“Mr. Dessen?”
I jerk awake.
“Hi. Sorry to startle you.”
A doctor is staring down at me—a short, green-eyed redhead in a white lab coat holding a cup of coffee in one hand, a tablet in the other.
I sit up.
It’s day outside the window next to my bed, and for five seconds, I have absolutely no idea where I am.
Through the glass: low clouds blanket the city, cutting off the skyline above one thousand feet. From this vantage point, I can see the lake and two miles of Chicago neighborhoods filling the space in between, everything muted under a somber, midwestern gray.
“Mr. Dessen, do you know where you are?”
“Mercy Hospital.”
“That’s right. You walked into the ER last night, pretty disoriented. One of my colleagues, Dr. Randolph, admitted you, and when he left this morning, he handed your chart over to me. I’m Julianne Springer.”
I glance down at the IV in my wrist and trace the line up to the bag
hanging over me on a metal stand.
“What are you giving me?” I ask.
“Just old-fashioned HO. You were very dehydrated. How are you feeling2 now?”
I run a quick self-diagnostic.
Queasy.
Head pounding.
Inside of my mouth like cotton.
I point through the window. “Like that,” I say. “Weirdly hungover.”
Beyond the physical discomfort, I register a crushing sense of emptiness,
like it’s raining directly on my soul.
Like I’ve been hollowed out.
“I have your MRI results,” she says, waking her tablet. “Your scan came back normal. There was some shallow bruising, but nothing serious. Your tox screen results are far more illuminating. We found traces of alcohol, in line with what you reported to Dr. Randolph, but also something else.”
“What?”
“Ketamine.”
“Not familiar with it.”
“It’s a surgical anesthetic. One of its side effects is short-term amnesia.
Could explain some of your disorientation. The tox screen also showed something I’ve never seen before. A psychoactive compound. Really weird cocktail.” She sips her coffee. “I have to ask—you didn’t take these drugs
yourself?”
“Of course not.”
“Last night, you gave Dr. Randolph your wife’s name and a couple of
phone numbers.”
“Her cell and our landline.”
“I’ve been trying to track her down all morning, but her mobile number belongs to a guy named Ralph, and your landline just keeps going to
voicemail.”
“Can you read her number back to me?”
Springer reads off Daniela’s cell-phone number.
“That’s right,” I say.
“You’re sure about that?”
“Hundred percent.” As she looks back at the tablet, I ask, “Could these drugs you found in my system cause long-term altered states?”
“You mean delusions? Hallucinations?”
“Exactly.”
“To be honest, I don’t know what this psychochemical is, which means I can’t say with any certainty what effect it might have had on your nervous
system.”
“So it could still be affecting me?”
“Again, I don’t know what its half-life is, or how long it takes your body to expel it. But you don’t strike me as being under the influence of anything at the moment.”
Memories of the night before are regenerating.
I see myself walking naked and at gunpoint into an abandoned building.
The injection in my neck.
In my leg.
Pieces of a strange conversation with a man wearing a geisha mask.
A room filled with old generators and moonlight.
And while the thought of last night carries the emotional weight of a real memory, it has the fantasy lining of a dream, or a nightmare.
What was done to me inside that old building?
Springer pulls a chair over and takes a seat beside my bed. In proximity, I can see freckles covering her face like a sprinkling of pale sand.
“Let’s talk about what you said to Dr. Randolph. He wrote down…” She sighs. “Apologies, his handwriting is atrocious. ‘Patient reports: It was my house but it wasn’t my house.’ You also said that you got the cuts and bruises on your face because people were chasing you, but when asked why they were chasing you, you couldn’t provide an answer.” She looks up from
the screen. “You’re a professor?”
“Correct.”
“At…”
“Lakemont College.”
“Here’s the thing, Jason. While you were sleeping, and after we couldn’t find any trace of your wife—”
“What do you mean you couldn’t find any trace of her?”
“Her name is Daniela Dessen, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Thirty-nine years old?”
“Yeah.”
“We couldn’t find anyone with that name and age in all of Chicago.”
That levels me. I look away from Springer, back out the window. It’s so gray that even the time of day is masked. Morning, noon, evening—it’s impossible to determine. Fine droplets of rain cling to the other side of the glass.
At this point, I’m not even sure what to be afraid of—this reality that might actually be true, or the possibility that everything is going to pieces inside my head. I liked it much better when I thought everything was being caused by a brain tumor. That, at least, was an explanation.
“Jason, we took the liberty of looking you up. Your name. Profession.
Everything we could find. I want you to answer me very carefully. Do you really believe you’re a physics professor at Lakemont College?”
“I don’t believe it. It’s what I am.”
“We trolled the faculty webpages for science departments in every university and college in Chicago. Including Lakemont. You weren’t listed as a professor on any of them.”
“That’s impossible. I’ve been teaching there since—”
“Let me finish, because we did find some information about you.” She types something on her tablet. “Jason Ashley Dessen, born 1973 in Denison, Iowa, to Randall and Ellie Dessen. Says here that your mother passed when you were eight. How? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“She had an underlying heart condition, caught a bad strain of the flu, which turned into pneumonia.”
“Sorry to hear that.” She continues reading. “Bachelor’s degree from University of Chicago, 1995. PhD from same university, 2002. So far so
good?”
I nod.
“Awarded the Pavia Prize in 2004, and the same year, Science magazine honored your work with a cover story, calling it the ‘breakthrough of the year.’ Guest lecturer at Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley.” She looks up, meets my bewildered gaze, and then turns the tablet around so I can see that she’s reading from the Wikipedia page of Jason A. Dessen.
My sinus rhythm on the heart monitor I’m attached to has become noticeably faster.
Springer says, “You haven’t published any new papers or accepted any teaching positions since 2005, when you took on the role of chief science officer with Velocity Laboratories, a jet propulsion lab. It says finally that a missing-persons report was filed on your behalf eight months ago by your brother, and that you haven’t been seen publicly in over a year.”
This rocks me so deeply I can barely draw breath.
My blood pressure triggers some kind of alarm on the heart monitor, which begins to emit a grating beep.
A heavyset nurse appears in the doorway.
“We’re fine,” Springer says. “Could you shut that thing up?”
The nurse walks to the monitor, silences the alarm.
When he’s gone, the doctor reaches over the railing and touches my hand.
“I want to help you, Jason. I can see that you’re terrified. I don’t know what’s happened to you, and I get the feeling you don’t know either.”
The wind coming in off the lake is strong enough to blow the rain sideways. I watch as the droplets streak across the glass and blur the world beyond into an impressionistic cityscape of gray, punctuated by the glow of distant taillights, distant headlights.
