He’s everywhere, but he’s nowhere.
Blinks of chaos. Blinding bright lights. Faces I recognize but don’t know. The woman in burgundy scrubs, pushing the mop. Eyes meeting mine, dead on.
Who am I, to her? To anyone?
Him.
I’m weightless, blinking through gauzy layers of time. Intimate times we’d laugh till we cried. Skin on skin, the flex of him inside me, long nights or mornings when we’d web together. Linger on each other. Soft murmurs. Whispers. Kisses.
Sleep. Wake. Life. Death.
Puzzle pieces.
A moan curled in my chest, hurled through my throat. He impaled me. Met the thrusts of my hips as if he’d never left. Flesh solid under my desperate fingers. Orgasm. The elevation, the fall, the rebuild. Together.
He has a name. What is it?
I pulled way from the dream, in it but not. The thrusts diminished, morphing into the beat pulsing through my body.
Heaviness in my lap. My arms, I realized. Wilted torso like a sack of potatoes. Vinyl hammock under my ass. Knees bent, feet on a lower surface.
Pressure, gentle. At the back of my hand.
Not mine.
“You’re Georgia,” a male voice murmured in my ear. “My name is Todd.”
The name rolled through my mind. Was he the man I loved?
“You knew Paul Stanton.”
“Paul.” The name flew from my throat, my tongue drunkenly rising to create the end of the name. My ears rang at the unnatural sound of a voice, a name, a word, coming from this body I might still be in.
I tried to open my eyes. Like pushing boulders with my mind. Slits of light blinded me, everything blurry. I focused on a shadowy blob in front of the light. Surely that was where the words had come from.
“Don’t speak,” the blob hissed. “If people walk by they need to think everything’s normal.”
My eyelids shut.
“Do you know what your normal is?” the voice softened.
Visions strobed past my mind. Sharp and round edges. A man who made my skin crawl. His waxy pale skin and beady eyes unblinking as he fired off orders, stories. Images on a screen—riots, death, chaos, war.
Then a blonde man, tall and lanky. Smiling in the sunlight as he reached for my face. His touch as gentle as air.
“About like that,” a whisper said.
Todd, I remembered, pulling back through the steam.
“Sometimes you just stare. Like when you’re next to the big window in the dining room.”
Tendrils of memory met.
The window.
It was foggy. Needed cleaning. But the trees beyond spread their wings and if no one screamed or moaned nearby I could hear birds in the morning.
A dream.
Not a dream?
“No big expressions. No eye contact, no speech.” His voice dropped to a hush and I felt his touch at my arm, something small tugging at my skin. “I’m giving you saline. Just like yesterday. You’re not alone anymore, Georgia.”
His murmurs continued, a wordless cadence, and blackness found me again.
*
My mind was numb. Salted, bloated, parched. The skin around my sore eyes tingled. I tried not to track a bird soaring in the blue sky. Or the shaking green leaves pointing its way through.
Todd had given me my first name. Time had given me the rest.
Georgia Winter.
I didn’t know what year it was. If my parents were still alive. If I’d had kids. But there was a looming pressure. I needed to get to Paul. Tell him the truth, which was coming back in senseless fragments.
He’d been my boyfriend. My lover. My everything. Sex. Love. Snippets of conversations and plans.
Days blinked by in seconds on the days Todd was off work. Slowed and cleared when Jorge was my nurse, and I realized he gave me saline too. They both stretched my arms and legs, encouraged me to push up to stand. Up and down, over and over again. My muscles burned, but it was easier every time.
Outside, I watched the flap of a crow’s wings tick by the seconds. Flap, he climbed. Flap flap flap, soar. Feathered fingers sliced the air, molding invisibility to allow his arc.
Something bumped my wheelchair. A hand knocked the brake from the wheels.
“Okay, Ms Langston.” Jorge. Behind me. Using the name that wasn’t mine, but mine. “Time for your infusion.”
My body stiffened, begging me to run. I locked it down, giving away nothing as I stared hard at the bird, his wings straight and gliding through the air, willing him to bring me with him, until my wheelchair turned around and revoked him from view.
