1

Æther

For the past few weeks, this guy, this Dr. Lawson, has been staring me in the face and telling me I don't have legs. When I don't listen he tries to appeal to me in a friendly-seeming way. He'll pull up a chair next to mine, look down thoughtfully, and speak in a softer tone, telling me I don't really have hair. If he's feeling bold that day, he may say something like, "Your claws are coming in nicely." And after I give him some rude reply, he'll frown like a disappointed teacher and say he wishes I'd just relax.

Every day he gets me out of bed at the same time and tries to tell me that if I worked hard enough, I could attach myself to people's heads and drain their life away from them. Always the same routine. Why would I want to suck away someone's life? Sometimes I think he really means it. Sometimes I think he's the one that should be the mental patient.

"It's unnatural," he says, "to believe what you do. It's why we have to keep you in this awful place." He says it like he cares. “...try to dig inside your thoughts and understand what you truly are. Just try to...remember yourself."

I tell him to just shut up. I'm sick of this.

"It's not many creatures in the universe that have multiple brain stems. You ought to be proud."

*

Aren says the sticks are starting to look like something. The popsicles they give you here are the drippy ones that taste like cough medicine, but I love them. Only the cherry ones though. Most days, I can get another stick to add to my map.

Aren leans over the table after I've glued it in place. It's another scaled-down bit of the main hallway to my popsicle hospital. Her brownish hair is tied at the back with a red ribbon, but she's wearing a white uniform like the rest of the nurses, orderlies, and doctors in this place.

She carefully puts her fingers under each end of the flimsy wooden grid. Two thirds of each stick is stained red. She lifts the flat model up off the table; it sinks a bit in the middle, but she holds it carefully and moves slowly over to the wide cabinet at the left wall of the game room. I'm sitting at the table, watching her slide the frail model onto the bottom shelf of the cabinet, and then lock it with a small key.

I'm mostly quiet while she speaks at the table in the center of the room, sitting across from me, Ieaning on her folded arms. She tells me about her husband, her grandmother, her two-year-old son, the book she's reading.

No one enters the room while we talk. She tells me about how a few friends of hers are attempting to teach their still-infant children how to speak, worrying that their learning will fall behind other children's when they get to school.

"Sounds to me like they're more worried they'll fall behind." I say.

"I know, that's what I say." She sighs. "They keep showing me these learning books and 'activity toys' they give their children, so they'll know how to read and count and everything before they even get to school." She looks exasperated. "We're going to have a generation of 'engineers, I know it." I nod, and she smiles, shaking off her annoyance. My mouth is dry, I realize, as she finishes. There's silence for a minute, while I'm searching for any words to offer.

"I was at the supermarket this weekend," she says, picking up some more books, "and this man told me he thought my hair was beautiful." Her eyes widen while she says this, apparently waiting for a reaction, but I don’t move. "I just think that's really strange. I didn't know who he was."

"What did you say to him?" I ask. Hearing her tell me of her life outside the hospital, I shudder at the sensation that she and I are breathing different air, that her outside is completely foreign to me.

"Just ‘thank you.’" She pauses for a minute, and looks around, touching the back of her neck, then smiles in embarrassment at me. "I thought he must be lonely. I felt bad for him."

I say. "He'll be alright."

*

I sleep in a tightly-bound contraption that hangs from the ceiling in my cell, my dark cave of a room. I'm wrapped up like a 40-year-old fetus in this bag that, I imagine, must have been made from the sinew of some huge animal. It's dry and warm inside, and though my back and legs are bent at unnatural angles, I can't help but feel totally comforted in there. I always fall right to sleep once they hoist me up and lock the door for the night.

Dr. Lawson tells me I was created for a reason, but I don't want to hear it. I've never been very religious.

Lawson, sitting in that chair of his, with a clipboard and a pencil, tells me my eyes are beginning to develop, but, "you won't see much more than colors and light for a while."

I want to say, "I can see fine,' but don’t bother today. I'm looking at the cigarette he's holding and thinking that I've never seen him smoking before. He keeps talking, and I keep thinking that doctors must not even be allowed to smoke in hospitals. Before I know anything has happened, be grabs my arm and sticks the lit cigarette right onto it. I clench my fist, ready for the burn, but nothing happens. He lifts the ashy, smoky thing from my arm, and there's nothing. No burn mark, Dr. Lawson tells me how this creature I am, that I'm supposed to be, is unaffected by high temperatures.

