Sister Of My Soul

“Ahh, bay say day, oo, ef, jhay…” the girl sang to herself. Jaycey looked up from his drawing to stare at her. He knew immediately who the singer was, and quickly looked back to his sketchbook, pretending he hadn’t looked up at all. Who else could it possibly be? Of course, this was Fate’s doing. Of course, the sweet soprano voice drifting down the moonlit hill could only be the voice of the woman he least wanted to see. Of course. The sarcasm was tangible. The ethereal presence next to him was silent. Jaycey exhaled, frowning, and he vaguely wondered what song she was singing.
Jaycey had barely finished thinking the thought when he realized the disconcerting syllables were merely the alphabet, but in a different language. The tune was almost the same. Jaycey followed the song in his mind, pencil poised above the paper, body relaxed and distracted. A breeze rocked the hammock in which he was balanced, upright. The grass rippled. The girl was leaning against an apple tree in full blossom, her hands wrapped around her knees. The leaves shook themselves out, under guise of wind, and tried to lull Jaycey to them with their faint but tempting scent. But the fruit was bitter, and the boy knew the son had ended—too soon, but not soon enough. Jaycey’s mind had left the tree, and the song was superfluous. He would have been intensely aware of the singer even if she had not been singing.
The girl’s name was Lee, shortened from Leeanne. A small-town name given by small-town parents, but Leeanne lived in a small town in much the same way that polar bears live in the Amazon.  Leeanne hated her name almost as much as she hated Jaycey.
Almost, but not quite.
At the same time, she felt the ache in her stomach and the nagging in her brain - the part of her that wanted to comfort him and be his friend – quite acutely. She knew that that emotion wasn’t real. She only felt partial to Jaycey because the Government wanted her to.
Helen, next to Leeanne, extended a ghostly tendril and pressed it onto Lee’s shoulder with surprising solidity – it took an unusual effort for an ameserr to solidify this thoroughly. The result was heat and comfort, which radiated into Lee’s body. In response, her body sent an endorphin rush to meet it, and Lee felt better.
An ameserr is a part of the inner self that can be seen, separate from the body (It is said that they evolved from the ‘imaginary friend’, but that’s probably a myth). The name comes from the French words for ‘soul’ and ‘sister’, the information from which can be derived two facts: The first, that the French did indeed discover the ameserr and are still the pioneer of ameserr studies across the globe; and the second, that the words have been utterly mutilated by the American people.
Ameserrs are immortal, and they cause their humans to be immortal as well, by waiting until the body dies and then inhabiting a new one, this process’ predecessor being reincarnation (Since there are finite numbers of ameserrs and ever-increasing numbers of born children, the newest global phenomenon was of children without ameserrs).
A defining characteristic of the ameserr is its gender – Ameserrs were always female. Males had a different form of soul-sibling, called an amefrerr. Lee, like most young women, had trouble understanding the working concept of an amefrerr. Leeanne’s father had explained in metaphor:
“If a piece of string is threaded with a ring and held taut and level, the ring will stay put. If, however, the string is inclined slightly, the ring will slide down the incline. My amefrerr is both the string and the hands directing them, and I am the ring. During my first revolution through life, I could only age as long as I’d been that age before.
“In other words, a man can only go where he’s already been, and to get there, he has to wait in line. Watch.” Lee’s father had changed into a boy of about eleven, blonde-haired, wide-eyed, and mousy as he could be. The old man’s clothes had dwarfed the little boy, and he comically stretched his arms wide, displaying the clothing he was drowning in. Then her father had recovered and became again the creased, grey-haired elder that Leeanne knew well. He had straightened his clothes and continued.
“I can also become a withered old man, but I can not reach pas the bodily age of seventy, which is the furthest I dare risk. Don’t want to lose all I’ve worked for now, bud.” He’d finished by ruffling Leeanne’s hair and standing, walking off to do parent-ish things like pay bills and complain about achy joints.  What Lee would have also benefited from knowing, that her father hadn’t mentioned but she learned about later, was that if a man dies, either by old age or unnatural causes, he can not return to the earth, and he stays in the land of the dead forever.
Lee knew that soul-siblings had lots of other powers, but she hadn’t learned them all by heart, and the few she did know were so numerous that it could take her an hour and a stack of loose-leaf paper to make even a rough compilation of the things she knew.
