The Last Conversation

032

Anne says your name and gently shakes your shoulder.

The room is full of light and the yellow walls are angry. There’s a deep crackling within your chest on inhales and your exhales are whistling hisses.

“Good morning. I know you’re not well, but we have to do this downstairs, at the kitchen table, and then you can rest. Come on. We’re almost done.”

Anne sits you up, drapes your right arm across the back of her shoulders, and lifts you onto your feet. The morning sun amplifies the yellow; the walls glow and the light becomes a disorienting, intoxicating mist. You don’t want to leave this room. This is a room you could stay in forever.

The two of you stagger into the hallway and then down the stairs, one halting step at a time. You want to ask about seeing the bathroom and if in fact there is a mirror or an empty space on the wall where there should be one, but it is too late. You will not be walking back up the stairs.

Anne deposits you into a chair at the kitchen table. Your head lolls, pitches into your chest, and perhaps you sleep, or pass out, but you come to when there’s a sting on the back of your left hand.

She says, “You are dehydrated and I’m replenishing your fluids intravenously. This will be more restorative than a simple glass of water.”

Cold rushes into the back of your hand and up your forearm. After a few moments you are able to lift your head and look around the room. There’s a metal stand next to you, a plastic bag full of clear fluid dangles from its top, and a thin tube connects from the bag to the back of your hand. On the kitchen table is a large black notebook, a pencil in its spine.

“______? Are you with me? Are you feeling a little better?”

You say, “I’m here.” Here is in the brown house, the replica; you remember that. It hurts to talk and your voice is not your own. You don’t like hearing what it has become.

Anne slides the notebook away from you and to the empty place at the table. She says, “We’re going to have a conversation, ______. It’s the most important one we ever had or will ever have. Please, keep in mind everything you remember and everything you’ve learned about yourself, about who you were and who you are. You’ve done so well in such a short period of time. I’m very proud of all you’ve accomplished, but you must remain focused during the conversation, and do not allow yourself to wander. You must stay you within the parameters of what is being discussed. You are not to ask me any more questions about last night or the prior thirty days. Please, ______. I need you to do this for me.”

“Because we’re partners?”

“Yes. Because we’ve become the most sacred of partners. I am going to leave you here while I change my clothes, but I will only be gone for a few minutes. Don’t get up, don’t move. That part is important too, because this—you sitting here by yourself at the table—this is how I found you. This is how I find you. This is how it starts.”

She leaves. You cough and the sound is terrible and you know your chest is broken. You stare at the needle in your hand and the plastic IV line. You imagine yourself, the one you saw in the mirror last night, that you has always been waiting here, in this kitchen, waiting for Anne to come back. You try to imagine what she is going to say to you, and what you are going to say to her.

Anne returns. She wears a flannel shirt and blue jeans. She places the notebook on the floor, out of sight. She closes her eyes, breathes deeply twice, and then begins.

She says, “What are you doing down here? You should’ve stayed in bed.” Her affect has changed. Her familiarity with you is different. You can see it in her posture, in her wide eyes, in her fidgeting hands.

You are not sure who you are, who you are supposed to be. You are not sure what you’re supposed to say. You make a guess. “It was too bright. I wanted a glass of water. I—”

“You sound awful, ______.”

“I feel like I sound.”

“You should let me take you back to the Facility. I can take better care of you there.”

“No, I’m not going back. No way.” You remember waking up in the room and what it felt like and you never want to feel that way again. “You’re not putting me in one of those rooms and leaving me—”

“Stop it, I won’t leave you. You aren’t going to get better if you stay here.”

“I’m not going to get better if I go back either.”

“We have to try. We have to try something! Something different than me sitting here watching you die.”

You pause, unsure of what to say, of what she wants you to say. You try to imagine your face isn’t the one from the mirror but the one from the videos, from your memories. “Okay, I don’t want to, but okay. If you really want me to, I’ll go.”

Anne shakes her head, breaking her emotionally intense affect. She smiles crookedly at you. She cups a hand around her mouth and whispers, “You’re doing great. This is the only time I’ll correct you, I promise. You need to say, ‘Why would I ever go back to that place? And why do you want to go? You’re the one who said you were convinced the virus came out of the Dormitory.’ Say that and then we’ll go from there and without me correcting you again. Okay, please?”

