Chapter 11 #2
I hauled myself back out, gasping, sweat beading on my forehead.
I might not be able to block out memories, but I was definitely getting better at going after them.
I moved on to the next thing on my table. A felt-tip pen.
He liked living with his uncles, but sometimes he felt bad about it.
He loved his parents, Mom and Dad, and Ben.
But their house didn’t feel like home anymore.
Home was his room upstairs at Uncle Mason’s house.
Home was the open kitchen with plenty of space for Uncle Ward’s wheelchair. Home was Alma and Peveril.
He knew that made Mom sad, but he couldn’t help it.
He didn’t worry about hurting Uncle Mason or Uncle Ward. Even when he only spent an afternoon or a single overnight at his parents’ house, he worried about hurting them.
Home was safer.
My heart clenched for Jackson as I pulled myself out of his thoughts.
Even though I hadn’t had a loving family it was clear from his thoughts that he worried about what his abilities could do to his family—I knew very well that he was absolutely right to be worried.
I knew exactly what his power was capable of because I’d used mine.
I knew what killing someone does to you.
I don’t regret having done it, but I did regret that I’d had to do it, if that makes any sense. But if I hadn’t meant to do it? That would have been so much worse.
I moved on to the next object. A quarter.
He hated change and didn’t understand why he always jammed it in his pockets to weigh down his pants. He was just going to forget it and send it through the wash or maybe drop it in some homeless person’s cup or chuck it in a fountain somewhere just to get rid of the jangle in his pants.
Deeper.
She counted out the change, handing it to the man with the soulless suit that told her he either worked for the government or wished he did.
She bet that if he did, he probably wasn’t actually a federal agent or whatever he thought the black-suit-white-shirt-black-tie made people think.
She bet he was a tech support guy or the coffee gopher or something.
Deeper.
She dug through her change purse, desperate for the coffee she was counting out coins to pay for.
Being a grad student sucked, and she’d run out of grounds this morning and still had two days before her next monthly stipend check came through, so change from the bottom of her purse was all she had to pay with.
She breathed a sigh of relief when she found the last nickel she needed to hit the price of a black coffee and handed the handful of change to the cashier with an apologetic smile.
I let the memory fall away as I collapsed into the chair I’d intentionally put behind me for when I’d pushed myself enough. What Mason would probably call too far.
I leaned my elbows on the table, putting my head in my hands, feeling the dampness of my sweat-soaked hair against my fingers. Now that I was out of other people’s memories, I could feel the pounding of my heart, the panting of breath in and out of my lungs, and feel the tremble in my muscles.
The very edges of my vision were swimming with shadows.
Maybe Mason was right, and I’d pushed myself too far.
Not much I could do about it at the moment, unfortunately.
At least not until the dizziness and shadows receded so that I could stand up and get some water and microwave some leftovers.
I’d intentionally—although perhaps foolishly—not eaten dinner before attempting my little experiment because I didn’t want to throw it all up again.
But that meant my blood sugar had crashed, and now I was trying to decide if this was better or worse than the nausea.
There was spaghetti in the fridge from last night.
Nothing fancy, just noodles and canned sauce that I’d shaken some Italian seasoning into.
I try to learn cooking from watching online videos, but I usually don’t have most of the equipment or ingredients for anything more fancy than basic pasta or scrambled eggs or rice and some sort of topping.
I sometimes buy canned or frozen things, like those bag meals that you’re supposed to sauté and serve over rice.
And then I eat them for three days because other than single microwave meals—that I’m trying to eat fewer of—most things are designed to feed families, not single guys.
When the shadows at the edge of my vision receded and the room stopped spinning, I got a container out of the fridge and threw it in the microwave for a few minutes.
I’d also decided to get fancy when I’d gotten the pasta and sauce and had bought one of those frozen pre-garlicked loaves of bread, so I was able to pull a few slices of garlic bread out of the fridge, too.
I bit into one of the pieces, my jaw cracking a little as I chewed the hard french bread. I knew I was supposed to put it back in the oven to reheat, but I didn’t care that it was cold and chewy, at least not enough to bother with the oven.
The microwave beeped, and I used one of the stack of dish towels Hart had given me to pull out my dinner so that I didn’t burn my fingers on the bowl.
I tucked the bread into the top of the bowl, then carried it out to the small room with its cheap Ikea chair and footrest next to a folding TV table.
I set my food on the table next to my laptop, then settled into the chair.
I opened up the library app, pulling up the audiobook I was currently listening to—These Memories Do Not Belong To Us by Yiming Ma—and hitting play. I’d started it the day before, the title all but compelling me to borrow it, given how closely it seemed to parallel my life.
The story wasn’t anything like mine, of course.
It was set in a futuristic imperial China with a toxic capitalistic economy in which people were able to purchase and experience other people’s memories.
I’d been a little skeptical at first, given how much I hated actually experiencing other people’s memories, but it was a dystopian, authoritarian future, so maybe that was part of the point. I was enjoying it, at least so far.
I ate as I listened, although I didn’t feel particularly hungry.
I knew I’d pushed myself to the point where I wasn’t hungry anymore—just dizzy and slightly wobbly-feeling.
At least I didn’t feel like throwing up, even if I also didn’t feel like eating.
But I could make myself eat when I needed to.
I had a lot of experience with it—the food at Tranquil Brook had barely qualified as such, but I’d known that in order to keep myself alive, I’d have to eat it, disgusting or not.
Despite having spent several hours listening to These Memories Do Not Belong to Us and having worn myself to psychic exhaustion, I still couldn’t sleep.
After staring at the ceiling for a good forty-five minutes, I turned the light back on, then picked up the copy of Red Mars Raj had lent me.
I’d been deliberately going slowly through it, not because it wasn’t good—it was—but because it let me spend longer with something that was Raj’s.
Something that didn’t flood me with memories every time I touched it.
He’d handed it to me in a gallon plastic bag, a small smile on his face, before he and Hart had left Beyond the Veil earlier in the week.
He must have used gloves or something else to pull it off his shelf, too, because when I’d cautiously taken it out, all I’d gotten from it was a sense of warmth and pleasure—he’d enjoyed reading it, but he’d been immersed in it, letting the language and scenes take over his imagination, blocking out everything else.
It was the same reason I read: to push everything and everyone else out.
I liked that he read the same way. That he allowed himself to read that way, lost in the book, rather than stuck on the words or trapped by the thoughts and worries of the day.
It made me like him more.