Stillness Part V, Chapter 45
I have to begin this story where I can. It isn’t the beginning of the story; it’s the first day of my life that I really “remember”— in the common sense of the term. It’s the day I left the home. It was also the day the Phenomenon occurred, as well as being the day that any number of people that I knew (presumably along with some people I did not know) were removed.
That’s an unfortunate word, but it’s the best one I’ve ever been able to come up with to describe what happened. They were removed. Other terms used by those of us who discuss this subject (a small group) include undone, unmade, uncreated, destroyed, eliminated, and erased. Erased is probably the most popular. I don’t deny that it’s a good fit, but I prefer removed.
Todd says that removed is a euphemism. He suggests that there is something Orwellian in my selection of the term, that I’m trying to hide the awful reality of what occurred behind a word that obscures tragedy with its vagueness, like when an airline makes reference in its annual report to a mysterious mid-air explosion killing all 257 people on board one of its planes as a “conversion” or “replacement” of its aircraft. I believe Todd is mistaken on this point. The word removed is not vague, nor does it shy away from reality. If there was an explosion, I would say explosion. If we knew people were killed, I would say they were killed.
But we don’t know any of that. We don’t know that anyone has been erased, or eliminated or destroyed. There is this nagging sense, this appalling and overwhelming fear, that they might have been. But we don’t know that for sure. Far from obscuring the horrible reality, I think the word drives the horror home. They were here, they’re gone, and we have no idea what happened to them.
Anyway, whatever it was that happened to them, it happened that day. The day I left the home. The first day of my life that I remember.
Perhaps I should clarify that.
It isn’t that I don’t remember events that occurred before that day. As a matter of fact, I remember a good many events, and in great detail. For example: I remember being on a bus one day when I was 23 months old. There were 37 people on the bus when my mother and I boarded it. There were 16 stops between where we boarded and where we got off. During the course of the trip, there were as many as 51 and as few as 29 people on the bus. I can tell you how many were sitting on the left side of the bus, how many on the right. How many were men, how many were women. How many got off at each stop and how many got on.
And it isn’t just numbers.
Four stops after we boarded, a blonde lady got on the bus and sat down right in front of us. She wore a gray coat with a green scarf. Her fingernails were painted red. The polish on the middle finger of her left hand was chipped. Her husband sat next to her, a balding man wearing a white shirt and gray trousers. They got off the bus seven stops later. Along the way, they talked about someone named Pickles, who was causing a lot of trouble by where and when she was going to the bathroom. I realize now that Pickles was their dog. The man was quite upset about Pickles. The woman was less so. She told her husband he was being silly.
Wait. That isn’t entirely accurate. He exact words to her husband were, “All right, Stan. You don’t want to be silly about this, do you?” I remember her exact words just as I remember their entire conversation. I could provide a verbatim transcript if I wanted to.
Which, believe me, I do not.
Meanwhile, as the couple in front of us were talking about Pickles, there were other conversations going on around the bus. Seven distinct conversations. My mother and I made that bus trip 247 times over the course of about 18 months. I remember everyone who got on, everyone who got off, what they looked like, what they were wearing, every word they uttered.
But you have to understand, this particular episode occurred when I was not even two years old. By the time I was, say, five, I would have taken in quite a bit more. By that age, my mind had advanced from merely recording every detail to performing complex operations on the data gathered. I might divide the rows of the bus into six zones (or four or eight or twelve, it didn’t matter) and calculate the probability that the next spoken instance of the word “and” or “stop” or “lunch” would come from a particular zone. I might simultaneously cross-reference this information with the likelihood that a person in a given zone was wearing brown shoes or blue jeans, developing an intricate model which showed the correlation between what the bus riders wore, what they said, where they sat, where they were coming from, and where they were going. I might then take this entire model and compare it with a similar model I constructed the previous day (or six months before) of ants carrying the remains of a cookie into their anthill. From these two models I might derive a third, showing the unexpected links between the two, and suggesting some underlying symmetry to the universe.
So, yes, I can “remember” quite a few things that happened before the day I left the home. In fact, every waking moment of every day of my life, I was inundated with facts, events, data points. All of which stayed with me and are with me to this day. My mind would take this information in and work and rework it relentlessly. But there was very little sense in all this that it was I who was doing the observing or analysis. The concept of myself as a self was there, but it was no more prominent or seemingly significant than the number of people who got on the bus at a given stop. I think I sensed at some level that it was more important, or that it somehow should be more important, but I couldn’t get my mind to focus in that direction.
So there I was, lost in the cacophony of my own thoughts. There were a few sets of circumstances in which the me portion of my mind would temporarily emerge. The presence of some individuals — Grace in particular and, before that (to a lesser extent) my mother — would bring about this effect. And sometimes music did it, too.
