Removing Her

Removing Her

By: Paul William Fassett

I have lived for hundreds of years, traveled the endless dimensions in search of meaning, and I have found nothing but pain. Meaning is in the experience of life, and that meaning changes from person to person. Experience is what tells us that water is wet, that fire is hot, and falling down, though painful, is just a lesson to be learned.

            Sometimes our experience can control who we are, and no matter how hard we try to break our programming we end up repeating the same mistakes because we are trying to avoid pain.

            But pain is universal. At some point we all experience it.

            What if you could shape your experience? What if you could tailor the memories of your life to fit the lifestyle and future you desired? Would you become a different person?

           

            Kaiber Kully was a man of special talents that only his closest friends knew about. Which is why Jaden found himself with a broken heart knocking on Kaiber's apartment door.

            Kaiber wasn't expecting company. In fact he was meditating. It was the only way he knew how to deal with all the pain he took into himself from others.  He stood and looked in the mirror, quickly dealing with his hair by running his fingers through it until it was brought to lay back against his head.

            Bang bang came the sound from the door.

            “Hang on a minute,” Kaiber said.

            Kaiber never saw himself when he looked in the mirror. His lips, though thick and plump could be thin and tiny, depending on who he saw there. His small dimpled chin could be large, jutting, round or covered in hair. He never saw himself anymore or felt like himself. He had experienced too much of other people's lives to know who he was anymore.

            Bang bang the sound came again, and this time Kaiber had enough. He swung the door open to see his friend Jaden standing there, looking like his muscles leaped off his skeleton and wriggled out of his skin.

            He was like an empty flesh colored sack. His skin seemed to hang off him, and deep circles ringed the outside of his eyes. Every hair on his head seemed to be working for itself going this way and that way, and he gave off a smell that should never come from a full grown adult.

            “Jaden, what are you...” Kaiber didn't know what to say. “What happened to you?”

            “I'm a mess man. I can't sleep, I can't hold down food. I haven't left my apartment for weeks.” Jaden slid around Kaiber and walked to the middle of the living room, sitting on the arm of Kaiber's beat up green couch.

            “Why?”

            “She left me man. She just walked out.”

            “Who, Katey?”

            “Yeah. I thought maybe something happened to her. I came home, and all her stuff was gone.” Jaden was in a panic. His eyes were wide and dark. He paced and sat and repeated. “No note, nothing. I called her on her codex, and she had her serial number changed.”

            “Why? I mean, what happened?”

            “I looked into that, you know. I had a PI go and find her. She moved in with some Elf named Jock.” Jaden grabbed Kaiber by the collar. “I need you to help me man.”

            “Calm down, Jaden.”

            “Seriously! You don't know what it's like to live in my head! She is in there, fucking that Jock asshole, in my brain, all hours of the night. And she enjoys it. She enjoys every fucking minute of it, and all I can do is lay in bed and watch her, hear her moaning in my head. I can't fucking take it anymore!”

            “What do you want me to do about it?” Kaiber asked, hoping he didn't know the answer.

            “Take it away,” Jaden said.

            “Take what away?”

            “Her. Get her out of my head. Do that thing you do and get rid of her.”

            “No.”

            “Come on man.” Jaden was pleading. His face took on the pallor of a dying man. His lips trembled. “Look at me. You know I wouldn't ask you to do it if it wasn't important, man.”

            Kaiber turned away from his friend and was walking to the door when a clammy hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

            “Look at me!” Jaden held his wrists out, and several cuts scabbed his forearm like tree bark. “You have to help me man. I can't take it anymore. There's a decade worth of memories in me and every thought is her.” He beat his fist against his head as the tears came spontaneously.

            Kaiber grabbed his arms and pulled Jaden in and hugged him like a mother would a crying child. Jaden's body convulsed and bucked with each muffled cry becoming louder and louder as tears soaked through Kaiber's shirt. A minute seems like an eternity when you are holding a crying man, trying to come up with a reason not to help.

            Jaden pulled away, wiping the tears from his eyes, never looking up from his feet.

            “Jaden. Do you know why I don't don't mess with memories anymore?”

            “No,” Jaden said.

            “Your memories don't just disappear when I go into your head. It's not like I take an eraser and they are gone.”

            “I don't care what you have to do, I just want to forget her.”

            “Listen. Whatever you are feeling, I will experience it. Your pain, your memories of her, that feeling of betrayal, anger, whatever, it becomes mine.”

            “I...”

            Kaiber could sense his friends hesitation, but his resolve didn't seem to break.

            “Would you do it for me, Kai?”

            “Is it worth losing me as a friend?”

            “It doesn't need to be that way...”

            “Yeah it does. Jaden, every time I see you from now on, I will be reminded of your pain. I feel it like it's happening all over again. Every time I see Katey, every time I think of you two together, I'll feel that agony. I'll have to cut you out of my life. Are you sure you want to do this?”

            Kaiber sat on the couch and watched as his friend stood there thinking, his face contorting as if sudden pains had shot up his neck and face. Tears rolled out silently from his eyes, and his mouth moved in a wordless cry as pain etched lines on his forehead.

            He sniffed and took a deep breath, trying to gain composure and sat down on the floor.

