Somewhere,
Fifteen Years Ago
I told you hate has a million textures. One of them and I went a long way back. It was the first thing I remember feeling.
Memory is a funny enough thing even when it hasn’t been tampered with, and my memories of childhood definitely have been. It’s not something I talk about all that often. But my first memories come a lot later than most people’s. The earliest I can remember is seven, maybe eight years old. And only then in bits and pieces. Maybe that’s for the best, considering the kinds of things I can remember.
But it still makes me anxious. Those memories were stolen from me. Someone went in my head, ripped them out.
I have real intimacy issues. And someone getting that intimate with my head makes me sick thinking about it. Which is one of the reasons why I try not to.
I grew up in a cage, remember. Being studied, prodded, poked, and finally tormented and tortured. Even considering involuntary repression, I don’t remember as much of it as I should.
Damnedest thing is, I don’t remember what I did to get out of there, either.
• • •
There are still days when what I remember is too much.
I grew up in a facility called Project Armageddon. Things just got cheerier from the name.
I remember my room – which I now properly think of as my cell. It was joined to a common room with a bunch of other cells, all belonging to other kids. All my age. Several times per day, we would be let out – sometimes to get exercise, but most often just to the common room, where we would meet, play, or listen to one of the lab coats pretend to be a teacher.
At the start of it, my cell was filled with things. Puzzles. Blocks. Colorful books and reading tools. Nothing that said too much about the outside world, but the lab coats hadn’t wanted us to grow up unstimulated. Sometimes there were even toys. I remember being given a doll. Not knowing what else to do with it, I turned it into a play-weapon against the other kids. It swung well, especially gripped by the feet. Satisfying.
As we grew older, I needed more than play-weapons.
The lab coats did not like it when we got along together too well. They turned classes into competitions with rewards and punishments – real painful punishments – attached. Everything was a zero-sum game. When there could only be winners and losers, and losers got their cell run through with random electric currents for so many nights in a row that even an adult would have broken down from sleep deprivation, you did everything you could to be a winner. “Playtime” became the worst part of the day. That was when the lab coats left all us kids alone in the common room and pretended not to supervise. I tried to stay to myself, or, at best, to avoid the rapidly forming gangs who targeted the rest. Only in-fighting among the gangs gave the rest of us any respite.
I’d like to say I held my own, but I was a kid. I wasn’t as vicious as I could have, should have, been. I was still learning to harden. And I would have a long time to go on learning it.
I hope the lab coats got their day’s entertainment in, watching us turn on each other. I’m not sure if things were getting worse for them in the outside world, or if they had planned this all along, but they started getting meaner. They took away the things they’d left us in our cells, until, eventually, we only had plain gray walls, a bed, a sink, and a toilet.
We knew we were being manipulated. The lab coats didn’t bother to hide it. But knowing it didn’t make a difference, not when the punishments were so severe.
Then the tests. At first, they were every other week. Then every week. Then every other day.
They took me to an office, where they sat me down in front of a contraption. A flashlight had been mounted on a stand and aimed at a sheet of paper with a slit cut through it. The light shone through the slit and onto a copper plate.
They started by just having me stare at it. That was fine. That wasn’t getting shocked, sleep deprived, or beaten up. But, eventually, they asked me to change the silhouette the light made when it fell through the slit. I reached for the sheet of paper, and they smacked my hand away. Apparently I was supposed to change it without touching anything.
This is one of the places where my memory, mercifully, gets foggy. I think the shocks and the sleep deprivation were affecting my ability to make memories. I’m sure our food was drugged. But it still seemed like there was more to it than that.
There were other tests. Sometimes they rolled a handful of dice in front of me and gave me a little – at first – shock when the dice came up anything but all sixes. Or they shuffled a deck of cards, made me draw one, and shocked me every time it wasn’t a joker. They never told me what they wanted, or why.14 I think my not knowing was crucial to their tests.
I compared notes with some of the other kids I was still on speaking terms with. The tests were all different. I was the only one who got the screen and light, or the dice and cards. Some kids were being asked to lift impossible weights. Others were asked, over and over again, what object the lab coats had set behind an opaque partition, or to guess what was on the lab coats’ minds. Or to put out a little fire by looking at it.
Some word from the outside world filtered down to us. Mostly through eavesdropping on the lab coats, or the echo of a radio bouncing down the corridors. And that word was that not everybody had been born equal. I knew that; believe me, I knew I was at the bottom rung. But some people were born even more different than others. Cursed, it seemed like, from the way the outside world was treating them.
It did not take long for it to dawn on us that we were among the cursed.
Mutants, they called us, but I heard plenty of other words. Muties. Abominations. Freaks. Dangers. Little terrors.
When we were old enough to have figured that out, things changed. The only time the lab coats guarded their tongues around us – the only time they were nice to us – was when they were about to take us for more tests, or do something more horrible. I don’t know what they wanted from us, but they weren’t getting it.
That was when some of the kids started disappearing.
It was almost a relief at first. The earliest to be taken had been two of the worst bullies among us. Although I had gotten one of the two to permanently leave me alone with a wellaimed nut-kick, I still hated them. And while I was a little uneasy, looking into their empty cells, the hate still outweighed it. One of the millions of flavors of hate I was still acquainting myself with.
