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Someone
He used to be someone.
Someone named Aaron Warner.
Aaron sounds strange on his tongue. Foreign. He says it in the chasmic darkness of his room as his wife Juliette Ferrars drifts off to slumber to reemerge in the morning with a hope that perhaps, this time, his restored self-identity rises with the dawn.
“Ella,” she corrected when he spoke her full government name. Her voice was tight. “You’ve always called me Ella.”
Everything is unfamiliar. These walls. The expansive closet of clothes. The wealth, inherited from a man no one speaks of. He has two brothers, did you know? He is the oldest. He feels like a child feeling the world, stumbling over gravity in pursuit of the answer hidden within his labyrinthine fate: Who was I?
Ruler. Husband. Friend. Brother. Son. Ruler.
He is twenty-one.
Juliette wards over him as if he is a hapless babe made of glass, but in truth his current state isn’t too far from that description. Just recently he was discharged from the hospital and secured in his castle, his idiosyncratically comical nickname for the skyscraper looming over the metropolis and beyond, the place of his birth, the mighty throne of his sovereignty, and most accurately, the tomb of his former self, atrophying day by day as he grasps for a fragment of himself, but Juliette yields nothing, and haply, it is in his sacred favor that the truth is kept silent. There was an accident. Brain damage. You can come back from it, I believe in you. It takes so much more than faith to restore him. Juliette, notwithstanding, wields a persistent strain of belief so brazenly heedless of the goliathan odds it sparks his feeble flame of hope.
In his place she upholds temporary authority and is for the numerous hours of many days absent, and it is difficult for Aaron to remain awake. When she thinks he is asleep she strokes his hair. It is a weird feeling. He cannot recall if he loved it. Before the accident, they must have been intimate, he concludes along with his breakfast, which she taught him how to cook, just a small variety of dishes.
Somewhere in this lavish castle, Kenji loads the clothes in the washer.
As if Aaron can’t walk.
As if he is a cripple wholly devoid of mobility.
He ventures down multiple corridors after washing his plate, depending on sheer muscle memory lest he wander astray, the tap of his footsteps echoing across these preposterously vast distances of his residence—if such a humble classification can accommodate the sheer absurdity of this place. Who needs all this? What kind of man was he? From what particular gilded lineage did he sprout? His brothers live elsewhere, in homes the size of mice, but scant tales of his existence aforetime all originate here.
Kenji in his hasty occupation with the clothes does not notice Aaron enter and the blonde stands there. Should he greet him with pleasantries? Just say good morning, it’s not that hard. It appears nothing swell is occurring for Kenji.
“Oh. You.”
It is the only syllable by which he will address him with apathetic monotony. Would an utterance of his name mar him?
Kenji returns to dumping the clothes in the washer.
“Let me help you,” Aaron offers.
“I’m good.”
“I am an adult. I remember how to wash my own clothes.”
“I’m doing this for Juliette.” The darkhaired man huffs.
“Ah.”
When he cooks for him: for Juliette. When he checks on him lest he require medical attention: for Juliette. His fondness is starkly reserved for his aggrieved comrade and Aaron is spared no invite. His laughter and comedic relief is for Juliette. This callous restraint seems unfounded, but maybe it is not, maybe it stems from past confrontation. Kenji mumbles, “Sorry, I don’t mean to be an asshole. I’m just tired.” There are dark smudges beneath his eyes.
Aaron is clenching and unclenching his right hand, a nervous tic following him from comatose. He walks away.
“Did you take your pills?”
“I’m doing that now.”
Thirteen
Aaron watches his thirteen year old self flank a man at his side during a public announcement. The man is his deceased father. His name means love, but Adam says he never had any to give his progeny.
Thirteen-year-old Aaron is blank-faced, withdrawn, quiet as death. Something vampiric malformed his boyhood, a premature tension to his countenance. Aaron turns to the mirror. His eyes hold the twisted irony of lively youth at adulthood.
This is the third video Juliette allows him to watch as a glimpse into his dismal childhood which seems a very long epoch of lonesome. The boy in the video never smiles, never laughs, never jests, the scarce moments wherein he engages in conversation performed solely in regards to political predicaments with a severe, clinical punctuality juxtaposed to the ease expected of his adolescence. The utilization of advanced words astounds him. He’s forgotten them all.
I was intelligent, he thinks with an ache of the heart. He writes the words down to later commit them to memory.
The man who is his father treated his son like a coworker. How does that work?
His limping gait is uncertain, ambling, unlike the arrogant little boy in the video, and just how catastrophic were his injuries that he cannot display the same surety possessed in his primary boyhood?
Dinner
Steam billows from two plates of food. Salt. Spices. Meat. His stomach growls. Juliette watches him like a hawk. His appetite cannot erect beneath her gaze. Kenji has gone back to his little house, maybe to someone who remembers him. How fraught Juliette’s life is right now that she returns to a stranger. She bites her lip nervously. “I’m guessing you’re not hungry.”
How do I say I want to eat undisturbed politely?
“How was your day at work?” Aaron queries stiffly, but it loosens her up like wine, and her day as commander unravels. She would rather detail the unending litany of duties than address the air between them wrung so tight they share long breaths of silence. He roams somewhere in his mind, thinking about the thirteen year old boy that is him and the father without love.
