Ana is the love of my life. The world freezes every time I kiss her, floating in time as if all the problems outside the radius of our intertwined bodies didn’t exist. If there is a paradise, I wouldn’t think it could be better than the time I spent with her. Even if I am anxious or stressed, at the end of the day when I see her, everything is absorbed, and no problem can bring me down as long as she is by my side. Her presence is enough, my deepest dreams are fulfilled.
As the universe seemingly circles in a way that dreams can never be achieved, it all changed that night. Ana disappeared after a day’s work. Her car was found empty on the side of the road, with all of her belongings still there. No signs of struggle or robbery. I notified the police immediately, who searched the forest in the small town where we lived, in vain. After the police gave up, I tried to find her on my own, walking daily in the forest, looking for any sign of what happened to her. My despair and sadness increased as my hope vanished. With all my efforts being futile, I gave up after a few months.
My mental state crumbled, I got deeply depressed. During the day I worked, at night I drank alone at home. I no longer hanged out with my friends, I just sat in the living room looking at the door, fantasizing that one day it would open and Ana would be there, with her warm and contagious smile.
Two years later, the police having long since ceased the search, the impossible happened.
The night was lost in the usual routine, me on the couch, beer in hand, staring into space. Light knocks echoed through the house; someone was at the door. I got startled, everyone had already given up visiting me, tired of being ignored. After all, the attempts from my friends to cheer me up always worsened my mood; so, after such failures, I isolated myself, always saying “no” to leaving my residence for something other than going to work. Due to all this, I imagined that I had dozed off and dreamed about the knocks.
A few seconds later, the knocking repeated, so I went to the door, unlocking it. Like my happiest dreams, there she was, hair shorter than the day she disappeared, but otherwise exactly the same. Ana, the love of my life.
“May I come in?” The delicate voice asked.
I froze, unable to decipher the situation, flooded with a mixture of surprise, apprehension and euphoria.
“Marco, hey, are you really going to ignore me?”
I came back to my senses and answered her:
“Sorry, of course you can come in. The house is yours too.”
She sat on the sofa, a discreet smile populating her face, alternating glances at me and the floor, as if she was embarrassed to stare for too long. I looked perplexed at the ghost in front of me, containing my hopes a little, even with the concrete figure of my dreams breathing the same air as me again. I unintentionally came across as a little rude next.
“Where were you?”
“Always straight to the point, huh? Can´t complain, this is one of the things that made me fall in love with you.” She paused for a few seconds and stared at the floor, in a gesture of concentration to remember what had happened. “Well, I was returning from work when I saw a person standing in the middle of the forest. I slowed the car down and rolled down the window. The man was screaming for help, looking desperate. I stopped the car and went to him, then I… I don’t remember anything else. Today, I woke up in the same place where I lost my consciousness, and I walked here. I don’t know how much time has passed, but by your beard it must have been at least a month.”
I sat by her side, holding those two delicate hands, which disappeared in mine, and faced her with a serious expression.
“Ana, I know this is not easy to hear, but you disappeared for two years.”
She remained silent, seeming to understand.
I didn’t say anything else, maybe she erased what happened in the last two years because of the trauma, she was probably kidnapped and gone through a lot. If she’s ready someday, she knows she can trust me to talk about everything.
-
I took the whole week off work and rekindled the lost happiness. It was like she’d never left, interacting as we’ve always done for the past 14 years, with that connection written in the stars since our teens. On Friday, I called some friends over to my house, I couldn’t wait to share the good news. Strangely though, when they arrived, she was gone. I searched the entire house, no sign of Ana. After a few beers, my friends left. A few minutes later, Ana appeared in front of me, with an angry expression.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you would invite people?”
“I wanted to surprise you, they miss you too.”
“I don’t like surprises. Talk to me next time.” She went to the bedroom and slammed the door. I slept on the couch that night.
In the following week, I went back to work. On the way home, with a new curiosity rooted in my brain, I started to observe the forest while driving. The answer to what had happened to Ana was in the middle of that green immensity.
One day, looking to the trees as I drove slowly, I saw a man staring at the road. I pulled over and rolled down the car window.
“HELLO?! ARE YOU LOST?”
The man immediately turned away from me and ran into the middle of the forest.
As soon as I got home, I described the anomalous scenario to Ana. After all, there was no house near that inhospitable region, and there is nothing to do there.
