15: Names

The nurses screamed at me to get out of Memory’s room after I squeezed his right leg so hard that he spat blood. Outside, I stared at a wall until Archie arrived. He hugged me and asked me how Memory was, but I didn’t say anything to him. He smiled softly at me and went inside. He had no more tears to shed.

He came out a couple of minutes later after the nurses kicked him out and took Memory into the operating room. Archie was no longer smiling, and his face was pale. I asked him what the two of them had talked about, but he said “nothing” and walked outside. I followed him in silence for half an hour until we reached the smoking area of our dorm. Archie asked one of the sophomores for a cigarette, took a puff, and blew a cloud into the sky. He stared, lost in thought, at the distant aliens above us.

“I was thinking about the last night I saw Kind alive,” he said. “After Memory came downstairs, I remember we were laughing at him about something, and then everyone turned around to watch the TV because they were announcing that aliens were real.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Afterwards, he saw you kissing Kind. All of us did,” he explained. “He was so angry, so terribly mad. Later that night, you went to the bathroom, and Memory forcefully took Kind to another room and slammed the door. I followed them to make sure everything was okay.”

He sat down on the bench, not taking his sight away from the aliens, and sighed. “I don’t know what happened inside. Both of them were really quiet for a while, but after a few minutes, both of them came outside and acted as if they didn’t know each other. It was weird.”

“Did you ask him what happened inside?”

“No,” he said. “But a couple of hours later, I noticed that Kind had a few bruises on his neck—God knows where else. Memory disappeared after that, and Kind spent the rest of the evening laughing with us and kissing you.”

He flickered his cigarette into the ashtray, completely missing the shot, and lowered his gaze to the ground. He walked slowly inside, into the elevator, and then into his room. I followed. He jumped into his bed and buried his face in his pillow as I sat on the edge of his bed, eventually falling back and lying beside him.

“What did the two of you talk about inside the hospital then?” I asked him after a while.

“Graduation isn’t until three,” he said. “We still have like four hours until then. Is it okay if I go to bed? I don’t want to exist right now.”

I placed my face in front of his and stared at him intently, forcing him to answer.

“Something about it didn’t sit right with me,” he said. “I asked him about it, and he told me they fought because of you. Kind promised him that you were all his unless he made a move by graduation, which he never did—so Kind did exactly what Memory could never do.”

“Memory told me that Kind fell that night because of what he did to him,” he said. “He confessed to me that he murdered him.”