On Sundays they test me. They put me in a room with a bunch of children's toys and a TV with a video game hooked up to it, but there's always only one game I can play. The creatures in the video game are the ones I'm supposed to be. I get it. They aren't subtle, the doctors. This is one more way for them to convince me. I'm supposed to kill the creatures in the game because they keep attacking me, and when I start to fail the doctors say it's because my subconscious won't let me attack other creatures of my species.

*

On the clock there are only three dots between the big hand and the six. I sit alone at my end of the long cafeteria table, finishing my now pointed-looking popsicle, drips of red falling from the chunk of ice I have pointed down at the tray. Seventeen minutes ago, like every day at 5:40 p.m., an orderly opened my cell door, looked in where I was sitting on the hard foor, my legs folded, waiting, and said to no one in particular, "Twenty minutes." And I was free. Free to visit any place in the world: the cafeteria or the game room.

This is my last release today, of the four I'm allowed besides my time with Dr. Lawson, so I'm able to get another stick for the map. I scrape the last chunk of ice off the stick and lick it dry, the thick cherry flavor sticking to my tongue, and I shiver from the tiny bite of cold. I flip the stick around in my fingers, the cherry end pointing up, and see Aren's face in my mind. She hadn't shown up at the game room during our normal times all week. Sometimes she just can't—I know that—but I now had accumulated six sticks, which would finish off the Southeast corner hallways.

One dot remains on the clock between me and my cell. I drop the clean stick down my shirt sleeve and tap my fingers on the table for the few seconds before one of other orderlies, one watching the patients in the cafeteria, glances at me to tell me my time is up. I stand up and follow her back to my cell, number 308. Every day I read the little plastic sign that says "Subject F" on my door. It says the same thing on my wristband. I don't know why.

*

When I walk into the game room and see no one the next morning, my body relaxes into a sigh, and I'm wondering when Aren will show up next. I tuck the seven sticks back in my pocket. Beyond the table in the center of the room, against the far wall is a television set that sits on the floor in front of a ten-foot blue carpet. I flip on the video game and start playing.

For the past few days I've immersed myself in the game during Aren's absence, but my eyes start to blur as I play, and my mind wanders away from where I am, from the creatures in the game, and the room's blank wails fade out of sight. She asked me, last week, where I was from. I told her I couldn't remember anything that had happened to me before coming to the hospital, that the doctors had told me I had amnesia and couldn't remember myself. The TV screen intrudes on my vision again and the image frightens me from my thoughts. I set down the controller and tum everything off. I feel confused still, in this room, and am relieved when the orderly comes to get me and takes me to room 308.

Subject F.

"I'm going to be frank with you," he says. "I trust you."

In my mind, I'm rolling my eyes.

Then he tells me that they're done testing me. He and the other doctors have agreed to stop the sessions of therapy and to allow me to "develop on my own." I have to stay here, at the hospital, but they think I'll find it in myself to understand my true nature at some point. He tells me this is our last session.

I exit the examination room, looking back and forth at each end of the hallway, as if I'm crossing a street, and head down the corridor opposite me. I'm not sure where to go first, so I just begin walking.

I slap open the door to a different wing of the hospital and for a few seconds, I look at some of the other patients, as if for the first time. Many of them are old, drooling on themselves, staring at their own hands, in wheelchairs that are parallel parked against the walls. It occurs to me that most of the people the doctors consider insane are sitting there quietly, not speaking a word.

As I'm passing another branch of hallway, one I've never visited at the far West end, a large spot of color in my peripheral vision makes me pause. Down there, I see, is where they must keep the children. Everything is red, blue, yellow, and orange, and there's a large window along the hallway, where they must be playing. A doctor and two nurses are watching through the window for a moment, but then the doctor says something, and she leaves with one of the nurses. I look to the sides, but no one is watching me. I walk toward the window, cautious of the woman in the white uniform as she stares through the glass. I don't want to appear as if I'm sneaking up on her, so I clear my throat as I reach the window. Her head doesn't move, but she looks at me for an instant.

