Forget Yourself (34 page)

I have lied to you again. I just told you I have no backbone. Well I must have at least a small backbone, for I asked them a question.

“How do you know when it is ‘too much’?”

They each laughed at me. They said that they would do their best to prevent any suicidal actions, but that they were not omnipresent, and could do little if we were to really put our minds to it. Callidi started crying again.

It was Lamia’s turn to ask a question: “But the conditions, the conditions are appropriate?”

“They certainly are appropriate,” the men replied, “you shall be living in squalor. That is appropriate. You wish to forget your old lives—if we were to place you in fine and very nice conditions then you would be repeating the same lives over. We want to try you with something new.”

Then, to our greatest surprise, it was Callidi who stopped her crying and asked her own question: “Why won’t you let us leave right now, if that is what we really want?”

“Because, there are greater interests than your own at stake. You could say you’re assisting in a great research project. Besides, we would really rather you forget our inhospitality since your arrival. It would not be a prudent way to keep our jobs. Or our heads, for that matter.”

We were led into a room with three clean beds. Lamia told us not to worry—remember the adventure. This is the type of chance you only receive once a lifetime.

Yet by that point I was beyond comfort. All I had left were questions—where would we be living? How would we recognise one another?

And most importantly: what will I become?

I woke up here, no memory as to why.

The visitor came back—back for the last time.

I’d stood, we’d faced one another. They were here for me, they wanted Blondee, they wanted to end the isolation.

Mine and their own.

They had a look, filled with hunger, starving for touch or maybe even taste.

They were alone and looked so pitiful, standing there in a corner with the fading smell of death. They opened their mouth, ready to talk, but if they did I’d be trapped. Air pushed from lungs, vibrated by voice-box and spread over me.

So I picked up a rusted can of apple-squares and threw it. That was that. They ran away and I knew they wouldn’t be back. I was alone.

I was surrounded by people, and I had always liked it like that, even before we all moved to the farmhouse. We had to go somewhere, there was no room left for us in the city—the farmhouse was my idea. No-one else was using it. They all remembered my suggestion, and I’d become some sort of leader. I never liked that as much: I liked being around people so I could merge and meld and melt with them, not so I could sit atop them all.

Well, not like that anyway.

We didn’t have much longer there, and the responsibility was mine. All mine. Not many of the others seemed to show much concern, though I had told them over and over, as we were gathered on logs outside chewing breakfast with fat chickens clucking about our knees. So far I hadn’t even received anything stronger than a ‘we’ll be fine’. We’d always made do, sure, but that didn’t mean everything would be fine, not forever.

We were in trouble—why couldn’t they see it?

So every day I waited for her, our handy post-woman, the bringer of bad news. She was a nice enough person, though I could tell she was bored by our situation. To her, we were a bunch of immoral hippy-types who spend all day fucking. Still, I liked inviting her in for tea, of sharing some space with someone from the city. She lived in the city, she told me, in a small apartment near the sorting office. She was very matter-of-fact and didn’t ask many questions.

I missed living amongst the towers and the hurried bustle of people, shoving one another and spilling down stairwells, into subway stations, up into office blocks. I liked wandering round and round in circles, getting lost in a mass of strangers. Sometimes they looked at me funny, in my natural dyes and unironed hair and jewellery I made myself. I’d look at them funny back and feel a strange sort of pride. I was different to them.

We all were, dotted about town, bad seeds scattered in a society which wanted some kind of order, in a world of new-found faith. If I wanted to play in the shower with the hottest redhead I’d ever known I’d go see Athers, down the diagonal street and past the New Life Celebration Hall, where chastity-ringed teens would glare. If I wanted to have Heph’s skilled tongue curl and thrust into me I’d head past the moral office, with the purse-lipped men and women in suits who stared past the hippy, the pagan in hemp.

Eventually they wouldn’t put up with us. There were less and less of us for a start—friends suddenly married, stopped taking calls, brothers or sisters or aunts found faith. Then there were bricks through windows and notes through doors. We gathered together in my lounge, too tired to fuck, and I suggested the farmhouse. We talked for two nights, eating meatless stuffing and Mumbai Mix.

My brother told me not to go. He said whatever happened I was better where I was. I gave him an ornament I made, I kissed him on the cheek and I told him to swing by any time. I missed him.

But it was a fresh start. We fucked of course, and we talked, and sang and even grew food ourselves. I brought chickens and we named them the first names which sprang to mind. We saw no programmes, we had no net, it was us, our bodies and the post-woman.

And the letters started coming. I crumpled the first ones up in front of the her, but later I smoothed them out and kept them. We were in trouble, we were deviant, and so I told the others. But there were no bricks thrown, there was no graffiti over doors, and so for them the world was fine. We had each other and that was all that mattered. Nothing could convince them otherwise.

