Revamped

Revamped

Copyright © 2018  by Elise Abram

All rights reserved.

Published by EMSA Publishing 2018

Thornhill, Ontario, Canada

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

First printing

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.

PUBLISHED BY EMSA PUBLISHING

http://emsapublishing.com

Revamped is printed in Minion Pro.

Credits: Cover font and chapter numbers: Gloop by Anthony Robinson | daFont.com under A. Robinson's commercial agreement for authors.

Cover art: Woman with curly hairs ID 11160052 by IngaDudkina | DepositPhotos.com; Vampire ID 14134388 by Subbotina | DepositPhotos.com.

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1

Tell me about your childhood, she said. She poised her pen above the paper, ready for note-taking.

There's nothing to tell, I answered softly.

She chuckled quietly. Surely, you must remember something.

I shook my head. There really was nothing to tell. It was as if I hadn't existed before three weeks ago. As if I were just newly born.

Let's approach this from a different angle, shall we? She looked at me and smiled. They'd assigned me the grandmotherly type, round and jolly with high, rosy, crab apple cheeks. She wore her hair curled tightly around the circumference of her face, newly-grown grey hugging her hairline like a tiara. What's the very first memory you recall?

I thought for a moment before answering so she'd get that my response was genuine. Waking up. In the hospital. Before I came here. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to a time before that, but all was mist and fog.

Okay. She made a note in my file. "Let's explore that memory.

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Imagine you're there.

Visualization. We'd tried it before. Visualize your parents. Visualize the house you grew up in. Visualize your childhood friend. It hadn't worked then. I didn't know what made her think it would now, but I played along. I closed my eyes, took a deep, cleansing breath, and tried to remember the hospital into which I'd been reborn.

It's cold. I'm shivering, I told her.

Good, she said. What colour is the room?

Light blue. The colour of a cloudy sky.

Very good. I imagined the edges of her mouth turned up into a smile at my revelation. Who's with you in the room?

I'm alone. There are magazines on the end table and a water pitcher on a tray on wheels over my bed near my knees.

I heard her clothes rustle; the sound of her nodding. How did you get there?

I don't know.

In the time before you were placed in the cold room—

There's nothing. I opened my eyes and frowned. I don't exist before then. Shortly after I was reborn, I began to think of my life as being the sum of two wholes. I had come to think of my life before I existed as The Before and my life after rebirth as The Now. The divisor between the two was some unknown devastating event, a huge caesura cleaving me—who I was, who I am, and who I will be—in two.

Calm down, Janet, the doctor said. Take another breath. A deep one. In through the nose to the diaphragm. Out through the mouth...good. And again...

Janet isn't really my name. Technically, I guess I'm a Jane Doe, one of two brought to the hospital that night. Some nurse had the brilliant idea to name one of us Jane and the other Janet; I guess I pulled the short straw. I kind of liked it at the time, you know? Janet. It rhymed with planet which made me feel out of this world, extraordinary, rather than some less than ordinary blank slate, one with no identity or memory. If I had to be anybody, I suppose Janet Planet was infinitely better than blah old plain Jane Doe.

Dr. Putnum coached me through three more breaths and then said, Good. I think we're done for the day. She smiled proudly, as if we'd actually accomplished something in the session. We'll pick up with this again tomorrow.

She nodded, ignoring me in favour of her furious note-making as I left.

An orderly from my wing was waiting on the other side of the door to walk me to my room for nap time. Nap time! Like I really was newly born and in need of rest, when all I really wanted was to break free of my cage and soar. If I were ever to figure out who I was—who I really was—I was sure it was out there, in the real world, and not stagnating in a near-rubber room on the inside. Someone knew me out there. Someone out there would claim me and help me to reclaim myself.

The orderly left me alone. I went straight to the bathroom, dim with the light out, and examined my features in the mirror. I looked like me—at least, I thought I did. I couldn't be sure if it were a latent memory from The Before, or a new one, formulated in the more recent Now.

I fixated on the face staring back at me, hard, until my vision blurred and my features melded into the surrounding darkness.

Something was wrong. The face in the reflection was me, but not me. This must be the way it feels to look at oneself in the mirror after reconstructive surgery, I thought. That metaphor seemed to fit best.

I couldn't explain it any clearer than that my reflection was somehow off.

An hour later, it was time for Group. Dr. Putnum was there. So were about a half-dozen other people from my ward.

My ward was a wayward home for lost souls. My ward-mates, each of them secure in their own delusions, were even more lost than I. We had all somehow forgotten ourselves. Somewhere inside us all, we had erected a dam. Our psyches stood beside that dam, stubbornly plugging up the only method of egress with a finger. Two scenarios were inevitable: we would eventually pull the finger out and allow our true selves to leak through, or the hole would crack under pressure, slowly expanding until our psyches rushed back in the blink of an eye. Gone one moment, here the next; sudden realization. Either way, we would all eventually be damned to suffer with who we were until the end of our days.