“It’s a new day, Ms Winter,” Jorge muttered, his Hispanic accent a caress even in its muted urgency. “You’re going to get dressed and get your medicine. Everything is normal, you will act. Today is the day.”
Ten minutes later I was in dead people’s sweats, slumped in my wheelchair in the hall next to my bedroom. Two EMTs rolled a stretcher down the hallway. They stopped in front of me and lowered it, then lifted me up, strapped me in, and rolled me back the way they’d come.
I counted the glaring lights strobing by on the ceiling as we moved. One… Five… Twenty… Seventy-five, then sunlight scored my pupils. I shut my eyes. Felt the bumps, heard the wheels of the stretcher rattle as they loaded me into the ambulance, the red in my eyelids going from bright to muted.
The vehicle roared to life. One man stayed in the back with me, as I felt us move down the road, talking to the driver about a girlfriend. Livid someone had told her he’d fucked someone else. They continued the typical ride, a few stoplights. A right turn, a left.
Then the driver cursed. The truck swerved to the side, making me curl my fingers into the bedding. The momentum inched me forward on the stretcher as the brakes squealed, the straps still tight on my chest.
We stopped.
The smell of burning rubber seeped in.
“Get out!” men’s voices shouted outside, layering over each other. “Now, now, now!”
Click, swoosh. The sound came from near my feet.
I opened my eyes. Looked up at the double chin of the guy above me, who was focused straight ahead. Slowly, his hands went up, his eyes tracking movement outside the ambulance.
The low hum in my ears cranked into a symphony of buzzing.
“Sit down, hands up, and don’t fucking move,” someone said at the door.
Todd.
I’d know his voice anywhere.
The ghost of Paul’s hands slid up my legs. My body jerked one way, and another. “Georgia,” the husky voice in my memory said.
Todd’s face popped into my line of sight, a halo of sunlight around him as the memory faded. He unclipped me from the gurney and reached forward, hand open. “Let’s go.”
Today is the day.
My body felt heavy, weak, but I pushed my arm up, clapped my palm to his and held on. He pulled me up to sitting, then onto my trembling legs. I looked down at the paramedic cowering at the head of the stretcher. The image blinked. Shorted.
Paul.
My knees wavered, and I leaned on Todd’s arms.
Pieces. Shards. Images. Gaping black holes of silent screams. Straight jackets. Famine. Disease. Sounds of blaring guitars, air chopping helicopters, the beat faster and faster. The smell of rotting flesh.
Todd squeezed my hand.
My bones felt like concrete, webbed together by jelly.
I was blind. Deaf.
Lost.
And I knew I could never be who I was before.
**
The world was in a washer. Solid images hazing, melting, wiping away. The hum in my mind as loud as machinery, deafening anything else. I was aware of my body, but couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t see it.
Images.
Real? Fake?
Paul.
***
I didn’t need to look at the clock to know the time.
Heat. Tiny vibrations of pulsing blood in my curled fingertips. A low hum in my ears.
10:30.
Come on, Georgia. Focus.
Straightening my spine, I inhaled. A slow, steady stream into my nostrils, cooling my throat, expanding my lungs until I felt their limit. I parted my lips, exhaled under the same speed. Under my control.
It wasn’t a secret that the government had been fucked up for years. Protests still filled streets and the news, people still on social media to testify their experiences and put out calls to action. But Todd and his group were of a different track.
They investigated and outed officials, aiming to expose every crooked politician for who they really were. To give media and the justice system enough evidence that could not be explained away, to put the pieces of shit in prison. To empower the people to work together as a whole, then begin everything again.
Connection. Community. Freedom.
Everything we’d wanted back, too.
Paul.
The nerves in my body jerked, but I’d kept my limbs still. Internalized everything. Locked it down. I moved, focusing on the tiny shifts of the angles of my seated bones against the yoga mat. How it turned my spine, changed the carriage of my body. One scapula slightly diagonal to the other.
Meditate, I told myself.
The static in my ears grew to a buzz.
I heard a distinct thunk. The front door, I knew, on the other side of my bedroom wall. Another noise, the deadbolt sliding into place.