            “I keep thinking,” Jaden said. “How I could deal with these thoughts but there doesn't seem to be a way out. Drugs, liquor, I've tried everything and all it seems to do is make it worse. If there was a way for me to pry her out of there I would, but just when I think I am over her, I find myself at her apartment, banging on the door. That elf fucker beat me so bad I thought I was going to wake up in the hospital. She stopped him. I went home that night, in pain, and figured, that's it. That was the wake-up call. Then I was laying in bed and I thought, she must still love me. She stopped him from beating me to death. There must be some love still in there. It's sick! I know that, but I just want her back, and then I want her gone, and then I want to kiss her, and then… I just want to kill her.”

            Jaden laid his arms on the coffee table and rested his chin on top, staring through the glass top at Kaiber's feet. Kaiber already knew it was over. Jaden had made his decision.

            He stood and went to the medicine cabinet and pulled out a red gel capped pill as big as a suppository and when he got back to the living room he laid it on the table in front of his friend.

            “Take that, and lay down on your back.”

            Jaden took the pill into his fingers and looked at Kaiber, a smile inching its way, tentatively, yet never committing to his face. It was a sort of silent thank you. Jaden swallowed the pill and laid back on the carpet as Kaiber came around the table and sat on his knees next to his friend.

            It only took a few minutes before the pill took control and Jaden was drifting off to sleep.

            Kaiber closed his eyes and in the jumbled mess of his mind, through all the voices of past memories. He sifted through the slide show of images, pushing aside photos and large novels of peoples lives that he had archived away in his mind. Kaiber turned off the hundreds of televisions stacked high as skyscrapers playing childhood memories of lives he never live, and cleared the space in his mind to be empty, and clear of clutter.

            He pictured his friend's face. The mask of pain he seemed to be wearing as a new persona, the premature wrinkles, and dark eye rings, his voice, he built a version of his friend in his imagination, lying on his back in the empty black void of the memory world. A tiny white dot formed at the center of Jaden's forehead and a beam of light shot from it like a beacon.

            Kaiber placed a finger inside and pulled at the white dot until it tore open and he was able to fit his entire hand in, and as the dot grew larger, Jaden's head, neck body and legs tore open to flood the empty space with a white light, and when the light receded, and the world of Jaden's mind rendered itself, Kaiber was there, with Katey, looking into her large green eyes.

            She was young then. Long blonde hair, tiny pointed ears, small among most elves. Kaiber knew her then, knew whatever Jaden knew. Knew she was only half elven, and hated that about herself. Like she had no identity. Kaiber felt Jaden's insecurity, like she was only with him, a human, because she was insecure, unsure of who she was.

            Kaiber was in bed with her, her body on top of his, her sweat becoming one with his sweat, feeling her tightness, her wetness, the warmth inside her, the intense pleasure.

            The memory split and they were in a room, a hotel room, and she threw something across the bed, almost hitting Kaiber. She creamed at him, told him he was making it hard to breathe. Kaiber felt what Jaden felt. The fear, the anxiety of her leaving him. Of her wanting to leave. All he wanted to do was cross the threshold of the bed that seperated them, and hug her, tell her he was sorry and that he'd do whatever she wanted, but he didn't. He didn't want her to know how weak he felt around her. How utterly powerless her inability to be honest with him made him feel.

            Roller coasters, video games, movie nights with friends, Kaiber even saw himself in Jaden's memories, felt the jealousy that Jaden felt whenever Katey talked to Kaiber, or laughed at one of his jokes.

            The hallway was just an outline of a hallway accented by a narrow floor, no walls, no ceiling, just a void and a helpless feeling that Kaiber could fall at anytime and be dumped into an endless fall. An echoed called to him as the hallway seemed to stretch forever into the empty horizon.

            Kaiber walked on as the floor became thinner and thinner until he was walking a tight rope, his arms stretched out at his sides, taking one step at a time, and though he wanted to stop, turn around, and pretend it wasn't there, the echoing sounds and the muffled pleasure, forced him forward.

            A single missed step sent him tumbling over, just barely able to catch the floor with his fingers. He hung there listening to the sounds grow louder as a door appeared above. It slowly swung open, and the noise was clear. Kaiber clawed his way up to the floor, and into the room on his hands and knees and when he rose he saw Katey, and a formless, shapeless thing of a man, twisted into impossible shapes, writhing in a sweaty pleasure.

            Kaiber clawed at his face closing his eyes so he couldn't see the woman that he loved betray him, to toss all those years aside for someone she barely knew.

            The floor turned soft and Kaiber was sinking. He tried to trudge toward the bed, but the mud was thick and each step took him further down until he was waist deep paddling trying to keep his head above the black, thick bloody mud.

            His head went under and when he opened his eyes he could see Jaden, hanging from a door knob, dead, a note pinned to his chest. The lack of air caused him to gasp and Kaiber felt the mud clog his lungs like vomit that would never rise and the last thing he saw was the lid of a storage chest closing as those memories were stored away in Kaiber's mind.

            Kaiber only saw Jaden when the stabs of painful memories became too frequent. It comforted him to know that Jaden was happy again. Able to live. If he was happy, it was like Kaiber had permission to be too.

            One day he saw his friend at a street side diner, eating with a young woman. Breaking his own rule, Kaiber went to see his friend, and they exchanged pleasantries, asked how the other was doing. Doing good, they said, and only one of them was lying.

            Her name was Britney, a half elf girl. Kaiber looked at her long blonde hair, green eyes, small pointed ears, and he started to cry. She reminded him of Katey, even that ineffectual look behind those beautiful green orbs.

            Kaiber walked away, embarrassed, unable to see them together anymore because he knew what he had done for Jaden was only delaying the inevitable. Like a wise man from earth once said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

            It was a lesson well learned.