The farthest back I remember is waking up in a little gray room with the unshakeable feeling that something horrible had just happened to me.
I was lying on a squishy mat that reached from wall to wall, just large enough to lay flat on without bending my knees. I sat up; I had the remnants of a headache, and I rubbed my forehead to try to ease it. What happened? Nothing in the room gave me any clues. I wore shorts and a t-shirt in a light, hospital-like blue, but other than the headache, I wasn’t in any pain, and this definitely wasn’t a hospital.
Not a moment later, the door opened, and in walked a middle-aged man and a younger woman. Both of them wore khaki pants, gray polo shirts, and cloth masks over the lower halves of their faces. I could tell the man was smiling anyway. (The woman decidedly wasn’t.) “Hey, buddy,” said the man, kneeling in front of me in kind of a fatherly way. “How are you feeling?”
“Um ….” My throat was dry; I cleared it. “F-Fine. What—?”
He held up a hand, and I fell quiet. “I’ve just got a few questions to ask you, and then I’ll answer yours, alright?” He looked at me expectantly. I glanced at the woman; she was leaning against the door, a clipboard propped against her arm. There weren’t many places to lean in this small room other than the door, but something about the blocked doorway made me nervous. I nodded at the man. Whatever gets me out of here fastest. “Excellent! First question: Where did you attend elementary school?”
Weird thing to ask, but easy enough. I opened my mouth to reply—and it was like I’d smacked right into a glass door. I was sure the answer was on the other side, but the door wouldn’t open, and I couldn’t see what lay beyond it. “I ….” The silence stretched as I trailed off.
“It’s okay not to know,” the man said gently. “You can just say, ‘I don’t know.’”
“I don’t know,” I repeated, my voice hoarse. The woman jotted something down.
The man seemed unperturbed, giving no sign of whether or not they’d expected that response. “Okay, next question: Name any U.S. president.”
Again, easy—or it should’ve been. My fingers dug into the foam mat beneath me as I strained for an answer. I knew this. I’d learned it, at some point— probably at the elementary school I couldn’t seem to remember. “Um … Thomas something. Jeffers?”
The woman wrote something down again. The man’s gaze was kind, but somehow not reassuring, not at all. “Next question, bud: What is a pet’s favorite place?”
I’d been about ready to ask how many questions there were, but that one snapped me out of the foreboding feeling in my gut. I furrowed my eyebrows; it seemed more subjective than the other ones. “I … guess it depends on the pet?” I said.
“Dig a little deeper for me,” the man persisted. “Any other answers coming up?”
I glanced at the woman—it looked like she was smirking now, but it was hard to tell behind the mask. My face flushed with involuntary heat, and I found myself thinking I should know the answer to this one, too. “Uh … cats like sunbeams?” I offered.
“Good enough, buddy,” said the man, patting my knee. I recoiled a little, shifting uncomfortably. He didn’t seem to notice. “Next question: What color are your father’s eyes?”
Easy; same color as mine. Which was—…?
Suddenly it felt like the floor had yawned open beneath me, swallowing me like quicksand. Just remember Dad’s face. You remember what Dad looks like. It’s only been— How long had it been since I last saw him? It couldn’t have been that long; I was only … How old was I?
“Hey.” The man tapped my knee, startling me out of my head. “Do you have an answer for me?”
My voice came out weak. “N-No.” The woman jotted it down. “What’s going—?”
The man held up a hand, silencing me. “Just a couple more questions, alright? I know you’re confused, but it’s really important that we get this done.”
I took a deep breath, worrying the edge of my shorts between my fingers. I just had to play along, and then I’d get my answers. “Okay.”
He smiled, his eyes crinkling. “Okay. Can you tell me what this says?” He pulled a card out of his breast pocket; it had black text on it.
It took me longer to read than I expected, a long pause between each word. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog?” Something about it sounded familiar. A children’s book, from the elementary school I didn’t remember? Seriously, how old was I? I had the sense that I wasn’t a child, but nothing about this conversation had given me any proof.
“Good!” He put away the card. “Now, just one last question: What is your name?”
And then the quicksand feeling was back, pulling me under so fast my guts twisted around themselves. My name. The single word that encapsulated my identity, represented me as I moved through the world; the first and last thing people knew me as.
I couldn’t remember it.
