John Gone (41 page)

He returned to the room and thought. It
wasn’t long before he reached a hypothesis. His arms shot down to
the ground, lifting his soggy trench coat from a puddle on the
floorboards. He shot his hand into the front left pocket. The watch
was gone. So was the tool used to remove it.

Felix looked to the table by the bed. There
was a note with his name written across its top in cursive. He
walked to the paper and unfolded it slowly before reading its
contents aloud.

Felix: Thank you for saving me all those
years ago. I can’t believe I forgot to say those words to you last
night. I thought about you and what happened on that night for
years, and always wondered what I could do to make it up to you if
we ever had the chance to see each other again. Now, given that
chance, I find myself stealing your property and abandoning you in
Germany with likely no easy way for you to get back. Admittedly,
it’s an odd thank you, I know. But I’m leaving now to make it up to
you. I saw your face when you talked about the boy. That’s why I’ve
gone. I have the chance to atone for both of us. Thirty years ago
you saved me. Now, it’s my turn to save someone. You’ve done so
much for me, and I know in my heart that I haven’t deserved any of
it. Still, I have one last favor to request: Find me again. I’ve no
right to ask, but I’ll be waiting just the same. You know where to
find me. Maybe someday, things actually can be different for us.
Until then, know that you have my love and eternal gratitude.
Karen.

Felix folded the note carefully and clasped
the paper tightly in his hand. He looked out past the window above
the bed he’d shared with Karen the night before. It was still
raining outside. He dressed himself in the same wet clothes and hat
he’d entered with, left the room, and travelled down the
stairs.

Outside the hostel, Felix looked left and
right down the street in front of him. Both directions were empty
of people, probably due to the storm. Felix turned left and started
walking. It was as good a direction as any.

John sat quietly at the lab’s workstation and
drew a thick black line down the side of the white page, closing
his eyes as he slid the pencil’s tip against the curvature he saw
in his mind. He brought the line up the other side of the sheet,
finishing the contour of her face and closing the shape at its
top.

He drew the hair next, carefully arcing the
graphite a few inches above the scalp, lifting the lines high
before crashing them down past the sides of her cheeks to the
unseen shoulders beneath the page. He brought the still-sharp tip
in past the edge and outlined an eye. He finished the other the
same, letting the pencil naturally dip down from its inside corner
to form the bridge of her nose. Her smile came after, an easy task,
which he drew as thick and as wide as he’d seen it so many times
before, during those welcome breaks between his voyages.

He dropped the pencil and looked down at
Ronika’s face, unfinished but present. The portrait was similar to
the others he’d drawn, now stuck orderly to the back wall with a
thick, blue gummy substance he’d found in a drawer. There were
twenty-five in total, and John counted for the eighteenth--it was
the one with the shading he’d been proudest of, drawn lightly
against her left cheekbone, pitting the smooth landscape of her
face against the invisible light source he’d created for it. He
found the portrait and mimicked the technique onto the page laid
across the table.
This one will be perfect.

Art had been a hobby of John’s while growing
up on the island. The activity was perfect for him, inexpensive and
solo. He’d shown talent, but had never taken the time to develop
it, never truly focusing on the work as a craft. Now, in the lab
alone without distraction, he had the time to do so.

He‘d first begun with lettering, learning to
write again with his left, non-dominant hand. From there he’d
graduated to shapes, advanced from shapes to figures, and from
figures to portraiture. His ability as an artist had blossomed
exponentially, due solely to the fact that he could now devote
most, if not all, of his hours and days to perfecting it. In only a
year’s time, John had improved his skills by a decade’s worth, and
he used them frequently to capture his memories before they faded
with time, a consistent fear shadowing his thoughts.

Next to his gallery of Ronika, John had hung
drawings of others, the lot of them who’d been involved with his
adventures. All were there but Amandine, whom he thought would have
preferred it that way. Even Adam had his place among the art,
seated in an imaginary scene, reading a book about dragons to his
daughter. It was John’s way of offering the man both an apology and
his forgiveness.

