The Memories Game by Matt Hollingsworth
An ex-convict suffers the aftereffects of a memory mixing experiment conducted on her while she was in prison.
Zero sat in her normal spot on the park bench, watching the path out of the corner of her eye. She pretended to read but was unable to get through a single paragraph without stealing a glance at the park entrance and losing her place. She checked the time on her phone and drummed on the bench with her fingers.
Fortunately, she didn't have to wait much longer. Zero heard the man's voice that was more familiar to her than any other voice in the world. The man said to his son, "We'll play for just a few minutes before you have to get started on your homework. But that's more than enough time for me to kick your butt."
Zero smiled, knowing the boy's reply before he said it: "That's because you always call it when you're ahead."
The dad responded, "I guess that means I'll have plenty of opportunities to call it."
It was a joke they'd repeated thousands of times, practically a ceremony for beginning their games. Zero risked a glance at the basketball court. The dad - Sebastian - had been a light blond when he was younger but now was fading prematurely grey. He had the face of someone destined to be a father, the kind of man who'd made corny "dad jokes" years before he had a child. His son - Yancy - was a redhead, and Zero was aware just how embarrassingly long he spent each morning making himself look fashionably unkempt.
Zero had never spoken to either one in her life, yet she remembered everything about them, from baby Yancy's sleeping face as they drove him home from the hospital to the prickle of Sebastian's beard when they kissed. She remembered their lives up until three years ago, and from then on, she knew only what she could gather from their Quiplog pages and other social media.
Despite the dad's insistence that the game would only last a few minutes, they played for over half an hour before Sebastian got a phone call. His enthusiastic answer of "Hey Shae!" turned Zero's blood cold. It was nearing time for work, so she got up to leave. She didn't want to listen to that conversation.
During her time in prison, Zero had had a full nursing course downloaded to her memory. It was often hard for ex-cons to find work, and she was grateful for her current job at the nursing home. It had been her first pick, and she'd had to pull some strings to get it, but while she tried to care for all her patients, in truth she was only there for one - Dolly Martell.
"How's it going Mrs. Martell?" Zero asked when she delivered her medicine that morning, resisting the urge to call the woman "Mom."
"Same as always, Zee - old and grumpy." The woman was in her eighties, but she stubbornly refused to go grey, dyeing her hair a deep black every few weeks. The color was starting to fade, and Zero knew she'd soon need to help her dye it again. This was always a hassle with the woman's conditions; the list at the top of her chart looked like an index page of a medical textbook.
Mrs. Martell had an old photo album in her lap, and as Zero changed her IV, she asked, "Have I ever told you the story of my daughter Allie's graduation?" She motioned to a picture of a middle-aged lady, but Zero already knew what Allie looked like - they'd shared a prison cell for three years. Additionally, Mrs. Martell had recounted the graduation story a dozen times, not knowing that Zero remembered the event firsthand. Nevertheless, she enjoyed telling the story and Zero enjoyed listening, so she asked to hear it again.
Allie had never been the brightest student, Zero knew, not that Mrs. Martell would ever say that. It'd taken her an extra year and a half, and a lot of encouragement from her mom, to graduate from high school. Not having much money, she'd had to wear her sister's robes which were about three sizes too large.
"I'd told her not to do anything dumb until she had the degree in her hand," Mrs. Martell chuckled. "And that's exactly how long she waited. As she walked across the stage and took her diploma, she passed a microphone that someone had forgotten to switch off. She paused for half a second, and I was thinking, oh no, what's she going to do. And Allie steps back to the microphone, leans in, and says, 'I did it, Mom. I love you.'"
"That's sweet," Zero said.
"Her uncle thought so too. We were in the stands, and he said, 'Makes it all worth it, doesn't it.'"
Zero smiled. She hadn't heard that detail before. "Uncle Oscar said that?"
Mrs. Martell nodded, then suddenly her brow creased. "How'd you know Oscar's name?" she asked.
A practiced liar, Zero responded on reflex: "From one of your stories. You've told me about all your family."
"I'm surprised you remembered. We were a big family. Used to be so many of us, but now there's no one to even visit."
