CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

The Red Forest

“Bethany,” my father began. “Let's get the story straight. You are not a hostage here and you never were.”

“Gunpoint!” I exclaimed weakly. “I was brought here at gunpoint.” I lifted three fingers to enhance my point. “Three times!”

“You were rescued from a madman who kidnapped you,” he corrected with a stern voice.

“That's not the story I'll tell,” I said in a sing-song whine. “I'll tell the police and anyone else that you were the one to kidnap me.” Suddenly, my teeth were chattering. I grasped at a blanket and tried to cover my shivering frame.

“She's going into shock,” Christian muttered. “She needs to go to a real hospital.”

“Look,” my father said, wheeling closer to me. “I need you to prove that my theories about immortality are correct. You have this man's heart inside you and it has made you immortal. There is a lot of money riding on this and some extremely hostile people waiting for the answer.”

I wanted to reply, but the chattering of my teeth was overriding my ability to talk or listen or reason with whatever he was saying. Instead, I closed my eyes and felt the blanket around me. I had to get a grip on myself. At the very moment I decided I had to get a grip, I did. My teeth stopped chattering, and my body did what I told it to do, instead of what it did naturally.

“It’s not that we want to live forever. It’s because of things this man,” he said pointing at Christian, “has done during warfare. With his unique ability, he has been a perfect message system since he simply cannot be persuaded to give up information, or die. He has probably done it for centuries. He’s a hero, but why should he have to shoulder the burden by himself? If we could learn what’s special about him, what stops him from dying, from being bothered by torture, he could pass his diplomacy baton on to the next generation of immortals, and he would be free.”

“Free?” I muttered.

“Yes,” he said, smiling. Even I thought it was a rather convincing smile. “Free. He would be free to travel, to be with you, to live without always having to look over his shoulder. Others would take over for him.”

I looked him straight in the eye. “I want to be free, too. Send me home.”

“You’re not looking at the bigger picture. Can’t you see how exciting all this is? How exciting it could be for you? You would be the first!”

“Look, I never had a heart transplant. I had surgery and it saved me,” I lied, not caring how outrageous it sounded to my father, who already knew differently. “You see, Christian wasn’t afraid to bring out the big bucks to pay for special treatment, which was something you could never do. It was shocking when you died and had so little money to leave your daughter.” I glanced at Christian. “Wait a minute! He died,” I said, pointing at my father. “But he’s not dead! How do we know you’re not immortal, dad?”

He grumbled and shook his head. “I’m an old man in a wheelchair.”

“You could just be pretending,” I said with a smug smile.

“I’m not immortal. Bethany,” he said, pulling something from his pocket and ignoring the nonsense I had spouted. “Have you seen my tombstone?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know it's been blank because there was never a death certificate for me. I had a closed casket funeral and they buried an empty box. Just this last week, someone did this.” He showed me a photograph of his tombstone. It now had a death date, and unless I was completely confused, that day was today. “If you don't cooperate, they'll kill me. The men I'm working for; they're dangerous.”

I never felt sorry for people who asked me to. I found pleas for pity pathetic, even when I wanted pity for myself. “Yeah,” I said, examining the work. “They hired an actual engraver. Only cold-blooded killers do that.”

Christian laughed, but dad kept talking like I hadn’t said anything. “I owed them a lot of money before I faked my death, but now I owe them much more.”

“And I'm supposed to protect you from the consequences of what you did? Perhaps you could explain why.”

“They were the ones who told me about him,” he said, indicating Christian and sticking to his original story. “They told me if I moved you to Edmonton and used my grandfather as an excuse to make friends with him, he would save your life and he did. Surely, knowing that will help you to understand that they are people with incredible resources. It's not for nothing that I've worked for them all these years.”

His argument was conflicting. Either the people he worked for were good people, who would not kill a crippled man, or they were monsters who didn’t deserve to know whether I was immortal or not. He might have been able to find a way to convince me if he had not mentioned 'all these years'. I thought of the bugs and cameras I had found in my room and the hungry way Charles looked at me. I remembered the fake army guys, their automatic weapons and how I had once expected my whole life to twirl by me without ever having a gun pointed at my nose.

