“Right,” says Cam. “Scantron.” Because her answer is the very definition of a test, isn’t it?
He looks at the images and does as he’s told, pulling the objects he recognizes closer. The portrait: “Lincoln.” The building: “Eiffel.” The red vehicle: “Truck fire. No. Fire truck.” And on and on. As he pulls an image away, another sprouts to replace it. Some he has no problem identifying, others have no memories associated with them at all, and still others tug at the edge of his mind, but he can’t find a word to attach to them. Finally, when he’s done, he feels even more exhausted than he does after physical therapy.
“Basket,” he says. “Crumpled paper basket.”
Roberta smiles. “Wasted. You feel wasted.”
“Wasted,” Cam repeats, locking the word in his mind.
“I’m not surprised—none of this is easy, but you’ve done well, haven’t you? And you are to be commended!”
Cam nods, more than ready for a nap. “Gold star for me.”
- - -
Each day more and more is asked of him, both physically and mentally, but no explanation is given for any of it. “Your success is its own reward,” Roberta tells him, but how can he relish any success if he has no context with which to measure it?
“The kitchen sink!” he tells Roberta at dinner one day. It’s just the two of them. It’s always just the two of them. “The kitchen sink! Now!”
She doesn’t even have to probe to figure out what he means. “In time you’ll know everything there is to know about yourself. Now is not that time.”
“Yes, it is!”
“Cam, this conversation is over.”
Cam feels the anger well in him and doesn’t know what to do with it, and he can’t put enough words together to take it away.
Instead it goes to his hands, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s hurling a plate across the room, then another, then another. Roberta has to duck, and now the whole world is flying dishes and silverware and glass. In an instant the guards are on him, pulling him back to his room, strapping him to the bed—something they haven’t done for over a week.
He rages for what feels like forever, but then, exhausted, he calms down. Roberta comes in. She’s bleeding. It’s just a small cut above her left eye, but it doesn’t matter how small it is. He did it. It was his fault.
Suddenly all his other emotions are overwhelmed by remorse, which he finds is even more powerful than anger.
“Broke my sister’s piggy bank,” he says in tears. “Crashed my father’s car. Badness. Badness.”
“I know you’re sorry,” Roberta says, sounding as tired as him. “I’m sorry too.” She gently takes his hand.
“You’ll be restrained until morning for your outburst,” she tells him. “Your actions have consequences.”
He nods, understanding. He wants to wipe away his tears, but he can’t, for his hands are secured to the bed. Roberta does it for him. “Well, at least we know you’re every bit as strong as we thought you’d be. They weren’t kidding when they said you were a baseball pitcher.”
Immediately Cam’s mind scans his memory for the sport. Had he played it? His mind might be disjointed and fragmented, so finding what it contains is always difficult, but it’s easy to know what memories don’t exist at all.
“Never a pitcher,” he says. “Never.”
“Of course not,” she says calmly. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
- - -
Bit by bit and day by day, as more things fall into place in Cam’s mind, he begins to realize his terrifying uniqueness. It is night now. His physical therapy has left him, for once, feeling more exhilarated than exhausted—but there was something Kenny the therapist had said. . . .
“You’re strong, but your muscle groups don’t work and play well with others.”
Cam knew it was just an offhand joke, but there was a truth to it that stuck in Cam’s craw, the way food often did. The way his throat didn’t always agree to swallow what his tongue was pushing its way.
“Eventually your body will learn the alliances it has to make with itself,” Kenny had said—as if Cam was a factory full of strike-prone workers, or worse, a clutch of slaves forced into unwanted labor.
That night Cam looks at the scars along his wrists, like hairline bracelets, visible now that the bandages have been removed. He looks down to the thick, ropy line stretching down the center of his chest, then forking left and right above his perfectly sculpted abs. Sculpted. Like a piece of marble hewn into human form—an artist’s vision of perfection. This cliffside mansion, Cam now realizes, is nothing more than a gallery, and he is the work on display. Perhaps he should feel special, but all he feels is alone.
He reaches toward his face, which he has been told not to touch. That’s when Roberta comes in. She knows he’s been taking stock of his body, having spied on him through the camera lurking in the corner of the room. She is accompanied by two guards, for they can already tell Cam’s emotions are starting to surge and threaten a tempest.
“What’s wrong, Cam?” asks Roberta. “Tell me. Find the words.”
His fingertips graze his face, which is filled with strange textures, but he’s afraid to truly feel his face, for fear that in his anger he might tear it apart.
Find the words. . . .
“Alice!” he says. “Carol! Alice!” The words are wrong, he knows they’re wrong, but they are the closest he can get to what he wants to say. All he can do is circle, circle, circle the point, lost in orbit around his own mind.