She ducked her head, and in Zero's mind, Allie's memories welled up, and she wanted to say, "You're not alone, Mom. I'm here." Instead, she bit her lip, murmured some excuse, and stepped out of the room.
"She's not my mother," Zero whispered to herself, fighting tears. "She is not my mother."
Zero had never told Mrs. Martell about being in prison with Allie, much less their strange connection. A few years before her arrest, the prison systems had begun experimenting with memory treatments. The idea was to take four cellmates and mix their memories together so that each had the full memories of all four. Prisoners wouldn't know who they were. They'd have four sets of memories but no idea which of the four was theirs.
The goal was that it would keep them docile; take away personal identity and you take away any reason to fight or try to escape. To the surprise of nobody but the wardens and overly-educated psychologists who'd come up with the idea, this hadn't worked out, and eventually, the practice had been discontinued, but it was too late for Zero who retained the full memories of her roommates - Allie Martell, Susan Branch, and Jessica Alister, who had been Sebastian's wife and Yancy's mom.
For three years, the inmates hadn't even known their own names. Or, more accurately, they'd known four names but not which name belonged to which of them. Instead, they'd used the last digit of their prison numbers as nicknames. That's where Zero had come from. Now that she was free, the authorities had returned her identity, but she still thought of herself as Zero, as if four different lifetimes had cancelled each other out and she didn't know what was left.
During their incarceration, the roommates would spend hours trying to guess from context which memory belonged to which of them. They called this the memories game. It was made more difficult by the fact that the prison tended to pair similar-looking roommates to make it harder for them to figure out whose memories were whose.
Zero was supposed to get the extra memories removed when she was released, which is what happened to Susan Branch - Jessica having died and Allie still serving time. But for whatever reason, the removal process hadn't worked on Zero. Even after release, she was stuck with extra memories. The technicians couldn't explain it. They'd never seen a case like hers.
Before the memory blur, the prison had given Zero treatment for her substance addictions. She no longer felt withdrawal, nor the physiological need. She thought this would set her free, but as the days of her freedom dragged on and on, her greatest enemy was not addiction itself but boredom and loneliness. When the world felt stale and uninteresting without friends or responsibilities to anchor her - that's when she would feel the call of the drugs that had put her in prison in the first place.
It was during those times she would return to her rounds, starting with the Quiplog pages for Sebastian and Yancy Alister. Neither posted often, and Zero would often end up checking a dozen times for each new picture or update. The first thing she saw today was a picture from one of Yancy's school friends in which the boy had been tagged. Zero didn't know this friend, so it must be someone he'd met after Jessica had been incarcerated.
Zero thought about the morning of Jess's seizure, when the guards came to take her to the infirmary. She knew that Sebastian had never divorced Jessica, even when she'd gone to prison, that he'd promised to wait for her.
It called to mind another memory from years before - Sebastian's arms wrapped around her, a positive pregnancy test in her hand. Sebastian had wanted kids as soon as they were married, and after two years of trying, he could finally whisper: "We have a baby. We're going to be parents."
Zero's mind drifted back to Sebastian and Jessica's wedding night, but that made her feel dirty. These weren't her memories, and she didn't have a right to them. But they were such nice memories, better than any of Zero's actual memories, and she held them in her mind trying to ignore the pangs of her conscience. She'd never loved someone the way Jessica loved Sebastian.
Which is why it stung her when she checked Sebastian's page and saw him holding hands with the woman - Shae, the lady he'd married after Jessica died, the one who'd called him that morning. Seeing Sebastian with a woman other than Jessica made the world feel off-balance. It seemed unjust, and Zero thought, It should have been me who died, not her.
Unable to stand another moment alone in her apartment, Zero grabbed her jacket and stepped out.
For a few months after their incarceration, Zero had remained friends with Susan - her only roommate to be released alongside her. Then she made the mistake of confessing her "stalking" - as Susan had put it - of Jess and Allie's families. Immediately, Susan had cut off all contact and blocked her on social media to prevent Zero from stalking her as well. She didn't need to worry though. There was nothing about Susan's life that Zero envied.