On my ward was a girl who had cleaved herself in two—Emma, the Prim and Proper and Christina, the Promiscuous; Edgar the Goth, who believed himself to be a vampire; Grace, who had been abused by her father and chose to slit her wrists rather than turn him in to the authorities; Ray, former crack addict and habitual runaway who was there to dry out and find God in the process (or so his parents hoped); and Milo, perpetual greaser who dressed and acted as if he was forever lost in the fifties.

Edgar had just finished his schpiel, the now tired story of how he craved blood and wished we would move Group to night, so he didn't have to duck and cover each time he passed a window. Dr. Putnum was in the process of ending Group when Milo raised his hand. Dr. Putnum, we haven't heard from Janet today, he said earnestly.

I have nothing to say, I responded, breaking my promise to ignore Milo's taunts.

You never have anything to say, Edgar chimed in.

Grace began to sing softly to soothe herself. Others affirmed Edgar's sentiment.

There's nothing to tell, okay? I said, raising my voice.

There's always something to tell, Edgar prodded.

Not for me. I thought for a moment, willing something—anything—to come through. There's nothing to tell because I don't remember anything, I told them whilst glaring at Edgar.

Wow, Milo said, that's a bitch. I almost believed the sentiment.

Memories are a bitch, Christina said (at least, I think it was Christina). "If you asked me, Janet won the lottery. What I wouldn't give to wipe some of my memories clean."

There was momentary silence. Milo broke it when he said, What lottery? Memories are who you are, man. I embrace my past. If I had the chance to do it all again, I wouldn't change a thing.

"Surely, there must be one thing, Milo?" Dr. Putnum asked.

What? No. No. No. No. You can't do that. We were talking about Janet, Milo said.

"We were. We were talking about Janet, and now we're talking about you."

No. No, we're not.

"We are, Milo. You said you wouldn't change a thing if you had to do it all again. Don't you have any regrets?"

I regret I didn't kiss Annabeth in tenth grade, Milo said, grinning.

I had a dream last night, I told Dr. Putnum in Session. About Milo. I hadn't planned to tell her about it, but since I was there and needed something to talk about, I kind of blurted it out.

Dr. Putnum shifted in her seat. Go on, she said.

I woke up. In my dream. And there he was. Lying on top of me. No, that wasn't right. There was no weight, and there had been space between us. "More like...floating above me. He said he wanted to tell me something.

"I propped myself up in bed so we'd be closer. He said he wanted to whisper it to me because he was in my room, and he wasn't supposed to be there.

I remember thinking that I should be afraid and wondering how Milo had gotten into my room when they lock the rooms at night, and I was going to ask him, but then he smiled, and I felt like I knew him—

"You do know him. From the Ward. From Group."

No, not like that. I mean, I knew him...from before.

Oh, Dr. Putnum said, exclamation fraught with realization.

No! I said, God, no. Not like that. I mean, it felt like he had been in my life before. Like he was someone I could trust.

Then what?

He smiled at me, and I forgot any doubts I might have had about him.

You said he had something to tell you?

I nodded. "So, I propped myself up in bed so we'd be closer, and so he could whisper whatever it was he wanted to say into my ear.

"Suddenly, his smile grew...I don't know...sinister, his eyes seemed to glow, like a cat's eyes will in the light, and he said, 'We are a lot more alike than you know, Prudence,' and then he was on top of me, and it was hard to breathe, and I woke up.

"I was shaking, drenched in sweat. I couldn't get the look he gave me out of my mind.

'We are a lot more alike than you know.' What did he mean by that? And Prudence! He called me Prudence! Is that my name? Who the hell am I?

Dr. Putnum managed to talk me down before dismissal from Session, reassuring me that my dream had been good. A revelation. A breakthrough. Dreams were like windows to the soul, she'd said. She'd smiled and went back to focus on her notes.

The orderly led me outside and deposited me on a bench in the garden to think.

Prudence.

The Beatles' song sprung to mind.

Spring was testing the waters to see if she was ready to jump in and breathe new life into the world. There were few clouds in the sky. Tufts of snow played chicken with the sunlight, daring each other to hold their ground. The snow would lose eventually, but not before a few more sallies against the sun.

I turned my face up to warm my cheeks in the sunlight, wondering when had been the last time I'd appreciated nature, the circle of life, the seasonal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, when the orderly came to shoo me back inside for my nap.

Though I was tired, found I could not sleep no matter how I tried. 

It was the sunlight. My mind kept returning to the sunlight and the warmth it had beamed onto my skin; my body craved it.

I stretched a blanket over the floor beneath the sole window in my room and lay on it, so I could once more feel the warmth on my skin. At last, I fell asleep.

When I aroused from sleep, it was to the sound of the orderly's gasp. I awoke to the scream of his voice as he hollered down the corridor for a medic. It seemed loud enough to wake the dead. I didn't understand what his problem was until I stood up and caught my reflection in the mirror through the bathroom doorway. My hand rose to my face and touched the tender skin it found there.

Burned. I'd been burned, and severely so. Dime-sized blisters covered my face and exposed forearms like a pox.

The medic rushed into the room. Dear God, he said when he first saw me.