Seneca Rebel

I WOKE UP freezing cold in a white room wrapped in blue mirrored windows. Thousands of one inch white tiles made up the floor, and flat white paint covered the ceiling. No blemishes. It was just like the last time, only this time I wasn’t alone. From my horizontal perspective, I spotted several figures. Everyone was blurry. Slowly, I craned my neck. While I was fully expecting to be paralyzed, I was pleasantly relieved to find my body fully functioning. They had only knocked me out this time. Thank goodness. I emerged from the brain haze and recognized that there were five... or six people present. I was on a hospital bed, in a hospital gown. Gregory, a couple of S.O.I.L. officers, two women I never had seen before in doctors’ coats and... Reba?

Reba’s eyes were pinned to the ground in front of him. I didn’t allow my gaze to linger on him for too long because I knew what they had done. I had to go with the flow because they had tried to wipe out my memory. I couldn’t let on that I knew who Reba was and it appeared that he was helping me do that. Normally I would have been shocked to see him here, but these days I was shockproof.

Gregory stood up. “Hi, Dorothy. I’m Dr. Wes Stanton. You have experienced a bad fall but don’t you worry. You’re going to be fine. You can go ahead and sit up whenever you feel ready. Everything looks good, so we’re going to send you on your way, we just need to ask you a few questions to confirm there hasn’t been any memory impairment. Okay, sweetie?”

I wanted to jump out of my seat and get right up in his smiling, lying face.

“Okay.” Wow. They really had gone through with it. They were purging me from society. At least, they were trying.

I sat up. Looked at Reba. He was watching me intently, but quickly shifted his eyes away to avoid eye contact.

“Dorothy Campbell?” One of the two women I had never seen before wore eyeglasses that she focused with a tiny nob on the side as she looked up from a tablet in her hands. Her lenses reflected a charged silvery glare from her screen so I couldn’t see her eyes.

“Yes.”

“Do you know where you are?”

I swallowed. I swallowed my pride. I swallowed my fear. I swallowed my sense of rebellion. “No.”

She smiled sympathetically, “You were on a trip to the Capitol with your second cousins from Ireland. You slipped on a candy wrapper and hit your head pretty badly. You are in the infirmary at the Smithsonian.”

Seneca Rebel

The woman next to the interviewer typed feverishly on an identical tablet. She didn’t even look up. They both had their hair in buns. They could have been twins, except that only one of them wore glasses.

The interviewer cocked her head and spoke in a warm, relaxed tone. “Dorothy can you tell us where you are now?”

“The infirmary at the Smithsonian.”

“Good.”

Gregory looked to Reba.

Reba’s whole body was tight like he was under a dentist’s drill. He blinked about a mile a minute. “Affirmative.”

This was unreal. They used Reba to determine truth in exit interviews for exiled Senecans.

Gregory nodded to the interviewer.

“Dorothy, can you tell us the last person you saw?”

I squinted and rubbed my forehead as if trying to think through the pain of my fall at the Smithsonian. “Well, before my cousins, it would have been my mom and my dog.”

Gregory waited on Reba. “Affirmative.”

Reba knew that the brainwashing was not working on me, but he provided an “affirmative” for every answer I gave. For two hours we went through a list of things that I’d supposedly done. The interviewer planted in my mind bits and pieces of facts from my alleged travels with my second cousins. The twisted part was, they knew all about my second cousins. Even more than I ever did. The woman next to the interviewer worked the tablet like a stenographer. I knew exactly what she thought she was doing. She thought she was re-calibrating my neurological processes via the mainframe to which I was supposedly entangled. They were attempting to implant false memories.

Reba was so focused on keeping his gaze locked on the floor, he could have burned a hole in it with his eyes.

Gregory approached me and patted my shoulder, just as he had when he and Ellen had stopped by to see me with the Dominic warning. “The gentlemen and I are going to be going now. This nice woman will help you get dressed in the clothes we found you in. You go ahead and make yourself comfortable here, sweetie. Later this morning, these two nice Smithsonian liaisons will be accompanying you on a flight back to Los Angeles.”

Smithsonian liaisons! Gregory was proving himself to be quite a piece of work.

“You’ll be home with your mom by dinnertime.”

“Thank you.” I purred pathetically, like an injured kitty to a pro-bono veterinarian. And, voila, my work here was done.