FREAK
By An Loe
To Bea.
1
PART I
2
CHAPTER 1
To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.
- Phyllis Theroux
I was lying naked on the bathroom floor.
This was relatively normal.
Cool tiles pressed against my shoulder blades, and I breathed: in, two, three, four, hold…out,
two, three –
My brother banged on the bathroom door.
“Olivia, you ready?”
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
I still had my panties and bra on, so it was only a matter of grabbing my denim shirtdress off the
back of the door and closing the snaps. I yanked my short yellow hair behind my ears and started my
breathing exercise again before I opened the door.
In, two, three, four…
My brother was standing by the front door, his old teal gym bag slung across his back. No doubt
that bag contained his entire summer wardrobe – which consisted mostly of flip-flops anyway.
“How’s Lamaze class?” Alex teased. Having grown up with me in a tiny two-bathroom Colonial
Alex was amply familiar with my anxiety coping strategies – deep breathing, reciting poetry, lying naked
on cold surfaces… I was a pretty easy target for his digs.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said and grabbed my backpack. Alex followed me out the front door,
locking it behind us. I threw my backpack in the backseat of the station wagon, where the rest of Alex’s
summer wardrobe was jumbled in a purple laundry basket. Rolling down the front window I took one
last look at the home I grew up in – my mother’s rose bushes on the brink of blooming, brick pathway
salted against weeds, white siding gray-blue in the morning sunlight. Alex interrupted any romanticizing
with a punch to my left shoulder.
“It’s not like you’ll never see it again – we’re going to Maine for the summer, not for ever.”
Technically Alex spoke the truth. I was even happy to spend the summer in York, far away from
school, self-conscious pool parties, and the humid apple orchards of my hometown. But this was the
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last time I would see my house before I left for college – my mother even planned on buying me towels,
a laundry basket, and the requisite fuzzy folding chair at Wal-Mart during our vacation. I closed my eyes
and leaned back in the seat.
“You have your seatbelt on?” I asked as Alex turned the ignition.
“Yes, Nanners.” Alex’s favorite nickname for me – and our grandmother.
I told myself everything would be fine once we were in York. For the next forty-five minutes
Alex would blare Ben Folds – trying to tempt me into a sing-along and distract me from my prerequisite
highway-driving panic attack – while I begged Alex to stop singing and focus on the road. We’d get there
in no time.
York Beach, mid-June. Still too early in the season for heavy traffic (it would be mid-August
before the Atlantic Ocean reached fifty degrees), Alex and I chose to drive through Long Sands, the
longest beach in York. One side of the road abutted parking meters, boardwalk, and beach. The other
side of the road was packed with seafood restaurants, two-story yellow bed-and-breakfasts, and the
occasional multi-story hotel. Driving on we passed the red convenience store that sold the best
homemade breakfast sandwiches in town, then the ice cream parlor where Alex worked summers in
high school. In honor of my frequent visits he had named a sundae after me: the Olivia, one scoop
orange sherbert, one scoop vanilla, with chopped walnuts, bananas, and a dollop of whipped cream.
Our summer house was a few blocks away, though it did abut the sea. Our share of the
coastline was more boulders than beach – shoes were a must, swimming unwise. As it was, the summer
house was fairly small, a cedar-sided Cape with two dormer windows. My mother was a copyright
lawyer but a single mom. The beach house was a dream shared by my mother and father, so I guess
Mom originally bought the fixer-upper as a rebellion following the divorce. All I know is the first couple
summers we all shared one bedroom and ate mostly bananas, pop tarts, and hotdogs. Then my mother
spent a winter driving back and forth to oversee the installation of a functional kitchen, followed by the
finishing of the basement, then the second bathroom and two bedrooms in the attic.
When we pulled in the gravel driveway my anxious stomach unwound like a rung-out rag.
Home again.
I practically ran to my room upstairs while Alex turned off the burglar alarm – a necessary
precaution in the winters when the neighborly Mrs. Donnelly only checked the house once a week for
burst pipes. I flung open the bedroom window that faced the ocean, turning up the volume on the
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thunderous waves. The smell of brine and salt was a balm to my jangled nerves. I’d get the pillows and
sheets from the bathroom closet in a minute.
Alex rapped on my open door.
“Divide and conquer – I go to the grocery store, you pick up the mail from the post office?”
“Deal,” I said, and actually smiled.
I scored the post office gig because it was boarding distance from the house. By now you might
have guessed that I don’t drive. Well, I do know how to drive – my mother insisted on it in case there
was an emergency while my brother was away at college. Our lessons started with white-knuckled
sojourns on the least-trafficked roads in town. They ended in the breakdown lane of the highway, my
head firmly between my knees. You could argue my fear of the highway is rational – have you seen the
statistics on car collisions? – but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate. I have an anxiety disorder.
I think about it from an evolutionary standpoint. Imagine the hyper-masculine beefcake: hairy
back, prominent brow ridge, thorax like a barrel, blunt fingers. Ten seconds of watching him trying to
find deodorant in the grocery store and you think, “That man was born in the wrong millennium. He
needs a decrease in testosterone and an increase in the size of his frontal lobe.” I don’t have an excess
of testosterone – I have an excess of adrenaline. In other words, I have the endocrine system of a
Neanderthal. If your memory of health class is a little fuzzy, I’ll remind you that the endocrine system is
responsible for the so-called “fight or flight” response in humans. Back in the Stone Age, I’m sure it was
really important that your body flooded with adrenaline every time you saw a flicker of striped tiger hide
between the leaves. Due to a lack of tigers my endocrine system seems to react to the troubles of daily
life: the unanticipated death of my cell phone battery, a test I forgot to study for, tomato juice spilled on
my favorite dress, the snap of a burned-out light bulb, insomnia, headaches, cars, etc. The symptoms: a
flush like someone dumped a bucket of hot water over your head, an audible spike in heart rate, this
tight feeling like every blood vessel is constricting, tremors like you’re sitting on an unbalanced washing
machine, and nausea topped by the occasional bout of vomiting. Sometimes it’s just an uneasy feeling,
like your lunch sitting poorly. Other times I lock myself in the bathroom, strip to my underwear, and try
to cool myself on the porcelain tiles, waiting for that hollow feeling at the back of my throat right before
I throw up… to pass.
It always goes away eventually, but the anticipation of the next time doesn’t really leave. Let’s
just say I embrace my high school niche of quiet art nerd. My brother Alex has always made sure I don’t
turn into a complete agoraphobic. After all, he’s the one that bought me a longboard for my sixteenth
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birthday. With a longer deck and sturdier trucks than a skateboard, it’s built for distance, not tricks –
and it doesn’t have NIRVANA etched on the bottom in black ballpoint pen like my brother’s hand-medown. As long as I have my board with me, I have an escape route no farther than the soles of my
shoes.
Inland York looks a lot like my hometown: white-steepled churches, gravel baseball diamonds,
residential roads lined with oak trees and birch. The sun was full noon, now, and when I reached the
post office the denim underneath my backpack was sticky. I kicked the tail of my board and carried it in
by the trucks.
My mother has the post office hold our mail during the winter months, including Christmas – I’d
have to sort and recycle the junk catalogs before I boarded home. While an employee searched the
annals of the post office for our piles of mail I scanned the fliers tacked to a community cork board: an
ad for the Bagel Basket, the community summer theatre schedule, a sales pitch for a dented striperfishing boat that only had one phone number torn off. But it was a lime green flier that captivated my
attention:
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?
There was a photo of a boy with a long nose and braces, then a brief description:
LEWIS EPPS, 18 YEARS OLD, 140 POUNDS, 5’7”, LIGHT BROWN HAIR,
HAZEL EYES, LAST SEEN IN PORTSMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, MAY 29,
LAST PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT DUGGAR’S FARM IN EPPING, NEW
HAMPSHIRE
I did a double take at the age. Then I saw the smaller inscription below the photo:
PHOTO IS 5 YEARS OLD
What kind of sad family didn’t have a photo of their kid newer than five years ago? Maybe
that’s why Lewis ran away – well, if he ran away. I was interrupted by the postal worker, who handed
over several piles of mail with a dirty look that almost made me shove the mail in my backpack and run.
Logic won out, however, and I spent the next five minutes at a folding table next to the recycling bin. At
the time I wasn’t paying attention to the names on the envelopes.
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My brother beat me back to the house – the kitchen counter was covered with brown paper
grocery bags. I dropped my backpack on the only clear square foot of counter space. Fortunately Alex
had a bottle of Snapple lemonade sitting next to the sink for me.
“God bless you,” I said, retrieving the drink from its puddle of sweat. The twist top gave a
satisfying pop and I started chugging. Then I saw what my brother was unloading from the bags.
Two jars of salsa, corn chips, popcorn, ice cream, and three six packs of beer.
Alex caught me looking. I instantly tried to relax my face.
Alex looked sheepish.
“I thought you were worried enough this morning with the drive over and all,” he said. “I
figured it was better to wait to tell you.”
I focused on screwing the top back on my lemonade. My stomach was feeling sloshy.
“I’m just gonna have a few people over tonight. Not a big party – mostly people you know, too.
It’s been my first year at college, and, you know, with Mom gone…”
Mom wouldn’t be driving up until tomorrow afternoon.
“And hey, you just graduated from high school – a party is practically mandatory, right, Livy?”
As if I needed reminding. I had graduated two days ago, on a Saturday morning. I don’t
remember much of the ceremony because I was focused on breathing deeply, not panicking, and not
throwing up on the Principal or Amanda Beaton sitting next to me. I understand that high school
graduation is a right of passage, and I walked to make my mother happy and so there were pictures of
me in a graduation cap.
Hanging out with the people who were witness to my most awkward years did not sound like
fun, however. And I’ll be honest – I hate parties. I hate the crowds of people, the sudden bursts of
laughter and yells and loud music, the food coated in powdered cheese. I don’t need an audience for
my panic attacks. I’m ashamed enough on my own.
I walked my lemonade to the fridge, letting my blond hair fall from my ear and in between my
eyes and my brother’s face.
“I’m not cleaning up after you tomorrow morning,” I said.
“You can hide in your room if you really want,” he said.
I missed the summers when it was just me and Alex, alone.
7
Sometimes the anxious anticipation of an event can be worse than the event itself. Sure, I
wasn’t anticipating an execution. Sure, I could hide in my room all night like a prisoner and avoid the
party altogether. But my fingernails kept on sneaking between my teeth and my calves were doing that
annoying-trembly-thing.
I picked up my backpack from where I had dropped it by my bedroom door and sat on my
unmade bed. I would sort out bills, credit card offers, and personal mail instead of pacing like a maniac.
I was halfway through the stacks when I sliced my finger on a poorly sealed envelope.
“Damn,” I whispered, then flipped the envelope over to see how it was addressed. I didn’t get
past the first line.
Olivia Bellman
The last time I had gotten a personal letter it was a birthday card from my retired grandparents
in Nevada. This time I didn’t recognize the handwriting, and somehow I didn’t think this letter included
a twenty-dollar bill. There was no return address.
