Robert Crane - Alone

“How long did she leave you in there?” His eyes still appeared unreactive.

I laughed, a dark, humorless bark that rumbled through me, keeping my emotions in check behind a facade of false bravado. “Which time? There were so many. As you mentioned, I am somewhat stubborn and defiant. I was in there at least once a week. Usually for smarting off; Mom didn’t like that much.”

“How long?”

I shrugged. “An hour or two, most of the time – with the door closed on the front, so it was completely dark. And that, honestly, wasn’t so bad. It was the times when I was in there for days, those were the ones when it was bad—” The times when my stomach screamed at me because it was sick of nothing but the water that was piped in from a reservoir by a small tube. The times when I started to get lightheaded and had to sit down, where I just felt weak and near dead by the time she let me out.

If she let me out.

He grimaced, the first sign of emotion I’d seen from him since the conversation began. “What about the longest time?”

I paused, and an insane sounding laugh bubbled out of my mouth. I felt a stupid, pasted-on grin stretching my face. “A week, I think.”

His voice had grown quiet, but it was undergirded by a curiosity. “When was that?”

Silence owned me, but just for a beat. “Let’s see. After I ate something and showered, I lay down to sleep – you know, horizontally, because trying to sleep curled up in a ball inside it sucks, just FYI – and I woke up and you and Kurt were in my house. So…a few days ago.”

This time the silence was stunned. “She left you…after locking you in?”

I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t ask the dark, piteous question I’d been asking myself lately. “And I haven’t seen her since.”

That ended Zack’s questions, thank God. He said some more things after that, but I missed pretty much all of it. My head was buzzing and I couldn’t focus. I forgot that I was hungry and as soon as I could get away from him I did, leaving him in the cafeteria. He extracted a promise from me that we would talk more soon, and I didn’t argue because I didn’t have the energy.

Ever been in a fight that gets really emotional, and you may have been feeling absolutely wonderful five minutes earlier but suddenly you’re just exhausted? That was me; all my energy was shot and I dragged myself back to my dormitory. I crashed on my bed, but I didn’t fall asleep. Instead I thought about Mom again; of the last time I saw her, when she shut the door on me, even as I was screaming, hammering my palms against the steel and begging her not to – and then she peered at me through the little sliding door, her eyes looking into mine, and she said something different than the hundreds of other times she’d put me in.

“Whatever you may think, I do this all for your own good.” I wasn’t in a position to pay attention at the time (I was as distressed when I went into the box as a cat being dunked in water – I’ve seen it on TV) but her look was different than usual. Less spiteful. Less vengeful. Less pissed. I might have seen a trace of sadness in her eyes, though I didn’t recognize it at the time.

Then she shut the little door and left me in the darkness.

I thought about her again, concentrating hard, trying to focus on her as I drifted off to sleep. I awoke the next morning, an alarm going off beside the bed. I hadn’t set it, but it was blaring. I looked at the clock and realized it was timed so I didn’t miss my appointment with Dr. Sessions. Someone from the Directorate must have done it, fearing (probably rightly) that I didn’t much care if I made them wait. Probably Ariadne. That bitch.

I thought about blowing it off, but the truth is I was curious. After all, they kept telling me I was meta-human, and I believed it, but I wondered what other abilities I might have. I was hoping for flight, because that would be cool.

When I got to Dr. Sessions’s office, he was sitting behind his desk, looking at something. When he heard me enter he turned and pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked through them at me. “There you are.” He began nodding and picked up a tablet computer that sat next to the laptop on the desk. “Have a seat; I need to have you fill out this questionnaire before we begin…” He handed me a clipboard and pen, then turned to walk away. I gave him a quick smile of thanks, which caused him to back away. I sighed internally. Even when I wasn’t trying to, I could drive people away from me.

The questionnaire took an annoyingly long time and asked some invasive personal questions (“How many sexual encounters have you had in the last seven days? Two weeks? Month? Six months? Year? Five years?”) Not like it was a difficult one, since until a few days ago I’d had zero human contact outside of Mom.

There were other ones that delved into health history, how I was feeling, when was the date of my last physical (“Never!” I printed in big, bold letters), when I first noticed a difference in my abilities – and on it went for a hundred and fifty questions, covering both the important (“Do you have any known allergies?”) to the mundane (“When was your last bowel movement?”). I thought about scrawling “None of your damned business” but ultimately I just answered the questions – almost all – truthfully.

The last question – “Describe in detail any unusual abilities or skills” – gave me pause. Part of me wanted to know more, to find out what kind of meta I was. Okay, all of me wanted to know. But that was tempered by the fact that I had only been here for three days and still had zero idea of who (if anyone) I could trust. If I told them I suspected I could use my dreams to communicate with others, would that be considered some kind of power or a sign that I was slipping in the sanity department? I believed I could talk to Reed through my dreams, but it was too weird to consider normal and as yet too unconfirmed for me to know with certainty I could do it. After all, it could have been his power, not mine.

I answered the question, “Superior Strength, Speed, Agility and Intelligence” (no, I didn’t put a smiley next to the intelligence part) and left any other suspicions off. As I had filled out the form, the doctor had milled around the lab, adjusting various pieces of equipment, humming as he skittered about.

He noticed me after a minute or so, and favored me with a smile as he approached. “We’re going to do some physical tests next, then I’ll give you this – a standard, multiple choice I.Q. test – and we’ll see how you do.”

For the next three hours, he put me through my paces. I thought maybe I had pissed him off in some way, because he was not kind in his efforts to “test” me. I ran on a treadmill at the highest setting for a long time, well past the point where I was bored and into the realm of thinking of casting myself into the place where the tread meets the plastic at the back, hoping to end my life with the added benefit that perhaps the running would stop as well. It couldn’t have been an ordinary treadmill because I swear I had to be running at fifty miles an hour.

He made me breathe into a machine (to test my lung capacity), had me lift weights (I cursed him because there was no measure of how much they weighed and he refused to tell me) and hit a punching bag. Then he handed me rubber balls and had me throw them at a target on a wall at full strength, which I did (until I turned all three of them into pancakes).

“It would have been easier if you would have taken your gloves off,” he said, looking over his glasses at me.

“Sorry, Doc. Rule number four.”

A look of confusion swept over his face. He led me over to a table in the corner. “One last thing.” He bade me to sit.