The portraiture of the others had come first,
as John had originally not been interested in drawing Ronika’s
face. He would see her again, he’d told himself often; she doesn’t
belong with the others.

Eventually despair had overtaken him. It had
been a year since becoming stuck in the lab, and not even Felix had
come back to see him. Six months passed before John decided to draw
his redheaded friend, the thought of forgetting her face causing
fear above all else.

John blew the graphite dust away from her
cheek and lifted his pencil. Its tip was growing dull again. He
lifted the scalpel that sat next to his paper on the table and used
it to sharpen the point as he often did.

Having no obligations had made him careful
and meticulous about every action he performed. Often, he found it
nice to do things that way. Sometimes he would spend forty-five
minutes just sitting in his chair, carefully sharpening his pencil
into just the right tip.

As he worked on the pencil, he noticed his
reflection in the metal table below him. He no longer recognized
the person he saw there. The John in the table had shoulder-length
hair. His face showed early signs of stubble. A white lab coat two
feet too tall was draped across his back.

Even the pencil he held was different. It was
down to only a fourth of its original length, and there were only
four more pencils left in the drawer after this one disappeared
completely. The pencil had now lasted a year, but its lifespan
didn’t bode well for the future of an art career.

Only four more years before I have to find
a new hobby
, he thought.
And what will that man I see in the
table do then?

A loud thud sounded from the bathroom across
the room, frightening John backward from his chair to the floor. It
was the first noise he’d heard in a year’s time that he’d not
caused himself.

“Felix?” he called. His voice cracked as he
spoke the word. It was also the first he’d spoken in a year. He’d
refused to speak, even to himself, during his time in the lab. He
feared it would be the first step in going mad. Many of John’s
decisions in the lab were made with that worry in mind.

“Is that you?” he called again. There was no
answer. Slowly, he rose from the floor and walked toward the
bathroom.

“It’s been long enough. You haven’t even
turned on the watch’s communicator! Did you forget about me?” he
asked angrily in his scratchy voice.

John opened the door and was surprised to see
a woman on top of his toilet. She was wearing the watch. He leaned
in cautiously and examined her face more closely. Suddenly, she
opened her eyes.

“Ahh!” John yelped, falling backward to the
floor again.

“Hello,” the woman said sweetly. “John?”

“Who are you?” he said, backing up until
hitting the wall behind him.

She walked over to him and leaned down.
“Don’t be scared.”

“Stay away from me,” he said, raising to his
feet and dashing back toward the workstation. He lifted the scalpel
he’d dropped on the table and waved it at her.

“Okay, I’m sorry,” she said, stepping
back.

John noticed the picture he’d drawn of
Thutmose behind her, then looked back at the knife in his hand. He
set it down on the table, ashamed of himself.

“Who are you?” he asked, his voice returning
to what it once had been.

“My name is Karen,” she answered.

“Karen?” John repeated. “Why does that sound
so familiar?” He sat in the chair by the workstation and stared
across the table at her. “You’re the woman Kala was looking for,
aren’t you?” he realized suddenly.

“Yes,” she said, taking one step closer to
John. “He found me, actually.”

“Good for him,” John replied sternly. “You
know, he’s never spoken with me since he left me here. Not once.
And he can; oh, I know that he can.”

“May I?” she asked, gesturing at the round
black stool by the table. John nodded his approval and she sat
down.

“You know, there was a time when I’d sit in
this chair twice a day and watch Felix do his magic.”

“Why were you down here?” John asked
suspiciously. “I thought he said he was alone.”

“Not at first,” she answered. “There was a
time when he worked here willingly, albeit under a false pretext. I
was his supervisor.”

“Then, are you the one who trapped him here?”
John asked.

“No,” she answered. “Didn’t he tell you
anything?”