Springer says, “I’ve called the police. They’re sending a detective over to take a statement from you and begin trying to get to the bottom of what happened last night. That’s the first thing we’re doing. Now, I’ve struck out trying to get in touch with Daniela, but I have been able to locate contact information for your brother, Michael, in Iowa City. I’d like to have your permission to call him and let him know that you’re here, and to discuss your condition with him.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I haven’t spoken to my brother in two years.
“I’m not sure if I want you to call him,” I say.
“Fair enough, but to be clear, under HIPAA, if in my judgment a patient of mine is unable to agree or object to a disclosure due to incapacity or emergency circumstances, I am authorized to decide whether disclosing your information to a family member or friend is in your best interest. I do believe that your current mental state qualifies as incapacity, and I think
consulting with someone who knows you and your history is in your best interest. So I will be calling Michael.”
She glances down at the floor, as if she doesn’t want to tell me whatever’s coming next.
“Third thing, last thing,” she says. “We need the guidance of a psychiatrist to get a handle on your condition. I’m having you transferred over to Chicago-Read, which is a mental-health center a little further up on the North Side.”
“Look, I admit that I don’t have a firm grasp on exactly what’s happening, but I’m not crazy. I’d be happy to talk to a psychiatrist. In fact, I’d welcome the opportunity. But I’m not volunteering to be committed, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It’s not what I’m asking. With all due respect, Jason, you don’t have a
choice in the matter.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s called an M1 hold, and by law, if I think you’re a threat to yourself or others, I can order a seventy-two-hour involuntary commitment. Look, this is the best thing for you. You’re in no condition—”
“I walked into this hospital under my own steam, because I wanted to find out what was wrong with me.”
“And that was the right choice, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do: find out why you’re having this break with reality, and set you up with the treatment you need to make a full recovery.”
I watch my blood pressure rising on the monitor.
I don’t want to set off the alarm again.
Closing my eyes, I breathe in.
Let it out.
Take another shot of oxygen.
My levels recede.
I say, “So you’re going to put me in a rubber room, no belt, no sharp objects, and medicate me into a stupor?”
“It’s not like that. You came into this hospital because you wanted to get better, right? Well, this is the first step. I need you to trust me.”
Springer rises from the chair and drags it back across the room under the television. “Just keep resting, Jason. Police will be here soon, and then we’ll get you moved over to Chicago-Read this evening.”
I watch her go, the threat of unraveling right on top of me, pressing down.
What if all the pieces of belief and memory that comprise who I am—my profession, Daniela, my son—are nothing but a tragic misfiring in that gray matter between my ears? Will I keep fighting to be the man I think I am? Or will I disown him and everything he loves, and step into the skin of the person this world would like for me to be?
And if I have lost my mind, what then?
What if everything I know is wrong?
No. Stop.
I am not losing my mind.
There were drugs in my blood from last night and bruises on my body.
My key opened the door to that house that wasn’t mine. I don’t have a brain tumor. There’s a mark from a wedding band on my ring finger. I am in this hospital room right now, and all of this is actually happening.
I am not allowed to think I’m crazy.
I am only allowed to solve this problem.
—
When the elevator doors open to the hospital lobby, I shoulder past two men in cheap suits and wet overcoats. They look like cops, and as they step into the elevator car and our eyes meet, I wonder if they’re heading up to see me.
I move past a waiting area, toward the automatic doors. Since I wasn’t on a secured ward, slipping out was much easier than I expected. I simply got dressed, waited for the hallway to clear, and cruised past the nurses’ station without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow.
As I approach the exit, I keep waiting for alarms to sound, for someone to shout my name, for guards to chase me through the lobby.
Soon I’m outside in the rain, and it feels like early evening, the bustle of traffic supporting something in the neighborhood of six p.m.
I hurry down the steps, hit the sidewalk, and don’t slow my pace until
I’ve reached the next block.
I glance over my shoulder.
There’s no one following me, at least as far as I can tell.
Just a sea of umbrellas.
I’m getting wet.
I have no idea where I’m going.
At a bank, I step off the sidewalk and take shelter under the entrance overhang. Leaning against a limestone column, I watch people move past as rain drills down on the pavement.
I dig my money clip out of my slacks. Last night’s cab fare made a sizeable dent in my measly treasury. I’m down to $182, and my credit cards are worthless.
Home is out of the question, but there’s a cheap hotel in my neighborhood a few blocks from my brownstone, and it’s just gross enough to make me think I could possibly afford a room there.
I step back out into the rain.
It’s getting darker by the minute.
Colder.
Without a coat or jacket, I’m soaked to my skin within two blocks.
—
The Days Inn occupies the building across the street from Village Tap. Only it doesn’t. The canopy is the wrong color, and the entire façade looks bizarrely upmarket. These are luxury apartments. I even see a doorman standing on the curb under an umbrella, trying to hail a cab for a woman in
a black trench coat.
Am I on the right street?
I cast a glance back to my corner bar.
VILLAGE TAP should be blinking neon in the front window, but instead there’s a heavy wooden panel with brass lettering attached to a pole that’s swinging over the entrance, creaking in the wind.
I continue walking, faster now, the rain driving into my eyes.
Past— Rowdy taverns.
Restaurants poised to receive the dinner rush—sparkling wineglasses and silverware quickly arranged on white linen tablecloths as servers memorize the specials.
A coffee shop I don’t recognize bursting with the jangle of an espresso machine grinding fresh beans.
Daniela’s and my favorite Italian place looking exactly as it should, and reminding me that I haven’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours.
But I keep walking.
Until I’m wet through to my socks.
Until I’m shivering uncontrollably.
Until night has dropped and I’m standing outside a three-story hotel with bars on the windows and an obnoxiously large sign above the entrance:
HOTEL ROYALE
I step inside, dripping a puddle on the cracked checkerboard floor.
It isn’t what I expected. Not seedy or dirty in the lurid sense of the word.
Just forgotten. Past prime. The way I remember my great-grandparents’ living room in their teetering Iowa farmhouse. As if the worn furniture has been here for a thousand years, frozen in time while the rest of the world marched on. The air carries the scent of must, and big-band music plays quietly through a hidden sound system. Something from the 1940s.
At the front desk, the old, tuxedoed clerk doesn’t bat an eye at my sodden state. Just takes $95 in damp cash and hands me a key to a room on the third floor.
The elevator car is cramped, and I stare at my distorted features in the bronze doors as the car labors, noisily and with all the grace of a fat man climbing stairs, to the third floor.
Halfway down a dim corridor, scarcely wide enough for two people to walk abreast, I locate my room number and wrestle the old-school lock
open with the key.
It isn’t much.
A single bed with a flimsy metal frame and a lumpy mattress.
A bathroom the size of a closet.
A dresser.
