Eidetic Memory
All that information was coming from somewhere and I think that was the day the door to it got kicked down.
The following document has been transcribed from a notebook found at the address [REDACTED] in Mechanicsburg, PA (D.O.A. 12/09/2010) by field agents embedded in the Federal Bureau of Investigation pursuing the trail of known wanted criminal [REDACTED] (Designation W.O.I.-104). Primary occupants of the residency were not present at the time. Evidence suggests that [REDACTED] did not force their way into the residence and had been present for several days. As of present, [REDACTED]/W.O.I.-104’s whereabouts are unknown. Various investigations pertaining to their attributed criminal activity are ongoing.
When we were sixteen, the school faculty and staff began to talk about our “plans for the future” for the first time that I could remember. For most of my memory, there was always the promise that our supposed education would end after twelfth grade, like any other kid’s, but what came after that was vague. There wasn’t much talk of continued education or careers outside of the military. It was pretty clear that enlistment was the direction we were being steered. They never specified or told us much about the in’s and out’s of what it meant to enlist in the Army or Navy or Air Force, though. The most my father ever said was that, as an Army man himself, it probably wasn’t for me, and I’d be better served in the Navy.
They did such a piss poor job at preparing us for life after graduation that Alice would joke that the only graduation ceremony we were going to get was the unceremonious dismissal of a bullet to the back of the head and a shallow, unmarked grave. We still didn’t know exactly why we were in the position that we were in, but if we’d hit whatever benchmark they wanted us to hit, we would have been taken for “selective education” like some of the others. I think that’s what they attempted to do with the arcade for me, but it didn’t pan out like it did for other girls. There was this one girl, Olivia, the stand-out athlete of the class. I think she was as close as they were going to get to a super-soldier. I don’t remember how many laps she was able to complete during the “running test” but it was somewhere north of four hundred. She was picked up one day to work with who we were told was an “Olympic track and field coach”. We never saw her or heard about her again. I’m not big on sports but I've never heard about her winning any gold medals, either.
Alice would laugh when she talked about the grim future she believed awaited us, but she was never joking. She developed this awful sense of fatalistic humor over the years that hid a dark bruise on her psyche that only got worse as time went on.
When I started taking classes regularly again, she was a different person from when I left. She wasn’t any better liked by our peers but she wasn’t nearly as timid. It was her who approached me when I returned to the school. She didn’t do it to “welcome back” an old friend, because we weren’t friends. She was just curious about what had transpired at the arcade during my absence. I thought it prudent to apologize for what happened when we were nine, which she claimed not to remember the incident until I brought it up. I don’t know how much I believed that. She had a scar on her lower lip from that day that never healed. I can’t imagine she’d forget how she got it.
It’s kind of funny how the older we got, the more we seemed to take on more of the other’s attributes while losing our own. When we were little, she was a quiet thing that didn’t speak let alone raise her voice, and I was standoffish and hot-headed. But after my own failed attempt at a “Shawshank Redemption” as I like to call it, I lost a lot of that attitude. Outside of a shockingly blithe and not-so-stern talking to by my father, nobody ever punished me for trying to run away. I don’t think anyone needed to; the humiliation and disappointment proved more damaging to my sense of self than anything they could have done short of lashing me with a bullwhip. The message was deafeningly loud and abundantly clear - you can’t get away, so don’t even bother to try. And I didn’t.
Alice never tried to run away but as the years went on she got less and less agreeable. You could chalk it up to that natural rebellious streak that comes part and parcel of being a teenager but for obvious reasons I think there was a lot more to it than that. She wasn’t combative so much as she was simply dismissive, indifferent, and unflinchingly nonchalant. She didn’t cast furtive looks around like she expected someone to whack her upside the head at any given moment. She’d just sit there with this heavy-lidded look that said, I’d rather be cleaning shit with my bare hands right now than sitting here. If she didn’t want to do something, she just didn’t.
I remember we took this test one time, one that was supposed to be very important, very difficult. We were told that once everyone had finished, we could go outside. Until then, we all just had to sit and wait. Some kids took longer than others, as you would expect.
