Recycled

(CW: Memory loss, needles, abusive parenting, medical malpractice, themes of death)

I awake with a start into a body. I realise I have eyes that can open, and they do so. I realise I have fingers to twitch, and they curl around the arms of the chair I’m sat on, feeling the smooth, cool wood of its arms. The material is a rich warm brown, but lacks whorls and obvious woodgrain; its flaws have been untangled and banished, leaving only a perfectly plain blank slate.

The before is nothing. Before this moment of waking, I was nothing, and therefore everything; a mote of possibility without body, matter, or memory, simply an experience of understanding the vast emptiness that cocooned me, held me in a vast blanket of midnight clarity. But now I am a body. I move the legs I see below me, stretching as I step out of the chair, extending the arms of this body above my head to hear rhythmic clicks as the bones and muscles reawaken from their torpor.

The body’s skin is a similar colour to the wood of the chair, clear and smooth, draped with white cloth. Trousers, shirt, socks. A body requires covering, I remember suddenly. A body like mine, a body that moves and breathes and, at this moment, desperately needs a drink.

Looking around, I see windowless walls, a small room, with a corridor leading out of it. Mirrors hang on the light blue walls at intervals, and next to the chair is a little table with a paper cup containing a clear liquid that I grab and drain in a spurt of movement, my body acting without direction. My hair, tumbling down my flat chest in corkscrew coils, tickles my cheeks as it moves with me, and the crystalline liquid is cold in my dry throat, bringing with it a relief palpable in every single limb, along with a zing of alertness through my brain, as though the water had lent its clarity directly to me.

It occurs to me that this isn’t a first. I have experienced the relief water brings before the nothing, I just… forgot.

Turning slowly, I look to one of the mirrors, and the body stares back. The wide, dark eyes drink everything in as my self and my body refamiliarize, and that clarity allows another spark to break through as I remember what people would call out when they saw the body, when they saw me. My name: Joseph.

What else could I have forgotten?

I, Joseph, breathe in, and my chest rises. I breathe out, and it falls. I marvel at the simple mechanics of it all as I turn to head down the corridor, my wobbly steps creating tapping noises that bounce lightly off the walls that surround me, taking my attention so wholly that I almost don’t notice when I reach another table.

On this wooden worktop, a book lies closed.

The corridor continues past here, but I reach to open the book with tentative fingers that I only now realise are trembling, causing the pages of the book to flutter like delicate wings. The thought of it brings back another flash of memory, of seeing moths flutter around lamplight in cool evening air, desperate to reach something that, if they were to touch, would burn them.

There, tacked down onto the pages, are a series of photographs of the same four people – an older man, an older woman, me, and another younger man – something I then understood myself to be, or to have been.

Above each face are captions:

Father.

Mother. Deceased.

Joseph, youngest child.

 Zephyr, eldest child. Deceased.

I trace my finger around the face of each person; Father, Mother, Zephyr’s, my own… there is recognition here, but it’s vague, clouded. The fragments of what I can recall are opaque cutouts passing in front of a bright light and leaving only their impression, stamped on the back of the eyes.

Enraptured, I stand there for what could have been hours, examining the people, how they stand together, how Mother and Father hold hands and I lean into Zephyr’s side as if for support.

Each is similar in some way to another. Zephyr has Mother’s smile, curved, slightly tilted at one side. I only share Father’s hands, with long fingers and raised knuckles. In fact, after much analysis, I note that the only oddity carried across all photos is Father’s face, so much more symmetrical and smoother, almost clinical in its precision, with a strange halo of distortion around his head.

He’s on the far right of every photo, and on the last two, so are strange indents in the paper, next to the photo’s edge. My eyes follow the lines of them as they disappear under the pictures. The trembling in my hands has intensified, and my breath hitches as I slide my fingers under the penultimate picture and lift it up, the blood in my limbs feeling strangely hot as I realise that for some reason, this feels like something I should not be doing.

This feels like an affront, like straying from a path.

