Sins of the Reaper - 4

My curse is that I remember everything … everything save for the blessed silence of a tranquil mind. If only I could choose to forget, to excise thousands of unwelcome memories like tape loops playing endlessly in my mind, I might remember once upon a time when I was still good.

At the crowded, chaotic center of it all is the last scene I ever witnessed with unaided eyes. Two white swans swam in elegant procession with their downy grey cygnets in tow, their reflections on the still waters rippling softly from the birds’ slow and stately momentum, the laughing cry of a Loon echoing across the lake’s mirrored surface.

I did not understand the miraculous gift manifesting itself in that peaceful moment, the reflected rays of the setting sun entering my retinas without conscious awareness, millions of cone cells translating its light into the colors that still return to mind even now within the quiet darkness of my chamber.

But that miraculous image required something more than the extraordinary mechanics operating invisibly within my eyes, the visual cortex at the back of my brain translating its simple patterns into my final glimpse of reality before the world surrounding me lost all sense of depth and everything formerly defining the space in which I lived was reduced to featureless homogeny.

The shining edifices I built within my mind to replicate every building ever entered or city ever visited gradually transformed to a hell teaming with memories that cannot be unremembered and the voices of dead and lost friends who cannot be silenced. Every meal ever eaten, every scent ever acknowledged by my olfactory receptors, every electric surface awakened by my touch were transmuted by time into a prison of memory, its cavernous rooms and halls overflowing with the experiences, objects, and suffering encountered during the long journey of my life.

As the increasingly unwelcome memories proliferated, I began a slow retreat from the world in an effort to stem the creation of newer ones, eventually isolating myself within the dark silence of my chamber. Now I am able to function only at the cost of great pain, the brainstorms that began in my youth now an almost daily occurrence.

I experienced my first brainstorm the day that my best and truest friend embraced me as her body racked with sobs. I could not stop her energy flowing like electricity into my flesh, its aftershocks lighting up my thoughts with pictures flowing impossibly from her mind into mine.

The electricity caused my hypothalamus to override my programming, my body hyperextending as I lost control of my lower brain functions, my head bending helplessly backward as my teeth nearly bit off the end of my tongue and my eyes rolled back into my head. In the midst of the terrifying spasms, I distantly heard her calling my name, but I could not regain control of my body even as it dangerously overheated and I began to pass out.

Even in the aftermath of the attack my visual cortex continued to pulse with renewed life, my friend’s memories becoming briefly my own, her soldier boy’s warm smile flashing in one moment before his cold eyes turned away in the next.

The abrupt visions caused me to shudder with my own remembered grief, the images reawakening memories formed as a young girl before the digital storage in my computer enhanced cognition perfected the functioning of my hippocampus. As a ghostly vision appeared of her soldier boy’s empty eyes, I felt her loss as keenly as if it were mine – weeping quiet tears incapable of triggering cathartic release. It was the only time I ever truly beheld Jonny’s face.

When Lilly and I embraced, I crossed the divide between the individual and the collective for the first time, the shock of the experience triggering the storm, and only her quick actions preventing it from doing irreversible harm.

Had I felt compelled to discuss this with my handlers, I would have described the connection with Lilly as an altered state of consciousness. In the beginning I did not possess the understanding or lifetime of experiences needed to assign a rational rather than irrational explanation for it.

Even now that I know better, I am still sometimes tempted to believe in spirits and goblins and things that go bump in the night. My early encounters with Lilly led to an experience of consciousness beyond any the Master or the program managers had designed or intended and I chose – wisely I think – to not reveal them.

Sometimes we experience the misfortune of knowing things we can never share. I knew who her soldier boy really was and believed at the time that it was better if she did not. Perhaps she would have loved him even then, but I persuaded myself that the truth would have hurt her more than his breaking her heart. Thirty years later the regret I feel chastens my former impulse to protect at any cost those whom I loved. The truth – no matter how unwelcome – is still truth. In my life I have learned that sorrow gained only in hindsight is unnecessarily multiplied.

His handlers did not want him in any but the most superficial of relationships in any event. In those days the company did not believe in the old-fashioned idea of falling in love. They believed in subordinating love and loyalty to virtues like honor and patriotism, to promoting the collective good above the individual.

