EXPLOSIONS ERUPT IN QUICK SUCCESSION. Maybe I should be a little unnerved by them, but I gotta say, now that gaming has become part of my daily routine, it’s kind of comforting. I like that I’m able to complete something that doesn’t require memory or the use of my healing body. I only need my thumbs here. Physical therapy leaves me in tears, and the doctors don’t know yet if I’ll regain full use of both my legs. There’s still a lot of swelling, but in the game none of that matters. The rumble and cacophony of noise soothes me from the silence.
“Did guys in suits come and ask you about the accident?” I ask Fayard. Turns out Ms. Daniels was right. It didn’t take more than a day for Fay and me to fall into a comfortable rhythm, friends. It would be hard to explain how or why I feel so at ease with him—I just do.
He’s furiously punching buttons, his focus completely on the TV monitor. He’s wearing shorts today and a BENEDICT COLLEGE TIGERS T-shirt that he ironed so fastidiously the crease is plainly visible down the sides. His head is still bandaged, but I can see the hollow of his collarbone, the outline of his calf muscles in his good leg, the taper of his fingers…
“Hmm?” he finally replies.
“Oh, I said, have guys in suits come and talked to you?”
“How did you know?” Fayard turns quickly in my direction and does a swift survey of the room, probably to make sure we’re alone. He avoids looking me in the eye. Maybe it’s the bandages that make him insecure; maybe it’s just me. I don’t judge him for it. I like that his face is obscured. He looks like I feel: hidden behind a mask.
“They’ve been coming to see me, too. This last time they let slip that they think the bombing was some assassination attempt. One of the president’s senior cabinet members was supposed to fly out that day, but he missed the flight because of a car accident.”
“Really? They told my mother it was a terrorist attack. Really scared her. They never asked me anything directly; Mamá wouldn’t let them past my bedroom door.”
“I don’t like it. It feels as if they’re trying to pry information from us. Like we have some connection to all of it. You don’t remember anything, right?”
Digital explosions rock our corner of the game room and light up the screen with scattered debris. Fayard shakes his head.
“They give me a bad feeling,” he says. “But as long as we’re in the hospital we’ll be fine. There are cameras, people. Once we’re released, though, who knows what will happen. I’ve been watching the news. You would think that an attempted assassination or terrorist threat that hasn’t been solved yet would still be relevant, but there is almost nothing about it. It’s like it never happened.”
His voice switches in and out of this weird accent. He’ll start a sentence and then catch himself, like he’s pretending to be someone he’s not or he’s remembering who he’s supposed to be in bits and pieces. I know the feeling.
“You sound almost happy,” I say.
“I am happy. I’m alive. You’re alive. That’s enough to make me happy.”
I can feel the heat bloom across my cheeks. And now I feel stupid.
“Is there anything wrong?” he asks, fingers jamming the controller as fast as a hummingbird’s wing.
“No,” I say, a little too loudly.
“Are you sure? You seem distracted. You never let a troll get by you, and three just slipped past your sniper site.”
“Oh, sorry. Um, can we stop?”
His fingers pause over the controller.
“Sure. There’s a few other games here.” Fayard stops the play and switches to the main screen to scroll through our options.
“I don’t want to play a game anymore. I want to talk,” I say.
My stomach flutters, but the antinausea meds I’m on pretty much guarantee I’m not going to throw up.
“We were together, right? Like more than just friends,” I start.
Fayard takes in a deep breath. I can tell from how his chest rises before he hobbles over to brighten the lights.
“Yes, definitely more than friends,” he adds. His back is turned. “Do… do you feel anything when you look at me, when we’re together?” I ask. He still hasn’t turned around to face me.
“I don’t have any memories of us, but…” He pauses to adjust the light switch.
Everything becomes bright, and it feels like the floor falls out from beneath me as embarrassment crackles hot and fierce in my chest. “But?” I prod.
“But I have these dreams. Immersive, more vivid than these games, dreams where I live whole lifetimes… with you,” he says softly.
I swallow hard.
“We’re in different places, but I’m the same person, or I feel like the same person. It’s hard to explain,” he says in a rush.
“Okay,” I say slowly, trying to keep my voice even, which is difficult because my throat is as dry as the desert I walked through in one of my own dreams with him.
“Last night I was—I mean, we were on a train. I worked there and I ran a numbers game. It’s like gambling. I made money and got into some trouble. I was running, or at least trying to. My leg,” he says, and taps his cast. His eyes have a far-off look as he explains, like he’s back there. I must make a face, because he laughs.
“Yeah, in every life my leg gets broken or severed or something. But you’re always there. We meet and I fall for you and…”
I break eye contact. I can’t risk him seeing an understanding in my gaze. If he looks deep enough, maybe he’ll see the life I lived last night in Mali. I know, because I woke up in a cold sweat and asked the night nurse if she’d ever heard of Mansa Musa. It was just my luck that she’d minored in ancient African studies, because she talked to me for nearly an hour about how he was the richest man on Earth and how famed his pilgrimage to Mecca was. I didn’t breathe a word to her about how I watched myself live as a slave, how I fell in love with a soldier wearing Fayard’s face. If I close my eyes, I can still taste the dates he fed to me.