“Honey, in the same place where you disappeared, I saw a person standing still. It could be the kidnapper or some accomplice of his, we should tell the police.”
“NO!” She seemed bothered for the second time since she had returned. “Don’t go into the forest, the important thing is that I came back, there’s no need to dig up the past. Promise me you’ll never go in there, it’s dangerous.”
“But…”
I couldn’t argue, Ana left me talking to myself. Obviously, I found her speech strange, could it be that she remembered something? I didn’t confront her, but every time I saw her, I contained myself from asking what were the dangers in the forest that she wanted to warn me about.
After the initial happiness of Ana’s return, I noticed some unusual behaviors. She never left the house, nor interacted with anyone other than me, not even on social media. One day, as we were cooking dinner. She put her hand into the fire, and only took it off after I pulled her arm. She then stared at the burnt skin, emotionless expression, as if she didn´t feel pain, but was amused by how she could see her own flesh. She snapped out of it after I broke the silence:
“Are you ok, honey?”
“Oh! Right… Ouch! This hurts really bad. Haha!” Ana made a “that hurts” expression and then smiled, as if she was acting.
“I´ll take you to the hospital.”
“NO! I´m fine, I just need some ice.”
For my surprise, she really was fine. There were no signs of burnt skin on the next morning, she healed insanely fast.
Another strange factor is that I have the impression that she doesn’t sleep, she just lies next to me and stays still. Before the disappearance, she always snored, now even after weeks, I’ve never heard her snore. On one of the nights, when I woke up suddenly, she had her eyes open, staring at me. She closed her eyes immediately, pretending she was asleep.
I needed answers.
I dusted off a revolver that was in my possession, an inheritance from my late father. I started taking it to work, leaving it in the car, hoping that on the way home I would see that strange man in the middle of the forest again, and I could confront him a little more safely, armed with the lethal tool.
After a few weeks of driving slowly and observing the forest, there he was again, that strange man standing in the middle of the forest. I stopped the car immediately and walked towards the figure, cautious steps.
“HELLO? ARE YOU OK?” I shouted as I approached, the revolver hidden in my back. The sighting became clearer as the distance shortened. He was a tall, middle-aged man with shaved hair. The peculiarity was in his expression. Despair and extreme sadness inhabited that static, unblinking face. I stopped a few meters from him. He did not move, nor did he respond to my interactions and attempts at dialogue. I punched his arm and screamed at his ear, not a muscle trembled.
Suddenly, he ran off into the trees. I went after him. It wasn’t easy to chase him in the dense forest, but with my hunger for answers, I got up immediately whenever I tripped over logs and stones, and ignored the tears in my skin caused by the tangles in branches. After a long journey, the man crossed some dense bushes, seeming to go underground. I stopped for a moment, my lungs complaining from straining beyond their usual capacity. After recovering, I continued to follow him, crossing the dense bush, and discovering a cave. The beginning was rough and tortuous, as expected in such an environment. After walking a few dozen meters, I came across a dead end. The man I was following couldn’t have just vanished into thin air, so I surveyed my surroundings, illuminating with my cell phone. Underneath a rock, there was a button. I pressed it, and an opening in the wall occurred, revealing a laboratory. The mostly white environment contained various research paraphernalia around it, and was incredibly spacious considering the location. On one of the tables, an image gave me chills.
With his chest open, a deformed man lay there, his organs in containers on the table beside him. I flinched as I heard an angry voice echoing from behind one of the doors.
“I give up, this fucker runs aimlessly out of nowhere, as soon as I finish analyzing this one, I’ll cut open that son of a bitch. There is no hope for him.”
I hid behind one of the counters when I noticed him approaching. It was a man in a lab coat, hair already white. I got up and pointed the gun at him.
“Who is that person at the table?”
He raised his hands, in a sign of complicity.
“I didn’t murder anyone, if that’s what you’re thinking. This specimen was created in the laboratory; it died after a few days, there was a malformation of the brain, I am just studying the errors in its creation.”
I shook my head, still trying to digest what he’d said. My conclusion was that it didn’t matter if that was true or not, I wouldn’t trust that man, something very wrong was happening and it was probably related to Ana’s disappearance and her coming back all weird. I pointed the gun at the door he emerged from.
“That door, open it.”
“Sir, this is a private laboratory, you are trespassing, I will ask you to leave.”
“OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR, I’M RUNNING OUT OF PATIENCE.”