Even though she was off duty, Zero went to the nursing home and spent an hour with Mrs. Martell. Afterwards, she walked by Sebastian and Yancy's house, hoping to catch a glimpse of them through the windows. She saw Yancy in his upstairs room and allowed herself to stare for just a moment. Shae's car was gone - she was probably at work - which was a relief. Zero hated seeing Shae in that house.
Suddenly, there was a voice behind her. "There you are."
She whirled around to see Sebastian Alister, his eyes burning with an anger that she recognized but that she'd never seen directed at her.
"You've been following us," Sebastian said. "Who are you?"
For a long moment, Zero couldn't speak. Tears welled in her eyes and almost involuntarily, she said, "I'm your wife."
They sat together in a café a block from his house where he listened to Zero's story. Sebastian shook his head and looked away.
"They wouldn't let me visit her when she was in prison," he said. "Except once, when she was in the hospital and it was clear she was going to die. They'd fixed her memories by then, before the end, so that we could say goodbye."
Zero remembered Jess being escorted from their cell by doctors and guards. This meeting was perhaps the only memory of Jess's that she didn't share. She felt glad they'd gotten to say goodbye.
"She loved you," Zero said.
"I know."
Around them, a dozen other conversations brewed. Some piece of Zero's mind felt she should be comfortable around Sebastian, summoned cozy memories of them sitting together on their living room couch, her head resting on his shoulder, nearly asleep. But these weren't her memories.
"You should get back to Yancy," she said, rising. She waited for Sebastian to respond, but he just stared into the distance.
Two days later, Zero received a message on her phone. No doubt Sebastian had gotten her number from one of the open directories online.
The message read: Do you remember what Jess said to me the first time she saw me in my tux?
The memory made Zero smile. She replied, If I'd known you'd look like that, I would've married you in your basketball shorts.
The next message was a long time in coming, but Zero had guessed what it would say a long while before she heard the ding: Can I see you again?
Zero took a deep breath. She'd dreamed of this, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she should refuse. It took her less than a second to decide.
The next day, Sebastian called in sick at work to meet up with Zero, and they talked for hours. That afternoon, their affair began in a nearby hotel. Zero told herself that she had more right to Sebastian's love than Shae did, that she'd been his wife first. And she tried not to think about how, as they lay together in bed, Sebastian had whispered a name into her ear: "Jessica."
Zero believed she knew Jess better than anyone, better than Jess had known herself, for she not only had Jess's memories but also the objectivity and emotional distance needed to analyze them.
Jessica had been a wonderful wife and mother - caring, attentive, patient. Soft yet strong, confident or at least appearing confident. But she had one flaw, a flaw to which she had been completely blind, that Zero had only been able to define after much reflection - she was incapable of feeling compassion towards those with whom she had no relationship. To her friends, she was sympathetic and kind, generous with time and money, yet in all her life she'd never given a cent to charity, not because of any stinginess but primarily because she'd never thought to; to give to charity was to benefit strangers, and all beyond her periphery were non-persons, background images with whom she could not sympathize. It was why she never cared about the news unless it was a story that directly impacted those she loved, and to her, the world beyond her loved ones might as well be empty.
Perhaps this was why she'd gotten involved with the embezzlement scheme at her work, because those she was stealing from were people who did not exist to her, and she was using the money to benefit those who did exist - her son and husband. And in her sometimes-smug confidence, she'd thought she would never be caught. This wasn't what Jess had told herself; she'd managed to come up with justifications for why she felt she deserved the money, but Zero suspected that this was the real reason.
Zero imagined that if their places were reversed, Jess would feel no guilt about an affair with a married man, not unless she knew the man's wife, because otherwise the other woman would not exist to her. Maybe that's how Jess would feel, but unfortunately, Zero was not Jess.
They had met for four of the past six days. Zero wasn't sure how he kept coming up with excuses, but his family had to be getting suspicious. Last night, Zero had worn a blue dress similar to one of Jessica's favorites. Sebastian had complimented her on it several times, so she'd bought another outfit reminiscent of Jessica. It felt dirty, but she'd wanted Jess's life for so long... After a rough childhood, followed by drug addiction and a prison stint, it was rare for Zero to feel loved.
That evening, as they lay together in the bed, he asked, "Have you ever thought about growing out your hair?"