Footsteps. Casual, soft. Hesitant.
A subtle double-tap knock. Todd.
“Come in,” I said, eyes still shut.
Quiet clicks, a springy spindle in the door handle. Pause. The sound of bare feet stepping over the vinyl floor. More quiet clicks, and the hollow settle of the door closing in the threshold.
His breaths were nearly silent. But I heard the sticky sound of another yoga mat rolling out, the rustle of clothes, and I knew he’d sat down.
He was later than usual.
“How was your night?” he asked.
“Fine,” I answered.
Paul.
He was like a tsunami in the ocean. His name, his face, the cadence of his voice. He was the purity of love, the breadcrumb to terror. The end and the beginning to everything.
I straightened my back again, feeling the answer from my muscles, rooting me in place. In time. In reality.
“Georgia? I have to ask. Do you remember anything else?”
I opened my eyes, looked into his dark irises. Not quite six foot, Todd was of Asian descent. Full lips, eyes that seemed to be in a perpetual sunrise over his thick cheekbones. A white V-neck T-shirt that barely covered the swathes of colorful tattoos or his fit body. Baggy athletic pants, draping down his powerful quads. A man who stayed ready for anything, and had been coaching me to be the same for the past few weeks.
The man who’d seen who I was when I was nothing. The man who really still knew nothing.
“Wish I didn’t,” I finally replied.
My skin tingled, aware of the sheets of molecules shifting between us, vehicles for heat and breath. One touching another and another, and I felt as if I could feel the essence of his life, strong and vulnerable. I leaned forward, grinding my clit against the mat as the moment choked me, my vision wavering, and for a moment, I dreamed of a life with him in a universe where Paul didn’t exist. And neither did this version of me.
Todd inclined his head, brows pushing lines into his forehead. Tell me, his eyes said.
I leaned back on my hands, breaking the spell, and sucked in a breath.
“What I remember,” I repeated. Even as my muscles clawed for Paul, the images and sounds pressed at the door to my mind. Breathing out, I tried to distance myself from both. To ignore my insistent clit. “I was doped up. My eyes… clamped open somehow. Noise canceling headphones. They made me watch a monitor. Lots of videos with volume on blast. Smells, like smoke or rot.
“They did it until I couldn’t think or behave independently anymore. Then they fed me shit to say, how to say it. On video. To Paul. A few times, I was more conscious and tried to speak for myself. I tried to tell him…but I couldn’t.”
“Fucking propaganda bullshit,” Todd whispered. “They’ve been using you to move him. Fuck, Georgia.”
“Fuck, Georgia,” I heard Paul say in my mind.
The vibration, the buzzing in my veins grew louder, my vision milky.
Flash, my fingers in his curls, his tongue on my clit. Those dark blue eyes glancing up between my thighs. Flash, those eyes inches from mine, closing as his cock sank deeper inside me, then fluttered open again, struggling to connect to me in every single way.
He was my anchor in a storm. My sanity in the clouds. I was his raft, his creativity, the part of him who moved in the world without shame. Confident. Strong. He’d been taught to fall in line. I’d been left for dead.
“Paul,” I said aloud.
“Georgia?” Todd, sounding far away.
My heart pounded. I straightened my spine, willing it to be strong. “I need to be alone.”
“No… Oh. It’s Wednesday. Almost 11.” His voice softened. He sighed.
“Yeah.” My fingers dug into my thighs. Wet heat slicked my underwear against my cunt. I ground my clit against the mat again and rocked my hips. Grit my teeth, losing the battle to control my body. “Go. Please.”
“What’s happening right now?”
Paul.
I shook my head. Closed my eyes. Imagined silence in my mind, clarity. Imagined all the memories, desperation, chaos gone. Erased.
“Listen to me,” Todd said, his voice strained. “Every Wednesday you’d come back out of that infusion or… whatever they were doing… and you were desperate, desperate, for a shower. Even without your words. And I finally smelled… You smelled like sex.”
No. Fuck, not this right now.
