Left-Handed Engineers From MARZ
Christmas - Reg's flashback

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Tammy sat at the dining room table, mesmerized by the flickering holiday candle at its center. Reg sat with her. The candle wax was scented like gingerbread and people moved about in the other rooms. The tiny flame reached thinly for more oxygen as it consumed the air around it. It seemed alive, undulating without rhythm or reason.

"You shouldn't let him sit so close to the fire," he heard someone say. "He could burn himself."

He wondered at that, but the Other Voice reassured him that he wouldn't get hurt just by sitting still. So he watched the flames lick up the oxygen around the logs in the fireplace. He didn't recognize the people around him, except for his mother, but he felt safe. Everything was calm and quiet and he was free to watch the fire.

But then he was grabbed by the arm and yanked upward, and in the resulting confusion the Other Voice slipped and his brain shot off several misguided impulses, and for a moment he was afraid he was going to lose everything he'd built since that time when he was as young as the Other Voice.

He didn't remember, but the Other Voice remembered. The Other Voice called it "before". Before, he didn't experience things very deeply. Before, people existed more clearly. They told him things about himself and they made him work very hard so that he would become more like they thought he ought to be. They told him to look up, but he looked down because looking up was painful. Listening was painful. He tried to listen anyway. But he liked to touch.

He didn't remember, but the Other Voice remembered. The Other Voice said he was like that once, and that he knew (something) of people.

The Other Voice remembered the last people. The girl had a flame too. She held it on a stick of kerosene in her hand. She let him look at it, and then the boy put paper to the flame and the flame disappeared. The boy and the girl laughed and talked, and he smelled a sweet smell that they made.

Then they put a piece of paper in his mouth. It was tiny and it stuck to his tongue. He wanted to see the flame again, so he sat on the floor and watched them. They were on the couch in a pile and they moved around and they touched each other. They reached around and into each other trying to touch deeper and their breathing was heavy and with little rhythm. They touched with more of themselves and he watched because he wanted to see the flame. Then he saw a flame, but it was too big and too cool and it changed color in the wrong ways. It wasn't real. But it was very big. It tried to talk to him, but he couldn't listen to it because listening hurt.

Reg didn't remember. The Other Voice said that Reg didn't remember because the part of him that experienced it didn't exist anymore.

Reg wondered if that was because the flame ate it, but the flame wasn't real. The Other Voice said his mind had broken. Pieces broke off and broke apart and turned to dust and dissolved into the solvent in the darkness.

Reg remembered the darkness. He didn't remember the scream before the darkness dissolved the dust. It wasn't his scream, the Other Voice said; it was the girl's. She had shown him the tiny flame, and she had given him the piece of paper, and the piece of paper had put the false picture of the big flame into his mind. And then the girl had watched him die. So she screamed.

Reg remembered the darkness. When he came back to life, he was still in the darkness. He didn't know where he was or who he was or why he was. He felt around to see what he could find, and he found a series of pathways that created chemical electrical pulses. Each pathway seemed to have a function, and some worked in combination. He tried some to determine their functions.

Several pathways triggered bits of memory. There were scents and sounds and sequences. He found two that were more complete than the other memories. In one, he was standing on a sidewalk, looking at blades of grass at its edge. He was waiting for someone and he could see his body's lower extremities in red sneakers as they moved in an improvised dance. In the other, two grown-up people lay in a pile on a couch. They moved and breathed heavily and touched each other and reached into each other.

He sensed that all of the memories were related to each other, but it was too early to figure out how. So he put the memory of himself the child and the memory of the touching grown-up people in separate places, and he attached the smaller memories to one or the other of the two large memories.

Soon he found pathways with other functions. He found some that opened a pair of eyes. He sensed that opening the eyes should have resulted in an image, but the only image was one of shadows and vague shapeless shapes. So he gave up on the eyes and moved on.

He found some pathways that made him aware of his internal rhythm. It appealed to him and comforted him, so he paused and listened to the rhythm for a while. Whenever he got tired of exploring himself, he returned into his rhythm.

He discovered other rhythms, too. They emanated into him from outside; a steady blipping sound, and several hums and buzzes that he was able to differentiate.

He discovered something else with external origins, and he determined that they were smells. He found them very odd compared to everything else he had experienced so far, but in a certain way they were similar. He determined that he had three senses: internal rhythm, external rhythm, and smell.

Soon he added three more: taste, touch, and people. Touch was especially intriguing. Touch made him aware of his body and of the soft, warm object blanketing his body. Sometimes other touches came - cold metallic touches and warm organic touches and prickly painful touches. He thought people sense wasn't really a separate sense, because it seemed to be comprised of a combination of other senses. But he couldn't pinpoint how. All he knew was that occasionally he would sense people outside of him.

After approximately six days and seven hours, the section of memories built around the child memory pulled itself up and spoke. He let it guide him and was grateful, because his task was easier with guidance. Its voice helped him sort his discoveries more efficiently. He started to give it any pieces that had to do with judgment or decision. The voice's guidance improved and together they made a great deal of progress.

Together they discovered a seventh sense: arhythmic sound. This new sense enhanced the people sense. It even made him aware of the existence of speech, although he couldn't understand the meanings behind the words. The Other Voice assigned itself the task of amassing a vocabulary.