"Yes," Zero said, remembering Jessica's hair which hung down past her shoulders, as opposed to hers which was several inches shorter.
"You should," Sebastian said. "You'd look nice." In truth, Zero had already decided to grow it out and hadn't cut it since starting the affair.
Was she really going to continue this? But even as she asked herself, she knew that she would. Even if she had wanted to stop, she lacked the strength.
She thought about the path ahead with a mix of resignation and optimism: She would disappear into Jessica. Good. No one wanted Zero - least of all herself. For Zero to disappear would be no great loss. But there were people who loved and wanted Jessica. Maybe in time, Sebastian would leave Shae. Maybe Yancy would accept her as his mother. How wonderful it would be to hear him call her "Mom" again. It wouldn't be "again," something inside her whispered. He has never called you "Mom." Zero shifted positions, turning away from Sebastian, drawing up the sheets to her shoulders.
Three days later, Sebastian said, "I love you" for the first time. Zero didn't need to wonder whether the words were directed to her or to Jessica.
That evening at work, she asked Mrs. Martell whether she'd ever wanted to be someone else.
"Haven't we all," Mrs. Martell answered.
Their relationship continued for another two months, during which Zero grew out her hair and dyed it a slightly darker shade of brown to better match Jess.
One morning, her doorbell rang; it was followed by a hard knocking. Zero looked out the peep-hole and said, "Hello Shae."
"Open the door!" Shae shouted. Before Zero could respond, Shae said, "I don't know who you are, but stay away from Sebastian! Who do you think you are barging into our lives like this?"
The locks clicked open, and Zero stepped forward with such staggering confidence - or at least the appearance of it - that Shae actually stepped back. And Zero spoke in a voice that surprised even her, a voice not her own. She said: "My name is Jessica Alister. Sebastian is my husband. Yancy is my son. And you will stay far away from them."
For a moment, Shae could only stare. And the woman who had been Zero thought, this is how it should be - Zero died and Jess lives. And she felt the last of what was individual within her die, and she became nothing but memory given form.
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Fortunately, she didn't have to wait much longer. Zero heard the man's voice that was more familiar to her than any other voice in the world. The man said to his son, "We'll play for just a few minutes before you have to get started on your homework. But that's more than enough time for me to kick your butt."
Zero smiled, knowing the boy's reply before he said it: "That's because you always call it when you're ahead."
The dad responded, "I guess that means I'll have plenty of opportunities to call it."
It was a joke they'd repeated thousands of times, practically a ceremony for beginning their games. Zero risked a glance at the basketball court. The dad - Sebastian - had been a light blond when he was younger but now was fading prematurely grey. He had the face of someone destined to be a father, the kind of man who'd made corny "dad jokes" years before he had a child. His son - Yancy - was a redhead, and Zero was aware just how embarrassingly long he spent each morning making himself look fashionably unkempt.
Zero had never spoken to either one in her life, yet she remembered everything about them, from baby Yancy's sleeping face as they drove him home from the hospital to the prickle of Sebastian's beard when they kissed. She remembered their lives up until three years ago, and from then on, she knew only what she could gather from their Quiplog pages and other social media.
Despite the dad's insistence that the game would only last a few minutes, they played for over half an hour before Sebastian got a phone call. His enthusiastic answer of "Hey Shae!" turned Zero's blood cold. It was nearing time for work, so she got up to leave. She didn't want to listen to that conversation.
During her time in prison, Zero had had a full nursing course downloaded to her memory. It was often hard for ex-cons to find work, and she was grateful for her current job at the nursing home. It had been her first pick, and she'd had to pull some strings to get it, but while she tried to care for all her patients, in truth she was only there for one - Dolly Martell.
"How's it going Mrs. Martell?" Zero asked when she delivered her medicine that morning, resisting the urge to call the woman "Mom."
"Same as always, Zee - old and grumpy." The woman was in her eighties, but she stubbornly refused to go grey, dyeing her hair a deep black every few weeks. The color was starting to fade, and Zero knew she'd soon need to help her dye it again. This was always a hassle with the woman's conditions; the list at the top of her chart looked like an index page of a medical textbook.