Because of the ridiculous age of most humans on Earth, the traditions of the past were the customs of the present. If one was young, such as Lee and Jaycey (Jaycey was in his first revolution and Lee had only live three lifetimes so far. This was considered young.), then you were subject to the traditions of the past as well as every newfangled idea out there.
One of these traditions in particular have Lee and Jaycey a lot of grief, and so far, neither had thought of a permanent solution – aside from suicide, which wouldn’t work for Lee and certainly didn’t appeal to Jaycey, among other things. Thus, the status quo.
Jaycey and Leeanne were meant to be lovers. They were ‘intended’ by the Government, and when the Government wanted something, it never went halfway.
Make no mistake, the Government and the government were two decidedly separate agencies. The Government was malevolent, and the government was – if not benevolent, it was definitely not malevolent. On the one hand, the Government was a shadow agency that was bent on total world domination by ‘extralegal’ means. The government, on the other hand, was a perfectly harmless institution that made laws and levied taxes. Annoying, but well-meaning, at the very least.
Then, Leeanne realized that she had gotten carried away, and, in the usually paradoxal and contradictory nature of her personality, she snapped back to the present and subsequently lapsed into idle contemplation of life.
While Lee considered and Helen fidgeted, Jaycey argued with his amefrerr, France. Frances wanted Jaycey to talk to Lee, but Jaycey was refusing very firmly.
“C’mon, Jayce, you can’t fight fate!”
Jaycey gritted his teeth. The pencil in his left hand groaned and the paper creased. “Maybe not, but I can fight the Government.”
“You’ve got nothing to lose.”
“You don’t know that.”
Frances took Jaycey’s hands, and the amefrerr’s ghostly appendages meshed and melted into Jaycey’s tense ones, causing a great sense of euphoria to relax his muscles. His mind resisted fervently.
“I’m going to talk to Helen.” Frances announced, making no motion to get up.
“You wouldn’t dare,” said Jaycey, amber eyes flashing in warning.
“You can’t stop me,” Frances countered.
“I’d rather kill us than let you make peace with that monstrous life-ruiner!”
Jaycey knew right off the bat that he had said too much, had hit Frances below the metaphorical belt. He felt bad instantly. Frances fell silent. Jaycey dropped the pencil into his lap and reached out to touch Frances, but the amefrerr shrunk back and Jaycey dropped his rejected arm like a dead weight. The pair sat in tense silence.
A loon called, and its voice echoed through the twilight like the sound of a playful child laughing.
“I didn’t mean it,” said Jaycey to his lap. Frances would have exhaled heavily if he had breath.
“I know,” he said presently. “But you knew it would hurt.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Jaycey said earnestly.
“Obviously,” Frances said to himself. A minute passed. Neither one moved.
“Really.” Jaycey insisted.
“Really,” Frances said sarcastically.
“Really.” Jaycey repeated.
“I’m going to talk to Helen.”
“No!” Jaycey exclaimed.
“Yes,” Frances said, calmly yet firmly.
“No, NO, no!” Jaycey half-shouted. Frances stood. The hammock remained fiercely still as the weightless form ghosted off and walked determinedly up the hill. Jaycey clenched his teeth in anger.
“Frances!” Jaycey hissed. The amefrerr ignored him, and as Jaycey’s anger quickly escalated into fury, he felt the blood rush to his face when Helen glided gracefully down the hill to meet him.
Lee objected, reaching out to stop Helen, but her hand slid quite futilely through the thin air that Helen’s leg consisted of. Helen felt it nevertheless, and the ameserr turned and crouched by the girl.
“Don’t worry. I can handle it. Don’t you trust me?” Leeanne grimaced, but she couldn’t press Helen’s logic. She did trust Helen, much more than Jaycey trusted Frances.
“Okay.” Lee said finally, nodding. “Go see what he wants.” Helen touched Lee’s hand maternally and then glided down to meet Frances at the midpoint of the hill.
*    *    *
         “What’d he say to you, Helen? What’d you do to Jaycey?” Leeanne asked nervously.
“Not much,” Helen said dismissively.
“Not much?” Lee echoed, astonished. “Were you seeing the same thing I was?”
“It only seemed that way to you.” Helen said, her condescending tone hiding her hesitance. Lee raised her eyebrows reprovingly. “Okay, so it was a lot more than not much.” Helen conceded, staring into the fire while Lee stared at her. “But I really don’t think you want to hear it.”