I flipped the envelope back over and awkwardly opened the seal with my (unsliced) middle
finger. When I pulled out the folded paper something small like two beads skittered out. One caught in
the creases of the mattress; the other bounced and landed next to my pine dresser. I picked the closest
one out of the mattress seam and held it in my palm.
It was a red candy.
No – it was a circular red pill, easily mistaken as one of the red hots we used to decorate
gingerbread men at Christmastime. Someone had sent me medication.
“Trust me, I’m medicated enough,” I said to the letter. The front pocket of my backpack held all
of my prescriptions: an old bottle of Lexapro, the new addition of Effexor, Lorazepram, Clonazepam for
longer days…
Dear Ms. Bellman,
Despite my intentions I am guilty of tormenting a little girl and blackmailing her father. I
will never be prosecuted for this crime. By the time you read this letter I will no longer be in this
world.
Please uncover my accomplice, so that justice won’t be entirely annihilated.
Take these pills to find the truth.
Thank you for your consideration,
Lewis Epps
8
P.S. only go to the police once you have conclusive evidence.
All I could focus on was the name: Lewis Epps. I had received what seemed to be a criminal confession –
and suicide note – written by the missing boy from the post office.
I heard my brother taking the wooden steps two at a time and hastily shoved the pill and letter into my
dress’s deep pocket.
Alex found me in a nest of letter piles.
“Hey,” I said breezily.
“Hey, people will probably start showing up pretty soon.”
I glanced out the dormer window and was shocked to see an orange and yellow rim on the blue sky. But
I was distracted, now.
“Okay,” I responded.
He blinked, then was quick to smile.
“Awesome! I’m gonna get the chips and salsa ready!”
He galumphed back downstairs, long legs too impatient to take the steps one at a time. He ran track
recreationally in high school. I tried track as a freshman but didn’t stick with it. You can probably imagine how I
reacted to competitions.
I pulled out Lewis’s letter again and looked for clues. Did we go to high school together? My mother
had bought me a high school yearbook despite my protestations. I hopped off the bed and unzipped the navy
blue duffel bag that held the bulk of my summer clothing. The yearbook was slipped in on top. I quickly flipped
to the E’s. No Lewis. I flipped to the end of the yearbook where they usually listed people that had missed
picture day. No Epps.
I experienced a moment of disproportionate rage over the fact that I would have to wait until tomorrow
to use my mother’s laptop. I’d ride to the public library to log online but I was pretty sure the library closed at
five. Ah, the perks of living at an old beach house.
I returned to the letter.
I am guilty of tormenting a little girl.
I tried to think of any recent news stories about missing children, but came up blank.
Only go to the police once you have conclusive evidence.
Did that mean Lewis thought the police were in on it somehow?
Take these pills to find the truth.
Literally? Was Lewis in his right mind when he wrote this letter? And why the hell did he choose me?
9
10
POST SCRIPT
Fifty miles away at the Portland International Jetport Agent Gutierrez scanned the terminal
McDonald’s for her new partner. A young man raised his hand in greeting and swiped condiment from
his mouth with a paper napkin. Gutierrez rolled her suitcase to his table, then simultaneously flipped
open her badge and extended a hand.
“Agent Dolores Gutierrez, FBI,” she said.
“Peter Simon, CIA,” he said. His handshake was weak.
“I’d like to see some identification,” Gutierrez said. On principle Agent Gutierrez didn’t trust
white guys with first names for surnames. Agent Simon doubly qualified for mistrust because he wasn’t
with the FBI.
Peter Simon rolled his eyes and reached for his breast pocket. Then his other breast pocket. He
was clearly a few years younger than her, with wavy chestnut locks and Aryan-blue eyes. On the
weekend he probably wore his polo shirts with the collar popped. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said,
The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family
brokerage business.
He finally found his ID. Gutierrez lingered on the picture, making sure this buffoon was really
the guy she had to work with for the next few weeks.
“So,” he said, “ready for some post-9/11 interagency cooperation?”
“Post-9/11 interagency cooperation” was exactly what Gutierrez’s superior had cited when he
told her she was being loaned to the CIA for a special assignment. Gutierrez could recognize a
bureaucratic runaround. She doubted there was any substance to the allegations directed against Fofi
Goldberg, the subject of the investigation, but the exercise would give both the FBI and the CIA an
opportunity to cite interagency cooperation in their year-end reports. They’d have the travel receipts to
prove it. Gutierrez also knew why she pulled the short straw. Last month she had asked for a change of
partners because her former partner was a sexist prick that asked for a quickie during a stakeout.
Agent Lola Gutierrez: upstart Latina rookie, recently partner-less, due for a reminder about
where she stood in the Bureau hierarchy.
“You have a car?” Gutierrez asked.
“Standard issue Ford Taurus,” he answered, “just like Scully and Mulder.”
She didn’t laugh at the X-Files reference.
Suddenly Simon was speaking again. “Yeah, tell me about it. A firecracker in bed.”
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“Excuse me?” Gutierrez asked.
He looked at her blankly. “Did I say something?”
Agent Gutierrez quickly evaluated Simon’s symptoms. Normal pupil dilation, no smell of alcohol
on his breath, no sign of open containers in the car, no tremors, but shadows under his eyes that she
had missed in the lights of the airport terminal. He didn’t seem to be drinking, but he might be using.
“I think I should drive to York,” she said.
Agent Simon laughed, but it looked like a sneer.
“Sure,” he said. “Whatever you want.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a
cigarette and a pair of Blues Brothers sunglasses. “I need to catch some sleep.”
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CHAPTER 2
Mirrors are ice which do not melt: what melts are those who admire themselves in them.
- Paul Morand
I kept Lewis’s letter in my pocket like a talisman against forced social interaction. I was on the
old plaid couch in the finished basement, wedged between the armrest and my brother. He had
squeezed himself in between me and Sarah, his old high school crush, half an hour ago to play Apples to
Apples. There were about seven of us in the basement and more people upstairs.
“The winner for this hand – Green Card ‘Touchy Feely’ – is totally Abby, with the Red Card
‘Helen Keller,’” Sarah said. Abby whooped.
My brother gave a theatric sigh. “They should seriously discontinue the Helen Keller card. It
always wins.”
“That’s why it’s so FUN-neeeee,” Sarah sing-songed. Listening to Sarah was almost as fun as
rubbing broken tortilla chips in my eyes.
“Once, I totally got September 11th and Box Cutter in the same hand,” Bobby said reverently.
He was sitting in the corner next to the chips and salsa.
Silence.
Sarah dealt the next Green Card: “Oooh, Fast,” she said.
“Pssht, OWN!” My brother crowed, throwing down the Red Card “My Bedroom.”
“Think about it,” he said, “just think about it.”
The song on my brother’s iPod suddenly changed to Billy Joel and Sarah leapt off the couch.
“Ohmygod flashback!” she squealed, and then started dancing and singing along. “I’ll meet you
anytime you want at our Italian restaurant…” She grabbed my brother off the couch and laced their
fingers together. “Remember? Prom night Junior year?”
My brother joined in singing, twirling her to the saxophone. Clearly he forgot that Junior year he
was not Sarah’s date to the prom. Now everyone was singing along – or yelling – except me.
“Cool beer, hot lights, my sweet romantic teenage nights…”
It’s amazing what you can overhear when people forget you’re even there. Sarah pulled Alex
close during the sax solo and asked, “When’s your Mom driving up?”
“Not ‘til tomorrow afternoon.”
She smiled.
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I got off the couch and headed for the stairs. My brother was too caught up in Sarah’s
capricious attentions to notice.
Some guys were in the living room playing with my brother’s Playstation. No one was in the
kitchen. I walked to the sink to wash some dishes as an excuse for my absence. Sooner or later I’d just
go back to my room and stop pretending to be normal.
When I heard someone else on the basement steps I deliberately didn’t turn around, hoping
they’d just look past me.
I almost jumped out of my skin when Sarah said, “Hey, chica. Oh, sorry, here.” She tossed a
dishtowel at me so I could swipe the suds off my dress. “So, off to college this fall?”
“Yep,” I said. I didn’t tell her I had yet to put the check in the mail. I was just… procrastinating.
“Where are you going?”
“University of New Hampshire.”
“That’s a good school. Hey, here.” She was holding out a beer. I looked at it for a beat too long.
“Oh. God. This is your first time, isn’t it? No wonder you’re having no fun. Apples to Apples is like cars
and sex – way better with lubrication. Hang on.”
She put the can down on the counter and started opening cabinets.
“Um, can I help you?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said. She pulled one of my mother’s bottles of wine from the pantry. She already
had a corkscrew in her hand. This is when my health class training on peer pressure should’ve kicked in.
When I should’ve explained I don’t drink because my meds triple the effects of alcohol. When I
should’ve pointed out my mother had a taste for expensive wines.
Sarah was already pouring the wine into a red plastic cup.
“Here,” she said, handing it to me. “This’ll taste better. And if your brother asks, just say it’s
grape juice.”
She winked at me, like this was a secret between girlfriends, and returned to the basement.
I tried to pretend I was just a normal high school senior, celebrating graduation with her first
college party on the beach. If I was normal, I’d take a few sips, get used to the taste, and then try to
sneak a beer past my brother. This cup was training day for my college social life.
The boys in the other room suddenly exploded with groans while the people downstairs laughed
uproariously at an Apples combination.
I wasn’t normal, and whether she planned it or not, Sarah had humiliated me.
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I dumped the cup in the sink, grabbed the whole bottle of wine, and exited to the patio.
I wouldn’t drink in preparation for college, I would drink in defiance of it. I was happy without
peers, without comparisons – I was peerless, and found my own company most gratifying.
Yes, I was going to throw a pity party.
The tide was out, the ocean calm. I walked to the edge of our lawn and stepped off the stone
embankment, onto the rocks. I sat perpendicular to the house, one shoulder to the party, the other to
the sea. I started drinking. The experience brought to mind doses of pink medicine during the chicken
pox – gag-inducing. In the dissipated light from the porch my skin was dusky pink and tragically pretty.
The ocean was black. The song in the house changed several times, from Kanye to Weezer.
I was absently rubbing Lewis’s letter with my right hand when my fingers stumbled across the
pill still in my pocket. I pinched it between two fingers and lifted it to eye level. It was purple in the
moonlight.
I didn’t think I could handle college with an anxiety disorder. There was already an expiration
date on my sanity. Why not hurry and reckless things up a bit?
A voice in my head whispered, this is why your psychiatrist told you not to drink. Go back inside.
“Take these pills to find the truth,” I answered, and swallowed the pill.
As soon as I swallowed I thought: stupid! Stupid self-pitying dumbass!
I did a quick mental inventory. Most likely scenario: Lewis was delusional and had sent me a
vitamin supplement for women going through menopause. Worst case scenario: I just took LSD and was
about to have the bad trip of a paranoiac. I considered sticking my finger down my throat and purging
like a bulimic.
Too late. My heart doubled pace and my stomach clenched with a sudden cramp. I gasped,
clutching the front of my dress. My skin was blazing – I needed to cool off. It was too soon for the pill –
this was just a panic attack. I needed to cool down.