Mrs. Martell had an old photo album in her lap, and as Zero changed her IV, she asked, "Have I ever told you the story of my daughter Allie's graduation?" She motioned to a picture of a middle-aged lady, but Zero already knew what Allie looked like - they'd shared a prison cell for three years. Additionally, Mrs. Martell had recounted the graduation story a dozen times, not knowing that Zero remembered the event firsthand. Nevertheless, she enjoyed telling the story and Zero enjoyed listening, so she asked to hear it again.
Allie had never been the brightest student, Zero knew, not that Mrs. Martell would ever say that. It'd taken her an extra year and a half, and a lot of encouragement from her mom, to graduate from high school. Not having much money, she'd had to wear her sister's robes which were about three sizes too large.
"I'd told her not to do anything dumb until she had the degree in her hand," Mrs. Martell chuckled. "And that's exactly how long she waited. As she walked across the stage and took her diploma, she passed a microphone that someone had forgotten to switch off. She paused for half a second, and I was thinking, oh no, what's she going to do. And Allie steps back to the microphone, leans in, and says, 'I did it, Mom. I love you.'"
"That's sweet," Zero said.
"Her uncle thought so too. We were in the stands, and he said, 'Makes it all worth it, doesn't it.'"
Zero smiled. She hadn't heard that detail before. "Uncle Oscar said that?"
Mrs. Martell nodded, then suddenly her brow creased. "How'd you know Oscar's name?" she asked.
A practiced liar, Zero responded on reflex: "From one of your stories. You've told me about all your family."
"I'm surprised you remembered. We were a big family. Used to be so many of us, but now there's no one to even visit."
She ducked her head, and in Zero's mind, Allie's memories welled up, and she wanted to say, "You're not alone, Mom. I'm here." Instead, she bit her lip, murmured some excuse, and stepped out of the room.
"She's not my mother," Zero whispered to herself, fighting tears. "She is not my mother."
Zero had never told Mrs. Martell about being in prison with Allie, much less their strange connection. A few years before her arrest, the prison systems had begun experimenting with memory treatments. The idea was to take four cellmates and mix their memories together so that each had the full memories of all four. Prisoners wouldn't know who they were. They'd have four sets of memories but no idea which of the four was theirs.
The goal was that it would keep them docile; take away personal identity and you take away any reason to fight or try to escape. To the surprise of nobody but the wardens and overly-educated psychologists who'd come up with the idea, this hadn't worked out, and eventually, the practice had been discontinued, but it was too late for Zero who retained the full memories of her roommates - Allie Martell, Susan Branch, and Jessica Alister, who had been Sebastian's wife and Yancy's mom.
For three years, the inmates hadn't even known their own names. Or, more accurately, they'd known four names but not which name belonged to which of them. Instead, they'd used the last digit of their prison numbers as nicknames. That's where Zero had come from. Now that she was free, the authorities had returned her identity, but she still thought of herself as Zero, as if four different lifetimes had cancelled each other out and she didn't know what was left.
During their incarceration, the roommates would spend hours trying to guess from context which memory belonged to which of them. They called this the memories game. It was made more difficult by the fact that the prison tended to pair similar-looking roommates to make it harder for them to figure out whose memories were whose.
Zero was supposed to get the extra memories removed when she was released, which is what happened to Susan Branch - Jessica having died and Allie still serving time. But for whatever reason, the removal process hadn't worked on Zero. Even after release, she was stuck with extra memories. The technicians couldn't explain it. They'd never seen a case like hers.
Before the memory blur, the prison had given Zero treatment for her substance addictions. She no longer felt withdrawal, nor the physiological need. She thought this would set her free, but as the days of her freedom dragged on and on, her greatest enemy was not addiction itself but boredom and loneliness. When the world felt stale and uninteresting without friends or responsibilities to anchor her - that's when she would feel the call of the drugs that had put her in prison in the first place.
It was during those times she would return to her rounds, starting with the Quiplog pages for Sebastian and Yancy Alister. Neither posted often, and Zero would often end up checking a dozen times for each new picture or update. The first thing she saw today was a picture from one of Yancy's school friends in which the boy had been tagged. Zero didn't know this friend, so it must be someone he'd met after Jessica had been incarcerated.