He unlocked the door. Behind it, 3 cells. In one of them, the man I had followed was staring at the wall, not moving, and, sitting on the bed, a man identical to him. In the other cell, I shivered with what I saw, almost dropping the gun with the ease that ran through my body. She was there, her hair completely shaved, otherwise identical to the day she disappeared.
The love of my life, Ana.
She melted into tears as soon as she saw me. I ordered the scientist to open the cell and hugged her, confusion and happiness conflicting in my brain. Ana told me that she had been trapped there the whole time, and despite the fact that they had drugged her a few times and performed experiments that she had no idea of what they did because she was anesthetized, she had been treated well during the period. The scientist, upon seeing the scene, interacted with me.
“The clone. She’s with you, isn’t she?”
“Clone?”
“She is my masterpiece, the next human evolution, I created something better than divine creation. You need to give her back; we can pay you millions in compensation.”
‘I’m not giving anything back. She is not yours.”
“She was born here, I raised her. Let me call my boss, you can take your wife, but return the specimen, you will get rich.”
“No!”
“What do you think the creature that is living with you will do when the original one returns? She will kill your Ana to try to steal her life, or maybe even kill you both. It is very dangerous to keep her with you, bring her back, she was born in this laboratory and is alive for less than a year. It is an unstable and dangerous creation.”
I thought for a while. Besides all the strangeness, the woman at my house definitely had the same memories of my wife. She could remember things about the day we met, or the day we got married. Upon observing my expressions, the scientist added:
“Either you return her with an agreement beneficial to both of us, or my boss gets her back by force. You choose.”
The woman in my house might not be the Ana I married, but she was still her. If I gave her back, she would serve as a guinea pig for the rest of her life, not to mention that the bastard in front of me had kidnapped my wife. Rage dominated my whole body, as I remembered the two years of me staring at the door, and thought about the dozens of scenarios of Ana being tortured and experimented.
I pulled the trigger.
The bullet went through the scientist’s forehead, creating a smear of blood and pieces of brain on the wall. I pointed the gun at the man sitting in the other cell along with the clone, who was still standing facing the wall, not moving a muscle.
“They kidnapped me too. Let me go, please.”
“If I let you live, they will know, they will come after me.”
“I’ll hide, no one will know about me.”
I thought for a while. Even if the man hid, he could still be captured and tell about me. I looked at Ana, and made the decision based on her expression, as my rage disappeared staring at those brown eyes. I couldn´t kill that innocent man, what was I thinking, so I released him, who asked me to lend him the gun. I declined, obviously. He walked into the lab, came back with a scalpel, and stabbed his clone, who didn’t flinch or blink as he was struck, as if he didn’t feel pain or emotions.
“I’m doing him a favor, believe me. This is mercy.”
I looked at Ana, apprehensive about what he had done, but she reaffirmed that the man was trustworthy. She must know, after all they must have been each other’s only company during those two years.
-
Upon getting home, Ana´s clone looked at my wife with terror on her face, probably thinking that I had made some kind of deal with the scientist. I calmed her, but the awkwardness was only lessened after a lot of conversation. I found out about how Ana’s clone had escaped. The scientist took his creations outside, studying how they interacted in an outdoor environment. The clone I followed must have run away in one of those tests.
The second Ana is living with us as if she were a sister of the family, despite the fact that I know that she has all the memories of Ana, and, well, that time where I was alone with her, thinking that she was my wife. It was strange that both were being called Ana.
“Call me Diana, I think it’s a nice inside joke, plus it’s a name I like.”
This all happened last month. It´s been hard to sleep, I am afraid and anxious. I expect that, at any moment, some billionaire’s henchmen or some government task force will show up at my house and kill everyone. So far, I guess I got lucky, no one came looking for her yet.
I fear that maybe I doomed myself, I don´t think I’ll go to the police either, I think it would only make everything worse, anger whoever was the owner of that lab.
Now I understand why the scientist called the clone a masterpiece. She needs to sleep and eat a lot less than a normal human.
These last few days, Diana is wandering around the house a lot more. Some days she goes to the yard and stares at us through the window. When I confronted her, she said that she was bored, and wondering how normal humans sleep, finding it funny how we lose one third of our day just lying there, defenseless.
Diana is staring at me as I’m writing this, smiling in a robotic way, as if she knows that I’m telling our story. I asked her if she wants me to put something else for us to watch on the tv, as we are all sitting on the couch, but she said that she’s fine, that she just likes to look at me.
I hope that I made the right choices.