Inside the children are just playing. A few of them are hooked up to little tubes, or have small machines attached to their ankles. The playroom looks so quiet, like none of the children are speaking to each other; they are just floating from toy to toy, picking them up, imagining some life for each block, or truck, or shovel, and putting it down when it has died. The nurse stays quiet and I walk a few steps away, facing the other wall, where there's an impressionist painting of a city block with big gray buildings, blocky yellow windows, and a hundred circle heads moving by on the sidewalks.

I had an appetite, but not so much now. "Can you tell me how to get to the game room from here?" I ask her, still facing away.

She is a long time in answering. I turn around and she points without looking away from the children. She points further down the corridor, at a wall with a duck wallpaper border. "Just follow the ducks," she says. And I wonder if she should be a patient too.

But I follow the ducks, anyway. They take me right, left, right, left, straight, and left until I'm at an unlabeled door where it seems all ducks converge. As soon as I push open the door, my body tenses up for a second. I realize there is someone else inside the room. He is sitting on the carpet, playing my video game. I try to quietly step back, but he turns around before I can.

He looks up and smiles. I smile back at him, then walk into the room and stand there for a moment, as he turns back and continues to play. After a moment, he pauses and looks back at me, then glances around the room, at the few puzzles scattered across the carpet. "Did you want to play?" he gestures towards the screen.

"Oh, whenever you're done," I say, and then sit down a short way from him, looking at the screen.

"I shouldn't be long. As soon as I kill these next ones...”

I say nothing, just watch.

When he finishes, he hands me the controller, but doesn't move. I look up at the screen. It's my turn, but with him watching I can hardly remember what to do. I play without much interest for a few minutes as he stares at the screen along with me, until a nurse comes in and calls him out. He says "Good luck," as he stands up and leaves quietly.

With him gone I concentrate my vision on the screen, while the white room around me, the carpet, the small noises outside, even my own body drift backwards, away from me, and I am playing, and I am ready to go farther than I ever have. To kill these damn things.

*

"That's normal," he says. "Your eyes are your brain's most intimate connection with the world. They have to develop with the rest of your body. Like I've said before, you're doing fine. Everything you 're experiencing is normal for the Alpha develop—”

"This isn't normal," I say to him. My body is shaking from the cold sweat. My fists are clenched as I stare down at him.”

"Your eyesight will be back to normal, maybe even improved, by the end of the month," he tells me. "I guarantee it. I'm surprised you'd even speak to me voluntarily about this. I thought you wanted nothing to do with the physicians now that we've released you."

I walk out of the room and don't say a thing.

*

"I've been thinking it doesn't make sense," says Aren, "that the doctors said you were here for amnesia. We don't treat amnesia patients in this part of the hospital." She leans toward me on the table, her arms folded in front of her, and it is familiar, but only in some vague way. "Is that all they told you?"

I shake my head slowly, trying to clear my vision. Her face looks primitive through my aching eyes.

"No?" Her voice intrudes into my head now, and I look her in the eyes. "Is that all they told you?"

"No, it's another reason." "What is it?" her eyes are wider now.

"I…why do you want to know?" I ask, rubbing my eyes again.

"Because you don't behave like the other patients around here," she says, "at least not the ones I've seen since being here."

I wait a moment, still looking at her, trying to focus my sight. "I don't think I should tell you."

Her mouth opens as if she is about to speak, then her eyes flicker down and look away. She stares at the table for a few seconds, then looks up at me again. "Why?"

"You'll think I'm crazy."

She frowns. "I think you're crazy for not telling me. I could just look it up, you know."

"Maybe."

"Maybe?" she sighs. "What's the big secret? If you can trust me with your map, why can't you trust me with this?"

For a moment I consider telling her to stop asking. Would she believe what he had to tell her? She admitted to me once that she cried after reading a three-line poem about a grape. I owe this to her.

"The doctors say that the reason I'm here is that I've forgotten what kind of creature I am. They say I only think I'm a human, and that I'm really some monster that floats around in the air, and has two sets of claws, and I can drain the life out of other creatures. They keep telling me I'm developing into the later stages and becoming more powerful. My eyes have been hurting me, so when I told Doctor Lawson, he said it was normal development for the Alpha stage. They think I'm some big ferocious beast. They used to take me to play the video game all the time, and my therapy was just the doctors telling me that my legs were starting to sprout or my upper horn was longer than last week." I catch my breath and wait for her to accuse me of joking.