Alice never even cracked the test book. She just sat there at her desk, staring at nothing in particular, waiting with the kind of patience you’d only see in an actual saint. The teacher overseeing the test never said anything. He didn’t force her to start taking the test. He didn’t even seem to care. He just sat there doing crosswords the whole time. The other kids? If could’ve had the opportunity to beat Alice within an inch of her life, they would have. There were a lot of dirty glares and more than a few hissed threats from those around her, and the only time the teacher actually said anything was to tell them to shut up. They held us two hours after the school day was over because of Alice, which didn’t help smooth things over. By the time we were let go, the smoldering hatred in that room was so thick and intense I swear it had me sweating.
They tried for a week straight to get Alice to take that test. When she told me she never touched it, she did so with pride in her voice. They threw every punishment they could at her. Not just for that test incident but every time she antagonized them. Solitary confinement in a room by herself. Extra work, laborious chores, pointless and exhausting physical exercises, followed by extended hours at the school. The dreaded paddle was never out of the question, either.
They hit Alice so much that I think she actually came to enjoy it. I don’t mean that she was some sort of freak who got off on being beaten or anything, but that she derived this perverse sense of pride out of it. Like she was testing herself to see how many licks she could take, and more than anything, how much she could shock and surprise the staff with the sheer amount of abuse she could stomach without folding. She was rail thin but made of iron. Physically and mentally, she had to be the toughest of us. I knew that since she’d show up at school with black eyes or bruises that hadn’t been there the day before and snicker when she said she fell down the stairs at home.
The sad thing was that out of everyone in our class, Alice was probably the sharpest. Academically speaking, at least. If she’d just put her ego aside and done her work to her fullest abilities, I have no doubt that she would have been packed up and sent off to work with some “special academic tutor”. If there was a post-graduation destination for her, it should have been a full-ride scholarship to a place with Ivy League accreditation. She could tell you everything about anything you’d ever want to know. Back when we were first getting to know each other, she might as well have recited every fact on the FBI World Factbook1 on South Korea when she found out that’s where I was from originally. And North Korea, too. She told me all about New Brunswick, too, since that’s where she was born.
She wasn’t trying to flex on me, or anything. She just thought I’d be as interested in where I was from as she was about where she was from. Since she’d been adopted before she could even form memories of Canada, she learned everything there was to learn about it, especially her home province. She mentioned wanting to go and see it for herself whenever the topic came up. As we got older and graduation became a real possibility rather than some vague, unreachable point in the distant future, she said that she wanted New Brunswick to be the first place she went on vacation. Or, maybe she’d move up there. Put the past behind her and start over where she should have never left. Who knew?
I didn’t care about South Korea that much, but I appreciated the sentiment all the same.
Alice just seemed to know everything about everything. She was Wikipedia before that was a thing. Ask her about something, and she’d get excitable and giddy and tell you things about the subject or topic that you didn’t even know you didn’t know. Of course, I had no way of verifying if most of what she even said was true, but I chose to believe she knew what she was talking about. She always seemed to be happy when she was chattering away about something that didn’t really matter.
I remember teachers saying she had an eidetic memory, but I know better now. She had more than photographic memory. At first, I assumed she just read a lot of books in her free time. She said she did, but that wasn’t how she gathered her encyclopedic wealth of trivia- she said it just came to her. That if she thought about something for a minute, all the information about it just kind of popped into her head.
She wasn’t some contestant on Jeopardy that’d memorized a bunch of random facts through a lifetime of study. She was more than that. She really was something else.
I still don’t know why the idiots who ran that project treated her the way they did. Alice had a lust for knowledge that you would think an educational institution would foster, and if there was ever a reason to believe that the whole facade of that place being a school was a farce, it was that they didn’t. Given a little space, a little freedom, and cutting a whole lot of focus on things she didn’t give a damn about, she would have naturally flourished into what could have been a valuable asset for any branch of the military. Assuming that’s what they wanted for her. I just don’t understand how all the supposed luminaries who orchestrated our childhoods, for all their ostensible genius, didn’t grasp the simple, well-worn adage of, You attract more flies with honey than vinegar. They should have lifted her up rather than take every opportunity to beat her down.
I kept thinking that one party had to reach a breaking point. Either the school would realize that Alice had preternatural resilience and give up on trying to whip her into compliance, or they’d finally cook up a punishment she couldn’t handle.
They were playing chicken with each other and I knew the longer it went the worse it would be for Alice and Alice only when it came to an inevitable head.
There was one day Alice got into a fist-fight with another girl, and I mean a real knock-down, drag-out brawl with blood on the ground. I don’t remember what the inciting incident was, but I do remember it took two grown men to lay her out and keep her pinned down. They dragged her out in handcuffs.