“It’s not what you think,” I gasped, losing the battle for control, my body rocking hard back and forth on the mat, demanding pressure on my clit. Pleasure, need, desperation locked in my core. In my flesh, my bones. “Go.”
“Georgia, I swear to you, I didn’t put it together until it was so late on. I’ll never be able to apologize enough.” Todd’s voice broke. I felt his hands on one of mine. His heat. Connection.
“Paul.” His name ripped from the depths of my being. I grabbed my tit, leaning back against the side of the bed. My crossed legs fell open, the ghost of Paul’s hand tracing the line of my molting slit. He was the running water and I was the flame, but gasoline covered the world.
“Stop with the Paul shit, Georgia. Fight it. It’s implanted.”
“No,” I moaned, scuttling up the side of the bed backward until my ass found the cushy surface. I fell back, shoving my hand into my waistband, forking my fingers at my outer folds. “They brainwashed me, then left me alone. Memories. Always left me in memories. Consuming me, consuming everything. Needing…”
“Needing what?”
The room swirled. Paul, in a chair next to the window. Sunlight gleamed over his skin, highlighting the trail of hair from his navel. His fist stroked his thick, hard cock as he watched me masturbate. Lips curled every time I bucked, every time I nearly lost control.
“That’s it. Keep those beautiful lips open, baby. You get one time alone. Then I’m gonna fuck your tits, your mouth, before I turn you over and wreck that tight, sweet pussy,” Paul said in my memory. “Get it ready for me.”
“Fuck me,” I said into reality, dipping a finger onto my clit. I sucked a breath through my teeth, my throat tightening around a moan.
I strained past the haze in my eyes to find Todd next to the door, his hand wrapped around the doorknob behind him. Eyes wide, chest heaving, free hand on his stomach. His pinky grazed the top of a bulge mid-hip.
“Every Wednesday. 11:00,” I croaked, stroking my clit painfully slowly, my pussy demanding heat and hardness. “This flood of… Paul. Memories. This frenzy to fuck. I can’t control it. It shuts down everything else, which is why they did it to me. I need… Break the cycle. Rewire me. Please.”
“This is crazy.”
“Fuck me, or find someone who will.”
“Georgia…”
“Paul used to love to watch me.” I stripped my pants off, pulled my soft tank over my head. My nipples tightened at the open air and the flash of Paul stroking his wet cock crashed through my mind, wiping out my vision. Head jerking back, my mouth fell open and I heard myself moan, gasp. “He was vanilla at first, because of course he was, but that didn’t last.”
He cleared his throat.
“Just now I saw him, a memory of him stroking himself as he watched me do exactly what I’m doing now. He wanted me to come, just once, before he’d fuck me. Know what I did? Kept edging. Kept rubbing my little clit, slowly fucked myself with my fingers. Rubbed my juice all over my pussy, making sure he saw how wet I was. We were there for an hour before he fed me his cock.”
A moment passed. Keeping the pressure on my clit light and slow was agonizing, but I hadn’t heard him leave.
“Todd. Feed me your cock,” I whispered. I swallowed, wetting my dry throat. “Don’t make me beg.”
I heard the movement of clothes. Shaky breathing, coming closer.
The bed dipped and I sighed, tracing circles through my sopping pussy and back to my clit. Slipping, sliding. Exhaled on a moan.
A slow cadence hit the mattress next to me.
My breath shallowed, my fingers lighter. I slit my eyes, turned my head to see Paul’s hand pump his thick shaft.
It felt like lightning in my mind.
“Todd.” I covered his hand with mine and he stilled, his silky smooth cock throbbing in answer to my my stray thumb.
His hand drifted out from under mine. He sucked in a breath as my fingers wrapped around his shaft. “We… don’t have to do this.”
“We are, though.” Opening my eyes, I looked straight into his face until he met my gaze. His strong nose flared, the corners of his mouth turned down. I stroked up, over the crest of his head, and his head craned back.
“You want Stanton.” He struggled to keep my gaze. “I’m just here.”
He flinched when I removed my hand. Never breaking our gaze, I gathered the spit in my mouth, brought my palm to my lips, and slimed it with saliva. He tracked my…
