Because You'll Never Meet Me (26 page)

A viridian, amorphous surge of electricity engulfed me.

When Liz came back, she knew something was wrong. She was probably tipped off by the bulging of my eyes or the way my head kept thrusting itself back and forth, back and forth against the headboard.

“Ollie!”

“N-New Wave.” I tried to smile, but my face went slack. Liquid slipped from my bottom lip. More than saliva, because I'd bitten my tongue burning red.

Her eyes widened. She tried to pull the player from me, but my fingers tightened around it.

That wasn't the oncoming seizure doing that, I swear. I couldn't tell her that the sounds from the buds were so different from anything I'd ever felt that I would have died to hear more. There were … poundings? Bass? And something that must have been a synthesizer, punching my eardrums.

If it hadn't been
her
face,
her
eyes imploring me to stop, I never would have let go. When she yanked the earbuds from my ears, there was blood on them. She kept clawing at my hands.

I unclenched my fingers. Hot blood spewed from my nose as she threw the machine out my window, into the rain. But it still felt like I was holding it, like its vibrations were shaking my brain against
my skull. I was trying my hardest not to let the tremors win. But when a seizure takes you, you're powerless.

Mom told me that she came in right then, right when I lost consciousness and started convulsing outright. It didn't take her long to understand what had happened. She told Liz to leave.

Liz went.

I wondered if all she had ever wanted was an excuse.

Later, I opened the package, and inside was that stupid old book light again. Passing the torch, I guess. Or another good-bye.

Hey, Moritz. Have I ever asked you when your birthday is? If being raised in a laboratory made you a monster, what did being raised in the middle of nowhere make me?

I wish it would stop raining already, but that's selfish, too.

~ Ollie

Do not think that my silence has been because I blame you for the harrowing events relayed in your camping confessional letter. That letter left me gasping in sympathy.

Hear me now. Hear me in ALL CAPS:

IT WAS NEVER YOUR FAULT.

The guilt you feel is no more unusual than it is justified. I know how difficult it is not to feel responsible for terrible things that happen when you are helpless to change them.

My birthday falls on July 3. Can you believe I'm a summer child?

Ollie, you have given me all the kindness I never deserved. If that is selfishness, then I do not know the meaning of the word.

I did not mean to abandon you like this, sad and alone in the wake of both my neglect and Liz's. But I am so lost. I have been feeling very low for what felt like an eternity. Doubtless Father told you.

I wanted to hurt him. When I realized he had forwarded my letter to you without my consent. But his face. It was on the verge of dissolution. I can't hurt him. He saved me once, twice. I haven't told you. But the man I call Father saved me.

I do not know what has become of Lenz Monk. I have not left the apartment. I dare not tell Father what happened. I cannot face his disappointment.

It has taken me so long to tell even you. Your confessions shed light on my own experiences, and now I tremble at my desk. Your honesty about your suffering—your confounded honesty!—has at last given me cause to share my own trials with you.

Long before the disaster with Lenz, other memories made me monstrous.

I began writing down my beginnings some time ago.

Here is a concept you might not have read about:
Vergangenheitsbewältigung
. The word roughly translates to “working through the past.” This is difficult to describe to you. You are not German. But the people of Germany, as you have hinted before, do have a dark history behind them. We are haunted.

On a personal level, I am also haunted. All of us may have darkness in our past, Oliver. Some of us are haunted by those who came before us.

I said I would not speak of this. I try to see the laboratory as you imagine it: a factory that produces dolphin-wavy superheroes in bright colors? Perhaps a workshop full of vials and potions? Where men are given adamantium skeletons? Where the dead return to life? But this is not science fiction, Ollie.

In the hopes that it will strengthen the friendship that has grown between us, in fear that it is just as likely to rend us asunder, I want to tell you of my mother and the initiative she founded. I want to tell you about the children she worked with.

The children like us.

