21. Sneak Peek Of Brainwashing Bliss
Sneak Peek Of Brainwashing Bliss
My neuroscientist is secretly deprogramming me one milligram at a time and the first face I remember is his, even though we’ve never spoken. Memory erasure. Second chance. Doctor/patient.
Matthias: I went to her gallery show three years ago and stood in front of her largest canvas for twenty minutes like it was a theory of consciousness painted in reds and golds. I never introduced myself.
Bliss: The memories come back in order, first color, then sensation, then faces, and his face surfaces before my mother's, before my own.
Matthias: She describes a man she remembers at a gallery: warm smile, standing before her biggest canvas. She's describing me, and my hands are steady but nothing else is.
Bliss: "Were you there?" I ask, and the way his breath catches tells me everything before he says a single word.
Matthias: She's rebuilding herself from the inside out and I’m dangerously attached to the outcome. This was supposed to be science, not love.
SNEAK PEEK OF brAINWASHING BLISS
Chapter 1: Grey
Bliss
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 0630 hours
Grey has become the easiest color to make.
It waits in the tray, soft and obedient, neither dark enough to accuse nor pale enough to disappear. I drag the brush through it, then across the canvas, watching the line spread over the white space in a slow, uneven stroke.
Dr. Strauss says this is progress.
He says reduced stimulation helps the mind repair itself. He says color can agitate trauma pathways before the nervous system is ready to process them. He says many things in that calm, careful voice people use when they’ve already decided what the truth is and only need me to agree with it.
I used to know colors.
The thought flickers in and out before I can hold it still.
I look down at my fingers. Paint has gathered beneath my nails, but even that looks wrong now. Grey under the nail beds. Grey across the pads of my thumbs. Grey smeared along the side of my hand where I forgot to wipe the brush properly.
Forgot.
The word sits there, waiting for me to pick it up.
I don’t.
The studio is white from floor to ceiling, though they don’t call it a studio. They call it the creative integration room. The walls are white. The shelves are white. The table is white. Even the clock has no numbers, only two narrow silver hands moving around a blank face.
Everything here has been softened, stripped back, and made harmless.
I don’t feel harmed.
That might be the worst part.
A week ago, or maybe yesterday, I woke up crying because I couldn’t remember my father’s voice.
I knew he was dead. I knew he played piano in smoky bars in Montreal and wore scarves indoors because he said artists should always look slightly dramatic.
I knew facts about him, tidy facts, organized facts, the kind someone could write on an intake form.
But his voice was gone.
When I told Dr. Strauss, he smiled and wrote something in his file.
“Memory is not identity, Bliss,” he said. “Sometimes healing requires separating the self from the injury.”
I wanted to ask him what happens when they separate too much.
Instead, I nodded because nodding makes appointments shorter.
The brush pauses over the canvas.
There should be blue here.
The certainty arrives without shape, bright and sharp enough to make my eyes sting. Blue, but not soft. Not sky. Something electric. Something alive. I can almost see it under the grey, trapped beneath the color I’ve been allowed to use.
My hand moves before I think better of it, reaching toward the locked cabinet where the other paints are kept.
The door opens behind me.
I drop my hand.
Dr. Strauss steps into the room with a nurse beside him and my morning medication cup in her hand. His gaze moves from me to the cabinet, then to the canvas.
“Bliss,” he says gently. “What were you looking for?”
I stare at the grey painting.
The blue vanishes.
“I don’t know,” I say.
And the terrible thing is, I’m not sure if I’m lying.
***
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 0715 hours
The canvas dries in layers I don’t remember choosing.
Grey over grey over grey, each stroke settling into the next until the surface looks like weather without sky. I stand close enough to smell the paint, the faint mineral sharpness of it beneath the cleaner they use on the tables every morning, and still my hand keeps moving.
That’s the strange part. My fingers still understand pressure, angle, drag, when to let the brush flatten and when to lift it before the line loses shape.