I wedged the wine bottle in a crag; in a brief moment of clarity I remembered Lewis’s letter and
jammed it next to the bottle. Then I was stumbling my way between rocks, just getting close enough to
dip my feet in.
My foot suddenly slipped and I plunged into seawater up to my knees. I grasped the nearest
rock, dampening the front of my dress with kelp. My legs were instantly numb – I could barely feel the
bumps of my shoelaces.
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Another cramp hit as a wave shattered against my thigh, soaking my panties. I might have cried
out, but nobody heard me over the music pumping through the house. The houses on either side were
black, waiting for vacationers.
Then the seaweed underneath my hands was moving, slithering into snakes.
This time I screamed, flailing back from the rock and crashing underwater. The coast was
precipitous here – a few feet of rock could mean several meters of depth. I scissor-kicked to the surface
and looked for a rock to cling to but somehow I was several strokes away. A wave surprised me and I
was underwater again. My eardrums popped and sang with the pressure of the water and my eyes
burned.
Then I was at the surface again, oxygen burning my sinuses, the sound of the waves tinny and
harsh. I looked to the house but the image was swimming, the lighted windows blinking with eyelid
shades, the black houses on either side unfurling their roofs like wings, rising on wooden haunches, the
rocks roiling like smoke.
And then my memory ends.
I woke up on my back on the thin strip of lawn behind our house. The sky above me was pink
and gray. I sat up and my head exploded with pain. I drew up my legs so I could stick my head between
my knees. It must have been four in the morning; the sun was still behind the horizon, though the sky
was blushing. I wrapped my arms tightly around my knees to gather my body warmth.
My memory of last night was fuzzy. I remembered throwing a pity party on the rocks, and then
taking Lewis’s pill…
I was never doing drugs again.
Had my brother really let me spend the entire night passed out on the lawn? Then I
remembered Sarah. They were probably curled up together in bed – if they had made it past the plaid
pull-out couch.
I tottered to my feet and noticed I was barefoot; I must have lost my Chucks in the ocean. For a
moment I mourned their loss profoundly. There was nothing more comfortable than a pair of broken
tennis shoes. I had even drawn little hearts all over the laces in permanent marker.
I was extra careful on the porch steps, holding the railing with one hand and my head with the
other. I noticed I had horrible cottonmouth, too. First order of business a cold glass of water. Second, a
hot shower.
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I stopped in front of the sliding glass door, momentarily disoriented. There were several stickers
on the glass I didn’t remember: BEWARE of DOG and KEEP OUT. Could I have possibly passed out on the
wrong lawn? I decided to make my way around to the front of the house.
Alex’s station wagon was parked in the driveway. There was no mistake. But as I rounded the
foundation plantings and jogged up the front steps I noticed another sign – NO TRESPASSING – planted
among the bushes. I shoved open the front door.
To my left the living room was decorated with precariously stacked piles – books on top of
vases, a bowl of bouncy balls on top of an empty toilet paper roll, a tower of empty soda cans. Fishing
line trip-wires snaked between the piles. A webcam was tucked behind a lobster-trap buoy on the
mantle. What exactly had they done after I passed out?
I looked to the right. The door to my mother’s bedroom was slightly ajar, just enough that I
could see a sliver of the full-length mirror on the far wall. Something was moving in the reflection –
“FREEZE!”
I whirled around and glimpsed my attacker: bicycle helmet, polo shirt, two weighted socks
swinging and clinking like they were full of batteries.
I dashed for the stairs, slipped on an open scrabble board, and cracked my head against the
banister.
When I awoke for the second time that day the sun was shining confidently through the glass
sliders at the back of the house and I was lying on the living room couch.
Ice cubes rattled in a glass.
I turned to see my attacker sitting on the coffee table, holding out a glass of water. He had lost
the bicycle helmet, revealing matted blond curls.
I was instantly fully awake.
“Who are you?” I demanded, disoriented and too dizzy to run.
“I should be asking you that,” he said, eyes narrowing. “Although you don’t look like much of a
burglar.” He glanced at my bare feet.
“You’re trespassing,” I said. “I’m calling the police.”
“I’m trespassing? I live here!” he protested.
My brain was too swollen to process this information. “Um, were you here for the party?” I
asked.
17
His eyes narrowed again. “Is that code for something? Are you working for the government?”
I was tense, but for some reason I wasn’t panicking. Maybe it was because of the drugs. Maybe
it was because I hit my head. Maybe it was because this situation was too bizarre to comprehend.
I swung my legs over the side of the couch, he reached out –
I was instantly on my feet, a step back. My head pounded and my vision narrowed but I stayed
upright.
The guy put both hands up in a sign of surrender. “Sorry. But you should really lie down.”
“Alex?” I called. My brother didn’t answer, but I suspected he was passed out in bed.
“You’ve experienced mild traumatic brain injury,” the stranger continued. “You may experience
nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, sensitivity to light – hey!”
I ran upstairs.
I expected to find Alex’s room as he had left it: duffel bag unzipped on the floor, mattress bare.
I halted at the open door.
His bed was neat as a pin, with plaid sheets and a Red Sox afghan tossed across the bottom. The
built-in bookshelves below his window were stuffed with skateboarding magazines, rinsed brown
bottles, Stephen King novels, and a jar of pennies.
And no Alex.
I rushed across the landing as quietly as I could to look in my room.
The bed was made with my white quilt and navy blue pillows. My duffel bag was nowhere in
sight, but my favorite books were stacked on top of the banged-up maple dresser, from hefty Anne of
Green Gables on the bottom to tatty paperback My Teacher is an Alien on top. A whale print painted by
Peggy Oki hung above. The room was a replica from my summers in Middle School.
Alex must be in the basement, I told myself, still strangely calm.
I jogged back downstairs. The stranger was waiting in the front hallway.
“Disorientation could be a result of the head injury,” he said as I breezed past. “Or you could’ve
been brainwashed. Maybe I could help you find what you’re looking for.” I ignored him and opened the
door to the finished basement.
I trotted down the first few steps and peeked under the eaves. This room had hardly changed
from last night, from plaid couch to TV stand, but there was no sign of Alex. I traveled down a few more
steps to look in the corners but had to concede the obvious: Alex was not at home.
I jumped when I heard the guy’s voice from the top of the stairs.
18
“Is there someone after you?”
“No,” I said, then darted back up the stairs. I passed him and went straight for the kitchen
phone, ready to call the police.
But when I picked up the handset there wasn’t a dial tone.
The lunatic must have cut the phone line, just like a horror movie.
I gently settled the phone back in the cradle, thinking. Surely if he intended me harm he
would’ve gotten it over with already?
He was still a few feet away, arms crossed, frowning at me.
No time for a plan. I ran for the back door, yanked open the slider, and pounded down the
wooden stairs. My feet hit the wet grass and I was off, wheeling around the house until I hit the
driveway pavement, feet slapping. I sprinted down the street and didn’t look back. I had to at least
make it to the edge of town – all of these houses were empty, waiting for their summer tenants.
I knew the fear, the burn, would catch up eventually, but right now I was fleet on adrenaline and
high on speed. The bones in my feet hammered the pavement and my arms surged, propelling me like
pendulums.
I stuttered to a stop at the corner with the bike shop and diner. There were only a few people
out – a construction foreman eating a bagel on his way to work, a woman toting two plastic bags of
food. A woman flounced past in a green candy-stripe bustle and lace parasol.
I did a double-take. Was there a historical reenactment in town?
Suddenly self-conscious in my bare feet and dirty dress I started walking, unsure of my
destination. Now that I was out of imminent danger I thought about finding the police, or at least a
lifeguard station.
But the closer I got to Long Sands Beach the more I started to question if I was the crazy one
after all – or still tripping, at least. I was forced to abandon my historical reenactment theory when a
man with a beard as long as Gandalf’s breezed past on stilts, a pile of pots and pans gathered in a net on
his back. An admiral with tasseled epaulets and bulging belly followed, leering at a blond woman
dressed like Daisy from The Great Gatsby. A gaggle of coeds in trousered bathing suits passed me in
their rush to the beach.
I accelerated to a jog, desperate to glimpse sanity in the steady silver curve of the beach. The
buildings were started to change; every alley was crammed with a house, some doors seemed to open
19
onto dirt roads, others slammed shut before I could guess the size of the halls within, and above half the
houses construction beams and stairwells rose like afterthoughts or dreams.
Then I burst between two motels onto Long Beach Avenue. The beach was as crowded as the
Fourth of July: lines trailed from seafood stands like caterpillars, children ran with soft serve ice cream
cones, and the sand was a quilt of fluorescent towels and umbrellas. Then there was the harbor,
crowded with ships. Clipper ships and cutters, sea kayaks and tankers, schooners and yachts and
dinghies, tacking and taking in sheet, casting off and swabbing, gulls swooping about the masts and men
calling across decks. As I looked to the sky over the harbor I didn’t see the customary airplane trailing an
advertisement, but a silver zeppelin.
“Ho! Make way!” Someone called. I looked over my shoulder to see a chestnut mare and rider
emerging from the alley. I stepped out of the way and then jogged on across the street – but I wasn’t
going to talk to a lifeguard, now. Instead I hefted myself onto the stone seawall and tucked my knees
under my chin. I looked out to sea but I wasn’t really seeing.
By the time you read this letter I will no longer be in this world… Take these pills to find the truth.
The words of Lewis’s letter leapt unbidden into my mind. My fingers jumped to my lips as if to
silence a surprised cry. Was it possible? Instead I curled my fingers into a fist to slip under my chin.
I let the glitter of the waves blur into one long, glimmering line, waiting for the panic to come.
But still nothing! Sure, my heart was pumping and my head hurt, but I wasn’t mindlessly terrified. I
could breathe. I could think. In fact, my next step was perfectly clear.
It felt a little strange knocking on the door to my own home, but I judged from my earlier
experience that an announced entrance was safer.
The guy opened the door just a few inches, then pulled it wider when he recognized me.
“Hi,” I said. “I, uh, actually do need help finding something – someone, actually. Do you know a
Lewis Epps?”
“No,” he said. “But if you want to find anyone in this state, you go to see the Queen.”
“The Queen? Of Maine?”
“More or less. You’ll need to change, though.” I looked at my bare feet. I could only imagine the
dreadlocked state of my hair.
20
POST SCRIPT.
[Excerpt from the private journal of Dr. Fofi Goldberg.]
… We see not with the eyes, but with the mind. Our eyeballs are merely passive receivers of the
different wavelengths of light. It is the mind that interprets that data into a butterfly, a piano, a
doorway. We interpret based on our previous experiences. For example, we recognize a glass of water
because we have seen it before in drawings, tasted the water, touched glass. Whether or not we
perceive that glass as half full or half empty is another matter.
Sometimes the mind draws on the wrong foreknowledge, creating misperception. For example,
humans are capable of seeing a face in the arrangement of two eggs (eyes) and a piece of bacon (lips) on
a plate. In nature, some butterflies evolve to have wing patterns that resemble eyespots in order to
frighten away predators. Schizophrenia, of course, can cause visual hallucinations of entire human
beings. Hallucinogens such as LSD can cause visual hallucinations such as the personification of
inanimate objects.
