He was exactly where he’d been when I left him on the day of the attack: sitting in the corner, knees drawn up, lost elsewhere.
“Kwame?” He didn’t answer. “Are you in there?”
He looked up at me slowly.
“I… do not know.”
I sat down in the heavy wooden chair he kept at his desk.
“I thought you were making some progress.”
“No.”
“Has something happened?”
“I remember.”
“What do you remember, Kwame?”
“I remember my dreams. I did not know how I was… protected.” He spat the last word out, bitterly.
“What do you dream about?”
He looked up at me, horrified and distraught. “The same! Every night I have the same dream! It has not changed!”
“The dream about the cell?”
“Every night I condemn that… creature… to death. And I feel as though I am killing the one I love. As though that thing were my wife. And I remember!”
“What do you remember?”
“When I… kissed… him.”
“Iokan?” He gave me the barest nod. “Do you remember anything else?”
“I…”
He sat there, lost in memory.
“Kwame?”
“I remember… things.”
“Can you tell me anything?”
“I do not understand them…”
“Just start with one. Any one.”
He took a breath. “I… I remember a lecture hall. Someone talks with a strange accent… demonstrates something on the bench, something robotic… I never studied robotics! I took history. Electronics was a hobby, nothing more! And I remember… being a child, running with gangs, robbing drunks. But I never did that! I was in a private school! My father made sacrifices so I had an education… and, and… I see a bar in Matongu, with men dressed as women…” He trembled. “I have never been to Matongu. What is happening to me?”
This was a very good question. Strange psychological phenomena do crop up when you deal with different human species whose psychology is not fully understood, but I’d never seen anything quite like this before.
“I think… I think at the moment, Kwame, you’re feeling lost, like you haven’t got a map…”
“That does not help!”
“Let me finish. You’re in a strange land. Doesn’t it make sense to try and find a map to make sense of where you are?”
“And how should I do that?”
“I think you should make one.”
“How…?”
“You say you have all these memories that contradict each other. So perhaps it would be a good idea to make a list.”
“These ‘memories’ are not real. I will not dignify them by writing them down.”
“They’re not going to go away, Kwame.”
“They are not mine!”
“They may not be yours, but they’re in your head. And we can’t erase them. Isn’t it better to at least know what they are, to try and figure out what happened?” He didn’t answer. “I’ll start if you like.”
He still refused to comment.
“Well…” I rose and went to a wall, and set it up for text input. “You said you have memories of being in a street gang, as well as memories of being in private school. Let’s put both of those down…”
I drew a line down the wall, then wrote ‘Childhood: street gang’ on one side and ‘Childhood: private school’ on the other.
“Maybe what you can do is put all the memories into the two columns and see if you can work out a timeline for both sets of memories?”
He continued to ignore me.
“I’ll just leave this here and you can carry on whenever you want. I’ll save it so you don’t lose it…” I saved the file onto his home folder. “Don’t wait too long to get started.”
I left. Kwame stayed where he was, hunched into the corner of the room. Eventually, he looked up at the wall, and walked over to the screen.
He wiped it clean. All the words vanished. He called up his folder, and tried to erase the file. But an error message popped up: the file could not be erased without my permission. He tried to save the file as blank, with all the words deleted; he found he couldn’t do that either. He thumped a fist on the wall.
Then, after a while, he opened the file again.
9. Olivia
Olivia decided to cook, but not for the group. I found her pounding seeds with a mortar and pestle (a difficult task with one arm still in a sling), and asked what it was she was making.
“Mustard,” she said, keeping on with her pounding.
“Oh, so you managed to harvest some seeds before you left?”
“No.”
“Then how…?”
“These are for the new garden.”
“But I thought you said the soil was wrong?”
“Yeh. It’s all wrong. Can’t grow anything up here.”
“So why…” And then I realised: I’d given her permission to order supplies for a new garden more suitable for the soil, and she’d used it. “You ordered new seeds and now you’re turning them into mustard.”
“That’s the sum of it.”
“Those seeds are very expensive, Olivia.”
“I haven’t used money in years. Can’t even remember how it works, much less this electric credit balance thing you have.”
“And the mustard itself is poisonous to some people.”
“Is it poisonous to you?”
“No, but…”
“Then make sure nobody else has any, then! Right…” She finished pounding the seeds. I sighed and decided I might as well try to use the moment for therapy.
“So you’ve turned it into powder. What’s next?”
“It’s not powder. It’s ground seed. Or flour, if you want to call it that. Here, sniff.”
She held the mortar under my nose. The stench blew me off my feet and left me coughing on the floor. “Good, isn’t it?” said Olivia.
“I think I need a medic…” I spluttered.
“Rubbish. Splash water on your face, you’ll be fine.” I dashed to the sink. The burning faded as I drenched myself.
“How can that possibly be food?”
“It’s not food, it’s what you have with food. Be a dear and get me some vinegar. Just the kind we have with dinner is fine.”
I took a vinegar bottle down from a cupboard and handed it over while wiping my eyes.
“Did everyone eat this on your world…?”
“Don’t be stupid. What do you think, we’re all the same as each other? This is just what I have. Goes with any kind of meat, even that muck you print here.”
“How did people discover this? Were they suicidal and hungry at the same time?”
“Hah! Didn’t you have mustard on your world?”
“I have absolutely no idea what they had on my world. We don’t have it here because it kills people.”
“Well you needed it where I come from. You try eating meat that’s been through the marinade, see how long you can stomach it. Bit of mustard makes anything edible.”
“This is the marinade you used to destroy the revenation bacteria?”
“That’s the one.”
“And mustard made it taste better?”
“That’s it.” She poured the ground up seeds from the mortar into a bowl, then added water, a little sugar and salt.
“Did you grow this in the research station?”
“Tried to. Couldn’t get anything to come up. We had some in our supplies but that didn’t last…”