And then there were the dreams. The last few were a blur. I didn’t understand that at the time, but I do now. I was remembering them the way normal people remember their dreams — some parts vague, some distinct. Later I would fix my mind on the subject and the order of events would be more or less clear.
But back to my original point, the day I left the home was also the day I gained the ability to control my mind, to turn the volume down on the background noise of observation and analysis so that I can think, more or less like a normal person. I can turn the volume down, but not off. Nor would I want to. From the start, my brain was wired in — to say the least — an unusual way. If it had been unwired, or rewired, I might have been “cured,” but it would have been one of those successful operations in which the doctor loses the patient. The result would have been some semblance of a perfectly normal person, but it would not have been me. Whoever or whatever I am, the cacophony is a big part of it.
So anyhow, that was the day. The first day of my life.
It was late at night and we were all sitting around the office on the first floor. We knew it was wrong for us to be doing this, but there was no one to tell us not to. There were nine of us altogether: my best friends Grace and Todd, the latter of whom I had just retrieved from a coma; my friend Raymond, whom I had just brought back from the dead; the older girls, Judy and Bettina; the younger girls, Estelle and Lucinda; and Robert.
This left the nine of us to attempt to make sense of what had just occurred. Or what may have occurred, we really weren’t sure.
“Well, Robert,” Judy began, “ I guess now we all understand about your law of unintended consequences.”
Robert nodded.
“I don’t,” said Grace.
“I don’t either,” said Todd. “Can somebody tell me what’s going on here?”
Lucinda, who had been thumbing through some papers on the desk, looked up.
“What do you remember?”
Todd thought about that for a moment.
“I remember the ants…”
“That’s right,” Raymond interrupted. “On the back porch. They were biting us.”
I was struck by an urge to apologize for the ants, and for my doppelganger. I knew that I had dreamed both of them up. It was only then that I realized that I couldn’t speak: that if I tired, the result would be that grunting/groaning thing I did sometimes. Of course, I had known all along that I couldn’t speak — not while awake, anyway — but I had expected, or at least hoped, that I would carry that ability, along with my lucidity, out of the dream space and into the real world. No such luck.
And there was suddenly a lot that I wanted to say. I was overwhelmed by my feelings. It was much more real to actually feel them than to simply be aware of them in the same way I might be aware that the digits of today’s date added up to the number of blue flecks in a square of linoleum that I happened to glance at four years earlier. I felt shame and regret over the ants. I felt anxiety about who or what my mirror self was and what he had done. I felt joy at seeing Raymond and Todd all right, joy at seeing all of them, especially Grace, who had somehow brought me to this place.
It was then, when I looked at Grace — when I was overcome by recognition and love, feelings which before that moment I had only in my dreams — that I realized that something was terribly wrong. Or rather, terribly right. I had changed. I was there. I had finally arrived. I looked at Grace. I looked straight at her for the first time.
She didn’t notice.
“I remember a lot of noise and confusion,” Todd continued. “And pain. And then I remember showing up at the front door a couple of minutes ago.”
“Same here,” said Raymond. “After the ants, I was asleep or unconscious for a while. When was that, this morning? And then I just sort of woke up standing at the front door with Todd.”
Todd picked up the narrative again.
“Then we came in and…walked over here to the office for some reason. And then that kid who looks like Corey came down the stairs. Who is he, anyway? And Grace told us not to look at him, so we didn’t. And then he was gone…or something…”
He looked around the room for a moment, seeming to study each of us. His eyes met mine. He stopped on me for just a moment, looking puzzled. Then he turned and looked at Robert, sitting next to my left.
That’s right, I’m here, I said inside. I knew how to make the words in my mind, and event understood how to make them with my mouth, but somehow I couldn’t do it.
“And then the rest of you came down,” Todd concluded. “And here we are.”
“I’ve never been as scared of anything as I was of those ants,” said Raymond.
He got up from where he was sitting and walked over to the spot on the floor where Estelle sat. He looked at her with concern.
“Did they hurt you?” he asked, putting his hand on her head. “Are you okay?”
Estelle looked up and smiled.
“Greater love hath no man than this,” she said. “That a man lay down his life for his friends.”
There may have been some trepidation among the others about telling Raymond what had happened to him, but it apparently wasn’t a problem for Estelle.
Raymond laughed. He looked embarrassed.
“Well, I didn’t exactly lay down my life…”
He looked around the room.
“I mean…did I?”
“The ants were scary,” said Judy. “And dangerous. Deadly, even.”
Raymond let that sink in for a moment.
“But then how did I…come back?” he finally asked.