"The doctors try to tell you you're a monster? I nod, and she stares at me, her expression not changing……Alright."

You don't believe me, do you?"

*

Things are starting to feel cramped in my pod. When I move, still sleepy in the morning, I feel a sudden surge of claustrophobia and I'm grasped by the sensation that I have more than just two arms. My muscles can't move where I want them to, and my head feels enormous, as if it was really my whole body. There are times when my vision warps, when I can see through the material of my sleeping pod, and then my eyes blur again, and I'm lying on the floor, cold sweat quivering on my skin. The room, dim except for the small bit of light coming from the hall, makes me feel empty of energy, and I'm too weary to move.

This morning, or it could have been the afternoon, after my violent fall to the floor of my cell, I begin to feel a somewhat thick wetness against the skin of my back and my right arm. I look up, at the square of light on my far wall to focus my eyes, then raise my arm, with some difficulty, expecting to see gleaming red blood clinging to it. Instead there is a clear blue, jellyfish substance, slowly drifting downward, over the dark hair on my arm. And I just stare for the longest time.

I wake up again, and I am a meter or so closer to the door than I was before. I look down at my body, but the blue jelly is gone. My arm, all my skin, is dry again. I take a long breath and realize that I feel awake now, more comfortable in my skin, and I am able to stand. And then I can only think of food.

The halls seem too bright for me, in a way. I move toward some destination that is hazy in my mind, but I am determined to reach it. There are only white blurs around me, the people and the walls. I am there.

I am standing in the cafeteria. There are people walking from the right side of the room to the left, from the food line, to the tables. I stare around for a while, and no one looks up. Then I feel the emptiness in my gut and look towards the food line. I am there and asking for spaghetti, a bit more please. As I tum toward the tables the man behind the food counter says, "Want your cherry popsicle?"

I take my tray to a table where there is someone else, and I sit down. He is an old man. He looks up at me. His eyes are big and wet. He stares for a moment, not moving, with no expression, then looks back down at his own half-eaten spaghetti and begins to cry. I stare at him, wondering what caused him to break down, but I don't ask. I quietly spin my spaghetti into the sauce and swallow the knot in my throat.

I have this sensation that I am just floating between chambers in a dank, wet cave, and none of what happens in the hospital is any of my concern. In fact, I have the sensation that what is happening in the hospital is only a dream, a particularly meaningless one.

My plate is empty quickly, just an orange stain on my lunch tray, and I reach for the popsicle in its white wrapping. I lift it towards my face, looking at the red ice, and open my mouth to it. My face burns, almost explodes, my arms spasm outward, and I drop the thing somewhere. The man looks up with wide eyes. I continue to shake with sudden fear and surprise. There is something wrong with the ice. I get up to leave and begin walking toward the door. People must be staring. It was cold. The popsicle was cold. I leave quickly, and find my room with no thought. Dr. Someone. That doctor told me once that this thing...this creature I am, cannot withstand the cold or being frozen.

*

The now intricate-looking wooden map I've made sits on the game room table and I'm alone in there, planning my method of escape. I have learned very quickly that there is just one way to get past the orderlies stationed near the stairs and elevator: the vents. Only I would be small enough to make it through without detection. The corridors at the building's northeast comer are the quietest. Today. Now is the best time.

I stand at the corner, looking toward the open hole.

Now it is dark and inside the duct I can only hear the metallic echoes of my struggling against the tight opening, and the people behind me, pulling at my flailing legs. I can smell the foreign air moving up the pipes from some other floor.

They throw me into my cell it is the middle of the day—and I am trapped again. My body crawling along the coldness of the floor, I start to think that I must have grown more than I'd realized. My sight is back now. My arms, my mouth; I can feel the strength coursing through them, and I can see that soon enough, even they will not be able to contain me. Eventually either they will let me go or they will die. When their life becomes mine, there will be nothing to stop me from reaching the natural air of the outer world.

*

I'm lucky, I guess.

My pod cannot hold me. I slept in the corner last night. There was a mouse crawling toward me. It seemed to be unaware of my presence. It didn't really taste like anything. It wasn't enough, but I cannot yet break out. I will die soon if I don't have something...with life in it.

Il

Corruption

Recorded conversation: February 16...