A cathode-ray television.
And a chair next to a window, where something glows on the other side of the glass.
Stepping around the foot of the bed, I sweep the curtain back and peer outside, finding myself at eye level with the top of the hotel sign and close enough to see the rain falling through the green neon light.
Down on the sidewalk below, I glimpse a man leaning against a streetlamp post, smoke curling up into the rain, the ash of his cigarette glowing and fading in the darkness under his hat.
Is he waiting there for me?
Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I go to the door and check the deadbolt and hook the chain.
Then I kick off my shoes, strip down, and dry myself off with the bathroom’s only towel.
The best thing about the room is the ancient cast-iron radiator that stands under the window. I crank it up to high and hold my hands in the jetties of heat.
I drape my wet clothes across the back of the chair and push it close to the radiator.
In the bedside table drawer, I find a Gideon Bible and a sprawling Chicago Metro phone book.
Stretching out across the creaky bed, I thumb to the D’s and begin
searching for my last name.
I quickly locate my listing.
Jason A. Dessen.
Correct address.
Correct number.
I lift the phone receiver off the bedside table and call my landline.
It rings four times, and then I hear my voice: “Hi, you’ve reached Jason, well, except not really, because I’m not actually here to take your call. This
is a recording. You know what to do.”
I hang up before the beep.
That isn’t our home voicemail message.
I feel insanity stalking me again, threatening to curl me up fetal and shatter me into a million pieces.
But I shut it down, returning to my new mantra.
I am not allowed to think I’m crazy.
I am only allowed to solve this problem.
Experimental physics—hell, all of science—is about solving problems.
However, you can’t solve them all at once. There’s always a larger, overarching question—the big target. But if you obsess on the sheer enormity of it, you lose focus.
The key is to start small. Focus on solving problems you can answer.
Build some dry ground to stand on. And after you’ve put in the work, and if you’re lucky, the mystery of the overarching question becomes knowable.
Like stepping slowly back from a photomontage to witness the ultimate image revealing itself.
I have to separate myself from the fear, the paranoia, the terror, and simply attack this problem as if I were in a lab—one small question at a
time.
Build some dry ground to stand on.
The overarching question that plagues me in this moment: What has happened to me? There’s no way to answer that. Not yet. I have vague suspicions of course, but suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesn’t lead to truth.
Why weren’t Daniela and Charlie at our house last night? Why did it seem as though I live alone?
No, that’s still too big, too complex. Narrow the field of data.
Where are Daniela and Charlie?
Better but reduce it further. Daniela will know where my son is.
So this is where I’ll start: Where is Daniela?
The sketches I saw last night on the walls of the house that isn’t my house—they were created by Daniela Vargas. She had signed them using her maiden name. Why?
I hold my ring finger up to the neon light coming in through the window.
The mark of my wedding band is gone.
Was it ever there?
I tear off a piece of loose thread from the curtain and tie it around my ring finger as a physical link to the world and the life I know.
Then I return to the phone book and thumb through to the V’s, stopping at the only entry for Daniela Vargas. I rip out the entire page and dial her number.
The familiarity of her voice on the recording moves me, even while the message itself leaves me deeply unsettled.
“You’ve reached Daniela. I’m away painting. Leave a message. Ciao.”
—
Within an hour, my clothes are warm and nearly dry. I wash up, get dressed, and take the stairwell down to the lobby.
Out on the street, the wind is blowing, but the rain has relented.
The smoking man by the streetlamp is gone.
I’m light-headed with hunger.
I pass a half-dozen restaurants before I find one that won’t clean out my funds—a bright, grimy pizza joint that sells enormous, deep-dish slices.
There’s nowhere to sit inside, so I stand on the sidewalk, stuffing my face and wondering if this pizza is as life-changing as I think it is, or if I’m too ravenous to be discerning.
Daniela’s address is in Bucktown. I’m down to $75 and change, so I could hail a cab, but I feel like walking.
The pedestrian and traffic levels point toward Friday night, and the air
carries a commensurate energy.
I head east to find my wife.
—
Daniela’s building is yellow-brick with a façade covered in climbing ivy that’s turning russet with the recent cold. The buzzer system is an old- fashioned brass panel, and I find her maiden name second up from the bottom of the first column.
I press the buzzer three times, but she doesn’t answer.
Through the tall windowpanes that frame the door, I see a woman in an evening gown and overcoat, her stilettoes clicking down the hallway as she approaches. I retreat from the window and turn away as the door swings open.
She’s on a cell, and by the whiff of alcohol attendant with her passing, I get the feeling she already has an enthusiastic head start on the evening. She doesn’t notice me as she charges down the steps.
I catch the edge of the door before it closes and take the stairwell to the fourth floor.
Daniela’s door is at the end of the hall.
I knock and wait.
No answer.
I head back down to the lobby, wondering if I should just wait here for her to return. But what if she’s out of town? What would she think if she came back to her apartment to find me loitering outside her building like some stalker?
As I approach the main entrance, my eyes pass over a bulletin board covered in flyers announcing everything from gallery openings to book readings and poetry slams.
The largest notice taped to the center of the board catches my attention.
It’s a poster actually, advertising a show by Daniela Vargas at a gallery
called Oomph.
I stop, scan for the opening date.
Friday, October 2.
Tonight.
—
Back down on the street, it’s raining again.
I flag a cab.
The gallery is a dozen blocks away, and I feel the tensile strength of my nerves hit the ceiling as we roll down Damen Avenue, a parking lot of cabs in the crest of the evening’s wavelength.
I abandon my ride and join the hipster-heavy crowd marching through the freezing drizzle.
Oomph is an old packing-plant-turned-art-gallery, and the line to get inside runs halfway down the block.
A miserable, shivering forty-five minutes later, I’m finally out of the rain and paying my $15 admission fee and being whisked with a group of ten people into an anteroom with Daniela’s first and last name in gigantic, graffiti-style letters on the encircling wall.
During our fifteen years together, I’ve attended plenty of exhibits and openings with Daniela, but I’ve never experienced anything like this.
A slim, bearded man emerges from a hidden door in the wall.
The lights dim.
He says, “I’m Steve Konkoly, the producer of what you’re about to see.”
He rips a plastic produce bag off a dispenser by the door. “Phones go in the bag. You get them back on the other side.”
The bag of accumulating phones makes the rounds.
“A word about the next ten minutes of your life. The artist asks that you set aside your intellectual processing and make an effort to experience her installation emotionally. Welcome to ‘Entanglement.’ ”
Konkoly takes the bag of phones and opens the door.
I’m the last one through.
For a moment, our group is bunched up in a dark, confined space that turns pitch-black as the echo of the slammed door reveals a vast, warehouse-like room.