Still smiling, Estelle looked directly at me.
“So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
All eyes turned to me. This seemed like a good opportunity to let everyone know what had happened to me. Also, I needed to set Estelle straight. It was all very well crediting me with saving Raymond’s life, but my heroics should be tempered by my culpability in his death. But as I’ve already mentioned, I was still incapable of speech. However, I think my confusion of thoughts and emotions must surely have shown on my face, a fact that a group as perceptive as my friends at the home — as perceptive as I had made them — couldn’t possibly miss. Maybe Todd noticed, and maybe he was on the verge of saying something when the group’s attention was directed away from me once again.
“Estelle, are you all right?”
It was Lucinda.
Estelle looked at her and nodded.
“Can you talk normally?” Lucinda asked. “Without the Bible quotations?”
She seemed to think about this for a moment. Then she shook her head.
“I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart.”
“That sounds like a no,” said Todd. “What are you telling us, Estelle? That you don’t want to talk without the Bible quotes or that you can’t?”
Estelle appeared to struggle for a moment with what to say next, then she shook her head again.
Now everyone gathered around Estelle. Myself included. No one spoke for a while.
“Did the Bad Corey do it?” Grace asked, breaking the silence.
Todd looked at Judy, who looked at Lucinda, who looked back at Todd.
Their triumvirate was formed at that precise moment. Grace was dethroned. From then on, the three of them would be in charge.
“We can’t say for sure,” said Judy. “He may have done it, or Corey might have.”
“Or the Mountain People,” said Lucinda.
“We’ll get to them in a minute,” said Todd. “I think the twin Corey is the most likely explanation. We all have the sense — don’t we? — that he has somehow…removed (this was before Todd settled on the “correct” term) one or more persons from our midst. And our memories of those persons along with them, it would seem. Our memories are the shadows that disappeared along with the substance of their being.”
Like Lucinda, Todd can be kind of a speech-maker. When things get serious, they both have a tendency to pour on the rhetoric. Judy never used that kind of language; she always kept it simple. That may be the reason that she always had the last word.
“Yes,” said Judy. “We seem to have lost some memories. But I’m not sure that’s quite the same as what’s happened to Estelle. Corey, did you do something to Estelle?”
All eyes turned to me. The answer was: yes, I did. Of course I did something to Estelle. Whether I did it directly in a dream I couldn’t remember, or whether indirectly through my look-alike creation — who might have made a less-than-clean grab at her, taking some of her away and leaving some behind — it didn’t matter. One way or the other, it all originated from me. But still, I could not speak, so it seemed there was no way for me to own up to my crime.
I looked at Raymond, whose face was fine, now. Now more welts or blisters from the ant bites, no more flesh eaten away. I looked at Estelle, so pretty with her braided brown hair. She still had three welts on her face, but they were fading away. And then I turned to Todd. He was all right, too. He had no marks or welts, but still he looked different from the boy I met when I first arrived at the home. He and Judy and…someone?…had looked different in the face back then. Their faces were fatter. And there had been extra flesh under their eyes, which had appeared to squint, almost slant. I remembered the dream in which I offered all the children the chance to look however they wished. Only these two (three?) had requested any change: Judy quite eagerly, Todd with a certain reluctance.
He didn’t want anyone to think he was making the change out of vanity. He took the position that there was nothing wrong with the face of a person with Down Syndrome, which was a condition that he in fact still had. Wouldn’t it be better, he asked, to continue looking as he did, to be an example of just how highly functional an individual with Down Syndrome could be?
He had a point.
Todd did still have Down Syndrome; I didn’t dare change that fact. I had to be careful in how I went about repairing my friends. Though I had cleared up a few blocked pathways and provided some alternate wiring in his brain and nervous system, I hadn’t simply gone in and made him “normal,” whatever that might mean. If I had changed too much, I would have lost Todd in the process. Just as I need the incessant background noise in order to be myself, each of the others needed to retain their disabilities, or at least some share of them, in order to retain their identities. That’s why Todd, who had gained the ability to hear, had also retained the ability not to hear. Not hearing may not sound like an “ability” to those who have heard all their lives, but to Todd — whose mind was formed in a soundless world, and who needed that world to retreat to from time to time — it most assuredly was. I can empathize, inasmuch as I have the ability to turn up the background noise to blunt my own personality, when I become too much for myself.
Still, for all that, Todd decided to go with the cosmetic changes.
I turned and looked at Estelle again. The changes she had been through. First I had given to her, then I had taken away from her. But somehow she was still Estelle, wasn’t she? Maybe the other me was guided by a set of parameters not unlike my own. He might remove a whole person; apparently he had done that. But if he took something away from the person, he left the person behind. She was still Estelle: pretty and nice, and usually the quiet one.