I sighed. “You're wrong about me. I'm not immortal. If I were immortal I would not be this terrified of dying, which will surely happen to me if I stay here with you. You're worried about your own life. Your greed will kill us both. They'll kill you and keep me around to 'test' on, and when I turn out to be as fragile as you, they'll kill me too. If you want me to live, you're going to have to help me leave. Right now.” This was the last appeal I could make. He had to have some desire for my safety. I was his child!

My father took the news the same way I had and his fingers started to tremble like he too was in shock. He had a blanket on his lap and legs. It was brown and black plaid and he hid his shaking hands under the blanket.

“You have no idea how committed I have been to this project,” my father said in a small voice. “I've given everything I had over and over again to see this through to the end.” I heard the sound of something crack under the blanket and I thought he was cracking his knuckles as a nervous habit.

Christian knew better and dove to stop what was about to happen. I didn't see it. I didn't know what was happening until it was too late. Christian knew that the sound was the sound of a hammer being pulled on a gun. My father didn't take the gun out from under his blanket because he needed those precious seconds so he could pull the trigger before Christian stopped him. Christian didn't make it in time and the gun fired. The bullet hit me in the middle of my forehead and the bullet lodged itself in my brain.

***

I had never had something in my brain before. To put it mildly, it really messed me up. I couldn't see or hear. It was like I was thrown into the place that exists only when you’re bored. It’s sunny outside, you close your eyes, and still try to look out as if you could see something through your eyelids. The world there is dark, but there are shapes, blood vessels like the limbs of a tree, stretching just out of your reach. It's a place you can sort of see, if you use your imagination, but it isn't a place you can go, unless you get shot in the head.

I suddenly felt that I was there, in that place. The sky was brown and the trees were leafless and red barked. I was there, walking in a black dress.

In my dreams before, I had always worn a white dress, like a little girl going to sleep. I don’t mean it when I say ‘sleep’. I’m referring to the drug-induced sleep of a girl who is about to be cut open on an operating room table. I wore a white hospital gown that did up in the back, but when I imagined the dress, it was something you slid over your head, something with a lot of skirt you would have to pick up if you were to run. Something you wore when you wanted to feel the sun on your shoulders.

But now, the dress was black, and it was exactly the same dress. It had been white when my body was repaired under a thousand tiny concentrated lights. Now it was the black of a woman who repairs herself in the dark of a starless night.

I was not dead.

I could still feel the heart Christian had given me and it was beating strong, undisturbed by what was happening in my head.

I tried to see the forest around me as it seemed like the only clue for curing myself as I felt cut off from most of my senses, except my heart. Red vines hung all around me and everything was dark, but aligned correctly, growing the way it was intended until I came to the problem. It was like a torpedo crashed through a forest at high speeds and the limbs of the scarlet trees had broken when they collided. The shell was enormous and some part of me knew that it was the bullet inside my mind, but I didn't know how to remove it. It was huge, like a helicopter.

I rubbed my hands against the dark fabric of my dress and reminded myself that I was not there the way it appeared. My body was showing me the problem in a way I could understand so I could fix it. What part of me was seeing this if my brain had a bullet in it? If it wasn’t my brain, then I could repair even that. It was a part of me that lived, perhaps my spirit that saw the damage, and if I could instruct my cells to repair themselves, perhaps I would again be able to open my eyes.

There was no muscle in my mind to push the bullet out. Maybe I didn’t need muscle, tendon or bone. Christian didn’t need those things to keep his blood flowing. He commanded the cells to move and they moved.

I wondered whether or not I ought to try anything. Maybe it was better if I pretended to be dead. I didn't feel that death was close. The black of the dress didn't mean I was dead. It just signified how much I had changed.

In the end, I decided against it. Even if I wanted to lay still and pretend to be dead, my heart was still beating. Any idiot who could take a pulse would know the truth.

I had to learn to take control of my body.