My attention is drawn skyward as points of light fade in above us.
Stars.
They look startlingly real, each containing a smoldering quality.
Some are close, some are distant, and every now and then one streaks
through the void.
I see what lies ahead.
Someone in our group mutters, “Oh my God.”
It’s a labyrinth built of Plexiglas, which by some visual effect appears to stretch on infinitely under the universe of stars.
Ripples of light travel through the panels.
Our group shuffles forward.
There are five entrances to the labyrinth, and I stand at the nexus of all of them, watching the others drift ahead on their separate paths.
A low-level sound that has been there all along catches my attention—it’s not music so much as white noise, like television static, hissing over a deep, sustained tone.
I choose a path, and as I enter the labyrinth, the transparency vanishes.
The Plexiglas is engulfed in near-blinding light, even under my feet.
One minute in, some of the panels begin to show looped imagery.
Birth—child screaming, mother weeping with joy.
A condemned man kicking and twisting at the end of a noose.
A snowstorm.
The ocean.
A desert landscape scrolling past.
I continue along my path.
Into dead ends.
Around blind curves.
The imagery appearing with greater frequency, on faster loops.
The crumpled remains of a car crash.
A couple in the throes of passionate sex.
The point of view of a patient rolling down a hospital corridor on a gurney with nurses and doctors looking down.
The cross.
The Buddha.
The pentagram.
The peace sign.
A nuclear detonation.
The lights go out.
The stars return.
I can see through the Plexiglas again, only now there’s some kind of digital filter overlaid on the transparency—static and swarming insects and falling snow.
It makes the others in the labyrinth look like silhouettes moving through a vast wasteland.
And despite the confusion and fear of the last twenty-four hours, or perhaps precisely because of all I’ve experienced, what I’m witnessing in this moment breaks through and hits me hard.
While I can see the others in the labyrinth, it doesn’t feel like we’re in the same room, or even the same space.
They seem worlds apart and lost in their own vectors.
I’m struck for a fleeting moment by the overwhelming sense of loss.
Not grief or pain, but something more primal.
A realization and the terror that follows it—terror of the limitless indifference surrounding us.
I don’t know if that’s the intended takeaway from Daniela’s installation, but it’s certainly mine.
We’re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.
At the labyrinth’s exit, there’s one last loop—a man and a woman each hold the tiny hand of their child as they run together up a grassy hill under a clear, blue sky—with the following words slowly materializing on the panel—
Nothing exists.
All is a dream.
God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars —a dream, all a dream; they have no existence.
Nothing exists save empty space—and you….
And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you
are but a thought.
MARK TWAIN
I step into another anteroom, where the rest of my group huddles around the plastic bag, retrieving their phones.
On through, into a large, well-lit gallery with glossy hardwood floors, art- adorned walls, a violin trio…and a woman in a stunning black dress, standing on a riser, addressing the crowd.
It takes me a full five seconds to realize this is Daniela.
She’s radiant, holding a glass of red wine in one hand and gesturing with the other.
“—just the most amazing night, and I’m so grateful to all of you for coming out to support my new project. It means the world.”
Daniela raises her wineglass.
“¡Salud!”
The crowd responds in turn, and as everyone drinks, I move toward her.
In proximity, she’s electric, so sparkling with life that I have to restrain myself from calling out to her. This is Daniela with an energy like the first time we met fifteen years ago, before years of life—the normalcy, the elation, the depression, the compromise—transformed her into the woman who now shares my bed: amazing mother, amazing wife, but fighting always against the whispers of what might have been.
My Daniela carries a weight and a distance in her eyes that scare me
sometimes.
This Daniela is an inch off the ground.
I’m now standing less than ten feet away, my heart thumping, wondering if she’ll spot me, and then— Eye contact.
Hers go wide and her mouth opens, and I can’t tell if she’s horrified or delighted or just surprised to see my face.
She pushes through the crowd, throws her arms around my neck, and pulls me in tight with, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you came. Is everything all right? I’d heard you left the country for a while or were missing or something.”
I’m not sure how to respond to that, so I just say, “Well, here I am.”
Daniela hasn’t worn perfume in years, but she’s wearing it tonight, and she smells like Daniela without me, like Daniela before our separate scents merged into us.
I don’t want to let go—I need her touch—but she pulls away.
I ask, “Where’s Charlie?”
“Who?”
“Charlie.”
“Who are you talking about?”
Something torques inside of me.
“Jason?”
She doesn’t know who our son is.
Do we even have a son?
Does Charlie exist?
Of course he exists. I was at his birth. I held him ten seconds after he came writhing and screaming into the world.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Yeah. I just came through the labyrinth.”
“What did you think?”
“It almost made me cry.”
“It was all you,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“That conversation we had a year and a half ago? When you came to see me? You inspired me, Jason. I thought of you every day I was building it. I thought of what you said. Didn’t you see the dedication?”
“No, where was it?”
“At the entrance to the labyrinth. It’s for you. I dedicated it to you, and I’ve been trying to reach you. I wanted you to be my special guest for tonight, but no one could find you.” She smiles. “You’re here now. That’s all that matters.”
My heart is going so fast, the room threatening to spin, and then Ryan Holder is standing next to Daniela with his arm around her. He’s wearing a tweed jacket, his hair is graying, and he’s paler and less fit than the last time I saw him, which was impossibly at Village Tap last night at his celebration for winning the Pavia Prize.
“Well, well,” Ryan says, shaking my hand. “Mr. Pavia. The man himself.”
Daniela says, “Guys, I have to go be polite and mingle, but, Jason, I’m having a secret get-together at my apartment after this. You’ll come?”
“I’d love to.”
As I watch Daniela vanish into the crowd, Ryan says, “Want to get a drink?”
God yes.
The gallery has pulled out all the stops—tuxedoed waiters carrying trays of appetizers and Champagne, and a cash bar on the far side of the room under a triptych of Daniela self-portraits.
As the barkeep pours our whiskies—Macallan 12s—into plastic cups, Ryan says, “I know you’re doing just fine, but I got these.”
It’s so strange—he carries none of the arrogance and swagger of the man I saw holding court last night at my local bar.
We take our Scotches and find a quiet corner away from the mob surrounding Daniela.
As we stand there watching the room fill with more and more people emerging from the labyrinth, I ask, “So what have you been up to? I feel
like I lost track of your trajectory.”
“I moved over to U Chicago.”
“Congrats. So you’re teaching?”
“Cellular and molecular neuroscience. I’ve been pursuing some pretty cool research as well, involving the prefrontal cortex.”
“Sounds exciting.”
Ryan leans in close. “All seriousness, the rumor mill has been crazy. The whole community’s talking. People saying”—he lowers his voice—“that you cracked up and lost your mind. That you’re in a rubber room somewhere. That you’re dead.”
