“All this happened while I was asleep? Why did you ever wake me?”
The smile on Anne’s face falters. She says, “Come on. The fencing materials are in the backyard.”
Tools and wood are piled toward the edge of the grassed lot. Anne says that some of the supplies come from the maintenance department but over the years she’s successfully scavenged local abandoned homes and found one improvement store about a two-hour drive away that hadn’t been entirely looted.
“We’re only going to start the fence’s back section today, ______. We won’t push ourselves too hard. I know you’re not feeling well.”
You assist Anne in measuring the distance between posts, marking the spots with wooden stakes, digging six postholes, setting the posts in the holes with a quick-drying concrete. Then you take a break. You sit in the shade, drink lemonade, and eat rations. The lemonade stings your throat, but you do not complain. Anne talks. You do not. You concentrate on conserving energy and not passing out.
You and Anne spend the rest of the afternoon attaching rails to the posts and pickets to the rails. Despite Anne’s near-constant encouragement and compliments, you are ashamed because you are not as much help as you’d like to be. You bend nails and screw in the screws crookedly. Anne has to fix your mistakes and redoes much of the work you were supposed to do on your own. Your hands are slow and clumsy. Your hands do not remember to whom they once belonged.
Most of the celebratory dinner (corn, baked potatoes, leafy greens) comes from Anne’s garden, which she maintains in another area of the campus.
“I figured after all the hard work you wouldn’t mind the starches. There’s only so much I can do to dress up the protein paste though, sorry. I tried raising chickens and ducks, but I wasn’t good at keeping them healthy.”
The kitchen is exactly how you remember it, which is a comfort, because in the videos, you only saw an empty kitchen, the one from before the linoleum was replaced with laminate and before this little breakfast table, and you don’t remember updating the cabinets and appliances, but somehow you remember these being exactly where they are and looking like they do, and maybe you even remember Anne sitting like she is sitting now and looking like she is looking now, but you know that can’t be possible, can it? Maybe your memories are creating themselves; like the solar array and wind turbines, your memories are becoming self-sufficient.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
You are not. Your tongue is swollen, and chewing and swallowing are impossible chores. “I’m okay,” you say.
“You don’t look okay.” Anne looks right through you. You’ve been aware of that idiom and now, perhaps for the first time, you understand it. She says, “Come on. Let’s get you upstairs.”
“Who are we again?”
Anne tilts her head and furrows her brow, observing you, making silent calculations.
“What are we, Anne? What are we together?”
She pulls her hair behind her head and ties it into a quick ponytail. “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
You cough and you wince at the splintering shards of pain in your throat and head. “How do we describe you and me? Are we coworkers? Are we friends? Are we a couple? Are we lovers? What are we?”
Anne covers her mouth with a hand and laughs. She laughs until her face is red and she isn’t breathing. Despite how terrible you feel, you laugh too.
She stops laughing. A small shadow of a smile remains. Her eyes are pointed down at the table, not at you. “There were times when we were all those things. Right now, we’re partners.”
“Your hands do not remember to whom they once belonged.”
The sun hasn’t fully set outside, but it is dusk in the house. Anne leads you by the arm, up the stairs to the second floor, and if your memory of the house’s layout is correct, into what should be her office, the one with the yellow walls.
She says, “I recently decided to make this the master bedroom. I know the room is smaller, but I enjoy how the sunlight reflects off the yellow walls in the morning.”
With Anne’s help, you change into clean pajamas. They are made of a fabric softer than the pullover and white drawstring scrubs you’ve been wearing. You slowly crawl into the queen-size bed; the wooden frame creaks under your weight and movement. You lie on your right side, facing the windows. As your head sinks into the pillow, Anne pulls the bedcovers up to your neck. Your fever is raging. Your teeth chatter and your pajamas are instantly soaked in sweat.
Anne retreats to a bureau across the room, adjacent to the door. She lights a candle. The wall you are facing glows with eerie, flickering orange light.
“You need your rest. Tomorrow is a big day. A big day for both of us.”
She climbs into the bed but remains over the covers, not inside them with you. She drapes a hand over your shoulder and promises to stay until you fall asleep. You close your eyes, but you can still see the orange light on the wall.
You are awake in the dark, sitting at the edge of your bed, feet on the hardwood floor, and you are crying.
Anne isn’t in the bed next to you. Your muscles ache and your joints are filled with ground bits of glass. You don’t want to move, but you get up, and it’s as though your brain is a step behind your body. You shuffle to the door and fumble for the knob, which is cold in your sweaty hand. You open the door and you are so afraid, of what exactly you don’t know, but the fear is shutting down your mind. You flow down the hallway and to the bathroom as though the floor is the belt of a treadmill. You twist the sink knobs, but there is no water. You shiver, groan, and your hands shake, and that’s when you see there’s a mirror on the wall. It is dark, but you see yourself in the glass. You see who you are. You paw at the wall light switch next to you, but no light comes on. You stop breathing and moving and the you in the glass does the same. You both blink. You both raise a hand up to your face. You are not who you remember. You are not the person in the pictures and videos Anne has showed you. You are someone else entirely, and you want to yell but it comes out as a low, keening moan.
You blink and you don’t remember how you got there, but you are back in the yellow bedroom. You are standing in front of the window. You open the curtains and clumsily lift the blinds. Outside, the moon is missing a piece, but it’s still so big and bright. You sit on the bed and stare at it. Then you are standing and looking down the hill to the Dormitory, and it’s not as far away as you thought, and in the moonlight you can see fine, you can see everything. You watch the marble front entrance with its dry fountain, and Anne emerges between the Dormitory’s glass doors. She is walking backward, pulling a gurney behind her. There is someone lying flat on the gurney, covered by a sheet. She pivots and turns; her arms block your view of the other person’s face. Then you can’t see them very well because they are small underneath the big moon, because you are farther away from them than you thought.
You are awake in the dark, sitting at the edge of your bed, feet on the hardwood floor, and you are crying. You hear Anne’s feet pounding on the stairs and down the hall and then into your room. The candle has burned out and there isn’t enough moonlight spilling through the window behind you.
You ask her, over and over, Who, who am I?, and you ask her, over and over, Who was on the gurney?