I keep going.

It comes away easily, the glue barely there anymore.

Carved into the page below the photo, physically gouged in with something blunt and slightly curved, is a message: Father’s face is wrong.

Slowly, feeling the water that had felt so comforting and cooling curdle in my stomach, I press my fingernail into one of the carved divots. A perfect fit.

The corridor is suddenly far too oppressive, and I look around frantically, coming face to face with yet another mirror. I stare back as I did before, but this time my features are twisted with an expression of confusion and fear so alarmingly familiar that I stagger away, taking off down the corridor at a run.

A corner.

A corridor.

Another corner.

The Joseph behind the mirrors run with me as I go, a companion to my flight, and I’m considering turning back when I skid into a new corridor and see the door at the very end of it. I run for it, and shoulder barge my way through.

Just like I hadn’t needed to tell my body to take and drink the water, I don’t need to tell my body to use my shoulder in shoving the door aside; and I certainly don’t need to tell it to pull up short when I see what is waiting for me on the other side of the door.

No, my fear does that for me as I find myself rooted to the spot.

Another small, pale blue room – this time with no mirrors – contains three stools, two of which are occupied.

A woman in a sharp suit sits by the door, with a glowing tablet on her lap and an array of rectangular viewports arranged on the display.

She appears to be scrolling back and then replaying the footage captured in every rectangle in tandem, and I see myself in each. Starting at the viewer. My back to the viewer. Running past the eye of the viewer.

I look back the way I had come, catching a glimpse of one of the mirrors, realising that there had been more eyes in them than just my own as the door shuts behind me, and I turn to look at the other figure, my mouth once again dry.

Standing from the second occupied stool is a man with an unfamiliar face. His eyes are a bright green, his face haggard and weary, his smile thin and unemotive, but my eyes continue down to his hands, uncovered by the suit he also sports. Familiar skin, long thin fingers and jagged knuckles just like mine. I look back up at those eyes. There’s a halo of brown around them.

“Joseph; welcome,” the man says, his voice containing the low rumble of distant thunder, his words as smooth as a well-recited script. “That was quite the dramatic exit from the orientation. Please, take a seat.”

As if to lead by example, the man sits back down. I gingerly cross to the empty stool, but I do not yet sit. “What’s going on?” I whisper, my voice cracked and tremulous, uncertain of itself as I hear it for the first time in my waking memory.

“Sit.” This time, it doesn’t sound like a request.

This time, I obey.

“This,” he continues, “is your fresh start. Your rehabilitation.”

I’m still staring at that halo of brown around the green of this man’s eyes, the frame of him, the hands. So much familiarity, but… his face is wrong. And the hands are slightly different; they bear long, thin scars that the man in the picture didn’t have. “Father?”

There’s a long, tense pause. The woman stands. And then the man lets out a long, heavy sigh. “Damnit… I was sure this one would take.”

“The constant between this run and the last failures is the book, Sir,” the woman reports diligently. I stiffen. “We removed all other memory cues for this one.”

Father nods, looking briefly towards the woman. “Next time, clear the unit of all information. Blank slate.”

“What are you –?” I protest, but he interrupts me.

“I’m sorry, Joseph. Forgetting me and forgetting what you did to them is the only way you can rehabilitate; but don’t worry. The next time’s the charm.” My Father says as he stands, looming over me. A sense of dread that tastes like home permeates my mouth as he reaches into his jacket’s interior pocket, producing something long and thin with a needle point tip that I suddenly remember the sting of. Again, my body acts. I lunge, grabbing his lapel, and scratch the syringe out of his palm before a harsh hand grabs my hair and yanks me back, the woman pulling me against her body and holding me firm.

Father curses, the syringe shattering on the floor as he looks down at his hand; I have drawn blood, perfectly following the line of the old scar.

“From the top,” is all he says, a bored inconvenience to his tone before a sharp pinprick hits my neck, and my vision blurs, before it fails completely.

Joseph fades into nothing.

And I am everything once more.