It was a new thing, realizing how I felt about her. And then it hit me, how I felt about all of them.
They were aware, now, of the change that had occurred in me. I guess it was obvious from my looking from face to face. I was there in the room with them now. I was focusing on them. No one said anything; I think they were all holding their breath, waiting for me to speak.
But that wouldn’t happen for a long time.
As was typical, Grace broke the silence.
“Don’t cry, Corey,” she said.
And I realized I was crying. For the first time in my life. Or maybe the first time since infancy, I’m really not sure. Those early memories get a little cloudy. But my face was hot and wet. And then when Grace spoke, and it seemed that everything was acknowledged at once — all the pain, the loss, the joy; all the love I had for these my friends; everything I had never felt — and I cut loose.
I wailed. That’s the only word for it.
Somehow Bettina was there, and she put her arms around me. Then Grace and Judy and finally Estelle. Todd, Raymond, and Robert held back, not entirely sure what to do with all this gushy stuff taking place. I immediately empathized with them, realizing that I wouldn’t know what to do under the same circumstances. And then understanding that I was being empathetic with my friends made me cry all the harder.
This went on for a while, before I was finally able to pull myself together. All the while, Grace was saying “it’s okay; Corey; it’s all right” the way someone had said it to her when she used cry. Judy and Bettina picked up on this, to the point that I felt I was being comforted excessively. I pulled myself loose from them and wiped my eyes.
“Well,” Todd said, in a tone that made it clear that the big emotional scene had worn out its welcome, “this has been quite a night, hasn’t it? Corey, you can hear and understand me, can’t you?”
I nodded. It was an amazing sensation: communicating with my friends while awake.
There was applause. And cheering. The other boys were now quick to pat me on the back or — in Robert’s case — slug me in the arm exactly the way he and someone always used to do it. Each also gave me a way to go or all right, Corey. The blow to the arm kind of hurt, but I just took it and continued to smile my first-ever smile.
“Anyway, Corey,” said Todd, “did you do this thing to Estelle?’
So we were back to that question.
I didn’t know whether to nod that yes I had or shake my head that no I hadn’t. There needed to be a third choice — then I realized what it was.
I shrugged.
“You don’t know?” Todd asked.
“Wait, “ said Lucinda, “Corey, did the other Corey do this?”
I nodded.
“Can you fix it?” asked Grace.
I wondered. The thought of trying any more changes made me feel kind of sick. I shrugged. Then I shook my head.
“Right,” said Judy. “I think we’ll wait before we ask Corey to do anything else. I hope you understand, Estelle.”
Estelle nodded, looking very sober. She had the last word on this subject, which almost set me off again.
“Let not your hearts be troubled,” she said.
“Corey,” said Judy, “what happened to the other Corey? I mean, did you do to him what he did to the others?”
I shrugged. I could remember that I woke up and knew that there was danger, knew that my dream about the Remover had become reality. And I knew that I could somehow remove the Remover by touching him, and…thinking him away. And I did so. But for some reason, I didn’t think that what I had done was the same as what he had done.
“Clearly he did not,” said Lucinda. “If he had, we would have no memory of the other Corey.”
I nodded. She was right.
She was right, but of course none of us knew what any of this meant.
“Corey,” Lucinda continued, “How did you come to be able to remove the other Corey? And how is it that you’ve been cured of your autism?”
As I said, it wasn’t precisely accurate to say that I had been cured, but this was not the time to split hairs.
Lucinda had not asked a yes or no question, but I knew how to answer it. I started out of the office, and beckoned to the others to follow me. I walked across the common room and into the dark kitchen. The dark didn’t bother me, but someone behind me turned on the light. I unbolted the door to the back porch and stepped through. The night was still, sultry for such a dry climate. It was quiet: the crickets had given up their work hours before.
Through the screen, I could see the light in the distance. It no longer blazed like the afternoon sun; it had mellowed to something on the order of a half dozen full moons. I unlatched the screen door and led the lot of us into the backyard. We all stood there for a long while, studying this scene of a yet another dream that had become reality.
It was a city.
In fact, it was the city, the one that Judy and someone had painted in their mural. It was exactly where it should be, nestled in the bowl in the front face of the mountain. From this distance, we couldn’t make out the details of the skyline, but it didn’t matter. We all knew the city as it was depicted in the mural, and we all knew that the mural was a perfect match. We had seen this city with its glowing white towers many times before. And in fact, I had been there just a few moments before. I said goodbye to Angela and watched that city dissolve around me, making adjustments within myself all the while — awakening to this new life.
Yes, we all knew that city. We had all been there many times. In dreams.