Tabula Rasa Kristen Lippert Martin (2 page)

I hear him breathing hard. He’s right there, right next
 to me, but he says nothing.
Aftershave.
That’s what I smell. I have no association to go with
 it, which makes me think it can’t be one of the orderlies.
I know each of them by their body spray or shampoo or
 mouthwash.
I hold my breath, waiting, completely aware of how
 helpless I am. The man grabs my upper arm and then fum-
 bles toward my wrist, finally locating my hand. He presses
 something into my palm and wraps my fingers around it. It
 feels like a plastic bag.
A moment later, he retreats, and then I hear the door
 click shut.
I’m alone in the dark again, but I feel a rush of some-
 thing that I haven’t felt in a long time: hope, curiosity, and
 a little bit of anger.
I feel alive.
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CHAPTER 2
 wenty minutes later I’m out of the halo, and the lights
Tare back on full blast. I haven’t dared to look down at
 what’s in my hand. I keep my fist at my side, practically
 sitting on it.
I’m being transferred back to my room in a wheelchair.
One of the orderlies, Steve, is pushing me down the hall.
Steve is this huge, tall black guy with feet like canoes. I
 spend a lot of time looking down at the floor, and I fig-
 ure his feet for a size fourteen, easily. He wears a scarf all
 the time and usually a cap, too. I wonder if he has trouble
 keeping his head warm—too far for the blood to travel.
He’s probably the only person in this place I feel comfort-
 able around. I have no idea why.  
“Key lime pie with dinner tonight, Sarah! You like that.
I know you do.”
I have no real feelings one way or the other about key
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lime pie, but it seems rude to contradict him when he’s
 trying to be nice.
He whistles as we roll along and asks me for the second
 time, “So, how’re you doing today?”
We’re always supposed to say “good” when someone
 asks how we are. It shows we’ve got a positive attitude.  
“Mmm, okay,” I say.
“You’ll be done soon. Then you can get on with your
 life. Fresh start, and all that.”
Even though the power has returned, things are not
 back to normal yet. I can still feel something in the air,
 some echo of fear. As we pass the first-floor nurses’ station,
I see that it’s empty.
“Where is everybody?”
“Of course you’d notice. I knew you would. You notice
 everything.”
“That’s why I’m your favorite.”
“That’s right.” He rubs my head, and I wince when
 he accidentally presses down on the bandage covering  
 the loose halo insert. “Whoops. Sorry about that. You
 okay?”
“I’ll live.”
He leans over me and whispers, “I’m not supposed to
 tell you this, because the doctors don’t like us to say any-
 thing that might worry the patients, but we’re expecting a
 big blizzard tonight.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. They’re sending people home. Last flight out’s in
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thirty minutes. Down to a skeleton crew tonight. But don’t
 you worry. You’ll still be in good hands.”
Last flight out. Something about that idea makes me
 jumpy.
“Did the storm cause the power outage earlier?” I ask.
“Which power outage?”
“There’s been more than one?”
“Yeah. Three or four, mostly in areas of the com-
 pound we don’t use much. If you ask me, it’s all this fancy
 equipment they got here. Wind turbines, solar panels, geo-
 thermal whatnot. I’m telling you, the least little problem
 and it’s on the fritz.”
“Where are we, Steve?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“We’re so far from civilization they can’t use electrical
 cables to bring us power?”
“I’ll tell you this much: We’re off the grid. Way, way
 off the grid!”
“I hear helicopters a lot,” I say. “That’s how you guys
 get to and from work, isn’t it?”
He ignores me and starts whistling again.
“I get it. It’s a secret. How about I just guess what state
 we’re in? It’s somewhere with a lot of snow. And moun-
 tains. Maine? Montana? Some other state that starts with
 an M?”
“Hawaii. We’re in Hawaii.”
“Ha-ha.”
He walks on with his big, canoe-length steps. I keep my
fist tight around the little plastic bag.
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“Have you seen Jori lately?” I ask.
He gives a cough and waits a moment before answering.
“She’s fine.”
“Is she?”
“You just worry about you, Miss Nosy.”
Jori is another patient here, and I haven’t seen her in
 more than three weeks. I’m worried that something hap-
 pened to her. People have a way of vanishing from this
 place. One day they’re here; the next day they’re not. I
 don’t know if it’s because their treatment is completed or
 because something else happened to them. Something
 potentially “upsetting” to the rest of us. All they’ll say is
 that a patient is “gone.” That could mean anything from
 transferred to released to dead. You don’t mess around with
 people’s brains without losing a few, but they don’t want to
 come right out and tell us when people die.
Except Nurse Jenner. She doesn’t mind sharing bad
 news.
I have trouble believing Jori’s been cured and released.
