A Puppet in the Hand

Tam has been in the Ward for as long as she can remember, which isn’t saying much. Her treatments have destroyed most of her memory.

A puppet of the state, her life is controlled by forces she has never seen. Will a chance for freedom cut her strings, or just change the puppet master?

Part One: Order and Disorder

1. Patchwork Time

*

Our memories are card indexes - consulted, and then returned in disorder, by authorities whom we do not control.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, 1944.

*

His hair was black, hanging almost to his eyes. It captivated her. She couldn’t look away. Tam ran a hand over her own not quite bald head and felt the velvety regrowth prickling her fingers.

“How come they let you keep your hair?” she asked eventually. Everyone got their heads shaved once a week. It had always been like that, ever since she could remember. No one had any hair in here. The orderlies always wore elastic caps over theirs, the same papery blue material as their shoe covers. So they wouldn’t be infected with the sickness inside the wards, she thought. The only people she knew with observable hair like his were the interviewers.

The interviewers sat at a single table opposite her. The plain beige gown folded around her as she sat carefully in the single bare chair, isolated from them by a moat of space. She did not wonder where the boy had gone. She was used to that.

Tam gazed at the interviewers. The light shone lustrous in their hair. The small woman had deep red locks, cut short and puffy around her face. The man, his eyes small and sharp, had trim grey hair. It was the same trim grey hair covering his head as the thin, neat lines that ran down the sides of his cheeks and jaw. The taller lady had a glorious mixture of honeys and browns, swept around her head and fastened in a curl at the back. Tam wondered what her own hair would look like. What colour it would be. A tiny kernel of hope sat in her chest, waiting for them to let it grow.

“Recite the Order of the Catchement,” the taller lady asked of her. Tam felt their eyes drilling into her. Word by word, sentence by sentence, the carefully memorized phrases came out of her mouth.

“Our serenity. Not the serenity,” the lady snapped, interrupting her. The flow of Tam’s words drifted away. She felt the disappointment layering down onto her, burying her. Another mistake. She had never got it right. There would be no going home today. Hope atomized, decaying so quickly she couldn’t be sure it had ever been there in the first place.

“How long have we had this one for?” the small red lady asked wearily, flipping through a thick stack of pages.

“She’s never going to get it,” the sharp eyed man muttered.

“She is still underage. She can’t be sent to the re-education camps yet. Have patience, it’s only one more year,” the taller lady said, and the voices grew indistinct in her mind.

“Schedule her for another series of ECT.”

The ECT was supposed to reset the electricals in her mind. Smooth out the bumps. Wipe out unwanted memories. The process was more or less random, and she lost more and more of herself every time it was done to her. But they did not leave her with half a mind. Generously, they filled it with the makings of a good citizen. The Order of the Catchement. The Citizen’s Act. The Code of Conduct. The History. She sat in a bare room while they played the recitations over. She knew them. She knew them backwards. But it wouldn’t stick. Her mind seemed to reject it, no matter how hard she tried.

-

The afternoons after the interviews were always the worst. She lay on her white sheets, shaking softly. Something she couldn’t quite see was outside her grasp. She had been close. Close to what: she didn’t know. Close to not failing. Close to being better. Close to leaving. Close to going home. But that hazy concept was as far away as the sky now. She wasn’t getting better. They were giving up hope in her too; she could hear it in their tones.

The ECT scrambled her thoughts. It erased her past in random patches, and it devoured sections of the present. So time, for her, was not straightforward. It leapt about like a mad hare, leaving her with days unaccounted for, splicing two experiences next to each other. She would be in one room, close her eyes, and open them in another, on the far side of the ward, with no sense of having travelled. As if it was the world around her that changed, and she never did. She learned not to expect. Things happened, and she dealt with them as they came. Whether they were memories, or reality, or dreams, there was no way of telling. There was no point trying to discern the difference any more.

-

The boy was in front of her, staring. The boy with the black hair. She knew his name, she realized: Marcus. She didn’t remember when he’d told her.

“Where were you yesterday?” he asked. He sounded annoyed, or concerned. She was amused by his question. Where was yesterday? How on earth was such a question to be answered? They were separated from the next bed by only a fold of blue paper curtain. But it seemed another world, with him.

He often had strange questions, like “Where’s your home?” That one had stuck with her for a long time. She knew the idea, but she could find a way to put it into words. She couldn’t find anything concrete to nestle the idea in. But it was a lovely idea.

“What’s wrong with you?” he continued, “Why are you smiling? Tam? Don’t you even care?”

Her smile faltered at the anger in his eyes. Her response was not acceptable, as usual. “Care about what?” she asked, her voice faltering, hoping for a clue. With a clue she might be able to guess the right answer. But his frown only deepened and he shook his head, leaning back and staring at the pile of books by his bedside. Her gaze lingered on them too. She wasn’t allowed books.

“What did you do?” he asked, and her eyes found his gaze on her again. She made the effort, reaching into the fog of her mind, but found only trails of smoke. She had a faint feeling of doing something risky. She wondered whether she was supposed to learn from her mistakes, remember her faults. She wondered if they had been erased on purpose, to stop them contaminating her mind. She was here for a reason, she knew. Something had gone wrong with her, and they were trying to fix her. What was wrong, she couldn’t put a finger on. Maybe if I could, I could get better, she thought. Maybe if you could, you would get worse, another voice in her mind warned her.

“What did you do?” she asked him, hoping perhaps it would be similar. Maybe it would give her a clue.

He let out a breath of annoyance.

“It’s my father. He’s punishing me by sending me here for a while. Don’t worry, they won’t do anything to me. It’s all for show.” His voice faltered, looking at her, but she didn’t notice.

Father… the word was powerful, but connected to nothing.

“Are you a good person?” he asked. She turned and blinked at him. He was different. Time had passed. Days, she guessed, but the guess was wild. There was no way to measure it. “Are you?”

There was a strong feeling, very deep inside her, boiling at those words.

“I think I am,” she said, uncertain. The feeling inside her glowed appreciatively in response. It was the right answer. Her mind locked down hard on the words, trying to stop her saying them. It was the wrong answer.

“If you’re a good person, then why are you still here?” he asked, and all the fervour of his scrutiny bore down on her. The back of her neck grew damp and prickly. An ache grew in her chest.

“I’m not good enough?” she guessed.

He studied her. “You don’t remember outside, do you?”

She shook her head, ashamed.

“You’re better than a hundred other people out there,” he said, “A thousand. So why are you still here?”

Sometimes she wondered if she’d made him up. He was just a part of her mind come to taunt her. It was times like this that she knew he was real. He was the most real thing in her life. Around him, she could concentrate for minutes at a time. Sometimes. And sometimes he was there and gone again in a flash.

She looked up, hearing silence. He was gone. His bed was empty, and time did not make their paths cross again.

AN: Endless thanks to my awesome Beta Narq. This was inspired by dancin-in the-rain's "Room 475" (go check it out :D!)