Lucy grew more and more weary. That’s when Bridget visited and saw Lucy’s face.
“They’re not nightmares,” she stated matter-of-factly.
Lucy felt Lou stirring inside of her as Bridget continued.
“I’m sorry, I had no idea this would happen. Lou’s special. Lou has Sam’s blood, and through her you’re bound to the Beach. You don’t have to be afraid, though. You cured Sam—made him whole. You gave him a life to live for, to protect. Made him a part of this world. The world is a jumbled mess with life and death all mixed up, but Sam might be the one to make it whole again, like you made him whole. Without him, our fate is sealed; but with him, there’s still hope for a future. The Beach exists within each of our minds, but that doesn’t mean it’s just a figment of our imagination. It has value, purpose, and in time… you will understand.”
Bridget gently squeezed Lucy’s hand.
She took Lucy’s hand, like Lucy had taken his on that day a lifetime ago. She smiled and squeezed.
There Lucy was, on the Beach. Everything she had seen in her nightmares, she saw in that instant. Somewhere inside her, Lou was laughing. And then it all fell into place.
Sam’s birth, his family, the Death Stranding. For the first time she saw how all the pieces fit into a terrible truth that she didn’t want to believe, but couldn’t deny. She saw her part in it, too, and little Lou’s.
She remembered those funny little words on the picture. “Be stranded with love.” And she was.
Lou’s kicking woke her up. She was alone, still half-asleep, so everything around her looked askew. It was that all-too-familiar feeling of the waking and dreaming being tangled up. But Sam and Bridget and Amelie must have led even more muddled lives. A reality between life and death, between this world and the next. Because of all this chaos and confusion beyond imagination stranded on their shore…
“Help me, Sam,” she begged internally.
She took the pills on the table next to her all at once. She tried to make sense of it, but this was never her world. She was born into an older one, one without a Beach, where the dead stayed buried and life moved on. She was shaking so hard. She didn’t think the drugs were working. She had some syringes loaded with sedatives. She thrust one into her arm, one after another, until she ran out.
MOUNTAIN KNOT CITY // PRIVATE ROOM
“I’m sorry, Sam, I didn’t mean to go digging up your past. I just wanted to understand. I just wanted to understand the connection between you and Lou,” Deadman explained, lowering his head at Sam, who didn’t know what to make of Deadman’s frank apology. It made him feel like the dick in this situation for being so furious, and he wasn’t sure how to deal with it. It was him who had attached the phantom of Lou to this BB and acted like he was atoning for the life he hadn’t been able to save. He was irritated by Deadman’s prying, but he couldn’t blame him for it either.
“Seventy percent of my body is harvested from cadavers. I was a coroner before I became a member of Bridges. I know the dead, but I’ll never be able to know the Beach.” Deadman crouched down and looked into the pod at the BB, who had begun to sleep.
“Have you ever heard the tale of Frankenstein’s Monster, Sam?” he asked.
Sam had heard of the story. In fact, it had been Lucy who told him it. (Are you sure?) She explained to him: “The reason that humans want to be makers is because we are ashamed of being mere creatures. Our creation myths were formed because we wanted to be more than that. We wanted to be special. The Beach is the same.”
“I’m artificial,” Deadman explained. “Grown from pluripotent stem cells. And when that vita spark didn’t manifest in all my organs, they replaced the defective ones with those of the dead. People born the traditional way have Beaches. You have one. BB, too. But I have no such connections. No ka. I’m a dead man. No mother. No afterlife. No Beach. I never even had a birthday. I’m a soulless meat puppet.”
As Sam looked up and met Deadman’s gaze, he noticed that Deadman’s eyes were full of tears. He couldn’t believe it. This man had feelings. He was capable of independent thought. He was brimming with curiosity. He must have had a soul. (Silly Sam. Consciousness and the soul are different.)
“You see now why I’m so obsessed with it all? It was why I looked after the BBs, too. If this kid is just some piece of equipment, then what am I?” Deadman tried to touch the pod, but his hand slid right through it. “The battlefield, now that was an awful Beach. But strangely, I didn’t hate it. Because I knew you were coming for me. I’ve never felt that before. Connected to someone. Anyone.” Deadman turned his head as if to ask Sam for affirmation of that connection.
“Look, Sam. I sometimes think about this. If the Beach is linked to individual people, doesn’t that in itself mean that the Beach doesn’t actually exist? Doesn’t it mean that the Chiral Network and that Beach of Fragile’s that I use to jump from place to place is all just a delusion? That the only reason they form part of our reality is because we all share the same delusion inside our heads? That would make what we call connections extremely fragile. But it would also make things so much easier for me. It means that I wouldn’t have to come up with these justifications about Frankenstein’s Monster or cadaver organs.”
Huh? Was that confession just before a big pile of bullshit? It all made Sam’s head spin.
“You don’t need to look so grim. I know that I don’t have a Beach and that I can’t even sense it. I don’t have DOOMS. That’s the one thing that makes me the same as other people. But I still couldn’t stand it. I didn’t feel like I was alive. I was jealous of you.”
As far as Sam was concerned, if Deadman wanted his DOOMS, he could have it. It was because of those abilities that he had lost Lucy and Lou. An uncontrollable urge welled up inside him. If Deadman hadn’t been a hologram, he would have hit him. (Despite your aphenphosmphobia?)
—You didn’t have to cut ties and walk away.
Sam froze at Bridget’s frail voice. He looked warily around the vicinity like a frightened hound.
But all he saw was the look of puzzlement on Deadman’s face.
“That’s what Bridget used to say,” Deadman said. Had Sam misheard Deadman’s voice? Or were they sharing the same delusion? “Bridget was right. I truly believe so.”
“I didn’t cut any ties. They were never there to begin with,” Sam snapped back, afraid that he would hear Bridget’s voice in his head again. The hoarseness made him feel even more strange. It had been ten years. After ten whole years without contact, as Bridget lay there dying and Amelie was trapped on the other side of the continent, she had begged him to help. But what her lot called “ties” were nothing but lies. He couldn’t blame that frail woman for everything, though. He was here of his own accord. He was the one who hadn’t been able to bury the past. He hadn’t changed since the day he had been unable to protect Lucy or Lou.
But simply blaming himself like that was a distraction from what really mattered. He knew it. That’s why he was afraid to look Deadman in the face. Deadman probably saw through everything.
Sam couldn’t tell how Deadman was interpreting this long silence.
“I thought we had ties,” Deadman muttered, severing the connection. The hologram disappeared. The space he had been occupying suddenly felt all the more empty. It was the same feeling Sam had back then. When all he could do was stand dumbfounded in the middle of the crater that had been gouged out of the earth. Where that city had once stood. When he remembered the ruins of the satellite city that Lucy and countless others had been snatched away from, he had the same feeling that he had when he thought back to Central Knot City, and how he couldn’t save them either, despite taking Igor’s BB. The actions of the invisible dead who were purging man from this earth kept Sam grounded and stuck in the past. Even if he stretched out his hand, begged them to give him sweet release, his prayers would never be answered. He would only ever be sent right back where he started.