But then more of us kept disappearing. Kids I was indifferent to; kids I liked. The lab coats never said where they went. After a certain time, we were afraid to ask. The lab coats seemed to find excuses to shock us more when we did. They gave us plenty else to focus on. The competitions never got easier, and the strange tests became more frequent.
A dozen of us disappeared in one day. There were only five of us left.
We were still let out into the common room every day, but we stayed away from each other. We knew what was coming. I think the lab coats were maybe hoping we would finish each other off, but we had wised up to their tricks by then. We weren’t participating any more. In our own individual ways, we braced ourselves for the end.
Eventually, I was the only one left.
I only remember a few things after that point. My memory has great big holes in it, like dough stretched too far.
Close to the end, before the last of the other kids were taken away, I figured out that the lab coats were more interested in me than any of the others, but also that I frustrated them more. They were looking for something, and I was close to giving them what they wanted. But not quite there. They kept playing card tricks. Dice tricks. Punishing me when things didn’t turn out the way they wanted.
They graduated from physical torture to emotional extortion. At one point, they gave me a kitten, told me I had to take care of it. I knew what they were doing. They only ever gave you things to take them away.
They thought that they might coerce me into showing them whatever they wanted to see if they threatened something important to me. Knowing didn’t keep me from falling right into their trap. Even back then, I thought I was hard, but I wasn’t hard enough.15 I fell for the cat.
I made grand plans to smuggle my cat to safety through air vents too small to fit me. But they struck sooner than I had expected, before I could arrange any of that. Two of the lab coats took me to an office. They held my cat in front of a stun gun, and told me that, unless I showed them what they wanted, they were going to use the gun on my cat.
The stun gun would just hurt a person. It would kill a small animal. They thought they could force some kind of demonstration from me. Turns out they were onto something.
Getting me emotionally invested in something, feeling so strongly about something that my own life might as well have been in danger, was one way to get my luck to manifest.
As one of them moved the stun gun in, the other chose just the wrong16 instant to sneeze. His head swung down, toward the prongs.
The electric arc leapt right into his eye.
I had no idea what was happening, what I had just done, or even whether I had done anything. The only thing I knew was that the lab coats blamed me for what had happened. That was when they gave me my brand. A permanent mark, over my eye, so that every time I looked into my cell’s mirror I would remember the pain I’d experienced when they’d given it to me.
I don’t remember what happened to the kitten. One of the gaps in my memory swallowed it.
All I know is that, when I got out of there, she was gone.
• • •
The longest, biggest hole in my memory ripped open after the incident with the cat. That was the last I remembered of the lab coats or the Project Armageddon facility.
The next thing I could remember, I was out in the world.
For a long while, that was all I thought I needed to know. This is not a time I wanted to think much about. I don’t remember feeling like anything was missing. First thing I can remember for sure is standing outside the Church of the Sacred Heart in downtown Chicago on an icy December night. My lips were chapped and bleeding. My fingers and toes were so cold that I dreaded warming them up almost as much as I did staying out there. At least now they were numb. The pain of warming them up would have been a terrible, deep-down kind of hurt, like making a hundred little needles out of my bones.
Funny thing is, one of the things I can remember most clearly is the feeling that I hadn’t just gotten there. I knew exactly what warming my hands up after being that numb would feel like. I had been out in the world for days, for weeks, maybe for months. The open sky was no longer overwhelming. Snow was no longer otherworldly and enchanting, just mundane and deadly.
I can’t remember what happened in any of that time. Repressed trauma, maybe. Maybe. It didn’t bother me because I felt like my memory was intact, and I didn’t want it anyway.
• • •
I wished I knew how I got out of there. I wanted to know if I had hurt any of the lab coats on my way out. And I wanted to know where the place was, so that one day I could come back and hurt them again.
It was all gone, like a month-old dream.
Standing outside the Church of the Sacred Heart might as well have been an image from one of those dreams. It was a fragment of memory without a beginning or an end.
I don’t remember meeting Father Rudolpho Boschelli. Just like the outside world itself, the first time I remembered him, it was as if he had been in my life for a long time.
He said he remembered meeting me. I never wanted to ask him about it, but he told me the story, several times. Usually as a reminder of how far we came afterward.
He said I looked at him like I already knew him. Like I’d seen his type a hundred times before.
Like there was no point in him saying anything because I’d already heard it. Like we were soldiers on opposite sides of the front lines. Like we were generals – well, he had a different metaphor every time.
The point is, I made an impression. Enough that, even months after I’d settled into the Church of the Sacred Heart’s underfunded orphanage and our relationship had evolved in a different – if not necessarily better – direction, he kept returning to that story.
I had to take him at his word.
It seemed so normal – not having all that memory of things I really didn’t want to remember. None of it felt strange. All of the kids at the Church of the Sacred Heart had parts of our lives we didn’t want to talk about. Only natural to assume that the rest of them couldn’t fully remember it either.
It was only much later, when I had the presence of mind to want to think of that part of my life, that I realized how odd that was.
Well – realize is the wrong word, because I already knew it. It was just the first time I let myself think it.
But by then any trace of my path back “home” had vanished. All I was left with was the brand over my eye, and several of the million shades of rage.