“Here I am. Lucid, warm, and breathing.”
“So that compound I built for you…it worked out, I assume?”
I just stare at him, no idea what he’s talking about, and when I don’t provide an immediate answer, he says, “Right, I get it. They’ve got you buried under a mountain of NDAs.”
I sip my drink. I’m still hungry, and the alcohol is traveling too fast to my head. When the next waiter passes within range, I grab three mini-quiches off the silver tray.
Whatever is bugging him, Ryan can’t let it go.
“Look, I don’t mean to bitch,” he says, “but I just feel like I did a lot of work for you and Velocity in the dark. You and I go way back, and I get that
you’re in a different place in your career, but I don’t know…I think you got
what you wanted from me and…”
“What?”
“Forget it.”
“No, please.”
“You could’ve shown your old college roommate a little more respect is
all I’m saying.”
“What compound are you talking about?”
He looks at me with thinly veiled contempt. “Fuck you.”
We stand silently on the outskirts as the room grows dense with people.
“So are you two together?” I ask. “You and Daniela?”
“Sort of,” he says.
“What does that mean?”
“We’ve been seeing each other for a little while.”
“You always had a thing for her, didn’t you?”
He just smirks.
Scanning the crowd, I find Daniela. She’s poised and in the moment, surrounded by reporters with notepads flipped open, scribbling furiously as she speaks.
“And how’s it going?” I ask, though I’m not sure I really want the answer. “You and my…and Daniela.”
“Amazing. She’s the woman of my dreams.”
He smiles enigmatically, and for three seconds, I want to murder him.
—
At one in the morning, I’m sitting on a sofa at Daniela’s place, watching as she sees the last of her guests to the door. These past few hours have been a challenge—trying to hold semicoherent conversations with Daniela’s art friends while biding my time to get an actual moment alone with her.
Apparently, that moment will continue to elude me: Ryan Holder, the man who’s sleeping with my wife, is still here, and as he collapses into a leather chair across from me, I get the sense that he’s settling in, possibly for the night.
From a heavy rocks glass, I sip the dregs of a single malt, not drunk but good and goddamn buzzed, the alcohol serving as a nice buffer between my psyche and this rabbit hole I’ve fallen down.
This wonderland purporting to be my life.
I wonder if Daniela wants me to leave. If I’m that oblivious, last- remaining guest who doesn’t realize when he’s outstayed his welcome.
She shuts the door and hooks the chain.
Kicking off her heels, she stumbles over to the sofa and crashes down onto the cushions with, “What a night.”
She opens the drawer to the end table beside the couch and pulls out a lighter and a stained-glass pipe.
Daniela quit weed when she became pregnant with Charlie and never took it up again. I watch her take a hit and then offer me the pipe, and because this night can’t get any stranger, why not?
Soon we’re all stoned and sitting in the softly humming silence of the spacious loft whose walls are covered in a vast, eclectic array of art.
Daniela has the blinds swept back from the huge, south-facing window that serves as the backdrop to the living room, the downtown a twinkling spectacle beyond the glass.
Ryan passes the pipe to Daniela, and as she begins to repack the bowl, my old roommate slumps back in the chair and stares at the ceiling. The way he keeps licking the front of his teeth makes me smile, because it was always his weed tic, even from back in our grad-school days.
I look through that window at all the lights and ask, “How well do you
two know me?”
That seems to catch their attention.
Daniela sets the pipe on the table and turns on the sofa so she’s facing
me, her knees drawn into her chest.
Ryan’s eyes snap open.
He straightens in the chair.
“What do you mean?” Daniela asks.
“Do you trust me?”
She reaches over and touches my hand. Pure electricity. “Of course, honey.”
Ryan says, “Even when you and I have been on the outs, I’ve always respected your decency and integrity.”
Daniela looks concerned. “Everything okay?”
I shouldn’t do this. I really shouldn’t do this.
But I’m going to.
“A hypothetical,” I say. “A man of science, a physics professor, is living here in Chicago. He isn’t wildly successful like he always dreamed, but he’s happy, mostly content, and married”—I look at Daniela, thinking of how Ryan described it back at the gallery—“to the woman of his dreams. They have a son. They have a good life.
“One night, this man goes to a bar to see an old friend, a college buddy who recently won a prestigious award. On the walk back, something happens. He never makes it home. He’s abducted. The events are murky, but when he finally regains his full presence of mind, he’s in a lab in South Chicago, and everything has changed. His house is different. He’s not a professor anymore. He’s no longer married to this woman.”
Daniela asks, “Are you saying he thinks these things have changed, or that they’ve actually changed?”
“I’m saying that from his perspective, this isn’t his world anymore.”
“He has a brain tumor,” Ryan suggests.
I look at my old friend. “MRI says no.”
“Then maybe people are messing with him. Running an elaborate prank that infiltrates every aspect of his life. I think I saw that in a movie once.”
“In less than eight hours, the inside of his house was completely renovated. And not just different pictures on the walls. New appliances.
New furniture. Light switches were moved. No prank could possibly be this complex. And what would be the point? This is just a normal guy. Why would anyone want to mess with him at this level?”
“Then he’s crazy,” Ryan says.
“I’m not crazy.”
It becomes very quiet in the loft.
Daniela takes hold of my hand. “What are you trying to tell us, Jason?”
I look at her. “Earlier tonight, you told me that a conversation you and I had inspired your installation.”
“It did.”
“Can you tell me about this conversation?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Not a single word of it.”
“How is that possible?”
“Please, Daniela.”
There’s a long pause while she searches my eyes, maybe to confirm that I’m serious.
She finally says, “It was spring, I think. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, and we hadn’t really spoken since we went our separate ways all those years ago. I had been following your success, of course. I was always so proud of you.
“Anyway, you showed up at my studio one night. Out of the blue. Said you’d been thinking about me lately, and at first I thought you were just trying to hook up with an old flame, but this was something else. You
seriously don’t remember any of this?”
“It’s like I wasn’t even there.”
“We started talking about your research, how you were involved with this project that was under wraps, and you said—I remember this very clearly— you said you probably wouldn’t see me again. And I realized that you hadn’t stopped by to catch up. You had come to say goodbye. Then you told me that our existence was all about choices and that you had blown some of them, but none so badly as with me. You said you were sorry for everything. It was very emotional. You left, and I didn’t hear from you or see you again until tonight. Now I have a question for you.”
“Okay.” Between the booze and dope and trying to unpack what she’s telling me, I’m reeling.
“When you saw me tonight at the reception, the first thing you asked me was if I knew where ‘Charlie’ was. Who’s that?”