[muffled sounds, door opens, inaudible voices, door closes]

First Voice: He has made some progress.

[chairs move]

Second Voice: I'm just worried it won't be enough, and he'll end up choosing to die.

First: He's following the patters so far. I don't see why he wouldn't react the same way the others have.

Second: Internally he's the same, but there are some differences.

First: Like what?

Second: He's shown more resistance outwardly. At this stage most patients have adapted. He's still struggling.

First: That's no reason to think he's exceptional.

Second: I've worked with him more closely than you have. I've had to watch him carefully at times. None of the others attempted escape so late in development.

First: I'm not sure. You might be overestimating him.

Second: I know, but we should make sure he's strictly monitored.

First: Well, I feel pretty confident about him.

[long pause]

I need to go. Let me know if there's any change.

Second: Alright. Wait, we need to mark his charts.

First: Okay

[shuffling of papers, a click]

What's his code?

Second: Three-o-eight.

[pause]

First: Alright, I'll see you later.

Second: Goodbye.

[chairs move, man coughs, door opens, inaudible voices, footsteps, door closes]

III 

Hunters

The parking lot was mostly empty. The hospital was brick and at least fifteen stories tall. Sliding glass doors opened as I moved into the first floor lobby.

I walked up to the front desk where there was a woman, at least twenty years younger than me. "Excuse me," I said, "I'm Detective Adam Barker. A nurse said she'd meet me at the front lobby here. Aren Owen."

"Yeah," the woman said, "she left a message with me to have ya come to the fourth floor lobby right near the elevator. She'll meet ya there."

"Alright, uh, one other thing. Can you tell me where I can find Dr. Charles Lawson?"

"Dr. Lawson isn't in today. I'm sorry." She smiled.

The elevator opened and I walked into the open lobby across the hall, a small waiting room with nine chairs attached around the walls. The only person there was a lean woman in a nurse's uniform, sitting in one of the chairs, hunched over a thin hardcover book. When she heard me walk in, she stood immediately, sliding a plastic bookmark into her page. "Hello. I'm Aren. You're Detective Barker?”

"Yep, that's right."

"We'd better hurry," she said, "My break isn't very long." She stepped out of the room and I followed, taking in the stale air of the old, invalid patients sitting against some of the walls. She moved quickly down the hall, taking long strides. I felt almost lost after we turned a few corners. She clearly knew the building well. We entered a hallway which was decorated with ugly duck wallpaper and she looked back at me, then stopped suddenly at a white door before pulling out a key and unlocking it. She pushed it open quickly, and as soon as I followed her in, she shut the door and locked it again. "This is the game room," she said.

"Do you always lock the game room?"

"No," she said as she walked over to a large cabinet, the inside of which was full of old puzzles, board games, and a pile of sticks. She unlocked it with another key and pulled out a little plastic box. "Sit down."

"Yes ma'am."

She let out a breath, but didn't say anything.

Out of the box she pulled a 1980s style cassette player and a pile of about twenty homemade cassettes. On the tops of each were white labels which just said a number, and the date: 306: March 12, 306: July 4, 307: December 1, 308: January 9—

"That's it," she said, "I think this is when he first came."

“What are these?”

"Recorded conversations of one of the physicians here. Doctor Lawson," she said.

"How'd you get them?" I asked.

"I have access."

She put the tape labeled 308: January 9 into the player, and we begin to listen.

The entire first tape was just routine doctor talk, in my opinion; she fast forwarded ‘til nearly the end, and looked disappointed. Then she grabbed another tape, 308: January 21. We listened for a few minutes while the doctor asked this patient if he was having any reservations about taking part in the study. This nurse had said on the phone that they'd told the patient he had amnesia. The man answered no, then the doctor's voice said, "Great. This is that point that I told you about where we need to stop referring to you by your name, you know, for sake of anonymity, privacy—"

"See?" she said, "How I told you on the phone he never told me his name? It's because they made him forget it."

"He forgot his name after a month?" I asked her.

"Well, I think they were giving him a lot of drugs once they began the experiment."

"What are all these for? You can't use these in court, you know," I said.

"I'm just trying to convince you right now."

"What do you think the doctors are trying to do?"

"I don't know, but—" she stopped, "Listen."