My brother knew what was wrong—he told me in message after message after message. He thought I could go back. But I couldn’t—to give up my freedom, that is to die. I couldn’t stand his pleading, his reasoning—he wouldn’t understand, I’d already gone over it all in my head. He was trying to protect me—I couldn’t even protect myself. I stopped answering him. He would be better if he forgot about us and the farm. Memories of what you’ve lost are painful.

That’s what I said to him, the last time I wrote—you are my brother. You must forget me.

One night they came. Three vans filled with men in uniforms. There was shouting, from us and from them, screams from both sides. Heph laughed and joked at them. They shot him in the face. The kitchen walls were sprayed with the stuffing from his skull. After that the others were quiet, they were led into the back of the vans without a fight. I was led in last, the rough grip of fingers clamped to my shoulder. In the van it was dark. We were silent, all of us, as they took us away. We didn’t know where we were going, but it wasn’t our world. It wasn’t our world.

Once I was alone long enough I knew that Blondee would be left behind. No expectations, no desires, no idle conversations. No love.

Pilsner once told me that I needed more lovers than most, a validation of all that is me.

It isn’t true.

It just isn’t true.

Without love I’ll be free.

The wind has stopped: everything is quiet. The ground is starting to freeze beneath my limbs. The hole is getting cold.

I lived in a commune, I’m with the ones I loved. Of course I warned them, I warned them so many times. Now we’re here, away from the public, isolated, where we can’t contaminate even the sturdy post-woman. We were happy enough to leave by ourselves, to hide ourselves away—but this was on their terms. Without our deviant memories perhaps we could even be cured—perhaps we’d learn the worth of marriage, perhaps we’d learn our real-moral-roles. Woman as women, man as men. We’d be reborn, but between dusty walls, not in baptism. Contain what is queer. The others were right, I can understand, enjoy what you have, enjoy it whilst it’s there. We were the ones who knew love.

There were times I had no worries.

How can I worry whilst surrounded by affection, how can I worry when my mind is filled with pleasure and my cock feels as though it’ll explode? How can I worry when I can kiss those I love, when they can run their hands over my body with pure affection. Affection without possession. Whatever happens, whatever happens here, I’ll always have this instant, this point, this time of pure pleasure. Them and them and me.

She whispered in my ear, she told me I was young. I know what she meant, she meant that I should worry. I should be on my guard, that we should barricade the house, or flee, and run—somewhere else. If they come they come. One person licks my neck, their breath on my skin, whilst another plunges me into their throat, enveloping me with a deep driven kiss. There is only this, there is only this, and if we run we’ll miss it.

An arm I love, breasts I love, legs and balls and cocks.

I’m gonna cum, I’m gonna cum. I am here, I am here and I can smell the scent of sweat and feel the tremble of soft skin against my chest. How can I worry when I’m about to spill all I have, spill for those I love, how can I care about anything else? I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, and it’s now—now. There.

I woke up here.

The rain has died a little; I think I can hear footsteps.

I cannot tell. Perhaps, perhaps not. I’ll shout anyway.

No, nothing.

So I stole: I am indeed a thief.

But I wanted to give also.

If you are prevented from giving, then what is left but to take?

Doing nothing was not an option. Doing nothing is death.

And now I’m doing nothing. The wind howls here like a ghost. I can hear small leaves sliding over the tarpaulin.

I am Blondee, for the last time, I am Blondee.

There was someone else before and there’ll be someone else again. I knew them all. They come from different worlds. I don’t know if the worlds are real.

Someone else will run their fingers along dusty walls afresh, someone to wonder at the weather and watch plants grow in frigid earth.

Someone to eat the afterthought rations, to munch on mould-coated bread and slurp sour milkshake.

Someone to lie under blue tarpaulin and listen to the rickety pound of rain.

Someone to remember.

I’ll close my eyes, I’ll lie down, I’ll close my eyes and lie down and I’ll sleep. I’ll sleep and be reborn, and the whole world will be presented to me like new. Who else could I be?

Who else could be so lucky?

Redfern Jon Barrett is a writer and polyamory rights campaigner armed with a doctorate in literature. Author of
The Giddy Death of the Gays & the Strange Demise of Straights,
his works have exhibited in seven countries and been translated into five languages. His writing has featured in
PinkNews, A cappella Zoo
(and its tenth anniversary ‘best of’ edition),
Strange Horizons, Heiresses of Russ: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction 2014,
as well as Shaped by Time (National Museum of Denmark, 2012). He currently works with
Guernica
magazine as a fiction reader, dividing his time between Britain and Berlin, where he lives with his two partners and plays too many board games.