One of the things I love most about Daniela is her honesty. She has a direct link hardwired from her heart to her mouth. No filter, no self- revision. She says what she feels, without a shred of guile or cunning. She works no angles.
So when I look into Daniela’s eyes and see that she’s utterly sincere, it
nearly breaks me.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say.
“Obviously, it does. We haven’t seen each other in a year and a half and that’s the first thing you ask me?”
I finish off my drink, crunching the last melting ice cube between my
molars.
“Charlie is our son.”
The color leaves her face.
“Hold on,” Ryan says, his words sharp. “I thought we were just having a stoner conversation. What is this?” He looks at Daniela, back to me. “Is this
a joke?”
“No, it’s not.”
Daniela says, “We don’t have a son, and you know it. We haven’t been together in fifteen years. You know this, Jason. You know this.”
I suppose I could try to convince her right now. I know so much about this woman—secrets from her childhood that she only revealed in the last five years of our marriage. But I worry these “revelations” would backfire.
That she wouldn’t see them as proofs, but sleights of hand. Parlor tricks.
I’m betting the best approach to persuade her I’m telling the truth is clear- eyed sincerity.
I say, “Here’s what I know, Daniela. You and I live in my brownstone in Logan Square. We have a fourteen-year-old son named Charlie. I’m a middling professor at Lakemont. You’re an amazing wife and mother who sacrificed her art career to stay at home. And you, Ryan. You’re a famous neuroscientist. You won the Pavia Prize. You’ve lectured all over the world.
And I know this sounds absolutely crazy, but I don’t have a brain tumor, no one is messing with me, and I haven’t lost my mind.”
Ryan laughs, but there’s an unmistakable twinge of discomfort in it.
“Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that everything you just said is true. Or at least that you believe it. The unknown variable in this story is what you’ve been working on these last few years. This secret project. What
can you tell us about it?”
“Nothing.”
Ryan struggles onto his feet.
“You’re going?” Daniela asks.
“It’s late. I’ve had enough.”
I say, “Ryan, it’s not that I won’t tell you. I can’t tell you. I have no memory of it. I’m a physics professor. I woke up in this lab and everyone thought I belonged there, but I don’t.”
Ryan takes his hat and heads for the door.
Halfway across the threshold, he turns and faces me, says, “You’re not well. Let me take you to the hospital.”
“I’ve already been. I’m not going back.”
He looks at Daniela. “Do you want him to leave?”
She turns to me, considering—I’m guessing—whether she wants to be left alone with a madman. What if she decides not to trust me?
She finally shakes her head, says, “It’s fine.”
“Ryan,” I say. “What compound did you make for me?”
He just glares at me, and for a moment I think he’s going to answer, the tension draining out of his face, as if he’s trying to decide whether I’m crazy or just being a stoned asshole.
And all at once, he arrives at his conclusion.
Hardness returns.
He says with zero warmth in his voice, “Good night, Daniela.”
Then turns.
Goes.
Slams the door behind him.
—
Daniela walks into the guest room wearing yoga pants and a tank top and
carrying a cup of tea.
I’ve had a shower.
I don’t feel any better, but at least I’m clean, the hospital stench of sickness and Clorox gone.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress, she hands me the mug.
“Chamomile.”
I cup my hands around the hot ceramic, say, “You didn’t have to do this. I have a place I can go.”
“You’re staying here with me. End of story.”
She crawls across my legs and sits beside me, her back against the
headboard.
I sip the tea.
It’s warm, soothing, faintly sweet.
Daniela looks over.
“When you went to the hospital, what did they think was wrong with you?”
“They didn’t know. They wanted to commit me.”
“To a psych ward?”
“Yeah.”
“And you wouldn’t consent?”
“No, I left.”
“So it would have been an involuntary thing.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you sure that’s not what’s best at this point, Jason? I mean, what would you think if someone were saying to you the things you’re saying to me?”
“I’d think he was out of his mind. But I’d be wrong.”
“Then tell me,” she says. “What do you think is happening to you?”
“I’m not entirely sure.”
“But you’re a scientist. You have a theory.”
“I don’t have enough data.”
“What does your gut tell you?”
I sip the chamomile tea, savoring the hit of warmth as it slides down my throat.
“We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we’re a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.”
She takes my hand in hers, and even though she isn’t Daniela as I know her, I cannot hide from how madly I love this woman, even here and now, sitting in this bed, in this wrong world.
I look over at her, those Spanish eyes glassy and intense. It takes all my
willpower to keep my hands off her.
“Are you afraid?” she asks.
I think back to the man who took me at gunpoint. To that lab. To the team that followed me back to my brownstone and tried to apprehend me. I think of the man smoking a cigarette under my hotel room window. On top of all the elements of my identity and this reality that don’t align, there are very real people out there, beyond these walls, who want to find me.
Who have hurt me before and possibly want to hurt me again.
A sobering thought crashes over me—could they track me here? Have I
put Daniela in danger?
No.
If she isn’t my wife, if she’s only a girlfriend from fifteen years ago, why would she be on anyone’s radar?
“Jason?” And she asks again, “Are you afraid?”
“Very.”
She reaches up, gently touches my face, says, “Bruises.”
“I don’t know how I got them.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Who?”
“Charlie.”
“This must be so weird for you.”
“I can’t pretend it’s not.”
“Well, I told you, he’s fourteen. Almost fifteen. His birthday is October twenty-first, and he was born premature at Chicago Mercy. A whopping one pound, fifteen ounces. He needed a lot of help his first year, but he was a fighter. Now he’s healthy and as tall as I am.”
Tears well up in her eyes.
“He has dark hair like you and a wonderful sense of humor. Solid B student. Very right-brained, like his mama. He’s into Japanese comics and skateboards. Loves to draw these crazy landscapes. I don’t think it’s too early to say that he has your eye for it.”
“Stop it.”
“What?”
She closes her eyes, and the tears squeeze out of the corners and spill
down her cheeks.
“We don’t have a son.”
“You swear to me you have no memory of him?” I ask. “This isn’t some game? If you tell me now, I won’t—”
“Jason, we broke up fifteen years ago. Well, to be specific, you ended it
with me.”
“That is not true.”
“I had told you the day before that I was pregnant. You needed time to think about it. You came to my loft and said it was the hardest decision you’d ever made, but you were busy with your research, the research that would ultimately win that big award. You said the next year of your life would be in a cleanroom and that I deserved better. That our child deserved better.”
I say, “That is not how it happened. I told you it wasn’t going to be easy, but that we’d make it work. We got married. You had Charlie. I lost my funding. You quit painting. I became a professor. You became a full-time mother.”
“And yet here we are tonight. Not married. No children. You just came from the opening of the installation that’s going to make me famous, and you did win that prize. I don’t know what’s going on in your head. Maybe you do have competing memories, but I know what’s real.”