“Oh, I want to hear it,” Lee said seriously.
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Enough with the… Stop talking to me like that!”
“Like what?” Helen said innocently.
“Like I’m an annoying child or something. What’re you hiding?”
“Nothing!” Helen said quickly. “I’m not hiding anything.”
Lee caught the slight stress on the word ‘hiding’ and waited in disapproving silence for an explanation. Helen crossed her arms and said nothing.
“Helen.”
No response.
“Now who’s being childish?”
Silence from Helen still.
“What’d he say?” Lee whined finally, at her wit’s end.
“Okay, fine!” Helen said suddenly. Her tone became reminiscent of a third-grader gossiping. She turned her torso so she was facing Leeanne with her legs crossed. Lee matched the casual posture by tucking her own legs under and leaning forward.
“First, I asked him what he wanted.” Helen began, words tripping out with comical speed. “But he didn’t say anything, and he looked nervous enough so I didn’t press the matter. I asked why Jaycey was upset, instead.”
Helen’s tone became suddenly serious, and her language became more formal somewhat. “He told me, ‘Jaycey is mad because he doesn’t want me to be here.’ I raised my eyebrows, because I thought, ‘Why would anyone fight like that with their soul-sibling?’”
“Didn’t we just?” Lee interrupted.
“Not like that. You saw his face.”
“It was dark.”
“Yeah, I guess. Anyway, I raised my eyebrow, and then he said, ‘He’s confused. I just want to help him.’ As you can imagine, that made me even more skeptical. I said, ‘Lee’s the same way, but we’re getting on fine. Why tonight?’”
“I don’t really remember what was said next…”Helen said slowly.
“I don’t need exact quotes. Go on.” Lee urged shortly, intent.
“He said something about how you two were being immature about the whole thing. He said, ‘How long has he been torturing himself? Since September?’ I nodded, because that sounded right. The September part, I mean,” she said to Lee’s shocked expression.
“Um, then I think I said something about the Government’s true purpose, and he said, “Yeah, maybe it does mean something, but I’m afraid he’ll drive himself insane trying to resist it.
“’And thus he would drive you insane.’ I observed. ‘But doesn’t he know about the-‘ Frances cut me off with some nonsense syllable. ‘Yeah, he knows about it,’ he snapped, and I would have huffed if I had lungs.
“He leaned in really close, and took this real serious tone that scared me. ‘We don’t think it was an experiment,’ he said. ‘We think it happens all the time.’”
Lee gasped and her eyes widened in shock at the revelation, but Helen continued, not so much unperturbed as desensitized.
“All the time?” Lee asked incredulously. “Why?”
“That’s what I said.” Helen said, nodding. “He just shook his head and said they didn’t know. He started to say something else, but he changed his mind at the last second- or he was trying to articulate it,” Helen reflected to herself. If the interruption annoyed Lee, she didn’t show it. “Frances told me that Jaycey thinks…” Helen trailed off, reading Lee’s expression for clues about her reaction.
“What?” Lee demanded. “What does he think?” Helen hesitated, but she couldn’t fight Lee’s intensely curious expression.
“He thinks that… if he doesn’t resist now… he won’t be able to stop, give it up… later, I mean,” Helen spoke vaguely, struggling for nonoffensive words, but Lee understood, and nodded reflectively.
“Ego? Or true fear?” Lee asked aloud.
“You know the rest.” Helen informed Lee, and the both fell silent, remembering.
Jaycey had lost his cool and marched up the hill, fists clenched, face red, and had started chewing Frances out lividly. At first, Frances had looked guilty and small, but, as Jaycey became more and more animated, Frances had snapped and the confrontation had escalated into a screaming match.
Intimidated and shocked, Helen had fled to Lee’s side, and the two had made haste to get home. Though home was a school boardinghouse, and Jaycey lived in the boy’s wing, cut off from Lee’s by just a locked door or two, it was comfort to the pair like nothing else was.
Helen and Lee were in front of the crackling fire in the girls’ common room, both pale-faced and struck temporarily speechless.
“You’re tired.” Helen said finally, breaking the silence.
“I know.” Lee admitted.
“We should sleep.” Helen said.
“I know.” Lee repeated tonelessly.
The grandfather clock informed them that it was now midnight. Lee informed the clock that it was annoying and obnoxious. “Ostentatious,” Helen added, and Lee agreed.
