Anamnesis by Zorina Alliata (red queen free ebook TXT) 📖

He can fire me tomorrow and bill me for the egg. I'll pay in installments, okay? Now give me my clothes, damn it."

"Not so fast there, Purple," Hardy pronounced. The fire had subsided and a few naked men had gathered around them. "You left these men without a kitchen and without food. I think this is a darn good theme for our first team building exercise. Get him, boys!"

Dante's instinct took control of his body before his mind did. Before he knew it, he was running for his life, deep into the woods, followed by an angry mob of naked men, who had apparently armed themselves really quickly with tools and sticks from around the farm. He stopped behind a tree when the noises seemed to die down; breathing heavily, with sore feet and quite ashamed of the whole situation, Dante stood there trying to think what to do. In the dark, further south, he thought he saw Eric's drunken silhouette stumbling on the narrow path. "Wait up!" he whispered, hurrying up after him. "Wait up!"


CANTO VI


It was Tuesday night and Dante did not show up for the Wings & Claws beer fest. Tuesdays were especially important because the bar owner, a short, self-absorbed suburban big-shot, was selling half-priced beer taps and giving away stupid prizes to the heaviest drinkers.

I waited for him for a while, and then called him with no result. I left soon after my second beer and it took half of my trip home to finally see the worrisome numbers hanging on me near my left rib. Dante was in some kind of trouble, one far away and hidden from me; one of which I could hardly catch a whiff, a feeling; hardly a foggy sensation in my stomach. A crisp, new number had appeared and it worried me because it meant changes were going on in Nature, in the core and soul of the matter; changes I had to learn, to understand, to spell and defend against.

Caught in the vortex of changes, Dante's destiny had swayed and curled; I thought it might have been me who brought it there, just because I was prone to destroy people as soon as I got friendly with them; but that wasn't it. He was not important enough to me to really matter, or so I thought until then. He was never on the radar as dangerous because he was drinking beer with me every other night.

The warning was weak but unmistakable. As I got closer to my house and further away from the mall, it started to resemble a rapid heart beat and a rushed breath. I scanned my memories and fortunately did not see Dante there; he was still alive. Going through memories of the day, I found an old farmer who had died in the West Virginia fields while working. One of the last things he saw was Dante's face at the window of a speeding bus cutting through the hills. He remembered it vividly because Dante looked a bit like his son, and then the bus became a metaphor for his life hurrying to pass before his eyes. His horse farm had been in the family for four generations at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. Fastest way there from DC: Route 7 straight up.

I stopped the car in my parking lot and went upstairs to discuss it with Lou.

"Are you crazy?" Lou asked me panicked. "Go and save him, he was kidnapped, for God's sake."

"He's okay," I said. "If they wanted to kill him, they would have killed him already. They'll just scare him, probably."

"He's not like you," Lou reminded me. "He can be scared. Just go get him."

"I can't," I admitted. "First, I cannot admit through my actions or words that I am worried or care about Dante; if I do, it's like I'm marking him for destruction. I have to be cold and rigid with him, and then we can be friends, see? Second, how will I explain to him what I am doing there? I would have to tell him that I'm a freak and that I am made of a different matter than he is. There, again, go my chances of ever seeing him again, even if I save him."

"So… You are letting him die because you … are being a good friend?" Lou tried to understand.

"He's not gonna die." I sighed impatiently. "Why would they kill a dumb kid like him? He's got nothing."

"He's got those stock options," Lou remarked.

"I can't go," I said. "I have one real friend in this world and I will not risk that relationship to save him a night of discomfort. If he's not back by tomorrow morning, I'll see."

I went in the kitchen and poured myself a large glass of water. It was cold and it felt good; on my rib, dark-red shadows appeared; there could have been a fire.

Thinking fast, I picked up the phone and called 411. I asked for Mr. Saccas in Arlington, Virginia. Fortunately there was only one listing. I called and said I was a friend of Dante and that had disappeared that day; that I heard him say something about the Appalachian Mountains; that he was supposed to be back but never made it; that I was worried.

Mr. Saccas took the details in a short, calm conversation, with the professionalism of a cop. He thanked me and even spared a moment to assure me everything would be okay. I knew he would rush to save Dante, like he had done so many times before.

