The Eighth Day

Chapter 46

He stood on a beach bathed in darkening shades of red and orange as the horizon swallowed the sun. A salty breeze tousled his hair. He ran a hand through his beard, its coarse hair still unfamiliar to him.

The waves broke on the beach and glided over his feet before receding into the darkening ocean. He curled his toes in the sand and filled his lungs with the balm of the ocean and the city.

In one hand, he held a worn and stained newspaper.

He was an illusion—the rabbit in the hat, the quarter behind the ear, the severed rope made whole. His life was fiction, memories that never happened and love of a woman he never knew. But he was alive and whole. He hadn't suffered a mother's womb, the joys of childhood, the angst of his teenage years. But a part of him was real. He had a soul. He clung to the truth of this as a man lost at sea clings to driftwood.

In the grand scheme of things, he wasn't so different. Regular people with a past still remembered very little of it. They processed and stored their long-term memories in the left inferior prefrontal lobe, which didn't begin developing until the age of three. And after this age, only fragmented memories remained as a testament to those early years, a collage of remembrance and broken shards of the five senses stored in the brain as engrams. Even as adults, interests and needs filtered perception, and some memories were lost forever. The currents of time washed away these long-ago sights, smells, and sounds, leaving few experiences behind as proof of a past existence. What remained were snippets of a life that might've belonged to someone else.

Amnesia was the standard condition of the human species.

Even now, the memory of her face faded and would continue to fade until only a vague impression remained, but he remembered her voice as if it were yesterday.

You have a soul. A good soul. Don't ever forget that.

And it was his soul, not something created and grown in a lab. It defined him because it was real. His memories, however, were lies. Thus, he must unlearn his past, like a chalkboard wiped clean, because hidden behind the veil of consciousness, the face of another life waited, a life that belonged to someone long ago. He couldn't pick up where he left off like he was returning to an unfinished book. The pages were frail and crumbled beneath his touch. He had to write a new ending himself.

The wind changed direction. A man approached, shuffling through the sand, and stopped beside him. They faced the horizon together, comfortable in the silence. In spite of their differences, in many ways they were the same. Two broken men with pasts they must escape and futures they must rebuild.

"How're you feeling?" Harrington asked.

"Good," Shawn said. "How'd it go?"

"We're meeting for dinner tomorrow."

"A date?"

Harrington smiled. "I don't know if I'd go that far."

The rhythm of the ocean and sounds of the city surrounded them, a symphony of man and nature. Shawn said, "It'll work out. You'll see."

Harrington nodded. "I think you're right."

"Of course I'm right. Remember?" He tapped his brow. "Genetic augmentation."

Harrington laughed.

When the former detective got out of the hospital, he'd found Shawn sitting on the steps outside of his apartment, and he took the younger man in. Shawn stayed on the futon, and Harrington moved into the bedroom. They cleaned the place and made it hospitable.

They bought food and other necessities online and had everything delivered. Otherwise, they kept themselves barricaded in and checked the neighborhood through the window for signs someone was watching them. Footsteps in the hall or the slam of a door, and they scrambled for their guns. Harrington slept with his under his pillow, and Shawn didn't sleep much at all.