Lab rats

Lab Rats

---

The sky was still bright and blue as it had always been these past days, though it felt a little different than usual today when I looked at it now.  The world hadn’t changed.  Nothing had changed.  It was me who changed, and it was the same answer to the same difference that I was feeling every day.

I would get used to it soon enough, though.

A light tap on my shoulder and I turned.

“Oh, hello, Joey.  You’re done for today already?”  I smiled.

He nodded.

“Will you sit with me?”

He came round to sit down on the bench.

“Does it still hurt?”  I asked, looking at the bandaged arm.

He shook his head, then, glancing about me once, asked the same question with his eyes.

I smiled and pointed.  “It’s my left eye today but my leg’s fine now.  I’m never more glad, you know, for the wheelchair, even though I used to hate it.  With only one eye, it’s a lot harder to keep balance.  Trying to get the thing to go straight is a bad challenge enough that I don’t want to imagine what’d be like if I have to walk with my legs like this and one eye out.”  I laughed.

Joey was quiet.  He knew it as well as I did that those pretty, empty sounds breathed from adults’ mouths meant nothing for the like of us and the best comfort we could have was each other’s presence and facts.

We were, after all, only lab rats.

“It’s my birthday today, you know,” I said, tipping my head up to the bright, bright sky.  “At least, I want to think so that I remember it’s my birthday today.  I can’t believe I have been here for five years already.  They said I could go out for a few hours.”  I turned to look at him.  “You want to come along?  It’s been a while since we get to go out.”

There was a frown and the green of his eyes darkened.

“I don’t like it either when they do that,” I nodded.  “It’s disgusting how they pretend to be our parents and act like they care and feel so bad about whatever ‘accidents’ that happened to us.  Accidents—”  I couldn’t help myself but snorted, laughing derisively.  “Accidents!  As if!  And you know what’s worse?  Those rotten adults have fun making up stories to tell the others when we go outside!  Talking about sick creativity!”

My head still tipped back but I couldn’t see the sky anymore.  I was grateful for his hand.  I didn’t mean to lose to my temper.  His one good hand – the one part that he asked them to take from him last – was lightly pressed over my one good eye.  It was for his hand that I caught myself and was able to force down a choked sob.  Nothing here, nothing that ever happened to all of us here was worth crying for.  None, except one.

He waited until I calmed that he drew his hand away.  I blinked and squinted at the light.  I would grow to hate it eventually, I supposed.  Not that I didn’t violently dislike it already.

Light, peace, happiness, and whatever else that fell from their mouths as they preached on while taking things away from us one by one.  It was for our better futures, they said.  It was all for us, we must understand.

We did.  And it’s only fair that we hated them for it.  It’s only fair that we hated them for wanting forgiveness when all they did was lying and hurting us.  But then they were only selfish adults.

That’s why – the only reason why – I was glad I was made a lab rat; I wouldn’t live long enough to grow into one of them.

Another year passed, I was turning thirteen, and I still couldn’t find a reason to forgive my parents for giving birth to me and having me live in this world where they, the adults, kept experimenting on and on for what they wanted, telling themselves and everyone else that it was all for our sakes.

When did we ask and how did they know what we wanted without asking but assuming everything?

White and green thrust into my field of vision suddenly.

Startled, I sat up.

Daisies.  Joey was holding them out to me, waiting.

Vaguely, I noted the missing patch and realized he had taken them from the side.

He smiled.  He rarely smiled.  It was a nice smile….

My heart sank.  For no reason at all I wanted to cry.  For once I sincerely wanted to cry.

Leaning forward, he put the flowers in my hand and kissed my forehead.

I cried then.  With only one eye – the one part that I begged them to not take away from me just yet – I cried tears that I never let fall for anything and anyone else.  They fell, along with the first and last present I ever received, scattering white on the ground.

He held my hand, letting me cry until I was too tired to cry anymore.

He knew that after tomorrow I would never cry again.  I knew that after tomorrow he would never hold my hand again.

When Marissa Thompson came, I asked her to let Joey take me back to my room.  The mute Joey, even though he was younger than me and had only one hand, was capable that much.  She didn’t like the idea but consented after having gone on about the importance of their recent findings and how that would improve our well beings, and what would happen to us next.

We heard her out – not necessarily listened.  We held hands and I tried really hard to remember everything about Joey.  Especially his hand that had reached out to hold mine ever since we met in that white room back then.

We were lab rats, he told me when his voice wasn’t taken away from him yet.  The future which the adults who were born before us experimented on to achieve their blind dreams.  But besides existing as that consequences of their actions, we also existed as humans when we acknowledged each other as we had done here.

How?  I had asked him.  Because I called your name?

He reached out and took my hands in both of his.  This was how you recognized and accepted someone’s existence.

The door opened and he pushed me into the room.

Joey was careful – he had always been careful but more so after he had lost his hand – as he helped me getting onto the bed.

Tugging me in, he smiled at the look on my face.

I wanted to cry again but there was no tear left and I was tired.

He sat on the edge of the bed and took my hand, pressing it gently.

It was still light but he meant for me to take a nap.  The crying and the experiment done earlier today was enough to make me sleep into tomorrow.

The tomorrow that would be even more different than today to yesterday.

He put his hand over my eye and a sob broke from me.

He stayed until I fell asleep.

When I woke up, Marissa Thompson was busy putting colorful pills into separate small dishes.

“What’s for tomorrow?” I asked her.

“We’ll check and test the response in your right arm in the morning and operating on your legs in the afternoon.  You will get to rest for a week after.”

“Marissa Thompson, will you tell them this also?”

Putting caps on bottles, she looked up at me.

“I don’t need this eye anymore.”

---

My third year at the institution, it rained almost everyday.  He was rubbing my cold hands that day while I stared out into the gray nothingness.

“What’s there for us here really?  Those promises they say, we know they will never come true and even if by some miracles they do, they are not what we want for ourselves to begin with.  What’s there for us, lab rats, in this world?”

He paused and looked up.

I turned from the window and looked straight into his eyes.  “Is there anything for you here, Joey, that’s worth continuing existing?”

He didn’t look away like how the adults did when I asked them questions.  He looked back quietly, looking into my eyes, and, with a ghost of a smile, said.  “There wasn’t.  Until there was you.  When you came and you let me hold your hand, I thought that was enough a reason for me to continue living here.  I don’t need much or want much – not as much as they think I do anyway – and all I will ask for to my last day is to have someone I can hold hands when I’m alive and someone who will cry for me when I die.  I don’t care about the past or the future much.”  He put his hand over my eyes. “But I want my existence to matter in the present with someone.  While I’m still alive I want you to let me hold your hand.”

I held his other hand in both of mine, breath caught on a sob.

Since that day, I decided to continue on so that when that day came I would be the one who cried for him.


---

“Your last eye it is, then.”