Tabula Rasa(5)

The garden was supposed to be some utopian paradise, but I couldn’t imagine anything as a paradise that only contained two people. It seemed lonely. No wonder Eve began forming questionable friendships with reptiles.

I picked at the chicken nuggets on my plate.

“Something wrong with it?” Trevor asked.

“Just not very hungry.”

He looked concerned as if trying to remember if loss of appetite was related to concussion.

I stared down at the baked beans and chicken on my plate and wondered if I’d ever get my memory back. I wasn’t sure I wanted to remember a time that was happier when the world ran like clockwork and no one thought it could ever end. I had a sense of what things had once been like in general, though I couldn’t seem to project myself into any of the stories. Maybe that was for the best.

“When are we going to look for more survivors?” I asked, trying to stop thinking about my troubling loss of memory.

“Am I such poor company?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I’d seen proof positive that I at least knew him. We had at least, at some point in our history, sat together in a photo booth like we liked each other and gotten photos made. But the number of things he wasn’t telling me could no doubt fill libraries. Had we had a rocky relationship? Was there some awful shared trauma he’d been trying not to burden me with? A tragic loss?

Maybe I was the burden. Would it have been easier for him to survive this without me? Did he want to? It didn’t seem like this was a fantastic quality of life to aspire to. I wondered if anybody else out there had a life any better. The Amish were probably doing okay. If they hadn’t had to fight off hordes of previously comfortable people now without an internet connection.

So many questions. I thought back to the first moments after I’d woken. Trevor hadn’t seemed as surprised as I’d expected when I said I’d lost my memory.

It had all happened in a rush, but that part hadn’t seemed to ruffle him like it should have. He hadn’t even dwelt on it very long. The only part I was sure about was that when he tore through those woods after me, he’d been panicked.

Finally, he answered my earlier question about looking for others. “Let’s just give it a little while. We don’t know what we’ll encounter out there. I don’t think we should leave until we absolutely have to.”

“But, you said we’d be safer in a group. Shouldn’t we at least...”

“Elodie, that’s enough!” I flinched, and he quickly softened his tone as if trying to reason with a small child set on ice cream for dinner. “It’s not safe. And I don’t want you wandering outside the park on your own. We know the park is safe because I test it occasionally with the Geiger counter. I don’t want you wandering outside the guaranteed safe zone into a possible radiation pocket. We need to go together.”

“O-okay.” I didn’t even know if that was how radiation worked, but Trevor seemed sure of himself, so I let it go.

I finished my dinner, even though I didn’t really want it. But I might get hungry later, and the last thing I wanted to do was annoy this man I didn’t remember knowing. I also didn’t relish the idea of coming down here alone in the middle of the night foraging for canned goods like an insomniac squirrel. However unsure I might be of Trevor, I liked the idea of being by myself in this big artificial castle even less.

Trevor took the plates and cups back to the kitchen and washed them with some water he must have drawn from the mysterious well. There were several medieval-looking pitchers of it in the industrial-sized fridge, pitchers which waiters and waitresses no doubt had used to refill iced tea. I stayed off to the side out of his way, trying to pick out a memory of anything I had ever personally experienced before today.

When I thought really hard, I got a fuzzy image of a white room and Trevor’s face. But then it blurred back into nothing but a bright white visual noise that made me dizzy. I gripped the edge of the stainless steel island for support.

“Are you okay?”

“F-fine. Just a little disoriented still.”

Trevor nodded. “Given the spill you took, I’m sure that’s quite normal.” He left the dishes to drain near the sink and joined me on the other side of the kitchen.

“You can explore the park tomorrow. Just don’t climb on any more pirate ships.” He gave me a handsome crooked smile that somehow still felt overwhelmingly ominous despite how hard he tried to make it endearing. “Would you like to see the first floor?”

“Sure.” What I really wanted to say was ‘not really’, but I didn’t want to piss off the only other person possibly for miles—the only one who knew how to navigate this fresh new hellscape.

On the bottom level, Trevor turned a crank. The drawbridge we’d walked across to get into the castle actually came up, closing us in for the night.

“You can never be too careful,” he said.

It had taken a lot of strength for him to turn the crank and raise the drawbridge. There was no way I could do that on my own. It might be easier to lower it, but that was just me guessing because it seemed like letting it down should be less strenuous than bringing it back up. I didn’t like the idea of him being the one who said whether or not I could leave the castle by a simple display of brute strength.

But that was life now, wasn’t it? In a civilized world, there might have been some level of equality, enforced by laws, but mostly enforced by practicality and technology. Now, everything was back to the law of the jungle. And brute strength was king. This wouldn’t be a world of happy equality, no matter what type of person Trevor turned out to be.