I didn’t notice the tear sliding down my cheek until the man reached forward and thumbed it away. I jerked back, my chest heaving with panic. He seemed not to notice, or he just didn’t care. “Thanks for being patient with us, buddy,” he said with a smile that was, again, probably meant to be reassuring. “The good news is, you’ve passed the assessment with flying colors.”
My eyes snapped up, wild. “What the fuck,” I hissed, “is going on?”
“I’m handler Chris,” he explained, “and that’s handler Jerusha. Today”—here, he gained the air of someone beginning a long-rehearsed spiel—“is the first day of your new life as a pet. You’ve chosen to have your memory wiped clean by Riantcorp so that you can begin anew as a beloved companion for someone who will cherish you for the rest of your life.” Then he paused, and he and the woman watched for my reaction.
I just stared at him. That didn’t sound right at all. Why would I ever choose this? What was the me from a few hours ago—the me I couldn’t remember being—even thinking? “N-No,” I said, shaking my head vehemently. “No. I want out.”
Chris tilted his head sympathetically, like he was talking to a dog who didn’t want to go to the vet. “Sorry, buddy, but no take-backs. I promise, it’s not as bad as it sounds. You don’t have to worry about a thing anymore. No real-world problems; just love and companionship. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“No!” I blurted, pressing against the wall. “I want my fucking memories back!”
He clicked his tongue. “Bud, you signed an unalterable contract with Riantcorp consenting to all of this.” Jerusha plucked a sheet of paper off the clipboard and flashed it at me. I couldn’t read it from this distance—and I might not have been able to read it at all—but I saw the scribble of a signature at the bottom. “And, unfortunately, the memory wipe procedure is irreversible. Why don’t we just—”
“What?” I shot to my feet, the blood draining my face. No, no, no—why was it irreversible? How the fuck was any of this legal?
Chris rose with me, pushing down on my shoulder. “Buddy, just sit back down and take a few deep breaths for me, will you?”
“No!” I tried to push past him, but he held out an unyielding, beefy arm to block my path. “Let me go!”
“You don’t want to do this.” His voice lowered, and he dipped his head to murmur in my ear. “You get one more chance to settle down, alright?”
I pulled back just enough to look him dead in the eye, my fists balled. “Fuck. You.”
The ZAP came out of nowhere, a hot white pain shooting from my ribs into my whole body. I doubled over, knees hitting the mat. When I looked up, blearily, Chris was standing over me with what looked like a cattle prod. “Down,” he growled, and I was startled enough at the change in tone that I obeyed. He glanced over his shoulder at Jerusha. “Write down ‘high risk’ as the designation.”
“Yessss!” Jerusha smirked behind her mask; I heard the scratch of pen on paper. “I told you—I know a box bastard when I see one.”
He hooked the cattle prod to his belt loop. I hadn’t noticed before, but both of them had quite a few things hanging from their belts. “That’s unprofessional,” he said pointedly, unhooking something different—a big loop made of nylon.
Jerusha rolled her eyes. “What, are you gonna write me up before you cough up the money you bet on it?”
He ignored her, instead kneeling in front of me. I recoiled into the corner, especially when I realized what the thing was: a collar. One with a buckle and a padlock. “Come on, buddy,” he coaxed. “Just let me put this on, and we’ll leave you to get settled in.”
The moment he put that thing on me, this would become real. I wouldn’t be able to convince myself that someone else would burst through that door and say Surprise! We were just fucking with you. You hit your head and lost your memory, but you’ll be all better soon. No, if Chris put that collar on me, then his story would be real, and I didn’t want to live in the reality where I’d betrayed myself like this.
In the end, it didn’t take him long to wrestle me facedown onto the mat and force the collar around my neck. At the click of the padlock, I pressed my forehead into the squishy foam and suppressed a sob. “There, good,” Chris said. He hooked two fingers through the collar, and my breath hitched before I realized he was just checking that there was enough wiggle room.
Then, to my surprise, he stroked his palm over my hair. Pinpricks of disgust crawled down my spine as he murmured, “You did good. You did good. I know this is hard, but the only way out is through. Okay?”
“Fuck you,” I whispered against the mat, “you fucking bastard.”
His weight lifted off my back. “Get some rest. We start tomorrow. Welcome aboard, trainee.”
I didn’t look up to see the two of them leave. All I did was cover my ears so that I wouldn’t hear the final, constricting sound of the door clicking shut.