I won't apologize for withholding. Despite your disdain, I want to spare your ears whenever possible. I did not consider myself bound by linearity. Whenever you spoke of your mother, I recalled my own mother in vivid bursts that all but left me gasping. Your mother's electric fences and locks, smothering as they seem to you, are better than what raised me.

There is no pacemaker for this manner of heartache.

Like my mother before me, I am a weakhearted fool.

The name of my cardiovascular disease is cardiomyopathy. My brand of this disease is hypertrophic. My heart is weak, Anatomy Expert. This is due to an inexplicable thickening of the arteries within the cardiac muscle. This thickening restrains my blood flow. Chokes my heart out from the left ventricle.

This disease is often passed down in families. The heaviest inheritance. My mother knew to look for it even when I was a fetus. Not because she was a renowned doctor, which she was, but because a swollen heart claimed her sister. It stole her cousin, and a distant uncle.

It is this disease that leaves me frequently breathless. That swells my legs into tree trunks and makes my heartbeat rhythm-less. It is this disease that has often claimed young
people at unawares. During sports matches or at nightclubs or in the moments when they are most excited. When their hearts fail to keep up with their hopes. Did you wonder why I am such a pessimist?

It is this illness that my mother passed down to me. This illness that she once spent every spare moment of her life working to cure. When she founded the laboratory that made me how I am, Oliver, she did so with good intentions: to study and amend cardiomyopathy and other genetic conditions in utero. To spare infants lives of inherited pain. Pains as small as color-blindness, as large as sickle-cell anemia.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung
: correcting a broken past for the sake of the future.

When most people reminisce about dear ones lost, they see those dear ones through rose-colored spectacles. I'm not sentimental. I see my mother as she was.

There was something deflated about her appearance. She could put on the nicest patent leather shoes and a skirt and a silk blouse beneath her lab coat and just seem to sag inside them. Her eyes were ringed by circles a corpse would envy. She smiled rarely, and even then a misalignment of her jaw that made her top and bottom gums level ensured that her smiles were inevitably sharkish, displaying all her teeth at once. Perhaps this was fitting. Her smiles were calculated.

Of course I loved her. Does a child consider anything else? I did not consider how she never looked at me. She fed me and clothed me and raised me. That was love.

My mother never spoke of my father. She acted as though he had never existed. Implied that he was no more tangible than an anonymous donor. He mattered no more than a strand of DNA in a vial.

Perhaps she was more human before he left her. Perhaps not. I have no way of knowing. I wouldn't have known he was a man of flesh and blood at all, except that in my youth I overheard my nanny saying over the phone that a “good-for-nothing” had left my mother alone with “a retard in her belly.”

Some things you forget as a child. Some things you do not.

My mother studied medicine in Berlin before she ever worked at the laboratory.

Yes, Ollie. A laboratory.
The
laboratory. However fantastical your hypothesis, you are a good detective. Soon you might wish, more than ever, that you were wrong.

Doubtless this was the same laboratory that your father spent time in. I imagine your father was a kind man, just as many of my doctors were.

Most of the doctors who began working at the initiative had noble intentions, Oliver. They wanted to fix us before we even existed. They manipulated fetal DNA. They spotted diseases in amniotic fluid and endeavored to undo them. They plucked and pulled at genes to defy kidney disease, to purge Tay-Sachs from the womb, to deter fragile X chromosomes. To take hardships from the very beginnings of people. Sometimes epilepsy is genetic, isn't it, Oliver?

In the beginning, they meant well. I don't know when this changed, but it did. By the time I was toddling, the
scientists were no longer seeking cures to diseases. They were seeking evolution. They were seeking dangerous frontiers. Science for the sake of science is a terrifying thing, Ollie.

I know this in my weak heart. In my gut. I know this because this laboratory was my second home. The people working there were my family. The laboratory is here in Saxony, likely within one hundred kilometers of Kreiszig.

In the workday hours, my mother worked at a clinic in Kreiszig. Treating colds and fevers. Fungal growths and eczema. I remained at home with that cold-natured nanny. My mother did not want me coddled.