Zero thought about the morning of Jess's seizure, when the guards came to take her to the infirmary. She knew that Sebastian had never divorced Jessica, even when she'd gone to prison, that he'd promised to wait for her.
It called to mind another memory from years before - Sebastian's arms wrapped around her, a positive pregnancy test in her hand. Sebastian had wanted kids as soon as they were married, and after two years of trying, he could finally whisper: "We have a baby. We're going to be parents."
Zero's mind drifted back to Sebastian and Jessica's wedding night, but that made her feel dirty. These weren't her memories, and she didn't have a right to them. But they were such nice memories, better than any of Zero's actual memories, and she held them in her mind trying to ignore the pangs of her conscience. She'd never loved someone the way Jessica loved Sebastian.
Which is why it stung her when she checked Sebastian's page and saw him holding hands with the woman - Shae, the lady he'd married after Jessica died, the one who'd called him that morning. Seeing Sebastian with a woman other than Jessica made the world feel off-balance. It seemed unjust, and Zero thought, It should have been me who died, not her.
Unable to stand another moment alone in her apartment, Zero grabbed her jacket and stepped out.
For a few months after their incarceration, Zero had remained friends with Susan - her only roommate to be released alongside her. Then she made the mistake of confessing her "stalking" - as Susan had put it - of Jess and Allie's families. Immediately, Susan had cut off all contact and blocked her on social media to prevent Zero from stalking her as well. She didn't need to worry though. There was nothing about Susan's life that Zero envied.
Even though she was off duty, Zero went to the nursing home and spent an hour with Mrs. Martell. Afterwards, she walked by Sebastian and Yancy's house, hoping to catch a glimpse of them through the windows. She saw Yancy in his upstairs room and allowed herself to stare for just a moment. Shae's car was gone - she was probably at work - which was a relief. Zero hated seeing Shae in that house.
Suddenly, there was a voice behind her. "There you are."
She whirled around to see Sebastian Alister, his eyes burning with an anger that she recognized but that she'd never seen directed at her.
"You've been following us," Sebastian said. "Who are you?"
For a long moment, Zero couldn't speak. Tears welled in her eyes and almost involuntarily, she said, "I'm your wife."
They sat together in a café a block from his house where he listened to Zero's story. Sebastian shook his head and looked away.
"They wouldn't let me visit her when she was in prison," he said. "Except once, when she was in the hospital and it was clear she was going to die. They'd fixed her memories by then, before the end, so that we could say goodbye."
Zero remembered Jess being escorted from their cell by doctors and guards. This meeting was perhaps the only memory of Jess's that she didn't share. She felt glad they'd gotten to say goodbye.
"She loved you," Zero said.
"I know."
Around them, a dozen other conversations brewed. Some piece of Zero's mind felt she should be comfortable around Sebastian, summoned cozy memories of them sitting together on their living room couch, her head resting on his shoulder, nearly asleep. But these weren't her memories.
"You should get back to Yancy," she said, rising. She waited for Sebastian to respond, but he just stared into the distance.
Two days later, Zero received a message on her phone. No doubt Sebastian had gotten her number from one of the open directories online.
The message read: Do you remember what Jess said to me the first time she saw me in my tux?
The memory made Zero smile. She replied, If I'd known you'd look like that, I would've married you in your basketball shorts.
The next message was a long time in coming, but Zero had guessed what it would say a long while before she heard the ding: Can I see you again?
Zero took a deep breath. She'd dreamed of this, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she should refuse. It took her less than a second to decide.
The next day, Sebastian called in sick at work to meet up with Zero, and they talked for hours. That afternoon, their affair began in a nearby hotel. Zero told herself that she had more right to Sebastian's love than Shae did, that she'd been his wife first. And she tried not to think about how, as they lay together in bed, Sebastian had whispered a name into her ear: "Jessica."
Zero believed she knew Jess better than anyone, better than Jess had known herself, for she not only had Jess's memories but also the objectivity and emotional distance needed to analyze them.
