Anamnesis: A Novel (17 page)

Another half inch of papers included
treatment history for the course of two years. What dosage of medication I was
given daily, my vitals, comprehensive tests, reading assignments. Not a page
mentioned ice baths or tubes down my throats or acid. There was nothing about
abuse or inflicting of pain. Then again, there were still two years of
blackouts unaccounted for.

“Are all the records you’ve seen so far just
two years’ worth?” I asked Olivia.

She jumped when I spoke. I realized how
quiet it had gotten while I was absorbed in my file.

“So far, yes. They all cover a two year span.
Maybe the rest of the results are in the other room?”

I flipped through more of my daily
reports. “Might be. I wonder if—what the fuck?”

The knot twisted so hard and fast in my
stomach I thought I was going to vomit. I felt lightheaded.

The last page in my document was a
photocopy of a death certificate.

My death certificate.

I wondered if
William Grigg was my twin. Maybe we both went into Whiteout trials and he died
after two years. Ethan Knight got the raw end of the deal and his trials
extended longer when things got rocky with D.P. Or what if I was dead? What if
I was dead right now and in my own version of hell? I’m sure I deserved it.

“Well, obviously this is fake,” Olivia
said after studying the death certificate. “The most compelling reason being
that you’re right in front of me.”

Her declaration startled me. Of course I
wasn’t fucking dead. I wasn’t a twin and I wasn’t a ghost. My brain went wild
and had a knee-jerk reaction when faced with bad news. Someone declaring me
dead was bad news as far as I was concerned.

I fished out a cigarette and lit it. The
nicotine helped soothe my mind and my shaking hands. It wasn’t until I sucked
half of it down that I spoke. “What’s the date on that again?”

She told me. I thought about the missing
persons report and when my parents stopped looking for me. The dates went
together perfectly. Someone must’ve told them I was dead and that’s when they
stopped inquiring about my case. Not because they’d given up. Because they
thought I was dead.

“What’s the cause of death?” I asked.

“It says here you were found dead of a
drug overdose. Body found in Olympia, too decomposed for identification. Says
your remains were identified through dental records and notice was sent to the
parents.”

“Okay, so someone made me dead. Why? Why
would they do that?”

Olivia paused, then crouched down and
rifled through the folders she spread out on the ground. “Ethan, a lot of these
people have been reported dead. There must be a connection.”

“Take any files with death certificates.
We can read their backgrounds and see if anything matches up.” I flicked the
ash from my cigarette and stood. “Let’s finish up in here and check out the
other room, okay?”

It took another half hour before we were
done with all the files in the first storage room. Some of them were
waterlogged from a leak in the ceiling, but I suspected they were more of what
we already read. Olivia gathered a stack of ten test subjects who had death
certificates in their folders. All of them were photocopies. There seemed to be
little connection between them on first glance, except they died over the span
of two months.

The second room of filing cabinets wasn’t
as packed as the first. I felt a mixture of relief and nervousness. If we were
going to find something more, it would be in this room. At the same time, we
were at the end of the line. What we’d found so far was somewhat useful, but
not as much as I wanted.

We were quiet as we searched through the
folders. It was a lot of the same as the first room: profiles of people,
financial reports, summaries, pay stubs. Nothing incriminating. The profiles in
this room were of a new crop of people. D.P. hadn’t signed on people who only
had drug addictions. There were gambling addicts, chain smokers, college
dropouts looking for money, widows. People from all walks of life.

“Yes! Ethan, come here and look at this.”

I set down the folder of a middle-aged
woman and navigated around the junk on the floors to Olivia. She had one of the
hundreds of financial reports in her hands that I’d looked through in the other
room.

“It’s nothing. Just numbers on the
company,” I assured her and turned to move back to my work.

She frowned. I felt her judgment pass over
me as though it were a blanket sliding over my body. She pointed at the bottom
of the last page where there were four signatures. I’d seen them before on the
other documents but they meant nothing to me. I assumed they were just money
people. Accountants.