Interestingly, some Hindu philosophy holds that the entire world as we perceive it is an illusion,
no more substantial than the reflection in a mirror. As written in the Bible, We see through a mirror
darkly…
But if our perception is always based on foreknowledge, where do these hallucinations come
from? Our subconscious? The collective unconscious?
I hesitate to stray into mystical pop-psychology, but could hallucinations be a form of superperception into the unconscious? After all, LSD was originally used by psychiatrists in psychotherapy to
access repressed emotions…
21
CHAPTER 3
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
“Sorry about earlier,” the young man said. He stepped aside so I could come in the front hall. “I
heard someone come in the front and assumed it was a burglar or a murderer. You may have noticed
the booby traps. But after assessing the situation it seems like you’re harmless, if slightly unbalanced.”
Now that we were up close again I could see that he wasn’t that much older than me, though a few
inches taller. He licked his lips, which were already shiny and raw – a nervous habit, maybe. “You might
have a concussion. I feel somewhat responsible for that. I’m willing to help you, at least until I’m sure
you’re not suffering a hematoma.” He shifted and sighed, eyes flicking out the front window. “I
suppose I could take you to the hospital, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Hospitals make you easy to
track.”
Right. My fate now rested in the hands of a paranoiac. But who else was I supposed to ask?
This guy was the first person to offer me help to find Lewis Epps, who in turn seemed to be the only
person that could explain what was happening. And if I wanted to stay in my own house, it looked like
this guy was part of the bargain.
“I just want to find Lewis Epps,” I said.
He folded his arms. “Like I said, I have no idea who that is. But I’ll take you to see the Queen.
You’ll need to shower and change.” He nodded up the stairs, then looked me over as if still unsure if I
was a threat. At last he pompously thrust out a hand.
“Linos,” he said by way of introduction.
“Olivia,” I returned.
It was very much like shaking a dead fish.
I locked the door to the bathroom, a precaution unnecessary when I shared the house with Alex.
Then I opened the half-window to shove a towel between the panes – a makeshift shade.
As I rinsed the salt from my hair I reflected on whom Linos might be, living in this house full of
my things and my memories. I wiped the fog from the mirror in the upstairs bathroom and stared at the
22
reflection of a girl with cropped dirty blond hair, big hazel eyes, a small mouth and a long chin. Was he
an otherworld version of me? Was I imagining similarities in our appearance?
When I emerged from the steamy bathroom I found an emerald chiffon dress lain on my bed.
There was a note torn from a yellow legal pad thrown on top of the bead neckline: found this – Linos.
I grabbed the chair from my small letter-writing desk and shoved it under the doorknob. Then I
picked the dress from the bedspread and held it to my chest. The chiffon was buttery soft – I found
myself swaying unconsciously, like a little girl playing dress-up, ready for a night out.
Then I realized something was missing.
I wasn’t feeling an ounce of anxiety.
I dropped the dress and turned to the mirror hanging over my dresser. I scrutinized my
reflection, wiggled my nose, pursed my lips, tried shaking my hair out. I felt… good.
When I descended the stairwell Linos was sitting on the back deck snapping open pistachios. He
was still wearing his polo shirt but had added a black blazer and oxfords.
I picked my way around the booby-trapped living room and slid open the back door.
“So where is this queen?” I asked.
“Edgecombe, north of York, across Sheepscot Bay. It’s near Boothbay.” Maybe two hours total.
Including highway driving. I thought about it – and instead of trembling nausea, I felt a bubble of
excitement. I crunched my knuckles as if testing my strength.
“Shall we?” he asked, then picked up the bicycle helmet again.
“Are you wearing that?” I asked.
“Have you seen the statistics on car accidents?” he scoffed.
I had a strange moment of déjà vu, but brushed it off. So the guy was a little crazy – who was I
to judge?
We took my brother’s station wagon for the ride. By the time we were rounding Portland the
stars were visible; the city rose to the east like the glittering back of a sea turtle. I kept the window open
for the whole drive, so it was too noisy to talk – I would have felt awkward making conversation anyway.
I rested my forearm on the door and laid my cheek on my elbow. My hair would dry crazy, but I didn’t
care. We were driving so fast that the trees were blurry but I wasn’t afraid. I was light-headed, almost
elated – like a dream when you’re running so fast, or flying, and you know no one can touch you and
nothing will hurt.
23
Eventually we left the state highways and the trees closed ranks around us. The crescent moon
hung above the thicket like a fingernail. Then we turned a curve and the broad Sheepscot River unfurled
on our right, dotted with the occasional yacht or silver-white jetty. We passed small yellow cottages set
behind gravel driveways, skeletal trees, and chicken wire fences. I pulled my head from the window,
ears ringing, and reluctantly rolled up my window – it was getting cold.
Suddenly a red firework exploded above a hillock, illuminating a white Colonial with black
shutters and a farmer’s porch. I heard muffled shrieks and laughter and then a second firework erupted
from the ground, a Roman Candle with silver sparks.
“That’s where we’re headed, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Correct,” said Linos. The car slowed.
The party seemed to be primarily outside. As the car neared the hill I saw the silhouettes of
revelers leaping around a bonfire – the flames sparked green, the result of burning salted driftwood. A
girl ran past our car in a red party dress and black mask, followed by a man in a dress shirt, plaid boxers,
and gartered stockings.
“Is there anything I should know going into this?” I asked Linos. He shrugged but looked over his
shoulders for any more stray partiers.
We parked on the street and I stepped out. The house atop the hill glowed like Heaven or a
McDonald’s, beckoning. My memory leapt to another night, another house atop a hill, another party.
“Come on, Livy, it’ll be fun,” Alex coaxed, already backing up the hill. I stood frozen against the
car door, heart in my throat and feeling nauseous.
“I can’t,” I said. “I just – can’t.”
“Suit yourself,” Alex said, wheeling on one foot and slouching the rest of the way up the hill.
I opened the car door, furious with him, furious with myself, and spent the night in the backseat,
holding back tears and trying to read a Philip Pullman book by starlight.
More guests ran past and I felt an inpatient longing – I wanted to have fun for once. I glanced
at Linos and tried to imagine what kind of wingman he’d make. But he was looking at the party with a
frown.
“Uh, should we go up?” I asked, smoothing the back of my skirt.
Linos just shrugged. He rubbed his hand on the back of his waistband like he was checking for
something.
“What’s the story?” he asked.
24
“What?”
“Well, what are we telling them?”
“I thought I’d just ask if anyone knew Lewis Epps,” I answered. His paranoia was seriously
grating.
Linos sighed, as if put-upon, and looked over his shoulder again. I started the walk up the hill.
I heard feet pounding on the grass behind us and turned to see a barefoot man running up the
hill, laughing to himself. He wore a pair of brown wool britches, a pistol bandolier, and what looked like
the fur of a bear over his shoulders – no shirt. I heard Linos stop, too.
“The game’s afoot, chaps!” the man said. He had one of the fullest fu-manchus I had seen in my
life, and it twitched along with the corner of his lip. “Captain Bull. Are you in?”
“I’m sorry?” I said and he squinted at me.
“What ho, it’s a lady!” He gave a deep bow, throwing out the hand that I now saw held
firecrackers. “Enchanted, Mademoiselle.” He rose. “Now, I can’t find my tinder…”
With a whoop someone else leapt from behind a tree, landing on Captain Bull’s back like a
monkey. He fell backward, growling, and rolled several feet before disentangling himself.
“Avast!” he said, pointing his pistol at the giggling attacker.
“Dixie Bull, you are an ‘orrible pirate!” she laughed. She clambered to her feet, brushed off her
Grecian shift, and continued, “I am wearing white and it eez dark outside. What eez your excuse?” She
spoke with a strong French accent.
“Ah, I am blinded by your beauty, Madame.”
She reached into a pocket and struck two sparklers, handing one to Dixie for tinder.
“And your friends are who?” she asked, turning to us. In the light from the sparklers I saw
mountains of strawberry blond curls escaping pearl pins, a long Grecian nose, and a prominent cleft
chin. She looked only a little older than me, and she was stunning, if not pretty.
I realized Linos was bowing.
“My Lady Marie Antoinette, we have come to pay homage.”
“Oh, get up,” she said, “I hate formalities. But tell me your names!” Saying this she rushed
forward, clasping my hands.
“Livy – Olivia Bellman,” I stammered. “And – uh –”
“Linos,” my comrade mumbled.
25
“But I love visitors! We are about to play charades – come inside, vite, vite!” With that she
gathered up her gown, which now looked suspiciously like luxe undergarments, and sashayed up the hill.
We could only follow.
“I will answer before you ask. You are wondering what eez bringing me to Maine, United States,
of all places, no?” She flounced up the painted wooden steps of the front porch and spoke over her
shoulder. “Zis ‘ouse belongs to zee gallant Captain Clough. ‘Is daughter Sally and I were ‘eld captive in
the same prison in Paris.” Gone was any doubt that this Marie Antoinette was not the once-beheaded
Queen of France.
She opened the front door. To the right a parlor door opened as well, releasing a warm gust of
candle smoke and a chorus of “Mary Ellen Carter.” The Queen conversely led us to the left, into a dining
room. The mahogany table was laden with crimson slivers of beef, broken lobster legs sucked of their
meat, half-eaten apples, croissants buttered with cream and chocolate, slices of coconut cake with
flaking frosting. The floor was feathered with discarded silk napkins and overturned chairs. A woman in
a plaid summer dress lingered by a window, eating strawberry ice cream out of a silver ice bucket.
“I am sorry, but dinner eez past,” the Queen continued, “but zee pig should be roasted by
midnight! Anyway, zee Captain conspired to smuggle me, along with ‘is daughter, from Paris aboard ‘is
sloop, the Sally. But of course, when zee time came, I refused to leave without my ‘usband and
children.”
At the back of the dining room the Queen flung open a set of wooden doors, revealing a library.
At least, the walls to left and right were covered in bookshelves. The chairs were arranged in haphazard
rows, creating an orchestra, while the red-curtained bay window created a stage. A slender reading
table had been laid on its side to mask the makeshift lantern footlights. The Queen began to wend her
way among seated guests.
“Unfortunately zee Sally was already prepared with my tapestries, my armoire, my vases… and
six of my cats.”
At that moment a gray Maine Coon insinuated itself around the leg of a chair. The Queen picked
the cat up and draped it over her shoulders to coo in its face. I opened my mouth to interrupt but the
Queen started speaking again.
“I consider my possessions Madame Clough’s reward for all ‘er preparations. After all, she must
‘ave been at a loss, preparing zis ‘ouse for a Queen.” She paused to examine the room. “Of course,” she
conceded, “I now ‘ave a lovely ‘ome for my vacations. Now – charades!”
26
The room erupted with cheers, every hand raising a crystal glass to toast the Queen. She draped
herself in a filigreed wing-backed armchair to stage right, almost facing the audience. The Coon looked
like a massive fur collar.