He puts the controllers away and gingerly grips my wrist. I stop breathing when he lifts his hand to pull away. I turn my palm up and take the plunge, lacing my fingers in his.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
“No. I’m scaring you. It’s weird, I know. I told my neurologist, but he suggested I talk to a therapist specializing in head trauma.”
Warmth floods through my body, and I ease my hand back so I can fiddle with a button on my dress.
“I see a therapist.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?” he asks, worry lacing his voice.
“I didn’t say that. We’re in the same boat. Trying to figure things out with bits and pieces of a broken picture.”
“Right,” he says. He sounds disappointed. I feel guilty about not corroborating his story, but I need more information. I need to get this new life in order. My mind is playing tricks on me, just like his is playing tricks on him. We don’t need to get caught up in some shared delusion.
I take a deep breath. “But those are dreams. What about now? What do you feel when you’re with me… here?”
“I feel something. Not physically. Well, not entirely physically, but like I’m supposed to remember you. Everyone else seems like a stranger, but not you. I can drop my guard when I’m around you, but I can’t make sense of why that is. Why do I feel so comfortable if I can’t even remember us being together before the accident?”
He meets my gaze for the first time all morning, and my heart catches. That simmering energy between us that makes me want to touch him suddenly boils over. He keeps his eyes on me for just a moment longer before he turns and presses a fist to his chest, rubbing it in small circles.
“Are you okay? Should I call for the nurse?” I ask.
“No, no. It’s just… you make me nervous. No, that’s not what I mean. Sometimes I think English isn’t my first language, but I can’t remember what that language was.” He sighs. “I try to find the words to explain what it’s like when we’re together, but I can’t. Does that happen to you too?”
I shake my head. “Not really, but I do feel out of place.” And out of time, but I don’t add that. Instead I change the subject. “I’m supposed to love carrots, but I finally tasted carrots a few days ago and I hate them.”
“When they told me what the chili dogs were really made of, I almost vomited,” he says. He looks like he’s about to gag just thinking about it.
“I inhaled them. They were delicious. What are they made of?” I ask, a bit scared of what he’s going to tell me.
He shakes his head and laughs with his mouth wide open. “You do not want to know.”
“No, I do. I want to know. I want to know everything, even though I can’t wrap my head around the simplest things. Food should at least be simple.”
“You guys need Google.”
We both turn our heads toward the voice. It’s the boy with the oxygen mask. I’m ashamed I still don’t know his name, and I’ve seen him too many times in the game room to ask.
“Who’s Google?” we both ask in unison.
He wheezes, and his voice comes out as thin as a paper gown. “It’s a what, not a who. Has anyone put you guys in front of a computer yet?”
Another kid in a wheelchair, but with two working arms, wheedles in on the conversation. “They keep the brain-damaged kids away from them. Something about agitation.”
Mask boy rolls his eyes dramatically. “Follow me.”
We trail him down the hall into his room. It’s larger than mine and empty. Auntie O hasn’t left my side, so she’s become a fixture in my tiny space, sitting quietly under a soft lamp I’m sure she brought from home. The sickly-sweet scent of fresh but soon-to-be-rotten ranunculus fills the air, and the hospital-issue blankets have been supplemented by hand-sewn wax-print quilts that smell faintly of nag champa incense.
His room is barren, with only the scent of antiseptic and the glare of the afternoon sun as its complements. My breath sounds too loud in here. In the corner there’s a glowing screen, smaller than a television, but larger than the phones I’ve seen people carry.
“All right, so, uh… what’s your name? I’ve been calling you Bomb Boy in my head, but my mom would say that isn’t polite.”
“Fayard. Her name is Tamar, not Bomb Girl,” Fayard says before I have a chance to defend myself. “And what should we call you?”
“P-Nasty.”
“Excuse me? You want us to call you P-what?” I say in disbelief.
“P-Nasty,” he says to me with a straight face, and then turns to Fay. “Oh, she wasn’t Bomb Girl. It was Hot Angry Chick.”
“I’m not angry; I’m just opinionated,” I mumble, more concerned about this Google business than my hurt feelings.
“So, you open up the browser and type in anything you want to know more about. You sit here,” he says to Fayard. “Before you tell me how girls can do it too, he’s got two working hands with all the functioning fingers,” P-Nasty says to me.
I’m about to tell him where to go, but he’s right about this one. My thumbs are fine, but I don’t think I’ll be able to type. My competitive side suffers though. Ever since he mentioned girls being less aggressive during game play, I’ve been extra attentive to my kills in the WatchKiller Dogs game we play with the Busan team online every other night. I’ve surpassed his kills by nearly two to one, and I’ve only been playing for a short time. I turn my attention to Fayard, whose fingers seem to fly across the keys like he’s in some kind of trance.
“How do you know what keys to press?” I ask, and he just shakes his head.