I put out a hand to touch the length of the tree beside me. It felt nothing like a tree, but instead slick, warm, and pulsing. Then I saw the bugs. They were not insects, but spheres with tiny white wings. They were not blood. What was I looking at? They were everywhere, and they were suddenly coming in huge quantities, like a plague of Egypt. What were they? They weren't winged creatures any more than the trees were trees. I put my hands out and caught one. I caught a cube floating in a liquid droplet, with wings. It was a square crystal. It was salt water and it was flooding the area. The brain was a sterile place. It made sense there was something like saline there.

Then suddenly, there were other bugs. These were red with longer wings. These had to be individual blood cells I was spilling.

I needed to try something. I was now up to my knees in white and red bugs that were starting to seem more like streams of slugs.

I suddenly understood that I could still die. If I refused to take charge of the situation and fix the problem, then I could go braindead and die. I had to act.

I felt a tree quiver when I touched it. I touched one of the trees partly crushed by the bullet. It tried to bend, but its branches were pinned. I turned and placed my hands on an unbent tree and said, “Move.”

It moved.

Everything around it moved.

I moved.

And suddenly, I knew for certain that my body could move absolutely any way I wanted it to. I could get the trees to push the bullet back out where it came from. I could repair what was damaged and make myself whole.

My father shot me because he was desperate and he was gambling on the idea that I was immortal. I had to take the chance that I would be better off with my nervous system repaired, but if I pushed the bullet out, it would roll down my face. Everyone would see it. They might even be recording it. That would remove all doubt. What if I could get the bullet to fall a different way? What if it fell down through my sinuses and the roof on my mouth so it landed on my tongue?

Could I do such a thing?

As a way of focusing my thoughts, I told my body, “Make it fall. Make it fall.”

All at once, I knew I was disturbing my brain far more by what I was ordering it to do than the bullet had done. This was more invasive, but I heard little voices and connections in my body telling me I could let the bullet fall into the back of my throat and either cough it out or force it down my esophagus.

I chose the esophagus and felt the world around me tremor as the bullet sunk into the forest floor until it was out of sight. My whole body in the real world must have trembled with the force of it, but that was probably not important. The important part was that the people there must not know that the bullet had changed locations. I was surprised at how many of the winged insects disappeared with the bullet. Blood and saline were dripping from my nose and aiding the bullet on its journey downwards.

When the ground replaced itself, I walked around the forest touching the wounded parts and healing them with only my touch. It wasn't really my touch. It was my focus on each, individual part. I thought about Brandon putting his tongue in his mouth and insisting that he would know if it was his tongue. I understood the feeling now. Your body would follow your commands, each bit would do exactly what you asked it to do, even if it wasn't in that part's nature to do what you asked. His tongue was probably half-way knit back together before he disappeared and left me there.

With those thoughts, I finished healing my head and thought about the stitches in my back. With a bat of my virtual eyelashes, I was there in my black dress examining the four hundred stitches from a vantage point of inside my body. Each one was enormous, like a suspension bridge overhead with each of those bits of thread appearing like ironworks.

The blood here was the blood I had used as paint. I had done some of this damage by commanding myself to bleed more on purpose. Now I needed to stop the blood, seal the breaches and heal the whole area. The trees were here too, and I knew how they worked, but I didn't feel like that was what I needed. I needed the ground to rise to meet those stitches. Only when the floor and the ceiling of this space met would I not need those stitches anymore.

I considered how I ought to touch the floor to make it obey my command and decided to get down and rest my whole body flat against it with my view pointed upwards. I got down and put my head back, extended my arms slightly, palms up and called out, “Seal this up!”

To my great surprise, the floor didn't move. The walls did. The opposite walls rushed to each other and as they did, the stitches snapped one by one. It was like being in the middle of a horrific disaster, like the Red Sea coming down on the Egyptian army after Moses parted it. There were over four hundred of them, and each one of them broke with a satisfying snap.

I watched the remainder of my stitches snap. It was over quickly, like fireworks. Fireworks that stopped blood.

I got to my feet and felt a surge of triumph lift me. It didn’t matter what world I met when I opened my eyes. The gift Christian gave me was the greatest gift anyone had ever given. He had cut off his own hand without fear, and I wondered how far his gift extended.

Perhaps it didn’t have an end.