She’s a terribly limp thing, short and skinny, with skin the
 color of undercooked fish. She’s always hunched over, with
 her hands clutched in front of her chest like she’s trying not
 to crush the wings of a butterfly she’s managed to catch.
She’s fragile, nervous, and more than a little weird, even by
 the standards of this place. And though no one on staff will
 admit it, I’m pretty sure girls like that don’t go on to live
 happily ever after, no matter how many bad memories are
 cut out of their brains.
Steve steers me toward the elevators and presses the
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button. We wait, but no car comes. He keeps pressing and
 pressing the call button. Still nothing.
“Maybe it’s out because of the storm?” I say.
“Yeah. I bet that’s it.” He yanks the wheelchair back.
“We’ll go around the other way.”
Going around the other way means cutting through the
 main lobby to get to the north bank of elevators, which
 takes a few minutes of backtracking. As we pass the lobby’s
floor-to-ceiling windows, I see that the mountains in the
 distance have been erased by heavy gray sky.
Just then the wind kicks up. At the harsh, skittering
 sound of icy snow against glass, Steve starts taking longer
 and longer strides across the marble floor. I don’t know that
I’ve ever seen him move this fast before.
We pass the entrance to the first-floor ward, which is
 unused. From deep inside the pitch-black hallway there’s
 a rumble and crack that sounds just like a thunderclap. It’s
 followed seconds later by the creak of hinges.
Steve stops.
I tip my head back and look up at his face as he stares
 into the darkness. A strong draft blows toward us, and then
 the unmistakable scent of “outside” hits me.
“Smells like snow,” I say.
Steve sucks his teeth. “Yeah. One of the doors must’ve
 blown open. I’ll have maintenance look into it.”
I don’t know how a door could have possibly blown
 open. This whole place is locked up tight. Plus, they built
 this hospital complex into the side of a hill. First the main
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building, where we are now, and then the smaller building
 next to it  —South Wing. As Steve wheels me past the walk-
 way that connects the two buildings, my eyes are drawn to
South Wing. Something strange goes on in there. No one
 ever talks about South Wing.
Steve grips the wheelchair handles tighter and steps up
 the pace even more. I turn around in the chair, staring at
 the walkway. I’ve always wondered why the letters E and
C are etched into the glass. The staff only call this place
“the Center.” Or sometimes, when they refer to the two
 adjoining buildings along with the grounds themselves,
 they’ll say, “the compound.” But the E. C. has to stand for
 something.
“Steve?”  
“Eyes in front, Miss Sarah,” he says, gently turning my
 head back around. “And don’t be asking any more ques-
 tions. You just think about getting better.”
Getting better. That’s what I’m here for. And getting bet-
 ter means forgetting the past. Because the past is bad. Very
 bad. Worse than very bad. So much worse than very bad
 that I might not get over it otherwise.
Drastic measures. These are them.
When traditional therapy, drug therapy, and behavioral
 therapy all fail, you land here, and they drill through your
 skull and pull out the bad memories like they’re pulling
 weeds.
Everyone at the Center is being treated for severe post-
 traumatic stress disorder. At first, I thought that meant
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something traumatic had happened to me. But then one
 day I realized that assumption might be wrong. Probably
 around the time I noticed that my ward seemed to be the
 only one with round-the-clock security guards and a bank
 of monitors that displayed every inch of the floor. And
 there’s this feeling I get from the staff, like they’re all wary
 of me but pretending not to be. I asked my therapist if
 maybe I was the cause of whatever traumatic event I was
 supposed to forget. She just sniffed, pushed her glasses up
 onto her nose, and said, “Of course not.”
Of course not.
Then there was the time—after my third injection
 series—when a new orderly was wheeling me back to my
 room. He smirked at me and asked, “So which kind are
 you?”
“Which kind of what?” I didn’t know what he meant.
“Victim or perpetrator,” he said.
“What do you think I am?”
He looked me up and down and laughed. “You ain’t no
 angel, that’s for sure.”
I’m bored. All the time, horribly, horribly bored. I’m also
filled with this sense of unease that I can’t ever shake. It’s
 like, even though my mind can’t remember why, my body
 is straining to get back to whatever it was doing before I
 came here.
At some point I started counting the doors, the light
fixtures, the floor tiles. Anything and everything, until I
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could visualize this entire place in my head. I know the
 layout of every floor and every ward—well, everywhere
I’m allowed to go. And I do all this to stop myself from
 dwelling on “unproductive” thinking.
As Steve wheels me down the hallway, I look at the
floor. I know there are eighteen black tiles between the
 elevator and the rec lounge, and as I count the final tile, I
 lift my eyes and see that that’s exactly where we are.