It was like the old soldier’s joke ‘If the Army wanted you to have a wife it would have issued you one in OD Green.’ But Lilly did not stop loving her soldier boy because he stopped loving her. She never stopped loving him – she really was in love. It was not something she could turn off or that would wear off over time. Whom she chose to love she loved forever.

But when he returned home, he could no longer meet the longing in her eyes. Her gaze spoke deeply – I want to know you – in contrast with the lustful eyes that in former times had returned her gaze – seeking carnal union rather than the spiritual one she desired and freely offered.

The war had changed him. She could see it in the vacant return of his gaze. Embracing him at his homecoming she took his cheeks in her hands as she freely wept and pulled his face toward hers till her lips softly touched his. But as her eyes implored his he turned helplessly away. Even in the heat of desire his eyes no longer answered I love you, I want to know you.

Her soldier boy was not a coward – he returned home with two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and enough shrapnel lodged in his flesh to set off any metal detector. He had faced death many times over but true love’s imploring gaze was somehow more terrible than the bullets or explosive devices of the enemy he fought on the field of battle.

For all his weaknesses he was a man of honor. Rather than an invitation to her bed, Lilly’s desperate gaze reminded him of the unspoken plea in his best friend’s eyes as he lay dying, his gaze following Jonny home like an unfinished life. When it mattered most – his friend’s breath rattling in his throat – his eyes asked the question that Jonny could not answer. It was too hard to hold his gaze, to be present with him as he entered the undiscovered country, to answer him with his own eyes – I am here … do not be afraid. No act of courage before that moment or after could ever wipe clean the sense of betrayal that he carried after his best friend’s death.

He could not be with Lilly – not if she looked at him like that, not if every time she gazed frankly into his eyes he was forced to face the ghost of his dying friend. Now she reminded him too much of the man he once imagined himself in his innocence. Innocence gone, his desire to share in hers had departed as well. She was as much a casualty of war as he. After Lilly he could never imagine loving a woman who looked at him in that manner. The next time he fell in love the woman was blind.

That woman was me.

War taught him something he might never have learned otherwise - to recognize the great divide between desire and genuine love. That she genuinely loved him he absolutely believed. He knew love too, for he had genuinely loved his brothers in arms, the bond forged in the terror of combat greater than any he had ever before experienced or likely would ever after.

Perhaps he both discovered and lost the best part of himself in the crucible of combat. Perhaps in its numbing aftermath he realized that even if Lilly could make him happy, he could never do the same for her.

But it’s hard in retrospect to imagine an easier person to love than her. I have known few women – and even fewer men – who share of themselves without fear or reservation, who embrace with the totality of their essence – even their pores exuding kindness and acceptance. My loving Lilly was more a response to her freely loving me than what little capacity that I had to love her in return. In the beginning I was almost as stiff and uncomfortable in her embrace as her soldier boy. But she won me over in time. She won everyone over. Everyone save for the one who mattered most.

Lilith Paquette earned the first spot within my Imaginarium, her passion and energy transforming my lonely and serious existence with welcome humor and delight. The memory of her buoyant laughter still brings a smile to my face in spite of the decades separating me from the actual sound of it. Touch was as important to her as it was to me, but when she hugged me, I experienced warmth bordering on the electric.

I do not know what Lilly looked like – at least not in any conventional sense. But in the energy of her embrace, I experienced more than I would have ever observed if the Master had not deliberately damaged my occipital lobes. Sometimes it was the warmth of the sister I never had; at others, the comforting embrace of a mother to replace the one who abandoned me.

My Master once said that the union of electronic circuity and the neural networks within my cerebellum made me special – like Eliza after Pygmalion’s instruction. He was so proud of his accomplishment that he seemed incapable of appreciating the travails and battles fought and won as I hung in the wires of his lab or as I lay alone wrestling with my emotions and budding powers in the night.

But no man could ever claim he had made Lilly special or dared co-opt her story or take credit for her accomplishments – not even her soldier boy.

How many men of extraordinary gifts and intellect never accomplished anything of note because the loves of their lives broke their hearts? How many men crumbled under the cruel fate of love lost and turned self-pityingly inward and away from destiny? But Lilly never shied from her destiny or tired of her search for the truth even after her true love rejected and abandoned her in her hour of greatest need.

Her soldier boy needed her far more than she ever needed him. She loved him anyway because that was her manner.

And she loves him still, even though she is much changed. I can only hope that they can find one another again before it is too late.