“These reports have to be signed by the
president of the company and anyone else important. These names are the people
who owned this company.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“Don’t get defensive about it. We found
it, that’s all that matters.” Olivia said. Her tone changed and I knew the
conflict was over. “Jonathan Draper was the CEO of the company. I already knew
that name, plus ‘Draper-Paulinsky’ is the company name. He died five years ago
from a heart attack. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved in any of this, but
it’s likely a dead end.”

She caught my accusatory look. “I forgot
to tell you last night, I’m sorry. It wasn’t important since he’s dead. There’s
two other names on here. Christian Paulinsky and Rupert Fearnley. Like you
said, there are no titles under their signatures. I’ll see what I can find.”

Olivia dug her cell out from her
never-ending purse and started typing. I wandered back to the profiles I was
looking at. After reading enough of them, I felt a connection to all the
people. Unity was a strange feeling, but as I read their dosages of Whiteout,
the time they spent there, I couldn’t help it. I reached back deep into the
filing cabinet for the last folder.

“First search on Christian Paulinsky says
he works at Microsoft in accounting. Found him on LinkedIn. Looks like his
whole history is in finance so…damn, he lives in China. Unless we’re going to
fly over there or harass him on the internet I doubt he’d be a good lead.”

My breath caught in my throat when I
opened the folder. It was the redheaded girl from my dreams. Even with the
harsh lighting in the photo against that blank wall she was smiling and bright.
She was so young, barely an adult. Seeing her without the burns made me look at
her differently. She and Olivia had the same shade of auburn hair, the same
dimples in their giant smiles.

“Rupert Fearnley looks more interesting.
Found some kind of portfolio website for sculptures. He has a studio downtown.
We should go see him.”

I looked up at Olivia, the memory of the
redhead’s burnt face in my mind. Her smiling, telling me everything would be
okay. They were so similar. Olivia had a sister that left at some point. Where
did she go?

Olivia was still talking about Fearnley
when I came up beside her, folder in hand. She took one look at it and her body
swayed. She dropped her phone and brought both hands to her head, which she
clutched in a white-knuckled grip.

“Oh God, it’s her.” Her breaths came in
rapid inhales. “It’s her. It’s really her.”

“Is this your sister? What is this,
Olivia?” She’d kept things from me before. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was
another secret she thought wouldn’t matter, or wanted to keep private. “Is this
why you’re after Whiteout?”

“No.” She sunk to the ground, sitting on
her heels. “Well, it’s not the only reason.”

Here it came. What I’d been waiting for
since our argument in the parking garage. I felt the truth coming and it made
my stomach churn. It was the resignation on her face paired with the fact she
wasn’t getting any oxygen from her quick breathing. Panic attack.

“Okay. Calm down. You need to breathe or
you’re going to pass out.” I breathed in and out audibly, slow and loud to give
her a baseline. Soon she was steadying herself. I took the chance to look at
the rest of the folder.

Her sister’s folder was thinner than the
others. She had a different name. Lanna Price. Her basic medical information
was inside. Written in the current status report was “substance addiction”
without any specifics. There were only a few months of summaries on her
Whiteout dosage and vitals. I opened the biggest document, the contract, and
found the initials L.P. and a signature.

I sat down next to Olivia, wedged between
a stack of boxes and a cabinet. I wanted answers. If I got high and mighty, I’d
say I deserved them. She had unknown motives she couldn’t avoid explaining to
me any longer. She went quickly from shocked to numb. Her gaze was unfocused,
her hands clasped in her lap.

“I knew this is what I’d find but I still
can’t believe it’s true. They must have given her a new identity. Like how
William Grigg became Ethan Knight. Lanna Price is Laurel Holloway.”

“Enough, Olivia. What aren’t you telling
me?” My patience was running out. “You tell me everything
now
or I’m
gone.” 

Then it all came out in one steady, long
stream. Her voice was flat. Mechanical, like she was reciting something she had
memorized for some time.