“I bet it’s sense memory. I’m pretty sure you’ve played video games before, too. You wouldn’t be half as good if you were just picking it up.” He turns to Fay. “You want to look up the accident? Probably the best place to start,” P-Nasty replies.
Fayard starts typing and a flood of conspiracy theories associated with the event pop up on a few newspaper websites and forums, this mini-journal online conversation lounge where you can only write a few sentences, and this video forum where people have posted clips of the explosion. We should be dead. The blast radiated in all directions, and what was once a beautiful feat of architecture is now just rubble. A tiny red X superimposed over a cloud of ash points to where Fay and I were found, almost as soon as rescue efforts commenced. Fay plays a short clip from a local news station. A man in a shirt and tie stands outside the airport gates.
“A seventeen-year-old boy and a girl the same age were found in the rubble, almost as if they’d been dropped on top of it, clasped hand in hand. Some are calling it a miracle, others the second coming, and still more don’t know what to think. Extra security has been ordered at the hospital to keep away well-wishers and worshippers alike.”
Fayard stops the clip. “Why? The investigators have nothing to go on.”
P-Nasty shakes his head and takes a second to catch his breath after getting out of sync with his oxygen machine.
“Au contraire. It means they want your bandaged head on a p… pike,” he wheezes. “Have you looked outside lately?”
I peek out the window to the parking lot below. I haven’t paid much attention to it these last four weeks. There are six police cars parked along the walkway into the building, and two larger black SUVs flanking the lot’s exit. Blue and red lights flicker from inside their front windshields. There are even a few military vehicles parked along the street, though they are farther away.
Fayard has upgraded his wheelchair to a boot, so he hobbles over to look out as well.
“That’s a lot of security for a children’s hospital,” he says quietly.
I nod.
P-Nasty leans back to explain further. “You can tell who’s really coming to visit somebody and who’s just snooping. It’s in the walk. All the parents move fast, eager to see their kid because their labs came back positive or wanting to soak up every last minute with them before kickoff to that old soccer game in the sky. It’s the ones who are strolling, like they’ve got nowhere to be, that are the problem, and don’t rule out the staff, either. If either of you gets a new nurse on rotation, or a doctor you can’t verify online, don’t trust ’em,”
“You’re handing out all this advice for free?” I ask, suddenly suspicious.
He shrugs and takes another labored breath. “You guys are my entertainment. It’s like a telenovela. Amnesiac lovebirds infiltrate underground CIA network. It’s better than daytime television.”
Fayard hobbles back to look through the news listings, and a slew of images fills the monitor, but one in the upper right-hand corner leaps out at me and I nearly scream. It’s a drawing of a small egg surrounded by a metal ring. I stab the screen with my finger; Fayard clicks on the video and hits play.
A dark-skinned woman, hair up in a high bun and wearing a beige trench coat, begins to speak. “I’m Sarah Jackson-Hyatt and we’re outside the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History with Dr. Carl Little Feather, curator of the Lost Ancient Rites exhibit, where a priceless artifact has been stolen. Dr. Little Feather, can you tell us what the artifact is and how you discovered the object was missing?”
“The piece is an intricately carved agate stone surrounded by an osmium ring, believed to be at least five thousand years old. On its surface we’ve identified sixteen different languages, each with its own unique alphabet or hieroglyphics. Two of the languages we know, Tamil and Hebrew, but the stone itself predates the languages. It is arguably the most significant archeological find of our times.”
“And it’s been stolen,” she adds.
“Well, yes. We opened the exhibit to school visits in March, so that people could see the results of the excavation process firsthand. We had a good idea of the kinds of things we’d find in regards to pots, and clothing items that you usually find in this sort of dig, but we couldn’t know just how different this dig would be as we began to excavate the burial grounds near the new convention center.”
“You’re referring to the unmarked cemetery of newly freed African Americans found in Queens, New York, late last year.”
“Yes, the excavation is a joint effort by the Smithsonian and the Weeksville Heritage Center. The excavation finds don’t even belong to the museum alone. The Heritage Center trusted us with the stone, and we assured them that our facilities were secure. The FBI is now involved. They’ve reviewed the tapes, and we’ve closed the exhibit until further notice, but the stone needs to be returned immediately. It has a very unique radiation signature. It’s not meant to be held bare-handed,” Dr. Little Feather says.
“And why do you think a person would steal something like this? Is there significant value on the black market?” the reporter asks.
“We couldn’t begin to put a price on a find this rare. So little is known about these ancestors. A few small tribes in Guinea-Bissau have tales of an invisibility talisman that can grant the wearer the ability to fly that fit this description, but how this artifact would have shown up in New York and remain hidden all this time is a mystery. I can’t imagine there would even be collectors yet. Stealing from a museum is a federal crime. Who would risk years in prison for an unspecified payday?”
“Well, let’s hope someone out there will be able to provide some clues. Anyone with information is asked to contact the museum immediately.”
The video stops and switches to an advertisement for toothpaste. I have this nagging sensation that there’s something important I’m missing from the video, but I am unable to connect the dots.
I think Fay got the same impression too, because he’s up and out of the room without even saying goodbye.