They know how to blend edges until one shade becomes another.
They know how to leave space where light should go.
My mind watches from somewhere farther back, unable to explain why any of it matters.
There are photographs in my file. Dr. Strauss showed me one last week during reflective recall.
A gallery wall filled with paintings so bright they almost hurt to look at.
Red like an open wound. Orange like heat rising off pavement.
Purple so deep it looked alive. People stood in front of them with wine glasses and serious faces, pretending they weren’t being pulled apart by color.
He said they were mine.
I believed him because my signature was in the corner. Bliss Fontaine. The letters looked familiar. The paintings didn’t.
Now I paint fog. Soft shapes. Quiet lines. Nothing sharp enough to catch on anything inside me. “Less agitation,” Nurse Larkin said yesterday, arranging my brushes in size order. “You’re finding balance.”
I didn’t tell her balance feels like someone emptied the room while I was still standing in it.
The brush slips slightly. A darker streak cuts across the canvas, too sudden, too certain. I stare at it, waiting for the mistake to become something I understand, and then the smell comes next. Not from the room. From inside my head.
Burned wood. Melted plastic. Wet ash.
My throat closes before I know why. The brush drops onto the table, leaving a dark smear across the white surface.
I press my paint-stained fingers to my mouth, but the tears are already there, sliding hot and silent down my face.
I don’t sob or make a sound because sound brings questions, and questions bring Dr. Strauss.
The tears keep coming anyway, inconvenient and unexplained, like my body has remembered something my mind refuses to hand over.
I look at the canvas again. Smoke. Grey. A shape beneath it, almost hidden. A door, then not a door. A window, then not a window. A room filled with paintings.
My paintings.
One corner burns brighter than the rest, a smear of memory I can’t name but somehow know I’m losing.
The image fractures before I can reach it, breaking apart into white walls, silver clock hands, and the soft step of Nurse Larkin’s shoes in the corridor.
I grab the brush again and paint over the dark streak before anyone sees it.
By the time the door opens, the canvas is fog again.
So am I.
***
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 0830 hours
The color comes back as a bruise of light behind my eyes.
Not grey.
Something else.
Gold, maybe. Deep blue at the edges. A violent streak of purple cutting through it, alive enough to make my hand stop above the canvas.
I blink, and the integration room returns. White walls. White table. Grey paint. The locked cabinet.
My breathing changes before I understand why. I set the brush down carefully because Nurse Larkin counts broken things, and I’ve already lost one ceramic water cup this week.
The image isn’t gone.
It waits behind the room, bright and strange, refusing to flatten into the fog Dr. Strauss says is safest.
A crowd.
Wine glasses catching warm gallery light. Voices layered over one another, low and impressed and pretending not to be impressed. Someone laughing near the entrance. Someone else saying my name in a tone that sounds proud.
My name.
Bliss Fontaine.
Then a face.
Dark skin. Short black curls. Wire-rimmed reading glasses that should make him look severe but don’t. He stands slightly apart from the crowd, not posing, not performing admiration, not glancing around to see who notices him noticing.
He looks at my painting like it’s speaking to him.
No.
Like he’s answering.
The brush is in my hand again before I remember picking it up. My fingers move fast, scraping grey across the canvas, pulling shape from nothing. First the line of his jaw. Then the glasses. The angle of his head. The stillness of him among all that movement.
I don’t know him.
I don’t know where I saw him.
I don’t know why my hand knows his face better than my mind knows my own.
The painting changes under my brush. The fog becomes crowd shapes, pale shadows pressed close together. I leave him near the center, darker than the rest, more defined, though every color I need stays locked behind the cabinet door.
His eyes are the hardest part. Grey can’t hold what I remember, but I try anyway.
By the time I finish, my fingers ache and paint has dried along my knuckles. The room feels too quiet around me, as if even the silver hands on the blank clock have slowed to watch.