You cough. You nod. She repeats what she wants you to say, and then you say it, word for word.

Anne says, “I never said I was convinced.”

“Anne, you said—”

“What I said was the group of blanks we grew with the new modifiers to reprogram DNA, those patients were among the first to get sick. But correlation does not imply causation. Could be a fucking zoonotic virus, making the jump from one of the animal labs, for all we know. We really don’t know where it came from yet…” She trails off at the end, clearly not fully believing her own words.

You are so tired and can barely hold your head up. You don’t fully grasp what she is saying, but the words come to you, as though this conversation is a part of you, and it was hidden somewhere deep inside. You say, “Are you the only one who didn’t get sick?”

“No. Brianna and Alejandro were fine. But…”

“But?”

“I don’t know, now. I don’t know how they’re doing now. They left the Complex four days ago, like everyone else.”

“Did you, I don’t know, vaccinate or inoculate yourself somehow?”

“Jesus, no. If I could do that, don’t you think I’d save you too? How could you ask that?” She looks down into her lap instead of at you, and then she covers her face. When she looks back up, her expression is blank and unreadable. But it’s unreadable in a way you are sure means something.

You don’t say anything.

She answers your silent accusation with, “I want to try to help you, though. Let’s go back and let me try.”

“Don’t make me go back.” Even after everything, you want to remain within the promise and the lie of the little brown house.

“I don’t want to watch you die.”

“Don’t make me go back.” You are the you of now saying this. You don’t care if you are accurately representing the you from then.

Anne swears and pounds her fists on the kitchen table. She closes her eyes, then slowly reaches across the kitchen table and takes your right hand. Her skin is cold. “If this doesn’t… If you don’t get better—can I bring you back?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know this is hard, this is so fucked up and impossible to ask, but after you… After!”

“After I’m dead?”

“Yes, after. Only if you say yes right now, I can go to the Complex, we still have hundreds of viable blanks, and—you know what I can do. I can bring you back.”

“With all that’s happening, you’re actually asking this?”

“I am. I—I don’t want to be without you. Please.”

“I want you to say it.”

“______, please.”

“You have to say it.”

“Let me bring you back. I don’t want to be alone, be without you. I—”

“You have to say the word, Anne.”

“Let me clone you. Please, let me do it. I want you to let me bring you back.”

You are crying. The Anne sitting across from you is blurry and begins to look like the younger Anne you remember. “I don’t want to come back. It wouldn’t be me you’re bringing back.”

“But listen, think about all the—”

“Anne—”

“Amazing success we’ve had with augmenting our patients’ cellular memory, directly uploading information and images, and the exercises and therapy—”

“Anne! It wouldn’t be me.” You look at your hands and wonder whose hands they are.

“I would make them into you. They would be you.”

You repeat, “It wouldn’t be me.” What you mean to say, but in these final moments, you can’t summon the courage, is: It never was me.

“If you say no, I won’t clone you. I promise you. And I know it’s crazy, it’s fucking horrible and crazy, but I’m asking you. Please. Will you let me?”

“No. I’m sorry, Anne. No. You can’t. It won’t be me.”

Anne wipes her eyes, sighs, bends to the kitchen floor, and retrieves the notebook. She angrily scribbles some notes and throws the pen across the table.

She says, “Thank you,” but it’s perfunctory and she says it through gritted teeth and without looking at you.

You ask, “How many of us have there been?” You are breathing erratically and your voice is little more than a scratching sound.

“Too many.”

“We helped build our house.” You are desperate to feel a kinship with the rest of you who spent all those years with Anne. You are desperate to feel something that is yours, something other than emptiness.

“You did.”

“We all had this conversation.”

“Yes.”

“How many of us said yes?”

“None of you. Not a single fucking one of you.”

Anne explodes out of her chair and stalks to the kitchen counter, grunting and yelling in obvious frustration. She stops pacing and then quickly replaces your IV bag even though the old one is only three-quarters empty. Your hand and arm go warm this time.

She closes her eyes and sighs. She says, “There aren’t very many left of you to say yes.”

She rubs the back of your head. Your eyelids go heavy and you try to speak but you cannot. You feel yourself melting away, your consciousness receding toward a singularity.

Anne whispers, “I didn’t lie to you, ______.”