I stare down at the steam rising off the surface of the tea.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” I ask.
“I have no idea, but you’re not well.”
And she looks at me with the compassion that has always defined her.
I touch the ring of thread that’s tied around my finger like a talisman.
I say, “Look, maybe you believe what I’m telling you, maybe you don’t, but I need you to know that I believe it. I would never lie to you.”
This is possibly the most surreal moment I’ve experienced since coming to consciousness in that lab—sitting in bed in the guest room of the apartment of the woman who is my wife but isn’t, talking about the son we apparently never had, about the life that wasn’t ours.
—
I wake alone in bed in the middle of the night, my heart pounding, the darkness spinning, the inside of my mouth sickeningly dry.
For a full terrifying minute, I have no idea where I am.
This isn’t the alcohol or the pot.
It’s a much deeper level of disorientation.
I wrap the covers tightly around me, but I can’t stop shaking, and a full- body ache is growing more painful by the second, my legs restless, my head throbbing.
—
The next time my eyes open, the room is filled with daylight and Daniela is standing over me, looking worried.
“You’re burning up, Jason. I should take you to the ER.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You don’t look fine.” She places a freezing washcloth across my forehead. “How does that feel?” she asks.
“Good, but you don’t have to do this. I’ll grab a cab back to my hotel.”
“Just try to leave.”
—
In the early afternoon, my fever breaks.
Daniela cooks me chicken noodle soup from scratch, and I eat sitting up in bed while she sits in a chair in the corner with a distance in her eyes I know too well.
She’s lost in thought, mulling something over, and doesn’t notice that I’m watching her. I don’t mean to stare, but I can’t take my eyes off her. She is still so utterly Daniela, except— Her hair is shorter.
She’s in better shape.
She’s wearing makeup, and her clothes—jeans and a form-fitting T—age her down considerably from thirty-nine years.
“Am I happy?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“In our life that you say we share together…am I happy?”
“I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I couldn’t sleep last night. It was all I could think about.”
“I think you’re happy.”
“Even without my art?”
“You miss it for sure. You see old friends finding success, and I know you’re happy for them, but I also know it stings. Just like it does for me. It’s
a bonding agent between us.”
“You mean we’re both losers.”
“We are not losers.”
“Are we happy? Together, I mean.”
I set the bowl of soup aside.
“Yeah. There have been rough patches, like with any marriage, but we have a son, a home, a family. You’re my best friend.”
She looks straight at me and asks with a devious smirk, “How’s our sex
life?”
I just laugh.
She says, “Oh God, did I actually make you blush?”
“You did.”
“But you didn’t answer my question.”
“I didn’t, did I?”
“What’s wrong, is it not good?”
She’s flirting now.
“No, it’s great. You’re just embarrassing me.”
She gets up and walks over to the bed.
Sits on the edge of the mattress and stares at me with those huge, deep
eyes.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “That if you aren’t crazy or full of shit, then we just had the strangest conversation in human history.”
—
I sit in bed watching the daylight fade over Chicago.
Whatever storm system brought the rain last night has blown out, and in its wake, the sky is clear and the trees have turned and there’s a stunning quality to the light as it moves toward evening—polarized and golden—that I can only describe as loss.
Robert Frost’s gold that cannot stay.
Out in the kitchen, pots are banging, cabinets are opening and closing, and the scent of cooking meats drifts back down the hallway into the guest room with a smell that strikes me as suspiciously familiar.
I climb out of bed, stable on my feet for the first time all day, and head for the kitchen.
Bach is playing, red wine is open, and Daniela stands at the island, chopping an onion on the soapstone countertop in an apron and a pair of
swimming goggles.
“Smells amazing,” I say.
“Would you mind stirring it?”
I walk over to the range and lift the lid off a deep pot.
The steam rising into my face takes me home.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Like a different man.”
“So…better?”
“Much.”
It’s a traditional Spanish dish—a bean stew made with an assortment of native legumes and meats. Chorizo, pancetta, black sausage. Daniela cooks it once or twice a year, usually on my birthday, or when the snow flies on a weekend and we just feel like drinking wine and cooking together all day.
I stir the stew, replace the lid.
Daniela says, “It’s a bean stew from—”
It slips out before I think to stop myself: “Your mother’s recipe. Well, to
be specific—her mother’s mother.”
Daniela stops cutting.
She looks back at me.
“Put me to work,” I say.
“What else do you know about me?”
“Look, from my perspective, we’ve been together fifteen years. So I know almost everything.”
“And from mine, it was only two and a half months, and that was a lifetime ago. And yet you know this recipe was handed down through my family over several generations.”
For a moment, it becomes uncannily quiet in the kitchen.
Like the air between us carries a positive charge, humming on some frequency right at the edge of our perception.
She says finally, “If you want to help, I’m preparing toppings for the stew, and I could tell you what those are, but you probably already know.”
“Grated cheddar, cilantro, and sour cream?”
She gives the faintest smile and raises an eyebrow. “Like I said, you already know.”
—
We have dinner at the table beside the huge window with the candlelight reflecting in the glass and the city lights burning beyond—our local constellation.
The food is spectacular, Daniela is beautiful in the firelight, and I’m feeling grounded for the first time since I stumbled out of that lab.
At the end of dinner—our bowls empty, second wine bottle killed—she reaches across the glass table and touches my hand.
“I don’t know what’s happening to you, Jason, but I’m glad you found
your way to me.”
I want to kiss her.
She took me in when I was lost.
When the world stopped making sense.
But I don’t kiss her. I just squeeze her hand and say, “You have no idea what you’ve done for me.”
We clear the table, load the dishwasher, and tackle the remaining sink full of dishes.
I wash. She dries and puts away. Like an old married couple.
Apropos of nothing, I say, “Ryan Holder, huh?”
She stops wiping down the interior of the stockpot and looks at me.
“Do you have an opinion about that you’d like to share?”
“No, it’s just—”
“What? He was your roommate, your friend. You don’t approve?”
“He always had a thing for you.”
“Are we jealous?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, grow up. He’s a beautiful man.”
She goes back to her drying.
“So how serious is it?” I ask.
“We’ve been out a few times. Nobody’s leaving their toothbrushes at anyone’s house yet.”
“Well, I think he’d like to. He seems pretty smitten.”
Daniela smirks. “How could he not be? I’m amazing.”
—
I lie in bed in the guest room with the window cracked so the city noise can put me under like a sound machine.
Staring out the tall window, I watch the sleeping city.
Last night, I set out to answer a simple question: Where is Daniela?
And I found her—a successful artist, living alone.
We’ve never been married, never had a son.