“Alice!” He points to the bathroom. “Carol!”
A guard grins knowingly, but knowing nothing. “Maybe he’s remembering old girlfriends.”
“Quiet!” snaps Roberta. “Go on, Cam.”
He closes his eyes, forcing the thought to take shape, but the only form that comes is the ridiculous shape of—
“Walrus!” His thoughts are useless. Pointless. He despises himself.
But then Roberta says, “. . . and the Carpenter?”
He snaps his eyes to her. “Yes! Yes!” Somehow, as random as those two things are, they make perfect sense.
“ ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter,’ ” says Roberta, “an absurd poem that makes even less sense than you!”
He waits for her to connect at least some of the dots for him.
“It was written by Lewis Carroll. Who also wrote—”
“Alice!”
“Yes, he wrote Alice in Wonderland, and Through the—”
“Looking Glass!” Cam points to the bathroom. “Through the Looking Glass!” But he knows that’s not the word people use for it anymore. The modern word is—
“Mirror!” he shouts. “My face! In the mirror! My face!”
There is not a single mirror anywhere in the mansion, or at least in the rooms he’s allowed in. Not a single reflective surface anywhere. It could not be an accident. “Mirror!” he shouts triumphantly. “I want to look in a mirror. I want to look now! Show me!” It is the clearest statement and the highest level of communication he has yet to achieve. Surely Roberta will reward that!
“Show me now! Ahora! Maintenant! Ima!”
“Enough!” says Roberta, with calculated force in her voice. “Not today. You’re not ready!”
“No!” He touches his face with his fingers, this time hard enough that it begins to hurt. “It’s Dauger in the iron mask, not Narcissus at the pool! Seeing will lighten the load, not break the camel’s back!”
The guards look to Roberta, ready to leap in, to restrain him, to tie him once more to his bed, where he can’t hurt himself. But Roberta does not give the order. She hesitates. Considers. Then she finally says, “Come with me.” She turns and strides out of the room, leaving Cam and his guards to follow.
They leave the wing of the mansion that has been carefully designed for his protection, journeying to places that seem far less clinical. Rooms with warm wooden floors instead of cold linoleum. Framed artwork instead of bare white walls.
Roberta tells the guards to wait at the door, and she leads Cam into a living room. There are people present: Kenny, and some members of his therapy staff, as well as others whom Cam doesn’t know; professionals of some sort who work behind the scenes of his life. When they see him, they rise from their leather chairs and sofas, alarmed by his presence.
“It’s all right,” Roberta tells them. “Give us a few minutes alone.” They drop whatever they’re doing and scurry out. Cam would ask Roberta who they are, but he already knows. They’re like the guards at his door, and the guards on the rocks, and the man who cleans his messes, and the woman who rubs lotion on his scars. All these people are there to serve him.
Roberta leads him to a full-length mirror against a wall. He can see himself now head to toe. He sheds the hospital gown and stands there in his shorts, looking at himself. The shape of his body is beautiful; he is perfectly proportioned, muscular and trim. For a moment he thinks maybe he is Narcissus after all, absorbed in vanity—but as he steps closer and more into the light, he can see the scars. He knew they were there, but to see them all at once is overwhelming. They are ugly, and they’re everywhere—but nowhere are they more pronounced than on his face.
That face is a nightmare.
Strips of flesh, all different shades, like a living quilt stretched across the bone, muscle and cartilage beneath. Even his head—clean-shaven when he awoke, but now filling in with peach-fuzz hair—has different colors and textures sprouting like uneven fields of clashing crops. His eyes ache from the sight of himself, and tears cloud them.
“Why?” is all he can think to say. He turns from his reflection, trying to disappear into his own shoulder, but Roberta gently touches that shoulder.
“Don’t look away,” she says. “Have the strength to see what I see.”
He forces himself to look again, but all he can see are the scars.
“Monster!” he says. That word comes from so many different bits of memory, he needs no help finding it. “Frankenstein!”
“No,” Roberta says sharply. “Never think that! That monster was made from dead flesh, but you are made of the living! That creature was a violation of all things natural, but you, Cam, you are a new world wonder!”
Now she looks into the mirror with him, pointing out his many miraculous parts. “Your legs belonged to a varsity runner,” she tells him, “and your heart to a boy who could have been an Olympic swimmer, had he not been unwound. Your arms and shoulders once belonged to the best baseball player any harvest camp had ever seen, and your hands? They played guitar with rare and glorious talent!” Then she smiles and catches his gaze in the mirror. “As for your eyes, they came from a boy who could melt a girl’s heart with a single glance.”
There is a certain pride in the way she speaks of him. It’s a pride he cannot yet feel himself.