Juliette has finished talking and is staring at him in patient wait. “Are you okay?”
He nods.
“Did you take your pills?”
“Yes.”
“It’s every four hours, remember that.”
“I do.”
Her smile is strained, desperate. For her sake, he brings a spoonful of rice to his mouth, savoring the taste. Like the first day he walked again, it becomes easier and easier to chew, to think and ponder, to relax as he feasts. “This is amazing, Juliette. Thank you, Ella,” he quickly corrects, hoping it’s not too late.
“You’re welcome, sweetheart,” and she takes her own bite. It’s so quiet. He wants Kenji back, with his loud distaste and snark. He taps his fork on his plate in an attempt to distract himself. Clink. The name Paris comes to mind. The City of Love. A beautiful name bestowed upon the most macabre man alive. Well, he’s dead now. Clink. He was a tyrant deserving of his fate, so goes the story. Did Juliette kill him? She never said. Clink.
“Aaron, baby,” she says. “Are you hungry?”
Clink.
“I’m not hungry. I was thinking of my father.”
“You watched the video?” He nods.
Clink.
Paris is a beautiful name, he comments, but it’s clear it is soured in her mind. Quiet again. Clink, clink, clink… “Do you say it’s a beautiful name because it belongs to the City of Love?”
“Yes. Not my father.”
This pleases her. “We should visit someday. I’ve always wanted to go to Europe. We just never had the chance.” Why? he asks. “You were tangled up in your duties, but now it’s the other way around. A holiday in France would be lovely.”
“I suppose.”
She tilts her head inquisitively. “What do you mean?”
What does he mean? It’s an absentminded response. “Did Kenji talk to you? What did you do today?”
No and nothing. Besides watching the videos, he was an apparition in his own abode, sifting through the secretive sea of his thoughts, maybe reviewing the details of his job description/sovereignty/whatever you called this modern lordship. Did he run a democracy? Did he maintain the oppressive dynasty passed down his kin like an heirloom? His ruling hand draped protectively over its voiceless subjects, as made apparent thus far, yet simultaneously silenced the rising objections in its looming shadow. “Nothing much.”
Her hopeful gaze atrophies. They do not speak for the rest of dinner. But Aaron washes the plates with her. It is a start. The first of many.
Names
He mispronounced his own name after the coma: A-ron, not Eren. That is when Juliette knew something was truly, terribly amiss. Aaron Warner Anderson. He disliked Anderson, feeling it was a stain on his name, a faulty appendage, but it was heritage.
Aaron is a biblical name meaning mountain of strength, exalted, enlightened. Someone named him with intention. They foresaw his prowess. A mother with no name, no backstory, no haunting memory in his mind, a faceless prospect, his nonsentient womb. Leila. She died in pain. He wished he could remember if he saw her face before his almost death. If she implored death for a second chance, spare my son. He wonders if he’ll ever think of her with anything more than robot acknowledgement.
Illness
“Kenji, please, it’s just a day.”
“You can’t take the day off, are you insane? You’re a Supreme Commander.”
“Complications, Kenji. I don’t know if his body can handle the illness.”
A slammed cabinet. Footsteps. “Everybody warned you this would happen. Maybe you’ll grieve properly this time. With therapy. With a funeral filled with flowers and family, and with time, it’s fucking hard, but you’ll heal from this. This is not the way. By jeopardizing the entire country—”
“Promise me he’ll be okay. If anything happens to him…” Her voice breaks, but Kenji is ruthless.
“Princess, something has already happened to him. This…thing—”
“He’s a human being!”
“I’m worried about you and your mental health, Jello. How long are you going to pretend this is the same man you loved? The way he talks, it’s—he’s like a child but he’s a robot. At least real Aaron had real emotions. This is a cheap replica.” A clone? A replacement? There exists no measure of distance to calculate how vastly his delusion spans. It was a brain injury.
She says quietly but dangerously, “Don’t ever talk about him like that. Ever again.”
Aaron imagines Kenji throwing his arms up in resolved disappointment, saying, “Fine. We don’t have to address it. I’ll keep it on life support for as long as possible,” and Juliette’s voice is muffled as if within the cradle of Kenji’s comforting embrace because truth hurts.
Fear
What if Juliette is lying.
What if she is not his wife and he is not her husband.
What if he is not of his own consciousness.
What if this mind isn’t really his?
This is not a thing to lie about.
This is existence and she tampered with it. However it was ere, he wants it returned.
Maybe Kenji’s hatred is not so unfounded.
This thing, it, poor replica, cruel invectives all true. How do you know you’re really you?
Boy in the Box
There is a closet with four locks he is prohibited from entering. Juliette was too tangled up in a haste to remember to lock her door as she was running late for a big meeting, leaving an opportunity for Aaron to wander inside. He twists the closet door and it opens with a creak of fear, begging him to turn back but he mustn't; if not now, when will the rare chance ever present itself widely before him again? He faces the unknown. There is nothing but a small black on a desk, if you can call it that. No weapons, no secret documents withheld in this darkness—a black box with the title:
AARON WARNER ANDERSON 2
No. No. No. No.
It’s another video. An irrelevant medical record cast aside. He’s getting paranoid. The closet sways and he snatches the black box, turning it around for any other clues. Who knows of this? Oh, he knows who.