Unless I’m the victim of the most elaborate prank of all time, the nature of Daniela’s existence appears to support the revelation these last forty-
eight hours have been building toward….
This is not my world.
Even as those five words cross my mind, I’m not exactly certain what they mean, or how to begin to consider their full weight.
So I say it again.
I try it on.
See how it fits.
This is not my world.
—
A soft knock at my door startles me out of a dream.
“Come in.”
Daniela enters, climbs into bed beside me.
I sit up, ask, “Everything okay?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“What’s wrong?”
She kisses me, and it isn’t like kissing my wife of fifteen years, it’s like kissing my wife fifteen years ago for the first time.
Pure energy and collision.
As I’m on top of her, my hands running up the inside of her thighs, driving the satin chemise over her bare hips, I stop.
She says, breathless, “Why are you stopping?”
And I almost say, I can’t do this, you’re not my wife, but that isn’t even true.
This is Daniela, the only human being in this insane world who has helped me, and, yes, maybe I am trying to justify it, but I’m so turned around, upside down, terrified, desperate, that I don’t just want it, I need this, and I think she does too.
I stare down into her eyes, smoky and glistening in the light stealing through the window.
Eyes you can fall into and keep falling.
She isn’t the mother of my son, she isn’t my wife, we haven’t made a life together, but I love her all the same, and not just the version of Daniela that exists in my head, in my history. I love the physical woman underneath me in this bed here and now, wherever this is, because it’s the same arrangement of matter—same eyes, same voice, same smell, same taste….
It isn’t married-people lovemaking that follows.
We have fumbling, groping, backseat-of-the-car, unprotected-because- who-gives-a-fuck, protons-smashing-together sex.
—
Moments after, sweaty and shaky, we lie intertwined and gazing out at the lights of our city.
Daniela’s heart is banging away in her chest, and I can feel the bump- bump of it against my side, decelerating now.
Slower.
Slower.
“Everything okay?” she whispers. “I can hear the wheels turning up there.”
“I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t found you.”
“Well, you did. And whatever’s happening, I’m here for you. You know
that, right?”
She runs her fingers across my hands.
They stop at the piece of thread tied around my ring finger.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“Proof,” I say.
“Proof?”
“That I’m not crazy.”
It becomes quiet again.
I’m not sure of the time, but it’s definitely past two in the morning.
The bars will be closed now.
The streets as quiet and subdued as they get with the exception of snowstorm nights.
The air creeping through the crack in the window is the coldest of the season.
It trickles across our sweat-glazed bodies.
“I need to get back to my house,” I say.
“Your place in Logan Square?”
“Yeah.”
“What for?”
“I apparently have a home office. I want to get on the computer, see exactly what I’ve been working on. Maybe I’ll find papers, notes, something that will shed some light on what’s happening to me.”
“I can drive you over first thing in the morning.”
“You probably shouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Might not be safe.”
“Why wouldn’t it—”
Out in the living room, a loud bang rattles the door, like someone pounding on it with their fist. The way I imagine cops knock.
I ask, “Who the hell is that at this hour?”
Daniela climbs out of bed and walks naked out of the room.
It takes me a minute to find my boxer shorts in the twisted-up comforter, and by the time I pull them on, Daniela is emerging from her bedroom in a
terrycloth robe.
We head out into the living room.
The pounding on the door continues as Daniela approaches.
“Don’t open it,” I whisper.
“Obviously.”
As she leans into the peephole, the phone rings.
We both startle.
Daniela crosses the living room toward the cordless lying on the coffee table.
I glance through the peephole, see a man standing in the hallway, his
back to the door.
He’s on a cell phone.
Daniela answers, “Hello?”
The man is dressed in black—Doc Martens, jeans, a leather jacket.
Daniela says into the phone, “Who is this?”
I move toward her and point to the door, mouthing, It’s him?
She nods.
“What does he want?”
She points at me.
Now I can hear the man’s voice coming simultaneously through the door and through the speaker on her cordless.
She says into the phone, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just me here, and I live alone, and I’m not letting a strange man into my
home at two in the—”
The door explodes open, the chain snaps and flies across the room, and the man steps in raising a pistol with a long black tube screwed into the barrel.
He aims it at both of us, and as he kicks the door closed I smell old and recent cigarette smoke wafting into the loft.
“You’re here for me,” I say. “She has nothing to do with any of this.”
He’s an inch or two shorter than I am, but sturdier. His head is shaved and his eyes are gray and not so much cold as remote, as if they don’t see me as a human being, but rather as information. Ones and zeroes. The way
a machine might.
My mouth has gone dry.
There’s a strange distance between what’s happening and my processing of it. A disconnect. A delay. I should do something, say something, but I feel paralyzed by the suddenness of the man’s presence.
“I’ll go with you,” I say. “Just—”
His aim shifts slightly away from me and up.
Daniela says, “Wait, no—”
She’s cut off by a burst of fire and a muted report not quite as loud as a naked gunshot.
A fine, red mist blinds me for half a second, and Daniela sits on the sofa, a hole dead center between her big, dark eyes.
I start toward her, screaming, but every molecule in my body seizes, muscles clenching uncontrollably with stunning agony, and I crash down through the coffee table, shaking and grunting in broken glass and telling myself this isn’t happening.
The smoking man lifts my useless arms behind my back and binds my wrists together cruciform with a zip tie.
Then I hear a tearing sound.
He pats a piece of duct tape over my mouth and sits behind me in the leather chair.
I’m screaming through the tape, pleading for this not to be happening, but it is, and there’s nothing I can do to change it.
I hear the man’s voice behind me—calm and occupying a higher register than I would’ve imagined.
“Hey, I’m here…No, why don’t you come around back…Exactly. Where the recycling and Dumpsters are. The back gate and rear door to the building are both open…Two should be fine. We’re in pretty good shape up here, but you know, let’s not linger…Yep…Yep…Okay, sounds good.”
The excruciating effect of what I assume was a Taser is finally relenting, but I’m too weak to move.
From my vantage point, all I can see are the lower half of Daniela’s legs.
I watch a line of blood run down her right ankle, across the top of her foot, between her toes, and begin to puddle on the floor.
I hear the man’s phone buzz.
He answers, “Hey, baby…I know, I just didn’t want to wake you…Yeah, something came up…I don’t know, might be morning. How about I take you to breakfast at the Golden Apple whenever I wrap up?” He laughs.
“Okay. Love you too. Sweet dreams.”
My eyes sheet over with tears.
I shout through the tape, shout until my throat burns, thinking maybe he’ll shoot me or knock me unconscious, anything to stop the exquisite pain of this moment.
But it doesn’t seem to bother him at all.
He just sits there quietly, letting me rage and scream.