“Almost nothing,” he said. “But that’s just
like him. Selfish over even his own back-story.”

“Don’t judge him too harshly, John,” Karen
said softly. “He’s led a complicated life.”

“My sympathy for him ran out on the day I
realized that he hadn’t come back to visit me, and that he wasn’t
going to. That’s also the day I lost hope of him figuring me a way
out of here.”

“I imagined he’d come to see you,” she said
quietly.

“Well, he didn’t,” John replied quickly. “He
said he would and he didn’t.”

“He should have. I don’t expect you to
forgive him, but please understand that Felix has been faced with
one impossible decision after another since coming down to the
labs. He sacrificed himself to save me from here. Did you know
that?”

“No,” John muttered.

“He had a choice. Only one of us could leave.
He chose me over himself. That’s how he came to be trapped here,
like you are now,” she said.

“If he’s such a great guy then why hasn’t he
come back? Why hasn’t he spoken with me over the watch? He even
showed me how to work his dumb hologram thing. Why would he do that
if he wasn’t planning on talking to me with it?”

“If I had to guess? He feels guilty, John.
Leaving you here was probably harder on him than you can possibly
imagine,” she said.

“Why hasn’t he built another watch?” John
yelled, slamming his fist into the table in front of him. “Why
hasn’t he gotten me out of this place?” He panted three heavy
breaths before allowing himself to calm. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Karen said. “But if you want
an answer to that, then you have to try to understand the way he
thinks. Think about the choices he’s been faced with, saving me or
himself, trapping you here or gaining his own freedom, even seeking
some kind of revenge on the company before working on another
device to free you.”

“Is that what he’s doing?” John asked. “Out
there looking for some pointless revenge instead of saving me?”

“It wouldn’t be pointless if he actually
succeeded. They’re still out there, John, just half a mile past
those stones at your doorstep. Every year they’re bringing new
people to this exact same fate. If he can stop them, then it saves
countless lives moving forward. What’s the freedom of one person
when compared to hundreds? That’s the way he sees it, anyway. And
I’ll be honest with you; I can’t argue the logic. In an odd way,
each of his decisions has made sense. He isn’t evil; he’s just a
scientist.”

“Aren’t you also a ‘scientist?’” John
asked.

“Yes, and I’ve turned my back on my
conscience more times than I’d care to admit. But I’ve come to
realize that there has to be a point where we stop just thinking
with frozen logic. Scientists like to believe the world is just a
product of physics and math, vectors and numbers dictating
everything.”

Karen stood from the stool and walked around
the table to John’s side. “But there are things in the universe
like love and compassion, and humans feel them naturally in their
gut just as easily as neurons fire in their brains. There’s got to
be a reason, even a scientific one, that we react this way. We
cannot ignore the way we feel any more than we can ignore the way
we think. We have to find a balance there or we really are just
numbers and vectors.”

She knelt down by John and placed a hand on
his thigh. “And I can’t accept a universe defined like that. Not
anymore. And that’s why I’m here, to give you this.”

She stood, pulled the rounded tool from her
pocket, and slid it between the watch and her wrist. She unlatched
the band, and John watched the Diaspora slide easily from her arm.
She offered it to him. “Take it,” she said.

“But I can’t,” John argued. “You give me this
speech about love and compassion, then you ask me to take that,
that
thing
from you and leave you down here to rot? No.”
John swiveled his stool away from her.

“Someone has got to, John,” she said, “and it
sure as hell doesn’t deserve to be you.”

“And what have you done that’s so terrible?”
John asked.

Karen looked down toward the ground beneath
her feet. “I imprisoned a lover,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone
that before.”

“I don’t understand.”

“These caves ... ” Karen began, looking
behind her to the stone-filled port glass in the door behind her.
“The company collapses them to trap scientists for the off-chance
that they may need them again. They have the money for it, so they
just figure that it’s safer and more strategic than executing
them.”