I opened the fridge and got a soda; I drank it slowly. I decided that Dante's destiny was his alone. That even though he was also an anomaly of sorts, a transparent, good-hearted shadow I could not comprehend entirely, he and I were different beings with just a few things in common; and that was all. I had other things to do, more important than saving his life – for example, keep looking through the memories of former residents of Gaithersburg and locate valuable information about hidden plants and possible integral corners of Nature, to find the elusive 2-2-9 pattern.

There was a specific place I was looking for in their fragile memories of this life: a small valley at the corner of Shady Grove Road and Sam Eig Highway. Every morning while I was driving to work, there was a light fog there; almost unnoticeable usually, but sometimes dense and dynamic, swirling above the grass. The land belonged to a farm, one of the few that remained in Gaithersburg even after the suburban growth of the past years. The farmer must have had many offers to sell. Large office buildings and apartment complexes were built all around his land; he must have had a very good reason to stay.

The farm house was white and I could easily observe it from the mall at Rio with a pair of binoculars. No one in the anamnesis had any memories of the house; I couldn't even see as much as one person going in or out. The grass would grow in the summer and dry out in the fall, and nobody came out to mow it. I had spent several nights waiting in my car, but I never saw any movements, except for the fog forming at exactly 4:00 AM on summer mornings.

"I'm going out," I told Lou. "I'll go watch that farm again. It's probably the last place I haven’t figured out yet in this town."

"OK," he said, preoccupied. He was busy reading Daniel Martin, one of my favorite books. I smiled; he had taken my suggestion to read it.

The Rio mall had pretty much closed when I got there; even the geese on the lake were quiet. I parked at the back of Target, on safe asphalt, and put on my binoculars; Nature had to be observed from a distance.

About three hours later, I felt that Dante was completely out of danger. A little while later, two things happened at the same time. First, a car pulled up at the farm; the gate opened immediately to let it through. A light flickered, and a man appeared at the front door of the house. He was 50ish, tall and strong. He waved at the car and helped open the car door. Much to my absolute surprise, out of the car came Dante himself, shaking, dressed in a long coat and nothing else underneath, as far as I could tell. Mr. Saccas poked his head out of the car window, apparently giving some instructions, then promptly turned the car around and left. The gate closed behind him, and by the time I had turned my binoculars around, Dante was already in the house.

While I was dealing with this new information and crunching the numbers and the possibilities, my grandmother's visions suddenly came to me in a passionate rush, filling my eyes with tears and blushing my cheeks; I knew that she had died at that moment, that Nature took her, alone and unprotected. She had struggled by herself, but she was weaker every day, and I did not help. Her love for me, strong and warm like a summer evening, surrounded me. The stories of the saints she used to tell me as a child resurfaced first, colorful and alive. Her last moments were spent in the garden at dawn, where she slipped into the small man-made pool and was swallowed by waters.

I could see her life clearly, although her memories were still coming in flashes and shocks, as her subconscious pulsated while delivering them into the collective bucket, there for other generations to remember. Her secret, which she had shared with me as a child, was that she had faith in God. She prayed every morning and every night, in silence, in her mind, where no matter of any form could reach. She made the potions but believed that God would make them work, and not her magic. And as far as I could tell, he did, because she got the ingredients wrong several times.

"There is no God," I heard myself say to her at 14, a precocious, sad child.

"Of course there is, sweetie," she whispered back. "That's how you were born. You are a gift from God and his angels and our hope and love."

"I see no numbers for God," I said. "Where are they? Why can't I see them? All I see is stupid people and stupid life and how they never learn their lesson. The numbers are about back pain and giving birth and death. I don't see any divine combinations; I don't hear any of the people who ever lived giving me an account of meeting with God."

"When you believe, you'll figure out the numbers," she said. "It's that simple. They look like the moon."

"Then why doesn’t he help us?" I asked. "Why do we have to live in fear and hide from trees and flowers and rivers?"

"He is not the enemy." she said undeterred. "He helps in many other ways."

The conversation resonated in me for no apparent reason; nothing else was as powerful. And then I looked up and saw Dante in front of the farm house. This time, he had a t-shirt and some pants on. He sat there, confused, looking at the dark. I put my binoculars on and studied his face – around his ear, curled like a baby's hair, the numbers were spelled out in a moonlit glow.

*-*-*


By Wednesday morning when Dante courageously went