The rec lounge is one of the few places I’m allowed to
 go without supervision. I’d much rather go to the gym
 and burn off some energy, but they won’t let me do that
 anymore. Not since I pushed myself as hard as I could for
 as long as I could, just to see what I was capable of. I did
 seventy-four push-ups in a row and went up the climbing
 wall like a monkey. After that they rationed my gym time.
They told me I was at risk for a treatment setback.
As we move past the glass partition between the hall-
 way and the lounge, I sit up tall in the wheelchair to see if
 there’s anyone inside.
There is. Jori.
I wave to her, and she waves back with twice the enthu-
 siasm. I have to say, even if she does sort of give me the
 creeps, I’m glad to know she’s not dead.
“Can’t we stop a minute?” I ask.
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“It’s not good for either of you.”
I guess they must have found out what Jori and I were
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talking about last time I saw her. We were watching Bugs
Bunny, and she whispered to me, “Quick. Tell me what I
 look like before the nurse comes back.”
So I did, even though we’re not supposed to.
“You’ve got blue eyes, a high forehead, a small nose
 with kind of a ball on the end of it.”
“Really?” She pinched the end of her nose, trying to
 feel it. “Am I pretty?”
I lied. “Sure, I’d say you’re pretty.”
“Good. How old do you think I am?”
“Fifteen?” I was being generous. She really looks like
 she’s thirteen, twelve even.
“Maybe. I think I’m older than that, though. I think . . . I
 just have a feeling. I think I may have had a baby.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I had a memory of touching my tummy. And it
 was round and kind of hard.”
When I asked her what I looked like, she smiled and
 said, “Strong.”
That’s when the nurse appeared and shooed her away
 from me. I didn’t get a chance to ask her what color my
 eyes are, but I guess they’re probably brown. Most people
 in the world have brown eyes. Like 75 percent. I’m not sure
 how I know that.  
When Jori sees that Steve’s not stopping, she rushes
 toward the glass, putting her fingertips on the window like
 a lizard crawling up the sides of a terrarium. I turn toward
 her and raise my hands like, What can I do? Jori’s face falls
 as Steve whisks me around the next corner.
20

We’re halfway up the hall when a nurse trots after us.
“She’s very agitated right now,” she says, looking back
 over her shoulder. “Could I borrow Sarah for a few min-
 utes? She’s the only one who can calm the girl down.”
Steve rubs his chin. “Doc said not to.”
“Come on. I’ve been dealing with her outbursts all day.
I need a break.”
He takes his hands off the wheelchair. “I’m gonna get a
 cup of coffee. You get caught, it’s on you.”
A moment later I’m doubling back toward the lounge,
 and as I get closer, Jori starts clapping. The nurse opens the
 door and nods toward me. “Five minutes, Jori. That’s it.”
“Thank you, Nurse Lemontree!”
As soon as she’s gone I say, “Your nurse’s last name is
Lemontree?”
“Oh, no. It’s something with a lot of s’s and z’s, and
I think there’s an icki at the end. I thought Lemontree
 sounded much nicer.”
I get up from the wheelchair and walk toward the couch.
As soon as I sit down, Jori slides in next to me, pushing
 herself up under my arm and pulling her knees to her chest.
She always does this. I must remind her of someone who
 once made her feel safe.
“I’ve been wanting to see you, but they wouldn’t let
 me,” she says in a whisper.
“Yeah. I know.”
The nurse wasn’t kidding. Jori is agitated. And twitchy.
She keeps looking toward the observation window to make
 sure the nurse’s back is turned to us.
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“I need to tell you something.”
“What’s that?”
“They were talking about you,” she says quickly, lacing
 her fingers together in front of her chest.
“Of course they were. They talk about all of us.”
“This is different. It’s that woman from New York. The
 one with the red hair.”
“Ms. Hodges?”
“Is that her name?”
“Yeah.”
I close my eyes and see her in my mind. A fiery hatred
 engulfs me, but once again I force myself to ignore it.
“She doesn’t like you. I think she . . . I think she’s up to
 something, Sarah. Something really bad.”
I can’t help but shift myself away from Jori. Yes, I had
 similar feelings about that Hodges lady not even an hour
 ago, but hearing Jori say it makes me feel like Jori and me,
 we’re the same, and I don’t like that idea one bit. Even in
 a place like this, you want to believe that you’re not the
 worst off.
I cock my head to the side and try to smile. “Jori. Come
 on. You know what the doctors tell us. Sometimes we have
 these feelings like people want to hurt us, but it’s not true.
All that stuff is just in our heads.”
“I know, I know, but I’m telling you, this is different.
You need to stay away from her. Get out of here, even.”
“Where would I go? Down to the corner to wait for the
 next bus in my hospital gown and slipper socks?”
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