“Now,” the Queen commanded, “As zee newbie – zis eez the term, yes? – I demand you go
first.” She gave me a devilish smile.
“Actually,” I ventured, “I was wondering if you could help me find someone.”
“Oh!” she gasped, “a long-lost lover, I ‘ope. Or maybe ‘ee jilted you, and you seek revenge.”
“No, actually, he’s, um…”
“His name is Lewis Epps,” Linos interjected.
His sharp tone silenced the room. The queen cast her eyes on Linos for the first time, raising an
eyebrow.
“Ah, am I to understand you are ‘ere on business, then?” She paused, stroking the scruff of the
Coon. “You must understand I do not trifle with debt collectors. And I will not allow violence against my
guests.” The Queen’s glare was mirrored by her cat.
“No, nothing so sinister,” I jumped in. “I received a letter from Lewis and came to Maine on his
recommendation. Linos here has just been kind enough to help me look for my friend. He says you
know everyone there is to know in Maine, so…”
The Queen turned to her right and asked, “Marie, do you know a Lewis Epps?” Only then did I
notice the woman sitting in the shadow of footlights, one foot propped on an empty chair, reading a
book. Without looking up she answered, “No.”
“Marie Agathe is quite zee traveler,” the Queen explained.
“Molly Ockett to you pale faces,” the woman amended with a smirk. She tossed a long dark
braid over her shoulder and stood up. She wore a long-sleeved gingham dress to her knee, a pair of
leather leggings decorated with porcupine quills, and a black top hat. “I never met a Lewis Epps, though
– here, New Hampshire, or Canada.”
“Veuillez demander à nos invités si quelqu'un a rencontré Lewis Epps, s’il vous plaît?” the Queen
asked. “Si vous le trouvez avertissez-le s’il vous plaît qu’une belle fille et un homme furieux veulent le
rencontrer.”
“Bien sur,” Molly answered. Instead of exiting through the audience she turned around and
clambered out an open window.
“You will wait ‘ere while dear Marie inquires among our guests,” the Queen pronounced.
27
I lowered myself into a white wicker chair; Linos turned his back to the bookshelf and surveyed
the room like he was anticipating an attack. Someone stood up to perform a charade but I didn’t pay
attention. The queen similarly ignored us, content that we offered no more entertainment. Was Lewis
Epps somewhere in this very house? What would I say once I found him – I got your note?
Molly Ockett reappeared at the dining room door a few minutes later.
“There’s a man that claims he knew Lewis Epps, but he refuses to leave his hand at cards,” she
announced.
The queen waved a hand in our direction, which I took as a dismissal. Linos trailed me out. We
headed back through the dining room towards the parlor we had passed upon entering.
The door to the parlor had been left open this time and a chorus of “Cotton-Eyed Joe” issued
forth. Most of the room had been cleared for dancing but at the edge of the room chairs clustered
around assorted end tables for cards and drinks. Molly Ockett led the way through the assembly,
angling towards a table drawn underneath a small bay window. I glanced at the cards laid on the table
and realized they were playing none other than Apples to Apples.
“Elliot Caulfield, your guests await,” Molly announced, jabbing her thumb in our direction. I
scanned the table, waiting for one of the gentlemen to raise their head. I paused on a well-groomed
Civil War soldier with a prodigious mustache, but it was the young man next to him that tapped back a
black felt fedora and said, “At your service, Molly.” He wore a white button-down shirt with the sleeves
rolled and the collar undone, a gray pinstripe jacket cast over his chair. A crop of mousy brown hair
grazed his cheekbones. He looked out from underneath a pair of profuse eyebrows that somehow only
enhanced his looks.
He caught me staring and asked, “Who’s the skirt?”
“My name is Olivia Bellman,” I retorted. His eyes flicked between me and Linos.
A sudden darkness darted across his face – a look from deep beneath his brows, a grimace –
And then it was gone, a trick of the candlelight. He turned and gestured at his compatriots.
“You won’t mind if I finish this hand,” he said, ignoring Linos completely.
“Whatever’s most convenient,” I offered. I could feel Linos radiating… something. Impatience?
Anger? Fear? I had no idea what the hell his problem was.
“You see, Olivia, we have here a challenging hand.” Elliot grinned, leaning forward.
The green card “sexy” was set at the center of the table. I noticed a twenty dollar bill taped to
the back of the card, which explained how several grown men could take the game seriously.
28
“The two men to my right have already played formidable cards.”
Two red cards paralleled the green card: “choir boys” and “turkey baster.”
“But, alas gentlemen, I play the ace.”
With that Elliot put down the Helen Keller card.
The two men to Elliot’s right groaned; one started chugging his beer.
“As judge I must pronounce the winner, gentlemen,” the Civil War soldier announced.
I noticed Elliot’s attention had once again wandered from the game. I followed his eyes through
the parlor door to where Molly Ockett was speaking with two new guests. They both wore
unremarkable starched black suits and sunglasses. The chubby one then removed the aviators and
asked to see the Queen immediately. He tilted his face, revealing rippled scars around a distorted left
eye.
“Just hold it there, Brevet Major General Chamberlain,” a man drawled. My attention was
drawn back to the card table, where the fifth man had yet to play his card. He continued speaking.
“They may call you the Lion of the Round Top and you may very well be a college professor, but you
make a mistake if you proclaim this man the winner.”
Elliot’s attention was also drawn back to the card table. “Give it up, Rorke, there’s no beating
Helen Keller.”
“Exactly, Caulfield.” Rorke lifted a card from his hand and laid it on the table, completing the
set. “Nor are there two Helen Kellers in a deck.”
The table fell silent, everyone staring at the second Helen Keller card Rorke had just played.
“You’re a cheat,” Rorke said, voicing the tacit understanding passing around the table.
“It’s an old deck, Rorke, the cards must have been mixed with another deck,” Elliot reasoned.
“Bullshit!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Caulfield, but I shuffled the deck myself,” Chamberlain chimed in. “As a
gentleman and a general I must ask you to forfeit your winnings and leave the table.”
“Forfeit his winnings and pay a cheater’s tax!” Rorke yelled.
“Just let him leave with us,” I argued. “He’ll leave his money behind – you can split his bets
when we’re gone.”
“The only way he’s leaving,” Rorke said, standing up, “is if he pays the tax. Or I suppose I’d
accept an alternate form of payment… in lady parts.”
29
Before anyone could react Linos reached under his blazer, pulled a water pistol from his
waistband, and squirted Rorke in the face.
But it couldn’t have just been water, because it was bright blue and Rorke was screaming,
scratching at his eyes, overturning drinks.
The room fell silent. Rorke flailed wildly and crashed through the open window.
“Do you have a personality disorder?” I yelled, whirling upon Linos.
Then bedlam erupted.
Another card player swung a barstool at Linos, who ducked in time for the stool to hit a young
lady in the face. She chucked a tankard at him, sobbing, while her boyfriend grabbed a musician’s guitar
and started swinging. Punches flew like baseball bats, candles were extinguished on faces, and the band
started playing a jig. I grabbed a massive dictionary off the bookshelf and dispatched a gaffer in a tricorn
hat.
Someone was yelling my name. I turned and saw Elliot on the other side of the broken window,
hailing me with his fedora. I clambered over the card table to the window. He had thrown his coat over
the broken glass, making my leap from the sill safe.
“What about Linos?” I said upon landing. Elliot was attempting to pop the cork on a filched
bottle of champagne.
At that moment Linos was thrown through the window frame, a bearded man mounting the
ledge after him. Elliot simultaneously uncorked the champagne. The cork whistled past Linos and hit his
opponent square in the temple. The bearded man promptly keeled over.
“Couldn’t have planned it better if I planned it,” Elliot quipped. He lifted the bottle to his mouth
and took several hasty swigs before saying, “Now we run.”
I waited only long enough to make sure Linos was on his feet before I ran after Elliot. The hill
rapidly accelerated my pace and I knew I would fall down if I tried to stop now – the only thing for it was
to keep running.
When we reached the street Elliot and I spiraled off in opposite directions.
“Wait!” I called, and Elliot jogged to a halt. “What about Lewis Epps?”
Elliot had lost his hat on the run down the hill. Now that he was standing I realized we were
almost the same height; his wiry frame made him look taller.
“Uh – where are you staying?” he asked.
“York.”
30
“Meet me at the Short Sands arcade tomorrow, noon.” He turned and started jogging back
down the road.
Linos was beside me. “Why are you smiling?” he asked.
“My first college party,” I said. Then I remembered I was furious. “What was that?” I
demanded.
All he said was, “You lost a shoe.”
I took the shoe from Linos’s outstretched hand. “Thanks.”
I realized we had never clarified where I was spending the night.
“So am I spending the night at the house?” I prompted, trying to nip the issue in the bud.
Linos looked at me over the top of the car, his eyes shrouded in the moonlight.
“You aren’t sleeping tonight, Olivia – I need to keep you awake.”
“What?” I said, feeling the first true flutter of anxiety since I had arrived in this place.
“You might have a concussion, remember? You can’t sleep until we’re sure.”
“Oh,” I said, relaxing. “Right. Well I guess I’m stuck with you then, for now.”
He grumbled something I didn’t hear.
31
POST SCRIPT
“Hang on, I’m at a payphone outside the library. Let me get something to write on,” Agent
Gutierrez said. She set the phone on top of the console and pulled the phone book out, resting her pad
of paper on top.
“Okay, go,” she said, and clicked her pen.
“Well there’s not a file for Fofi Goldberg, but the file for the Goldberg family goes back a while.
Her mother was schizophrenic – the family enrolled for disability in 1982. The mother was covered under
her husband’s health insurance… Then in 1994 Fofi’s brother applied for disability. He was eighteen
then. He’s also a schizophrenic, paralyzed from the waist down.”
“Any note on how he became paralyzed?”
“It says he fell in the kitchen, hit his spine on an open oven door when he was sixteen.”
“Are they both still collecting disability?”
“No. In 1998 all three –”
“All three?”
“I’m sorry. The mother, the brother, and the father, were all civilly committed in August 1998.
All schizophrenics.”
“Fofi would be eighteen then. All of them – everyone in her family is schizophrenic?”
“Yes, except Fofi, evidently. There’s a note in the file here…”
A long pause.
“Come on, Becky, don’t keep me in suspense.”
“The caseworker responded to a call from Fofi… Fofi stated that her father had suddenly become
catatonic. She claimed she and her father had been caring for her mother and brother, but that she was
unable to care for them with her father in his current state. But the caseworker was suspicious. She
claimed there was evidence all three – mother, brother, and father – had been living in the basement for
several years. Soiled cots downstairs, immaculate bedrooms upstairs. God, she said there was a padlock
on the basement door.”
“Wait – the caseworker insinuated that Fofi had been keeping her family prisoner in the
basement?”
“While collecting the disability checks, no doubt, although the caseworker never out-and-out
says it. The caseworker was thorough – she even included a copy of the brother’s x-rays and a note from
32
a doctor she consulted. The doctor said the brother’s spinal fracture was consistent with being pushed
down a flight of stairs. Her boss told her to shove it, all speculation. Is that helpful?”
