her a shadow of a life, a flicker of what she was never going to be able to grasp. An imperfect eternity at best.

A hell?

I’d read in the news that a couple of guys had been caught planning to bomb the dome, destroy the whole thing and all those inside it. I’d been so horrified at the time, and then appalled at myself for this tiny half-wish that they might have succeeded.

Katy – a grown woman now – rubbed my shoulders and told me it was up to us to give Charlie hope and meaning, to make that life for her. Up to us.

#

But Katy died.

Katy died in a senseless, pointless way. I died a little with her. I stood at the glass, trying to find the words to say to Charlie, saying everything with my eyes before my mouth could get around its duty.

We, who couldn’t hug, collapsed against the glass, trying to offer comfort that wouldn’t come.

#

I’m saying to Charlie, “I’d better go now,” the longer she spends out here on the edges, the greater the risk of her mind breaking past the barriers, and the agony seeping inside. Entirely unknown if the likes of that could be reversed, and what it would mean for the inhabitant. Short visits are important.

“I’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” I say, remembering my heart and my age, wondering how many fortnights are left. And since I’ve let the bloodline die with me, poor Charlie, destined to be alone, and for so long.

I scrub the tears away. Too old for them by decades.

I walk out into the breeze, into the smell of diesel, and the first evening’s lights, the sunset and the windblown leaves.

I feel guilt, I feel privilege, I feel pity.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work