The tape blipped. Some time had clearly passed and the doctor was asking the man how he felt. The man replied that his muscles and eyes were aching, felt like they were stretching. The doctor told him that it was completely normal, and there was nothing to worry about. He then asked the man a few questions: his favorite movie, his dog's name, his wife's name. The man sounded dazed. He couldn't remember.

On another tape, the doctor read a passage to the man about a strange creature floating in a cave, searching for prey. I looked up from where I was watching the cassette wind as it played. The woman's face was blank, staring at the player. "Ms. Owen? Something wrong?”

She snapped from her trance and licked her lips, then looked up at me. "You can hear the rest of the tapes later. We have to go visit him now." After replacing and locking the tapes in the cabinet, she was off again, racing down the hallways between the other nurses and orderlies. We turned a few more corners and were in a long hallway on the opposite side of the building. She kept looking at doors on the hall, until she came to one on the right side, stopped, and stared.

I stopped next to her and looked at the door we stood in front of:

308—Subject 'F'—DECEASED  

IV

Mission

My blood was racing. My fingers couldn't keep still. My thoughts kept slipping back to the day he'd told me what the doctors were doing to him. I was ashamed to remember what I'd thought. There was nothing that connected one part of this to the next. The detective stepped out of the room. "There's nothing unusual that I can tell, Ms. Owen." He took a step closer to me. "Look, I understand why you're skeptical about those tapes, but it sounded like a legitimate psychological study, and I heard the patient agree to it, so you have to—"

There was a metallic crash at the end of the hall. Two orderlies came rushing from the other direction. I went closer, slowly, to see what was happening. Then, from the last door on the side of the hallway, a barefoot man in old, torn patient's clothing came out with such force that I stopped in my tracks. He was hunched over like an animal, breathing heavily. I stood fixed in that spot, my eyes wide open, watching as he leapt towards the orderlies, knocking one to the side, and grappling on top of the other, wrapping his arms around the woman's head, turning so he faced in my direction.

My mouth went dry when I saw his face. He wasn't deceased. He looked right into my eyes, but didn't seem to recognize me. I felt my blood pulsing in my wrist. Two more orderlies, both men, came rushing out of the door he'd come from. One of them grabbed his back, and he let out a high screech. The other man took a syringe from his pocket and jabbed the thrashing patient. Within a minute he was sedated and they were dragging him back to the room. I felt frozen.

The detective stepped up to my side. "Well...like I was saying."

"That was him!"

"What?"

"The patient they just sedated. That was the man," I said. "I can't believe they reported him dead."

The detective's brow bunched up as he thought. "Well," he said, scratching the back of his head, "I'Il go back there and talk to them. You stay here."

*

I already knew what he'd tell me before he came out the door.

"They marked his file wrong when he was transferred from his normal room."

"You believe them?"

He took a breath and rubbed his forehead. He was tired of me.

"This has happened before," he said.

My head snapped up and I focused on him. "What do you mean?"

He rubbed the back of his neck. "A couple years ago this hospital was accused of something like this. No monsters that time, but it was investigated, and they found nothing. I came to find out it things have changed. And I don't see that they have." "What? You haven't even heard all the tapes —you saw him, he—"

"I don't see anything to separate him from other patients at this ward, and he's clearly dangerous. You could never get him released."

I felt burnt out, took my gaze off him, and didn't speak.

"If you don’t like the conditions here," he said, "Just quit. I don't know what else to tell you. I have to leave now, Ms. Owen, alright? Goodbye."

I closed my eyes, recalling the patient's animal stare. Then I recalled the lost, blank look he'd had when I knew him before. I walked back to the game room. The time was well past the end of my break now. From the big cabinet I took the patient's popsicle hospital and the box of tapes.

I took the elevator to the ground floor, carrying the things, and brought them out to my car, where I put them in the trunk. I reentered the hospital and looked at Marla behind the desk. I stood there for a second, taking in the stark whiteness of that place, what the patient must have seen for so long. It was suffocating, then, and 1 understood why he tried to escape. It sounded like a good idea. "Everything alright, Aren? What happened to that detective?" she asked.

"He…uh...He quit on me, Marla."

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, and was silent for a moment. " "…what are you gonna do? I wouldn't blame you if you don't wanna work here."

"No, I'm gonna stay. I'm not done here," I said.