“Yeah, Becky. Thanks for breaking protocol – don’t worry, this will all be off the record. And I
owe you big time.”
“So off the record, Lola, are you investigating the caseworker’s claims?”
“No, somehow I don’t think I’m here to investigate a decade-old possible assault charge.”
“What kind of case is this?”
“Wish I knew. The CIA idiot gave me a file but half of it was blacked out. I ask him why, he says I
don’t have the security clearance. He’s been giving me the runaround ever since I showed up – not to
mention he’s a freak.”
“Bureaucracy works in mysterious ways. Just don’t lose your temper and do something stupid.”
“Yeah, sure. Seriously though, Becky, thanks. I’m over my head, here, and don’t want to end up
with my head up my –”
“You’re mixing metaphors again. You know, the real question is why Fofi ever gave up the scam.
What happened in 1998 that made her call the state?”
“Yeah. I gotta go Becky.”
Agent Gutierrez hung up the phone and put the phone book back in its cubby. Then she
reached into the inner pocket of her suit jacket and pulled out the newspaper column she had printed at
the local library.
LOCAL GIRL GETS FULL RIDE TO UNIVERSITY
Fofi Goldberg of Lakes Region High School has been honored with a
full scholarship to the University of New Hampshire.
Goldberg is
eighteen years-old and wants to become a neuropsychologist. She will
begin college in the fall.
Gutierrez tapped the date on the stub: April 1998. Just a few months before Fofi Goldberg
would call social services, revealing a family epidemic of schizophrenia. Just a few months before Fofi
Goldberg would go to college, all expenses paid.
Agent Gutierrez looked up in time to see a man in a white apron walking purposefully towards
her from the diner across the street. She shoved the article and her notepad back into her suit pocket.
“You know that curly brunette guy in my restaurant?” the man asked, jabbing his thumb in the
direction of the restaurant.
33
“Yes, unfortunately,” Gutierrez answered. What had Agent Simon done now?
“He’s bothering my patrons. He needs to leave.”
“Sorry, sir, I’ll take care of it,” Gutierrez said, already striding towards the diner. Her fingers
itched for her gun. “Can’t leave the guy for fifteen minutes,” she muttered.
Agent Peter Simon was kneeling next to an old woman in a tweed blazer and silk scarf. She had
a fork raised over her eggs benedict but wasn’t eating.
“You know it doesn’t really matter if you doubled his dose or he did it. He wanted to die, Marie,
it was only natural,” he murmured. He reached for the woman’s hand but she snapped it away, shaking.
“Simon,” Gutierrez snapped, “we’re leaving.”
“Finally,” he groaned. “What were you doing – writing a term paper?” He stood up and ambled
towards the door as if he hadn’t just been in deep conversation with a stranger. Gutierrez’s fingers
shook with anger as she slapped some bills on their vacated table.
The drive passed in tense silence. When they arrived at the motel Simon announced he was
going to take a nap. Gutierrez lingered outside her adjacent room, pretending to search for her keycard,
then slipped into Simon’s room before his door shut.
She slammed it behind her.
“Crazy bitch!” he yelled, leaping backwards.
“Crazy? Me? Tell me what you’re on this instant, Agent Simon, or I will handcuff you to the
toilet and call both our superiors.”
She knew her small stature and sex worked against her attempts at intimidation, so she wasn’t
unprepared when Simon started laughing. He didn’t even bother to fight her as she pulled him towards
the bathroom and lifted the top off the porcelain toilet tank, exposing the pipes.
“Last chance,” she warned, dangling the cuffs on a finger.
He only laughed harder.
In one motion she handcuffed him to the pipe.
Simon stopped laughing.
“You gonna tell me what you’re on?” she prompted, taking a step out of arms reach.
“Screw you!” he yelled, yanking on the cuffs.
“I wouldn’t pull too hard if I was you. I’d hate to see the look on your superior’s face when he
reads the bill for a bathroom remodel.”
34
“Very funny, agent. I know you’ve been pissed the last few days that you’re not big girl on
campus, fibby coming in to bust some chops. Well you win this round. Now unlock the cuffs and grow
up,” he said.
“Sober up,” she countered. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”
She knew she’d get chewed out, and probably given crap cases for a month. God knows she’d
have to put up with Simon’s banging on the bathroom wall for the next hour.
But it was totally worth it.
35
CHAPTER 4
You cannot see anything that you do not first contemplate as reality.
- Ramtha
“Are you angry?” Linos asked. We had been driving in silence for half an hour.
“No,” I said. I was relying on spending the night at this guy’s house, after all.
“Yes you are,” he pressed.
“What the hell was in that water gun?” I asked.
“Insecticide.”
“What?”
“A cop can’t charge you for carrying around insecticide,” he said. “And you never know when
you’ll need it.”
“Well, I don’t think you needed it,” I said, fed up with his paranoia. I sincerely hoped I wasn’t
this difficult to put up with back in the “real” world.
“Those men were very rude,” Linos said.
“You were pissed off from the moment we arrived,” I scoffed.
Linos waited so long to respond that I thought he wasn’t going to. Then he said, “I don’t really
like big parties.”
My annoyance dissolved into chagrin. Of all people I could appreciate an aversion to social
gatherings. And clearly this guy had some sort of disorder.
“Anyway, I can make it up to you,” Linos said, straightening in his seat.
He started to decelerate and turned on his blinker for the breakdown lane. The car stopped
next to an unremarkable patch of forest. Linos stepped out of the car.
“Um, why did we stop?” I asked, opening my own door.
“Come on, I’ll show you,” he said, turning back. In the monochromatic moonlight he looked
positively poised – waves of silver hair, jacket and pants indistinguishable black. I discerned a skinny
deer track leading into the woods. The trailhead was marked with a brown sign identifying an overlook.
I debated then decided I’d feel just as exposed waiting alone in a car on a state highway.
“Alright, lead the way,” I said.
The trail was less than a minute’s walk. It seemed we had barely entered the forest before the
trees thinned. We stood on a cliff top, several yards from the ledge, only a stone slab bench between us
36
and the open air. The overlook incorporated a waterfall plunging from a peak and the swamplands
below, laced with birch trees that glowed in the starlight. To be honest I had seen prettier overlooks in
the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but I wasn’t going to tell Linos that. I folded my arms and
craned my neck to get a look below.
“Turn around,” he said from behind me.
“What?” I asked, turning automatically.
He was holding out both his hands. “Take my hands,” he said.
“Why?” I prompted. I rested my fingers on top of his palms but didn’t grip.
“It’s a game.” Why did I feel uneasy? “Start walking backwards.”
Without even walking I stumbled on a rock and looked over my shoulder.
“No!” he said, “don’t look back.” I gave him a skeptical look. “I won’t let you fall.”
“Okay…” I said. So long as we walked slow enough I’d be able to test the ground behind me.
Maybe this was Linos’s equivalent of summer camp trust-falls. Just let me spend the night, I thought to
myself.
“Are you familiar with the Bible?” he asked.
“Um, enough. My mother sent me to Sunday School until I was fourteen. Why?”
We continued walking backwards. The trees loomed behind the silver halo of Linos’s hair, but
he was looking beyond me. He licked his lips.
“Do you know the story of Jesus walking on the water?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “During a storm Jesus walked onto the sea. One of his disciples tried to
follow, but he lost faith and fell into the water.”
Linos nodded. “That’s an abbreviated version.” His eyes looked past me, hopefully focusing on
where the ground stopped. “The disciples were out to sea in a boat, buffeted by the wind from the
shore. Long past midnight Jesus walked to meet them on the water.”
I could feel stones and gravel underneath the pine needles, now. We had rounded the bench.
“When the disciples saw Jesus, they thought he was a ghost,” Linos continued. “So Peter asked
Jesus to prove who he was. Peter asked to meet Jesus on the water. So Jesus called to Peter and Peter
was able to walk on water. It was only when Peter saw the wind chopping the waves that he became
fearful and started to sink.”
We stopped walking.
37
“But Jesus caught Peter, of course. Then he said ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ Olivia,
do you trust me?”
I laughed nervously. “In the movies people usually ask that question before jumping off a
building without a parachute,” I said. Linos was calm and unnervingly focused on me.
“Just remember, Olivia, you’re already walking on water. Don’t lose faith. Now look down.”
I looked at our feet. It took a moment for my brain to catch up to my eyes.
Linos’s feet were planted on silver stone, my feet were resting on the air. I could see the tips of
the birch trees a mile below me, stirring slightly in the wind. The sheer cliff face was a full foot in front
of me.
I froze.
This didn’t make sense.
“So it’s true,” Linos said.
“What?” I snapped. I was white-knuckling Linos’s hands, too petrified to move.
“I’ve read about the government’s experiments. Supposedly they thinned out the interdimensional barriers, and every now and then a person gets through. And in our world, they have…
powers.”
“So you walked me off a cliff?” I yelled, and then leapt at him, at solid ground. I crashed into his
chest and he stumbled backwards. I fell to all fours, blessing the earth.
“I would’ve caught you if it didn’t work,” he argued. “So long as you believed you were on solid
ground, you didn’t fall.”
All my sympathy for Linos was gone. I lurched to my feet. “I thought you were shy and
awkward, but you’ve just been waiting for something to happen, haven’t you? Watching me.”
“No,” he said calmly. “It was just something I read on the internet.”
“Go to hell!” I yelled, folding my hands over my head. But the adrenaline rush was fading,
making room for a flutter of excitement. If what Linos said was true…
I cupped my hands in an open fist and imagined –
“What are you doing?” Linos asked.
“Giving it a test drive,” I answered.
“No – don’t.” He extended a hand as if to stop me. As if he could – as if he deserved the right to
object after that stunt.
“What?” I laughed, happy to needle him.
38
“Can you imagine how people would react if they found out about you?” He shot a look back to
the forest. “You’d never be able to go home again. The government would be crawling all over you.
We’d be in questioning for weeks. Underground bunkers for months. Electrodes. HAZMAT suits.
Probes. Vivisection.”
“Alright, fine!” I said, just to cut off his paranoid speculation.
But then I imagined what would happen back home if someone was found to be capable of
performing miracles, and my mind leapt unbidden to E.T. I guess he had a point.
I shivered and rubbed my hands together. Then I looked at them, thinking.
“I still have to try something,” I said.
“Just – small,” he answered.
Once again I cupped my hands, imagining orange and black wings tickling, the prickle of
miniscule feet. I opened my hands to reveal a monarch butterfly. It climbed up my left index finger and
then flew away.
There was no question of falling asleep now.
39
POSTSCRIPT
[Excerpt from transcript of interview with Dr. Fofi Goldberg]
INTERVIEWER: Perhaps you could explain the concept of the collective unconscious for our less
knowledgeable readers.
DR. GOLDBERG: Carl Jung was the first psychologist to suggest the idea of the collective unconscious.