On the weekends, we traveled to the laboratory, where she served as the medical and experimental director. To my memory, she was the highest authority in the facility. The founder of what seemed to be an international initiative.

Every weekend, she strapped me into my car seat. Hushed me with a finger to halt my clicking. Then she pulled out into the streets and away from the city. I slept in the car when we traveled. Already, transportation made me uncomfortable. I remember the roads were winding, but I could not see them. It could not have been very far from where we lived. We always arrived within an hour or so. We parked in an underground garage that led directly into the facility.

You would not believe the ordinariness of the “secret” laboratory you are so curious about, Ollie. It seemed no different from any wing of any given hospital. It smelled like antiseptic, sweetened by a latex-y odor that dried out the nostrils. There was always a receptionist sitting at a counter
by the entrance. Magazines littered the tables. Clipboards in slots on the walls. Wheelchairs beside the automatic doors. Several waiting rooms were spread across two floors and a basement level, although there were no windows. The laboratory was fully staffed with scientists. Doctors and nurses and maintenance men and women from every continent. More than all this, though, there were patients. The patients were children. Perhaps they had originally been diseased. Now they were experiments.

You would not believe how far the laboratory had strayed. The scientists' nightmarish curiosity had resulted in nightmarish results.
Unbelievable
results, even. I question my memories. Could the children have been as bizarre as I recall? Or have my
Alpträume
—my bad dreams—merged with reality?

Regardless, the other children in the laboratory were not superheroes any more than I am.

I remember a girl with curly hair. Either I am delusional, or she had a second mouth on the back of her head that she had to feed on a constant basis. Very often, she sat holding a slurpie cup in her hand with a long, twisting straw winding over her shoulder to satiate that maw. At nighttime, she strapped a pacifier to the back of her head.

Could I have dreamed her up?

And even she was not the strangest. There was a pale, hairless boy whose arms and legs were jointed the wrong way. He could turn his head around almost 190 degrees, and always did so whenever I passed by. What possible “noble intention” could have resulted in that?

I have memories, real or no, of dozen-fingered toddlers and a lipless boy who disgorged his esophagus—a parasitic-looking tube lined with two rows of tiny teeth—whenever he wanted to eat. Once I witnessed him devour beef stew in the laboratory cafeteria. The sight of him sucking up chunks of beef was unappetizing. It looked as if a worm had burst from his throat to sip sewage.

Maybe their ailments were more typical than I recall. Time has warped my recollections. I never spoke to these other children. My mother carried me everywhere when I was small. Perhaps just so I would not speak to them. She would spare a few minutes to tote me around the halls and observation rooms of the complex. I was a trophy. The scientists and doctors she worked with would fawn over me. Prod me. Perform casual, clandestine experiments on the eyeless child.

There was a man by the name of Dr. Rostschnurrbart who took interest not only in my oddities, but in my well-being also. He would stop us in the hallway every time I arrived.

“Peekaboo!” he'd say, but cover one of my ears rather than his eyes. He'd use his other hand to hold up a number of fingers. Wait for me to match his number with my own.

Sometimes my mother would accompany him to rooms full of scanners. My weekly physical. She was always distracted. Always looking away whenever anyone addressed her. I could hear how her stuttering heartbeat matched my own. I could hear it. Even as a toddler it upset me. Rostschnurrbart and the other scientists became disgruntled: her
proximity disrupted their results. So she would leave me there alone and attend to work elsewhere.

She never told me what she was doing. She put her hand on my chest some evenings after work and then her other hand on her own. Looked at me as properly as she ever would, eyes on my chest if not on my face. I believed then that her work was for my sake.

For the sake of our weak hearts.

We did not often speak in my family, Ollie. We were never like you.

I harbor scattered memories of my experiences in the laboratory.

Every few months, men in suits toured the facility. The doctors were always aflutter in these weeks. Dressing us nicely. Washing our faces. Presenting the best sides of us. Demanding that we smile and wave at visitors from all around the globe.