The guards, who have been watching from the door, race in and help him up.
“Are you all right, sir? Should we call for help, ma’am?”
“That won’t be necessary. I’ll tend to him.”
They bring him to a plush sofa. He’s shivering now, not just from the chill in the air, but from the revelation of knowing his own personal truth. Roberta grabs a throw blanket and covers him. She orders the room be made warmer, and she sits beside him like a mother comforting a feverish child.
“There are big plans for you, Cam. But you don’t have to worry about that now. Right now, all you have to do is build that amazing potential; rope in all those parts of your mind that are still stray; teach every part of your body to work in concert. You are the conductor of a living orchestra, and the music you’re going to make will be beyond spectacular!”
“What if it’s not?” he asks.
Roberta leans over, kissing him gently on the forehead. “Simply not an option.”
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Cam’s dreams are always lucid. He always knows that he’s dreaming, and until now his dreams have been a source of intense frustration. They don’t follow dream logic—they don’t follow any logic—they are disjointed, disconnected, and confused. Snippets of randomness strung together by the cobweb of his unconscious mind. His dreams feel like channel surfing through mental stations so quickly, it’s impossible to grasp the concept of any one thought-byte. Maddening! However, now that he knows the nature of his being, Cam finds that he’s able to ride the wave.
Tonight he dreams he’s in a mansion. Not the one overlooking the ocean, but one in the clouds. As he moves from room to room, it’s not just the decor that changes, but the world as well—or rather, the life he’s living within that world. In a kitchen, there are siblings he recognizes sitting at a table waiting for dinner. In a living room, a father asks him a question in a language that didn’t make it into his brain, so he can’t answer.
And then there are the hallways—long hallways with rooms on either side, containing people he knows but only slightly. These are rooms he will never enter, and those people will never be more than images, trapped in those rooms. No further memory of them exists, or at least not within the cortical tissue he received.
In each room and hallway he moves through, Cam feels an intense surge of loss, but it’s balanced by the anticipation of the many rooms ahead.
At the end of the dream, he finds a final door opening on a balcony with no railing. He stands at the edge, looking down into billowing clouds below, shredded and reformed by the forces of some sentient wind. Within him a hundred voices—the voices of those who are a part of him—all speak to him, but their many voices have blurred into an unintelligible rumble. Still, he knows what they’re trying to tell him. Jump, Cam, jump! they’re saying. Jump, because we know you can fly!
- - -
In the morning, still high from the dream, Cam pushes himself harder than he ever had before in physical therapy. He feels the burn in his muscles now rather than the strain on his healing wounds.
“You’re at the top of your game today,” Kenny tells him as he treats Cam’s joints with a repeating cycle of ice and heat to speed the healing. Kenny, Cam has learned, was a top trainer for the NFL, but the powerful friends of whom Roberta spoke hired him to train a single client, offering him top dollar.
“Money talks,” Kenny had to admit. “Besides, it’s not every day you get to be part of history in the making.”
Is that what I am? Cam thinks. Future history? He tries to imagine the name Camus Composite-Prime taught in future classrooms, but it doesn’t stick. It’s the name. It sounds too clinical, like the subject of an experiment rather than the result. He ought to shorten it. Camus ComPri. The images of race cars speeding around a bend soars through his mind. The Grand Prix. That’s it! Camus Comprix. Silent S, silent X—a name that holds as many secrets as he!
He grimaces as Kenny ices his shoulder, but today, even that pain feels good.
“Pie-marathon, no more basket!” he says, then clears his throat and allows the thought to congeal, gathering the proper words. “This marathon I’m on . . . now it’s as easy as pie. Not feeling wasted at all.”
Kenny laughs. “Didn’t I tell you it’d get easier?”
This afternoon Cam sits on the balcony with Roberta, and they’re served lunch on silver trays. Each day the foods have greater variety, but they’re always in small portions. Shrimp cocktail. Beet salad. Chicken curry with couscous. All delicious challenges to his taste buds, sparking micro-memories and forcing neural connections to accompany his acute senses of taste and smell.
“All a part of your healing,” Roberta tells him as they eat. “All a part of your growth.”
After lunch, they sit for their daily ritual before the digital tabletop, taking in images to stimulate his visual memory. The images are more complicated now. Nothing so easy as the Eiffel Tower or a fire truck. There are obscure works of art that Cam must identify—if not the actual work, then at least the artist. Scenes from plays.
“Who is the character?”
“Lady Macbeth.”
“What is she doing?”
“I don’t know.”