The outdated pipes in the ceiling groaned, the building’s way of reminding its occupants that it wasn’t getting any younger.
Lee knew she was too close to the fire because her cheeks burned, but not only could she not move the furniture by her lonesome, her body refused to budge. Conversely, Helen stood restlessly and paced, her footsteps noiseless on the floorboards which squeaked and moaned under Lee’s weight.
Again, Helen broke the silence. “It’ll drive us crazy first.”
“We can’t just give in.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait.”
“He’s not going to budge, that’s for sure.” Helen said strongly.
“We wait for a sign, then.” Lee said, trying to break Helen’s defenses with realism.
“Eternity’s a long time to wait.”
Lee thought about the concept.
“You’ll die eventually,” Helen continued. “We’ll run.”
“You’ll look the same. They’ll find us.” Lee said, now becoming slightly desperate. She was having trouble weaseling out of Helen’s logic, and she absolutely didn’t want to be swayed on this matter.
“Not easily.” Helen reasoned.
“Government’s got ways.”
“I’ll change my name.” Lee paused again to think about this, but Helen pushed ahead steadily.
“It could work.” Helen said earnestly. Lee sighed hopelessly, and stood up, stretching her stiff legs.
“It wouldn’t work.”
“We’ll make it work,” Helen persisted.
Lee took a deep breath and exhaled. “We can talk about this when I’m not tired.”
Helen looked disappointed in Lee, but Helen was tired too, and she didn’t think she could win a battle arguing whether Lee was tired enough to argue or not. She could only dimly imagine how frustrating that would be, and she knew she couldn’t win.
“Fair enough then. Off to sleep we go.”
*    *    *
Jaycey suddenly stopped yelling and plopped down on the grass. He was tired of fighting, and now that Helen and Lee were gone, there was nothing to fight over. Frances sighed and followed Jaycey’s example.
“What did you tell her?” Jaycey asked hopelessly.
“I didn’t get a chance to say much…”
“What did you have the chance to say?”
“I told her that you were confused… um, our theory about the experiments… told her you wanted to give in, but you were afraid.”
Jaycey gritted his teeth angrily. “What did you tell her that for? I’m not afraid of anything like that!”
“You are too afraid, and it’s not my fault you’re not more in touch with your feelings.” Frances crossed his arms and turned his nose up theatrically.
“Bah, humbug,” Jaycey joked, making light of the situation as Frances was doing.
“You want to go inside?” Frances asked.
“Not yet.”
Jaycey stood and went down the hill to get his sketchbook. He looked at the page it was open to, the page he had been drawing when he had been interrupted.
The pencil lines in the drawing were feathery and light, but layered to give the illusion of shadow without overpowering the drawing. Jaycey had drawn a procession of hooded figures. If one guessed by their proportions, their thinness and height would make them humanoid, not necessarily human. However, Frances knew enough about Jaycey to see that this was just Jaycey’s style of drawing.
Frances followed Jaycey down the hill and peered over his shoulder at the drawing on which Jaycey lingered. Frances often thought that if he ever wanted to know what was on Jaycey’s mind, he could just hand Jaycey a pencil and paper and then see what was created.
Jaycey’s shadow procession told Frances that Jaycey felt somehow vague and undefined, in other words, misunderstood. The figures had a certain sobriety, which told Frances that Jaycey felt sad or unfulfilled. Perhaps the figures were duty-bound to march, much like Jaycey felt duty-bound to continue on his path.
The conjectures saddened Frances, who could remember a time when Jaycey drew colorful mushrooms and sunset seascapes.
However, a comfortable silence surrounded the pair, and they moved as one toward the white stucco building, lost in thought and remembrance.
*    *    *
Dome.
Why am I in a dome?
Lee was, in fact, standing in the center of a white dome. She stood on the raised circular platform, to which a single step led down. It was also white, but between the edge of the platform and the edge of the dome, there was a space about 6 feet wide that encircled the platform, donut-shaped. It was carpeted with grass, like an artificial meadow.
Weird, Lee managed to think. Her mind was cloudy and her eyes were heavy. She tried to blink, and found that her eyes were in fact closed. The fact that she felt her eyes closed and could still see alerted her to the fact that she was dreaming.
All around her Lee saw people she knew standing around in the grassy patch. Every time she looked, there were different people in different places, so she couldn’t sort out who was actually there.