According to Jung everyone inherits the memories of certain archetypal experiences. Jung
argues mythological characters, clichés – archetypes in short – constitute a shared library of
experiences that supplies everyone’s unconscious. In crude terms, of course.
INTERVIEWER: Your understanding of the collective unconscious goes beyond that.
DR. GOLDBERG: Absolutely. Shared memories in the unconscious don’t have to be mythical or
archetypal. Take for example September 11th. There is no question that September 11th is a
shared experience that affects the unconscious of adults in the United States. September 11th
informs our traveling, our voting decisions, our feelings towards the New York Fire Department.
It is shared by us all, it affects us all, and thus it is part of the collective unconscious.
INTERVIEWER: In your recently published article there was an interesting paragraph I’d like to discuss.
I’ll just read one sentence from it. “There isn’t a question of whether or not the collective
unconscious is real because we are both affected by and can affect the collective unconscious.”
DR. GOLDBERG: I said a lot in that paragraph but I think I know what you want for this interview. In the
article I talk about abduction syndrome, which is a pathological phenomenon in which an
individual honestly, truly, believes they have been abducted by aliens from another planet.
Often there are attending somatoform ailments such as headaches, rashes, etc. Of course, in
the eighteenth century no one was suffering from abduction syndrome. I argue that the idea of
alien abduction was introduced to the collective unconscious mid-twentieth century through
newly popular science fiction. Only after the idea of alien abduction was introduced did you get
this disorder of people claiming to be alien abductees, with consistent symptoms among them.
The fact that there’s a whole group of people sharing the same symptoms of abduction, when
we know for a fact alien’s have NOT visited this planet, suggests a shared concept of abduction
in the collective unconscious. Or so I argue.
INTERVIEWER: Unless aliens have visited this planet.
40
DR. GOLDBERG: Yeah, ha. You know it’s funny – when you read that sentence alone a little while ago it
almost sounded like I was suggesting the collective unconscious was a ‘real’ place you could
visit.
41
CHAPTER 5
I cannot say
that I have gone to hell
for your love
but often
found myself there
in your pursuit
- William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
“Remember you can’t fall asleep,” Linos said, closing the front door behind us.
“Yeah right,” I laughed. I bolted up the stairway.
I slammed the door to my reclaimed bedroom and then flopped onto the bed. I closed my eyes,
breathed in the sharp smell of the ocean, and let out a breathless giggle. If this was still all a dream, if
this high was still just from a little pill, I didn’t care.
Linos and I had reached an agreement in the car: magic was fine so long as I kept it to my room.
He had also wanted a rule “nothing larger than a breadbox,” but I managed to talk him out of it by
pointing out how I was already constrained by the size of my room.
I started by populating my bedroom with butterflies. Then I focused on the books on my dresser
so they levitated, unfurled, pages flapping and folding into the wings of a bird. I imagined the ceiling
into a field of flowers and laid down in a snowfall of petals. The magic seemed to work better when I
was able to imagine every detail in all five senses. Sometimes my flowers came out flat, or seemed
papery because they lacked fragrance.
I poked shimmering lights like fireflies into the air with my index finger. I made the quilt bloom
into silk daisies. Then I retrieved a picture book of sea creatures from a box in the closet and flipped
page by page, imagining each fish into the air around me, until the whole bedroom was a waterless,
bioluminescent aquarium.
And then I ran out of ideas.
I heard the phone ring downstairs, followed shortly by the slam of the front door. It was still
dark outside, which seemed an odd time to run an errand, but I wasn’t about to stop Linos from leaving
if he wanted to.
42
I sat on the wood floor, watching the fish meander above, and realized my power was limited by
my imagination – and I had never imagined anything outside of a small life in a small New England town,
the occasional adventure of boarding to the local grocery for a candy bar or a lemonade.
But now I wasn’t shackled by anxiety. I could listen to the megaliths at Stonehenge in Salem,
New Hampshire, spend a day at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston talking to the women of Gauguin, or
even dance with snow lions at the Potala Palace or ask the Mayan king Pakal if he met with aliens in
Palenque. What did I want to do? What should I do? It all depended how long I was going to be here.
I was alone in the house, surrounded by my brother’s magazines, my mother’s beach house
antiques, and my grandmother’s quilts, but still alone. Would I ever see them again? I folded my hands
over a suddenly hollow-feeling stomach.
A Parrot Fish darted past a glowing Glass Squid overhead.
It all came back to finding Lewis Epps and asking him what the hell was going on. Right now he
was my only line to the truth.
The sun had risen when I heard the wheels of a car in the driveway. I shook the flowers from
the bedspread, closed the book-birds, and used the picture book to catch the fish like a Venus-flytrap. I
found a pair of blousy white sailor pants and a silk shirt with a mandarin collar in my closet to wear for
the day. In this world I could be whoever I wanted to be, and I wanted to try on a hundred costumes
similarly.
I skipped down to the front door to meet Linos.
The backseat of the station wagon was loaded with sheet metal, lumber, and rope. Linos was
carrying PVC pipe into the garage.
“Uh, you went shopping?” I asked.
Linos shrugged. “I’ve been meaning to fix some things up. Security. Especially now that you’re
here.” He looked over his shoulder, as if someone might be eavesdropping.
“And there was a sale at four a.m.?” I pressed.
He just shrugged again, pipes rising and falling with his shoulders.
“There’s bagels in the back seat,” he said.
“I’ll get them,” I said. The paper bag was resting on top of an overturned metal bucket. The car
smelled of moist bread and iron. I grabbed the bag and retreated inside.
I was laying hot pink Fiestaware on the kitchen table when Linos came scuffing in from the living
room.
43
“So where have you been?” I tried again.
Linos uncurled the paper bag and reached in for a bagel. I cursed silently when he pulled out
blueberry – my favorite.
“I bought that stuff,” he said unhelpfully.
“You wouldn’t have happened to buy two of those, would you?” I asked, nodding at the
blueberry.
I was the first to spot Elliot a block away, lounged against an antique yellow convertible. He was
wearing white boat shoes and had thrown back the tails of his linen blazer to tuck his hands in his
pockets – he was the picture of beau monde. Except, of course, for the giant FUN-O-RAMA arcade
looming behind him.
I slammed the car door and jogged past Linos, dodging parking meters in my unexpected
enthusiasm to see Elliot. Maybe I was ready for some action after being cooped up in the house, maybe
I was sick of Linos’s craziness, maybe the sunshine was catching.
I slowed a few yards from Elliot. The bling-bong sounds of the arcade played like music for an
abstract carousel. Elliot was watching the beach, which was crowded with families eating taffy and
couples smoothing sunscreen over each other’s backs.
“Hello, Elliot. Elliot, right?” I asked.
He pushed his Ray Bans up his nose and looked at me. I watched his chin rise and fall as he
examined me from scalp to toes. His bushy brows rose over the rims of his sunglasses.
“Where’s the rest of the majorettes?” he finally said. At that moment Linos arrived at his more
leisurely pace, bicycle helmet in hand. “Oh, hell, why’s the anorak here?”
I waited for Linos to defend me, or at least supply an answer, but he just seemed to shrink
farther behind me.
“Linos helping me find Lewis,” I said.
The wind caught up a bit of Elliot’s shaggy hair.
“Well your associate doesn’t seem to play well with others. And I didn’t bring my brass knuckles
today.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “That fight started because you cheated at cards.”
“Alright,” Elliot said. “But the boff rides in back.”
“Wait – where are we going?” I asked.
44
“You’re looking for Lewis Epps, right?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Well I can take you to his place.”
Elliot bounced off the side of the convertible and opened the passenger door for me. I hesitated
then got in. Linos would be in the back seat with his insecticide if Elliot tried anything, and Elliot was our
only link to Lewis Epps.
Elliot turned the ignition and the convertible growled. We swerved out of the arcade parking
lot, Elliot ratcheting through the gears.
“So how do you know Lewis Epps?” I asked. I gathered most of my hair into a fist at the base of
my neck.
“I don’t, not really,” Elliot answered. We were traveling out of downtown York, into inland
residential neighborhoods. He suddenly floored it to eek past a red light; a mother had to yank her
toddler onto the sidewalk to make way.
“But you know where he lives,” I prompted.
“Sure. I was drinking with some other people he knew. He got too drunk to drive and I pulled
the short straw escorting him home.”
“Does he know we’re coming?” I asked, suspecting the forthcoming answer.
“It’s not like I saved his number. He’s probably just messing around in that garage of his. He’s
got a whole setup. Working on some vintage car or something,” Elliot explained, gesturing unhelpfully.
It took only minutes for York to turn into rural state highways and gravel roads. A few miles
from the beach and the town turns into forests and fields, isolated burger shacks and doublewide
trailers. A jog on the state highway thwarted speech; then Elliot turned onto a residential road lined
with trees and pockmarked by frost heaves. I clutched the door with my right hand and braced myself
on the dashboard with my left.
“Maybe you should slow down,” I hinted as the car popped from a pothole.
“Nah,” Elliot said, “we’re already here.”
He turned right onto a gravel road and the forest cleared, revealing fenced-in pastures. The
southern field was filled with neat rows of apple-green corn not a foot high. The northern field was a
tangle of Queen Anne’s Lace and yarrow. At the center of that field stood an old white farmstead with a
wraparound porch and widow’s walk high enough for a view of the sea.
45
As the car approached the farmhouse it became obvious that the house was in ill repair. Two of
the windows on the second floor were broken, the paint was flaking, and the wooden steps had rotted
away completely. Elliot turned off the car and the sound of crickets and sparrows swelled to fill the
void.
I felt an ounce of trepidation. I had been too busy pretending last night to think about what I
was going to say when I met Lewis Epps. They guy was a self-professed terrorizer of children, but he felt
bad about it, right?
“How do you get to the front door?” I asked, examining the three-foot leap from ground to
porch.
“He doesn’t use that door,” Elliot said, stepping out. “There’s an attached garage on the other
side.” I opened my door to follow.
“I’m going to wait in the car,” Linos announced. It was his first words since we had met Elliot at
the arcade.
“What?” I asked, one leg out the door. “Why?”
He shrugged and then looked away, over the fields. He was still wearing his helmet. He
certainly wasn’t helping my feeling of forboding.
“So long as you come in if you hear me screaming,” I said at last, and slammed the car door.
I hurried around the front of the house, hounded by the sensation of someone watching me
from the upper windows. The side garage came into view, no more than a plywood shack with
aluminum roof. Elliot was banging on a blue side door.
“Yo, Lewis!” he called.
I was relieved that Lewis didn’t seem to be home.
“He doesn’t seem to be working on his car,” I said. “Maybe you should’ve called after all.”
“No way, the guy doesn’t have a life,” Elliot insisted, and before I could object he backed up a
step and karate kicked the doorjamb.
“Holy…” I started.
Elliot was already walking over the threshold. A cloud of dust and paint chips sprinkled his
shoulders. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the inner gloom. I smelled mold.
“Looks like he hasn’t been here in days,” Elliot said.
46
I tiptoed inside. Wooden worktables and metal stools lined the walls, which were hung with
lobster traps, hammers, punched tin lanterns, and Maine bumper stickers. An old Chinese takeout bag
was swarming with ants. There was no sign of a car.