By this time, Reg had learned that many of the pathways caused movement within the body that contained him. Teaching himself how to activate each part was time-consuming, but he worked very hard to learn. He worked until he was exhausted. The slow progress of this task discouraged him, so he spent as much time in the refuge of his internal rhythm, and when he felt less ambitious, he sorted memories. But there weren't very many memories. He watched the memory of the two people over and over but couldn't make sense of it. He watched how they touched each other. The construct he had built around it felt sloppy and incomplete, but the Other construct functioned well. So he took it upon himself to get the second construct to function, too.

Then he was bestowed an eighth sense: sight. At first, sight terrified him, but with the Other Voice's guidance he was eventually able to use it as a tool to help him learn movement. With sight, movement became much easier. But people became intolerable. No, it wasn't sight that made people intolerable; the people increased their interactions with him on their own. Maybe the timing was coincidental.

The problem with all of these senses, however, was that things easily got out of control. The Other Voice claimed that his senses were deeper, but he wasn't sure what they were deeper than. The Other Voice also said that it was easy to turn his senses off, and that was a good thing. The internal rhythm never turned off, but the others did. He discovered that keeping four or five senses turned off at any given time kept things under control. The Other Voice also helped maintain control.

The Other Voice was the one who told him to reassemble the wall. No, the Other Voice was telling him at this moment to reassemble the wall. Reg realized that he was lost and afraid and that he wasn't where he thought he was. He started to remember the wall and he remembered that the wall held a mystery that he had forgotten. But this was the mystery... he was looking at it. The girl and the flame and the darkness and the constructs - it was only memory, and all of it belonged behind the wall where he couldn't see it. He had forgotten, but he remembered. He had relived it before. It wasn't now. He had to put it all back and rebuild the wall so he could find now again. He had to find now. But rebuilding the wall was difficult and it hurt.

Find Zephyr, the Other Voice instructed him.

Reg almost remembered Zephyr... then he fully remembered Zephyr. If he could find Zephyr, then Zephyr would lead him to now. He called out to Zephyr.

****

"I'm right here, man," Zephyr reassured Reg.

"ZephyrZephyrZephyrZephyrZephyrZephyr..."

"I'm here. It's me, Zephyr. Reg, can you hear me? You have to let go." Zephyr looked into Reg's hollow eyes, and then looked at the hand latched firmly around his left wrist. He looked over to Portia, who stood in the kitchen doorway with Bryce on her hip and wide-eyed Tammy clinging to her side.

"Is he gonna be okay?" Portia asked.

"I think so. But he needs to let go of me soon, or else I won't. I can't move my fingers anymore. Not that I could before, but you know." Zephyr smirked at her.

"Want me to pry his hand open?" Portia offered.

Zephyr shook his head. "You won't be able to. I just need to... aw hell, I don't know what to do." Zephyr rubbed Reg's thumb with his right-hand fingers. Maybe a gentle touch would help Reg loosen his grip.

"Zephyr Zephyr Zephyr... Zephyr..."

"I'm here, man."

Reg blinked. "I found you."

Zephyr smiled at him, and kept rubbing. "Yes, you found me," he said. He was relieved to feel tingling in his left hand, a sign that blood was starting to flow back in. It hurt like hell, but he refused to allow himself even a twitch. His free hand moved to Reg's fingers and he sat still and rubbed patiently.

Marlone poked her head in from the living room. "Dan's parents are leaving," she announced. "You guys gonna say good-bye?"

"Yup," said Portia. She glanced at Zephyr and then dragged Tammy through the kitchen and out of sight. Zephyr heard her and Marlone arguing between cheerful well-wishes. He managed to stay calm. Gradually, Reg's grip loosened further. Zephyr ever so slowly slid his hand free, resisting the urge to cry out as blood surged into it. He rested it in his lap and rubbed it against his knees.

Reg still looked panicky; whatever had spooked him wasn't over yet. And neither was the danger of being grabbed again. Zephyr didn't dare move out of the way... Reg was far too quick for him. He was just grateful it was him Reg had ended up clinging to, and not one of the children. Or Marlone, god forbid.

"Leave them alone, Ma," he heard Portia shout, as if on cue. "I mean it! Just leave them alone!"

The baby began to cry.

"Are you all right?" Zephyr whispered. "Want me to take you upstairs so you can rest?"

Reg's left hand twisted and grasped Zeph's vulnerable right hand so quickly that Zephyr couldn't help but jump. But instead of falling into another death grip, Reg shuddered weakly and shook his head. Zephyr waited.

"Hungry," Reg finally said.

Zephyr smiled gently. "Of course you are. You haven't had any kilocalories all day. Will you let me make you some oatmeal?"

"Oatmeal," Reg repeated.

Zephyr took that as a yes. But he still hesitated. Reg had him by the right hand now; not tightly, but that could change. He shifted slowly and peered over his shoulder to see who was in the living room. Portia was busy trying to calm the screaming baby, and Marlone was not an option. Jack and Marsh sat on the couch. Zephyr wasn't sure whether Jack would want to get involved. He knew Marsh wouldn't.

But what could ye do.

"Hey, Marsh? Come here. Hey, man, I need you to make some oatmeal."

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