I thought for sure Alice finally reached the limits of the program’s patience and that she’d be kicked out. It only earned her two weeks of suspension, which was the first time any of us had seen such a punishment.
I think that was just about the worst thing they could have done. I knew what was going on in Alice’s home, and what was going to happen to her there were things that the staff couldn’t do.
Of course, that was the point.
Just like when I returned from the arcade, Alice wasn’t the same when she came back. Just like me, there was a piece of her missing. She had this far-away look in her eyes when I saw her again that never really left. She didn’t get excited over anything or really show any strong emotions at all. In what few, quiet times we had by ourselves she was hard to talk to, and more than once I could hear her muttering to herself, though I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Whenever I asked what she said, she’d reply that she didn’t say anything.
To say it was concerning was an understatement. Looking back, knowing what I know now, I’m convinced she was drugged. Not medicated - drugged. There’s a difference. Medication is supposed to help you. Being drugged is being forced to take some chemical bullshit that scrambles your brain into malleable sludge.
It was evil. Pathetic, too, don’t you think? These big, scary government people, all these military bad-asses with badges and medals and guns were so desperate to bring an unruly teenage girl to heel for their experiments that they had to chemically lobotomize her.
It wasn’t the drugs that brought it all to an end, though.
I remember the day it happened as plainly as I would if it had happened yesterday. Alice had only been back at school for about three months and she’d been a lot more cooperative than she’d been before, but only because she was too messed up to do anything but comply.
We’d been assigned to clean out an office that belonged to a teacher that had been transferred elsewhere. Not terribly difficult work, just tedious and, frankly, pointless. It wasn’t a punishment, either. Just a chore. But it made me think back to the closet incident all those years ago. Before I tried running away, before the arcade. Might as well have been a different life. It wasn’t even the first time since then we’d had been assigned chores together, but the room was so quiet that we might as well have been the same strangers we were that day.
It was depressing to see Alice saunter around like she was half-asleep, and the silence between us was even more so, so I tried to lighten the mood with a joke. I told her, “If they try to pull that we know you stole something shit on us again, I won’t say anything if you don’t.”
That got a smile out of her, but not much more. She didn’t reply and went back to sweeping.
I couldn’t take what I saw. I asked her what they did to her. Why she’d been so weird. At the time, the possibility of drugs didn’t even enter my mind, but a whole lot of more physical things did.
Alice looked at me as if I was the crazy one. She said she wasn’t acting weird, and when I called bullshit on that, she started getting defensive.
I figured if there was one thing might bring out some of who she had been, it’d be her favorite thing. Trivia. Information. So, I asked her to tell me about South Korea. What was the second-biggest city? What was the GDP? What was the longest river in the country? I don’t really remember what I asked exactly but it was stuff like that.
I was surprised when she started answering them, albeit slowly, like she was having trouble tapping into whatever inexplicable source she used to pull information from effortlessly. For a second, she even seemed to perk up a bit, which made me feel a little better.
She started rattling off information about South Korea as I went back to work, satisfied that I’d gotten through whatever drug-induced malaise they’d put on her. With a little work, I figured I could get her back to some sort of normal.
I don’t think I even noticed until she said something about the atomic mass of strontium, which registered as strange since I wasn’t aware of any connection between South Korea and strontium. She said something about the gestation period of the Siberian Tiger. Then something about the date that Oliver Cromwell was appointed to Parliament.
I was about to ask who Oliver Cromwell was and what Siberian Tigers had to do with anything when I noticed that her breathing was becoming labored. I turned around and found her standing behind the desk, staring at her feet with her eyes wide, rambling about exo-planets and the total coastline of Chile and the stats of the 1978 Toronto Argonauts season. Each fact she stated she did so quicker than the last, her voice picking up in tempo and pitch until she was difficult to even understand. I went over and put my hands on her shoulder. She did the same to me and I noticed that she was beginning to shake violently. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes when I asked, and when I tried to talk to her she just raised her voice until she was shouting.
Alice twisted and jerked where she stood until she broke free of my grip. She threw herself against the wall and began to slide down it, still staring at the floor, screeching about disconnected dates and events and things and people. When I caught words that I could understand, they didn’t make sense. Numbers on numbers on numbers. Something that was clearly a language, though what I couldn’t say. Wheels within wheels.
I didn’t know what the fuck was going on but I knew something was wrong. I’d never seen a panic attack before but I figured this is what it looked like. I was about to have a panic attack myself as her shouting turned to screaming and trembling turned to violent spasms.