“When I was growing up I hated being at
home, because of all the problems with my family I told you about. I took on
every extracurricular activity I could to cope. It got me out of the house,
helped ensure I’d be able to go to college early, wherever I wanted to go. I
worked myself as hard as I could.” Olivia picked at her fingernails. Her voice
was thick. “Laurel handled things differently than me. She was only a year
older but she seemed to carry the burden of our family’s problems much worse
than I did. She fought my dad constantly, nagged at my mom. She had a lot of
boyfriends and made it known that she had sex with them.”

“She rebelled. That sounds normal enough
to me,” I offered when Olivia took a lengthy pause. Though I failed to see any
connection yet, I waited for the rest of her explanation.

She shook her head. “Not when those
boyfriends included Dad’s associates. Clients, other lawyers. Instead of going
after them—I mean,
they
were the ones having sex with an underage girl—
he blamed Laurel for it. Like he couldn’t call the police or stop them. He
always called her a slut and a tease. Dad hated her. He made her leave when we
had people over. Always had an excuse: Laurel is at a soccer game. Laurel has
an art class.”

“How did you find out about this?” I
asked. “Did she tell you?”

Her shoulders hunched forward. Olivia
threaded her fingers through her hair and clenched it. She was fidgeting. Her
unease was tangible. I had to make a conscious effort not to let it get to me.
“Yeah. She told me everything.”

“What did your dad do about it?”

“He made her disappear. When I was fifteen
I remember waking up and walking by her room, and the door was open. She wasn’t
in there. Her closet was empty. It was surreal. I asked my mom where Laurel
was. She said she got early admission into a two year study abroad program in Italy.
I knew right away it was a lie and asked her if she was sure. She said to ask Dad
if I had any questions. She knew I wouldn’t. She knew I’d never ask him
anything.”

Olivia went silent and the minutes crawled
by. Until I couldn’t take it. “So she never came back? Or called or something?”

“Eventually my mother told me she ran away
with a boy, but didn’t give me anything else. Dad kept up the lies. Told people
Laurel was doing great, got a scholarship to stay and finish her bachelor’s in
Italy. Then her master’s. Then she was going to get married and live there. He
created this whole world. I was so confused about it when I was young, then
when I got older the lie had been part of my life so long, I was locked up. I
couldn’t do anything.”

Now I was starting to connect the dots.
“How did you know he put her here? When I handed you that folder, you weren’t
surprised. At all.”

“I couldn’t tell you everything when I
first met you. I didn’t think you’d believe me. Or trust me. When I read your
blog and met you in person, I knew you weren’t the kind of person who believes
in good people.” She frowned as she looked at me. “That, and I was afraid. I
didn’t want to put all my cards on the table right away.”

I stilled. “What are you talking about?”

“Weeks after she disappeared, I got a
letter from Laurel. It didn’t have a return address. It wasn’t very coherent.
She said she was being held captive and experimented on. She couldn’t escape.
They were giving her a drug that caused blackouts. She wrote about how she lost
days and weeks of time. She’d come out of these blackouts, beaten and sure
she’d been raped.”

A tremor ran through my body. The fury I
had towards the people involved with Whiteout tripled. “And?”

“She’d traded sex with a security guard
while she was coherent to get the letter to me. Laurel said she missed me and
was afraid she might die. I couldn’t write back, but every couple weeks I would
get a letter from her. She’d talk about the experiments, how you couldn’t trust
anyone. Except there was one guy she thought she loved, who made her feel less
afraid.”

“Let me guess. William Grigg?”

“Yes,” Olivia confirmed. “You were Will in
the letters. She wrote about how you disappeared for a while but came back and
you insisted your name was Ethan Knight. You didn’t remember her. In her last
letter she was desperate. She said she feared for her life more than ever. She
was losing more of her memories every day from the drugs they gave her. She
wanted me to find her, but also to help you. She loved you.”

I rubbed my eyes as my brain tried to make
sense of all the new information. This was too absurd to be true. Yet I
remembered Laurel. I had good feelings in my dreams when I was with her.
Granted they always ended in pain and suffering, but never because of her.
Maybe I had met her. Maybe we did love each other.

One thing about Olivia’s story didn’t work
for me. “Why have you waited so long to find me?”