Perfection - The Oasis Project Book 1 (Complete)

Three - Ira

It came like a tsunami, an avalanche. Something so colossal that swept the world away. I thrashed blindly, not feeling my limbs connecting with anything, but at the same time feeling everything until my senses wanted to give out. The tension, the restraints, the light. The fucking light. A frantic beeping rose in volume, and my head spun too quickly to pinpoint its source. I supposed my mouth was open and it was my throat that was producing the strange howls I was hearing.

"Stop moving!" somebody yelled.

"Calm the hell down!"

I saw shadows that could be faces, ghostly shapes melting at every angle possible like The Scream. One moved out of my field of vision and I felt a phantom blast of needles hitting the back of my head. I suddenly realized what was wrong.

I couldn't close my eyes. Something was holding them open. Those ghosts were holding them open.

The fucking light. They should know by now, how much it caused me pain.

"Let me go back," I screeched in a voice that I almost didn't recognize. I gave my body another violent thrash and the ghosts disappeared from view. The world began to tilt. I felt medical instruments ripping from my face, but I could finally close my eyes against the mayhem. I was disorientated, but I could feel parts of my body that were consistent – my heart frantically beating, my head hurting. Something ran sideways across my eyelids. My limbs were tightly secured to the flimsy gurney on my back.

Through the dizziness, I heard footsteps coming my way. They hadn't finished. They were going to do it again.

"Ira," a gentle voice said, "breathe."

"Let me go back," I wept, my resolve seeping through my raw wounds. I kept my eyes shut.

"Ira, listen to me." The voice was masculine. It was soothing. "Deep breaths, okay? I'll take you back to your room. It's going to be okay."

I wanted more than anything to counter that with a string of insults, but my mind told me to breathe. My skull felt like a helium balloon. Was helium flammable? The rest of my body was certainly on fire.

"Focus on your breathing, Ira," the man said. I shook my head and began to sob as he tried to maintain my attention. "How are you feeling?"

I opened my cracked lips to give him an answer. "It hurts. It hurts so much."

♟♙♟♙

I saw him coming in with a plastic plate. He hesitated after closing the door before raising a hand to the wall on his right. The plate trembled, close to flopping, as he moved closer to where I was sitting. His dark brown hair was neatly combed to one side as always, and his fingers traced the wall with uncertainty. There was something in that hand – a recording device, I assumed. He always brought one in because he couldn't see well enough to take notes. After I threw a fit at the red light on the device last time, he'd probably gone over the whole thing with duct tape by now.

My head still hurt, and every now and then flashes of light jumped into my mind like fireflies. However, this time I was finally in my comfort zone, and he was the one who was on the back foot.

"Not eating," I said, watching my visitor's face fall. Finally finding a chair, he sat down and balanced the plate on his knees, adjusting the position of his long legs a few times before he was satisfied. I couldn't smell anything on the plate, not even this close. Of course, that meant the food was cold. Cold food for a cold place.

"Do we have to do this every time?" He sighed and turned on the recorder. There was a tiny click as the button gave away under his thumb. "This is all for your own benefit, you know," he said, making me roll my eyes even though I knew that he couldn't see it in the darkness. "Food is a basic human necessity."

"Only you and I wouldn't call this food."

He pursed his lips and gave up. "Let's start. What is your name?"

"Go fuck yourself, Stuart," I spat.

Stuart only chuckled off the insult. He was a young doctor, thirty at most, but acted like an ancient soul. With the amount of time he spent underground in these labs, too, he was starting to look like the undead with his skin growing paler by the day. He looked in my direction with calm green eyes behind plastic-framed glasses, unable to find my face to focus on in the dark. "Well, you remember my name after all that headbanging. That's a good start. What's yours?"

"Ira Konstantinov," I gave in. The masculine form of my last name, which I had used for years now, gave my answer the force that it needed. I wondered if I should have accepted the food to get me through this extremely frustrating interrogation.

No. I bent my fingers backwards as far as they would go. Reject as much as you can. It's all poison here.

"Do you know where you are, Ira?"

I let out a pathetic laugh. "Underground." Sometimes, I wondered if the doctors down here did these "psychological evaluations" to break up the monotony of their lives. "Under an island."

"Dell Island," Stuart corrected. "Good. Your brain is functioning normally."

He was infuriating, always asking these questions before we could talk about anything worthwhile. On a regular day I could consider entertaining Stuart, but today had not been regular in the slightest with the doctors drugging me and poking and prodding while I was out.

"Of course my brain's functioning properly," I muttered. "It's my eyes that you've all wrecked. Oh, did you forget that? Some psychiatrist, you are. 'All for my benefit. All for our benefit.' You turned my friend into a fish, for crying out loud. I think you need to see a shrink. Your head's not working right."

Stuart remained calm as he sighed, knowing that there'd be no interesting tangents from me today. After the mess in the lab, we probably wouldn't even get to my usual attempts to avoid my problems. "I didn't do that, Ira, and she is not a fish."

"That's not what I meant!" I raised my voice. There was no arguing with Stuart. I had never seen him lose his composure. I didn't know if he ever would.

I remembered the day that my friend burst into my cabana, terrified that her skin was starting to peel off and exposing a new inhuman layer. I had done what anyone else would have – I sent her to the tiny island hospital. I'd never imagined that I would ruin her entire life with my common sense, and that I'd sacrifice my own freedom to see that she was still alive.

"Celestia's fine," Stuart said. "She's made a lot of progress." His voice was so level that I couldn't tell whether or not it was a jab at my own lack of cooperation.

I was convinced that he fed Celestia truckloads of depressants, even though Celestia claimed to not cross paths with Stuart often. At the same time, I frequently questioned why Stuart never suggested giving me anything for my anxiety. Maybe he did through food and water, but none of them worked. At the end of the day, he just seemed to enjoy talking to me.

Stuart straightened up, stretching his spine against his perfectly-fitting white shirt. Some confidence returned to his voice when he found a way to link his motives with a topic I cared about. "In any case, she'll be back soon, so if you won't eat for your sake or mine, please have something for her sake. Celestia wouldn't want you to starve, Ira."

Stuart passed the plate of food over and I took it reluctantly. My dinner was a dry spinach and potato salad with chickpeas, blobs of carrot, and berries that looked like cancer cells. "Where is she now?" I glared at Stuart as I put a berry in my mouth. It tasted surprisingly good, but I knew that the taste was to disguise the unnatural chemicals within. "What are you doing to Celestia?"

"Nothing, I promise you," Stuart said in his usual nurturing tone. "She's in the infirmary for dehydration, but should be out pretty soon."