What was I supposed to do? Stay there and try to calm her down or go get help? I thought that with the way she was shrieking, someone would hear and come in on their own, but when she began clawing at her arms, I didn’t think I had time to wait.
No sooner did I step into the hall did I see another classmate standing by an open door, staring at me, and one of the teachers running in my direction. He pushed me aside, literally, and forced his way into the room. Another was coming from the other direction, and with help on the way, I went back in to see Alice.
I don’t know why I did. I wish I hadn’t. It was a fucking terrible sight - Alice, arms pinned to her chest by the teacher’s knees, blood dripping from the long gouges she’d torn from wrist to elbow with her own nails. The man’s hands were grappling with her head, fingers snaking through her blonde hair in an attempt to keep her from smashing the back of it against the tile. Long, spindly legs kicking and thrashing at nothing. Screaming words I could only half-understand in a voice so hoarse you’d think she’d begin to bleed from the mouth.
Someone else would call it madness, pure and simple, but it wasn’t. I know because the worst of it all was that she was looking at me, doing her best to maintain eye-contact over the shoulder of the teacher holding her down with the same desperation of a someone who’s drowning might try to reach a life preserver. They weren’t the senseless eyes of someone who’d lost their mind. There was an awareness in the way she looked at me that told me she was completely lucid but unable to stop whatever force had seized her. It was the raw, animal panic of a person scared in a way that can’t be captured in words.
What happened next was a blur. The other teacher nearly knocked me over as he forced his way in the room. The one keeping Alice from hurting herself yelled at him to get help and get me out, which he did. I was too dazed to resist, but I remember keeping my eyes on Alice’s as he dragged me out by the shoulders, and the whole time, I could only think that she was trying to ask for help.
A crowd had already gathered in the hallway, kept at a distance by one of the faculty. Two other staff went into the office and closed the door behind them, but it couldn’t block out Alice’s terrified screams. More faculty quickly arrived and began to disperse the crowd. One of them who’d seen me dragged out of the room took me aside and brought me to the principal’s office. I could hear Alice shrieking something about the casualties in the Battle of Jericho as I was led away.
The principal wasn’t even in the office when I got there, no doubt because he was being briefed on what had happened. I only started crying once I was alone in the room. When he did come in, he asked me to tell him what happened, and I did as best I could. He offered no words of sympathy or comfort. He didn’t even speak to me particularly nicely. I felt like I was being interrogated, as if I’d done something wrong. And I felt like I had, though I couldn’t think of what.
The people at that school had this special way of always making you feel guilty for some reason.
Unsurprisingly, Alice wasn’t in class the next day. None of the teachers said anything about it. None of my classmates asked. They certainly did talk about it in hushed whispers. I got a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer, but I think I was the only one who was actually worried about Alice’s well being rather than morbidly curious.
I never did see Alice again. I never asked what happened, either. I knew they wouldn’t tell me the truth if I did. It bothers me, you know? She was the only person in that whole school that I considered a friend. There were times I think she was the only person in the world that actually, truly cared about me not for what I could be but for who I was, and I have no idea what became of her.
For all I know, they threw her in a padded cell and threw away the key. Or worse. It’s hard not to think that’s the likely outcome since I believe what happened that day was what the people who ran that project had been waiting on. Like Olivia getting picked up to train with a supposed Olympic-tier coach, they’d finally unlocked the potential they’d been looking for in Alice. The time had come for her to graduate.
Like I said, Alice wasn’t just smart. All that information was coming from somewhere and I think that was the day the door to it got kicked down. They knew that she could tell you anything you wanted to know in a way that no one else could, and there’s a lot of things that the worst elements of the United States government would love to know. And there’s no teenage girl that they wouldn’t do anything to in order get that information.
But, every now and then, I can’t help but imagine that she might have gotten out. Maybe she was spent, they decided that whatever they hoped to get out of her wasn’t ever going to manifest, and they just gave up on her and let her go. It’s nice to think that somewhere in New Brunswick, right now, she’s out there, happy, healthy, and free to live her life.
It’s a nice thought. Not much more, though.
Personally, I got my vast wealth of knowledge pertaining to trivial bullshit from reading Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series while on the can.
Rest in peace to one of the few good uses for American tax dollars.
Oh boy, 11pm!
Prepare for the dr housening. The time is rapidly approaching