Jessica had been a wonderful wife and mother - caring, attentive, patient. Soft yet strong, confident or at least appearing confident. But she had one flaw, a flaw to which she had been completely blind, that Zero had only been able to define after much reflection - she was incapable of feeling compassion towards those with whom she had no relationship. To her friends, she was sympathetic and kind, generous with time and money, yet in all her life she'd never given a cent to charity, not because of any stinginess but primarily because she'd never thought to; to give to charity was to benefit strangers, and all beyond her periphery were non-persons, background images with whom she could not sympathize. It was why she never cared about the news unless it was a story that directly impacted those she loved, and to her, the world beyond her loved ones might as well be empty.
Perhaps this was why she'd gotten involved with the embezzlement scheme at her work, because those she was stealing from were people who did not exist to her, and she was using the money to benefit those who did exist - her son and husband. And in her sometimes-smug confidence, she'd thought she would never be caught. This wasn't what Jess had told herself; she'd managed to come up with justifications for why she felt she deserved the money, but Zero suspected that this was the real reason.
Zero imagined that if their places were reversed, Jess would feel no guilt about an affair with a married man, not unless she knew the man's wife, because otherwise the other woman would not exist to her. Maybe that's how Jess would feel, but unfortunately, Zero was not Jess.
They had met for four of the past six days. Zero wasn't sure how he kept coming up with excuses, but his family had to be getting suspicious. Last night, Zero had worn a blue dress similar to one of Jessica's favorites. Sebastian had complimented her on it several times, so she'd bought another outfit reminiscent of Jessica. It felt dirty, but she'd wanted Jess's life for so long... After a rough childhood, followed by drug addiction and a prison stint, it was rare for Zero to feel loved.
That evening, as they lay together in the bed, he asked, "Have you ever thought about growing out your hair?"
"Yes," Zero said, remembering Jessica's hair which hung down past her shoulders, as opposed to hers which was several inches shorter.
"You should," Sebastian said. "You'd look nice." In truth, Zero had already decided to grow it out and hadn't cut it since starting the affair.
Was she really going to continue this? But even as she asked herself, she knew that she would. Even if she had wanted to stop, she lacked the strength.
She thought about the path ahead with a mix of resignation and optimism: She would disappear into Jessica. Good. No one wanted Zero - least of all herself. For Zero to disappear would be no great loss. But there were people who loved and wanted Jessica. Maybe in time, Sebastian would leave Shae. Maybe Yancy would accept her as his mother. How wonderful it would be to hear him call her "Mom" again. It wouldn't be "again," something inside her whispered. He has never called you "Mom." Zero shifted positions, turning away from Sebastian, drawing up the sheets to her shoulders.
Three days later, Sebastian said, "I love you" for the first time. Zero didn't need to wonder whether the words were directed to her or to Jessica.
That evening at work, she asked Mrs. Martell whether she'd ever wanted to be someone else.
"Haven't we all," Mrs. Martell answered.
Their relationship continued for another two months, during which Zero grew out her hair and dyed it a slightly darker shade of brown to better match Jess.
One morning, her doorbell rang; it was followed by a hard knocking. Zero looked out the peep-hole and said, "Hello Shae."
"Open the door!" Shae shouted. Before Zero could respond, Shae said, "I don't know who you are, but stay away from Sebastian! Who do you think you are barging into our lives like this?"
The locks clicked open, and Zero stepped forward with such staggering confidence - or at least the appearance of it - that Shae actually stepped back. And Zero spoke in a voice that surprised even her, a voice not her own. She said: "My name is Jessica Alister. Sebastian is my husband. Yancy is my son. And you will stay far away from them."
For a moment, Shae could only stare. And the woman who had been Zero thought, this is how it should be - Zero died and Jess lives. And she felt the last of what was individual within her die, and she became nothing but memory given form.
What a fascinating premise, and I can well imagine government types conspiring to orchestrate such a scenario as co-inmates sharing memories for some uncertain end. And Zero's name--and apt metaphor for a life which is formless and inert and meaningless to its possessor. But the ending: completely unexpected. Perhaps the memory transfers in the joint messed with her mind in other ways and she bought into Sebastian's so-called love. This was a carefully written, expertly crafted story which held my rapt interest from the jump. Congratulations, Matt, and thank you for sharing the fruits of your labor.
ReplyDeleteInvolving! Terrific ending! The writing was at times poetic.
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