The thing that struck her as odd was the fact that everyone was picking wildflowers, or lying in the grass, acting as if they were not, in fact, in a white dome.
“Come join us,” A voice called, and it was male.
“Why are you doing that?” Lee asked. Even though they had spoken to her first, everyone looked up in unison as if they had just noticed her. The people stopped moving and switching places, and she was able to place some of her friends and family.
The flowers in their hands became round white stones, and Lee’s family began throwing the stones at her. Lee looked down and saw that all the grass had turned into a sea of round white stones. She panicked and jumped down from the platform, ignoring the step. She tried to run across the patch toward the white, curved wall, but the patch lengthened and narrowed and became a long hallway. The stones kept flying and hitting her, but there was no pain. Instead of pain, Lee felt a compounded and magnified fear jolt her heartbeat into overtime.
When lee finally reached the end of the hall, she realized that there was no escape. She pounded on the white walls with her shaking fists. They were not made of drywall, she now saw, but a hard, opaque plastic which shook with every blow.
Suddenly, there was a noise like paper ripping, and Lee’s fist tore a ragged hole in the plastic. She hurriedly stepped through and somehow the hole closed behind her.
Then the world swung on its axis and Lee was on a soft surface in a dark room.
For one relieved second, Leeanne thought she was awake, lying in her dormitory. Then, to her dismay, bright fluorescent lights flickered on with a buzzing sound.
The light was bright, but she was not blinded, so Lee looked around and realized she was in an uncomfortably familiar laboratory. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out. There were two people in the room, a red-haired woman and a man with a clipboard. Both were wearing white lab coats. The pair turned at Lee’s sudden intake of breath and stared at her.
The woman was the first to react. She reached one bony hand over and patted Lee’s hand maternally. Her hair was tied into a smart bun at the base of her neck and she had angular features. Lee would place her age at about mid-fifties.
“You’re fine, dear. Relax and go back to sleep.” Her voice was like that of a schoolteacher, not in a screechy way, but in the way some schoolteachers have of being simultaneously nice and clueless.
Lee shook her head with effort and tried to sit up, but found to her annoyance that her arms were held down with leather straps.
“She needs more meds?” asked the man from across the room. He was standing at the foot of another bed, a still-sleeping figure occupying it. He glanced up at the red-haired woman briefly, and then dropped his eyes to the clipboard.
“Yeah. By the time we get around to the injection, she’ll be awake enough to fight us.”
“Hm.”
The red-haired woman turned back to Lee and looked at her for a moment. Then she turned around and walked a couple feet to lean on a stainless-steel island table. Lee saw that there was a nervous-looking intern with brown curly hair standing behind her. The intern eyed Lee warily. He was the next one to speak.
“What’s with the girl?” he asked curiously.
The woman’s voice became decisive and instructional as she answered.
“This young lady is due for a shot of Paefigia.” The intern raised his eyebrows.
“What’s that, some kind of pasta?” he said sarcastically.
“It’s the trade name for a new form of artificial bacteria,” said the woman seriously, gesturing with her hand toward a syringe filled with a blue-green liquid. “But this girl keeps metabolizing the anesthesia, so we’re going to give her one more shot of straight pain meds, and hope it lasts as long as we need it to.”
“Normally we would wait until the patients were fully asleep to talk about these kinds of things,” said the man with the clipboard to the intern. “But in this case, our artificially engineered bacteria will damage some of her memory, as well as the target neurons.”
The intern nodded. “So they won’t remember this?”
“Not consciously,” the woman qualified.
Lee found her tongue and she yelled the first thing she thought of.
“Daddy! Help!”
The red-haired woman fiddled with an IV Lee hadn’t known she was connected to and before much time had passed at all, Lee felt sleepy and began to lose sight of the brightly lit laboratory.
As Lee fell asleep in her dream, she woke up in real life, and became so disoriented by this that it took her almost five full minutes to register that she was really awake.
After this milestone, Lee achieved hearing, and immediately wished she hadn’t. In her ear, and alarm clock blared the tune to “This Old Man” and Helen’s concerned voice was trying to capture her attention.
“Huh?” Leeanne asked blearily.
“Lee, I can’t press the buttons.”
“Oh.” Lee stretched her arm out and found that the clock was too far away, a minute too late. One dull thud and a few annoyed grunts later, Lee was finally awake.
“Ow.”
“You sure woke up sharp today, didn’t you?” Helen asked dryly.
“Yeah.”