Sam hadn’t always been a ghost. Of course, she hadn’t. Like the rest of us, she’d once been fully real. But then, like Marty McFly’s sister in Back to the Future, she began to fade. The reasons, of course, were different. No time travel was involved.
Instead, what seemed to be happening was a collective loss of memory. Could you exist if you weren’t remembered, and could you be remembered if you didn’t exist?
How it all started was the October Affair. The testing, the bodies harmed, the denials. They said it never happened, and so we agreed that it never had. The simplest explanation is always the best, of course, and so we said we believed them not Sam, because, if they were lying, and she was telling the truth, then the horror of it was just too much to handle. There were those who thought she could be in the right, but they kept their heads down and their mouths shut. After all, they had cats and dogs and children to feed and suburban lives to live.
If Sam was telling the truth, maybe there was another explanation. Couldn’t we just say that the bodies maimed and broken, they had been defective to begin with? Lacking the tight proteins, the right hormones, the right survival of the fittest DNA. That all sounded very logical, at least to us. But Sam, the younger sister of two tough on her older brothers, was stubborn to the end, and she wouldn’t get with the program. Like an idiot or a doomed woman, she insisted on what she had seen and heard and felt.
Playing the hero, her commander made a last-ditch effort at redemption.
“The senses can lie,” he suggested offering her some Scotch on the Rocks. She took the drink but not the advice.
“They can,” she had insisted, “but, in this case, they aren’t.”
He ordered her to take a vacation. And what choice did she have but to obey? So she went somewhere tropical. After all, it was on the Navy’s dime.
“Take two weeks, at least,” her commander told her. “And when you return.” Sam understood that they did not want her to return.
Friends told us that Sam bought a plane ticket from Norfolk to Honolulu. Sam was not one to waste government money, they reported. In this, at least, we agreed she could be admired. But not in the rest. They said the flight was cheap and the views pretty. But, in Hawaii, at the tiki bar, she could not relax. She called Jim and told him that she missed him. We all knew about the rumors of what had happened between them. But, from what we understood, even her partner didn’t try to officially intervene.
He suggested, as if he had been talking to someone who said she’d been kidnapped by little green men or a child, that she hadn’t seen what she thought she’d seen. But, hardheaded to the end, she insisted on her version of the truth.
Exasperated, he resorted to referring to a fictional TV program, “Even Mulder admitted the alien abduction was a hoax!”
From what we heard from a friend’s cousin’s sister, she didn’t thrive in Paradise. Though she always thought Pacific Ocean living would be a dream, she felt uptight and out of place among the lei- wearing tourists and the easygoing locals.
A friend of a friend told us that Sam tried to call Jim again, but he denied that it had ever happened. From what we could piece together, the conversation went like this. Sam asked when he thought she could come home. Jim asked what she thought she remembered. She talked of hair loss, bleeding gums, poison in the water.
Jim sighed, wondered out loud if she was even trying, pounded his fists against the wall. Pushing back tears, Sam quietly hung up the phone. The rest of this is pure speculation. But, from what we understood, Sam went to the hotel bar where the bartender, who was originally from Chesapeake, Virginia, recommended a drink called Hawaiian Bonfire. All Sam could think about when she heard its name was two things, the taste of Jim’s tongue in her mouth and the smell of cities burning. At least, that’s what we were told.