A man I don’t know stares back from the canvas.
Except something inside me rejects that.
Not don’t know. More like can’t quite remember.
The difference presses against the back of my throat until my eyes sting again.
Footsteps approach in the corridor.
I should paint over him. I know I should. Dark streaks get noted. Faces get questioned. Anything specific becomes evidence that I’m resisting the treatment.
But my hand won’t move.
The door opens, and Nurse Larkin steps inside with her clipboard tucked against her hip.
Her gaze lands on the canvas.
Then her expression changes. Just slightly. Enough.
“Bliss,” she says, too carefully. “Who is that?”
I look at the grey man with the wire-rimmed glasses and the eyes that understood color.
“I don’t know,” I say.
This time, I know I’m lying.
***
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 0900 hours
Dr. Strauss arrives with Nurse Larkin and the soft patience of a man who never has to ask twice.
He doesn’t knock before entering. No one does here.
The creative integration room belongs to the institute, same as the paint, the brushes, the locked cabinet, and the blank-faced clock above the shelves.
I’m only the person allowed to sit inside it for scheduled therapeutic expression between breakfast and cognitive review.
His gaze moves to the canvas before it moves to me.
The grey man is gone.
I painted over him as soon as Nurse Larkin left, dragging fog across his face until the glasses disappeared, then the eyes, then the outline of his jaw. I should feel better now that there’s nothing for Strauss to find.
Instead, the missing shape bothers me more than the painting did.
“How are we today, Bliss?” he asks.
We.
He always says it that way, as if I’m a small country he’s governing from a distance.
I look down at my hands. Grey along my fingertips. Grey in the creases beside my nails. A pale smear on the inside of my wrist where I must have touched wet paint without noticing.
There should be a word for what I am.
It waits somewhere close, hidden behind the white walls and the clean chemical smell. My mind reaches for it and comes back with nothing.
Not sad. Not sick. Not calm. Those are easy words, approved words, words that fit inside Strauss’s file.
This one starts with L.
I can feel the shape of it.
Luminous?
No.
Lonely?
Maybe, but not enough.
Nurse Larkin shifts beside him, her clipboard tucked against her chest. “Bliss?”
Strauss lifts one hand, stopping her without looking away from me. “Take your time.”
That’s another lie they like. They call it a schedule, but it feels more like a tide.
Meals arrive. Doors open. Doors close. People tell me where to sit, what to paint, when to talk, and when to rest. The days blur until they feel like the same one repeated under different notes in Dr. Strauss’s file.
I swallow and look at the canvas.
Grey. Grey. Grey.
The word arrives so quietly I almost miss it.
Lost.
My fingers curl around the brush until the wooden handle presses into my palm.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Strauss watches me for several seconds, his expression mild. “Fine is a useful word when we don’t wish to look deeper.”
I wish he would stop saying things that sound kind.
“I painted,” I say.
“Yes. You did.” He steps closer to the canvas, studying the surface. “Softer today. Less conflict.”
Because I covered it.
Because the man with the wire-rimmed glasses is buried under fog.
Because part of me was frightened enough to hide him and another part is angry enough to want him back.
Strauss turns to Nurse Larkin. “Increase observation after creative sessions. Note any return of representational fixation.”
Representational fixation.
A face, he means. A memory, maybe.
Me, trying to hold on to one memory before it disappears too.
He faces me again, his voice lowering into that careful warmth. “Bliss, the mind releases what it isn’t ready to carry.”
I stare at the canvas.
Maybe mine didn’t release anything.
Maybe someone took it.
The thought is too clear, too dangerous, and I let my gaze go soft before he can see it sharpen.
“I paint grey because I can’t remember any other color,” I say. My voice sounds thin, but it doesn’t break. “I know they exist. I know I loved them. But they’re gone.”
Strauss’s pen pauses above his notes.
I look at him then, and the last words come out before I can stop them.
“Like everything else.”
***