“Don’t you people have rules against breaking and entering?” I asked.
“You people?” he countered.
“Nevermind.”
Light shafted in from two transom windows, illuminating where Elliot had kicked up dust.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Look,” I said, and pointed at the concrete floor for Elliot’s benefit. “Yours
aren’t the only set of footprints. Someone came before you – recently.” I moved my finger, tracing
where the clean path diverged from Elliot. At least one person had entered the garage, stood in a
corner, and then presumably retraced their steps.
I heard a click and the room filled with light from a bare bulb overhead. The path was invisible
without the angled light from the windows but my finger was still pointed at the corner. I walked to
where I remembered the footsteps ended and looked. There was a wrench left on a metal stool and a
copy of Ender’s Game splayed spine-up on the table; neither looked like they had been touched
recently, though I stroked the spine of the book with a fond finger. Everything in this garage fit with the
profile of an eighteen year-old boy who liked to tweak electronics and fix up vintage phonographs.
More remarkable was the flower growing out of the woodwork like a tree from a diorama.
Something about the spiky white petals and yellow-tipped pistils was familiar… I cupped the flower in
my hands and inhaled.
“Asphodel,” Elliot said from across the room. He still hadn’t moved. “In mythology it was
manna for the dead in Hades.”
I wondered if Lewis had imagined this flower into being, and what personal significance
asphodel could bear for him. And I wondered why the scent was so redolent, so unsettling to me.
“But I don’t think that’s what he was looking at,” Elliot continued. “Turn around.”
I turned one-eighty to look at the room. Elliot stood in the opposite corner clutching the edge of
a canvas tarp that dangled from the ceiling. Without ceremony he yanked the tarp down, revealing a
giant pile of…
“Scrap metal?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” Elliot said. His tone had me jogging across the room to get a closer look.
47
At first I couldn’t perceive order within the sum of parts: the gears and chain from a bicycle, the
foot of a sewing machine, pearl jewelry, corrugated metal, a rusted meat hook, an LED headlamp. I
remembered the words of Lewis’s last letter: I am guilty of tormenting a little girl and blackmailing her
father. My mouth tasted sour.
Then Elliot stuck his hands into the bunch and raised a soldered clump of the scraps. And I saw
a head. Two headlamps for eyes, a water faucet nose, pearls melded around a hole like teeth, and
peeking from within the hole a sewing machine needle for a tongue. The entire thing was the size of a
large beach ball and trailed chains and hooks.
“A robot?” I asked, incredulous.
“A dissembled one,” Elliot said, pulling on some of the dangling chains.
“Do you think this is what Lewis was working on?” I asked. I ran a hand over the rivets of the
giant head.
“It would explain the pile of auto parts I saw in his backyard,” Elliot said, “although don’t ask me
what this robot is supposed to do…” He kicked at the pile and a corrugated metal tube clattered to the
floor.
If Lewis had used this robot as an object of terror, why would he give it a face? A smile made of
pearls? Was the robot laughing or crying?
“So how do you know Linos?”
The question derailed my train of thought.
“Oh, we’re, uh, roommates,” I answered, crouching to fish through the pile.
Elliot snorted. “How’s that working out?”
“He… keeps to himself,” I answered.
I was about to ask Elliot his theories on Lewis’s absence when I heard him hiss over by the
window.
“We’ve got tourists,” he said. I darted to the window to take a look. A black Lexus was parked
behind Elliot’s convertible, and two men in suits were examining his license plates. I thought I saw scar
tissue peaking from underneath the chubbier man’s sunglasses.
“They were at the party,” I said. “Do you always bring trouble?”
“Right back at you, Matahari. Where’s your weirdo?” Elliot asked, then answered for himself,
“Oh, hell, he’s in the field.”
48
I looked out the window again and caught a glimpse of Linos skulking in the tall grass behind the
intruders. I hoped he wasn’t too trigger-happy with the insecticide.
“Okay here’s what’s going to happen,” Elliot said. “Can you hot-wire a car?”
“No,” I said.
“Shit,” he whispered. Sweat glistened on his upper lip. “Okay. You’re going to have to run out
back and stage a diversion. Clank some car parts together or something. When the suits run to
investigate I’ll hot wire their car. Your friend can borrow mine.”
“Wait – how do I get out of here?”
“There’s a backdoor to the main house. As soon as you make a ruckus run back inside. We’ll
meet you out front.”
“Are we sure we need to run from these people?” I suggested.
Elliot didn’t even look at me when he answered, “Yes.” He strode to a set of wooden steps I
hadn’t seen. “Here’s the door to the main house. I think you can find your way out. Hurry up!”
I skipped up the wooden stairs and Elliot held open a chipped white door. The door whispered
shut behind me with a click. I was in the farmhouse.
It took a moment for me to get oriented. Lewis seemed to have kept the original furnishings,
from the crimson wing-backed chair to the TV-sized radio. There was a fireplace on the far wall, the
front windows to my left. I ducked, unsure if I was visible through the grimy glass, and trotted through a
doorway at the back.
I was in a gutted kitchen and a screen door was to my right. I opened it gingerly, anticipating a
whine from the rusty hinges. The sound was muted enough for me to sustain hope of escaping
undetected.
Elliot wasn’t lying about the junk yard out back. Lewis was hoarding the bodies of three rusted
cars, not to mention the parts of a yellow backhoe and a dissembled tractor. There was a path of
matted grass from the backdoor to the car heap where Lewis must have treaded back and forth every
day. I followed his footsteps and looked for something small I could throw. I plucked a rusted tailpipe
from the weeds and flung it in the direction of the tractor.
The thunderous BANG that followed chased me to the back door, where I tripped over the
concrete step and rolled inside with a clatter of the rusty screen door. I didn’t stick around to make sure
they heard my diversion – I dashed back to the garage and out the blue front door.
49
Elliot already had the door of the Lexus open; I could see his brown scalp above the dashboard.
Linos was scuttling towards the yellow convertible, Elliot’s keys in hand. As my feet hit the gravel the
Lexus purred with ignition, followed by the snarl of the convertible. I vaulted over the side of the yellow
coup yelling, “Go, go, go!”
Linos swerved through a u-turn and zoomed after Elliot, who was steering the Lexus in reverse.
Nose to nose the cars hit road, Elliot spinning out of reverse while Linos punched into fourth gear.
“Although I’ve studied defensive driving in case the government ever came after me,” Linos
yelled, “the statistics on surviving a crash at this speed –”
“Shut up!” I yelled back. I looked over the back seat and saw the two men running from either
side of the house, guns in hand. “We smoked ‘em,” I said, but the words caught in my throat. The men
both cut through the fields running – fast.
“They’re from my world,” I murmured, then louder to Linos, “Faster!”
Linos turned the windshield wipers on in a vain attempt to clear the flying gravel. Elliot veered
into the left lane, keeping pace with us. I looked back over the seats. The men were gaining. We were
going to need help to get out of this one.
I clambered to the back seat and placed both hands on the trunk. I focused on the clouds of
exhaust pouring from the tailpipe and imagined billowing fog. The tail pipe started belching thick gray
clouds which I willed into an opaque brume. Fog rolled to me like a herd of horses galloping across the
grasslands. The men disappeared.
“How long until the turn?” I asked, keeping my hands on the trunk.
“Hold on!” Linos yelled and I felt the car lurch left. We had turned back onto the pockmarked
street. I released my hands, stopping the fog before it became a trailblazer. The Lexus next to us roared
past and Linos shifted into fifth gear. Now it was a race to reach the state highway before they caught
our trail.
I fell sideways in the back seat as the car pitched and leapt over frost heaves. My stomach was
still swinging around the last corner. I propped myself up on one arm in time to see the black Lexus
shoot past a stop sign and swerve onto the highway.
“Linos…” I warned. “Stop at the stop sign.” Linos didn’t slow down. “Linos,” I insisted, and then
looked over my shoulder. One of the suited men was still in pursuit not two hundred yards from the car
– they must have split up at the crossroads. “Never mind!” I yelled. “Floor it!”
50
We took a hard right and the car fishtailed, throwing me onto the floor. Horns blared – A red
Volkswagen veered into the breakdown lane – and Linos straightened the car. It was a straight shot
down the highway. I turned to look back over the seats in time to see our pursuer surge around the
corner like a Terminator.
A hair elastic materialized in my hand before I realized I wanted it. I yanked my hair into a nasty
ponytail and focused on the running man now 100 meters behind us. I considered a stone wall, a gulf of
water, a bundle of rolling logs, but didn’t want to endanger the other people on the road. I searched the
backseat for inspiration and uncovered a brown wool blanket.
“I’ve got an idea!” I called to Linos and unfurled the blanket, holding it end to end. Facing the
back of the car I held up the blanket so it obscured my entire view of the road. But I didn’t see the
blanket in front of me – I was looking into my memory, down Long Beach Avenue, lined with power lines
and beach cabins, smelling of fish fry and sunscreen, the ocean a blue crescent in the corner of my eye. I
dropped the blanket and saw Long Sands unfurling behind me. I whipped around in the seat and
confirmed that the entire yellow convertible had been transported at least a dozen miles to Long Beach
Avenue. Linos slowed the car, adjusting to the new traffic.
But I didn’t see a black Lexus anywhere on the road – Elliot hadn’t traveled with us.
“Shit!” I exclaimed. I clutched the blanket but was unable to recall the patch of highway we
were driving on only a moment ago. All I could remember was the determined running man, legs
pumping like a machine, hands straight.
“We have to go back!” I cried to Linos. “Go back to the highway – we lost Elliot!”
“Not a chance,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”
For a moment I felt my power surging, fantasies of hitting Linos or steering the car off the road
momentarily blinding me. The unclear thoughts faded when I realized what havoc I could wreak.
“Linos, please,” I entreated, “we can’t leave him on his own in a stolen car.”
“Elliot can handle himself – you did magic Olivia, they know what you are!”
We were less than a minute away from Short Sands. Linos was driving back to the station
wagon. Linos peeled into the parking lot and jerked to a stop next to our car.
“Get in,” he commanded, and I dutifully changed cars, too shocked to argue. As we drove away
I rested my head against the glass window, watching the yellow convertible disappear in the side-view
mirror.
51
POSTSCRIPT
Agent Gutierrez gave Agent Simon ten minutes to return for a forgotten wallet or cell phone
before she broke into his room.
Peter Simon made his bed after he got up in the morning. He kept his suits hung in a garment
bag monogrammed P.A.S. that matched a black leather suitcase. He wore boxer-briefs embroidered
with the days of the week. The rest of his suitcase contained black socks and white undershirts. Simon
packed like a Japanese businessman.
The only signs of life were in the bathroom: gray gym shorts hung on a towel rack, a leather
toiletries case on the counter, wet towels in the wastebasket. It appeared Simon never used the same
towel twice. Evidently Simon was something of a neat-nick, despite his otherwise adolescent behavior.
Agent Gutierrez retrieved a pen from her breast pocket to pull back the zipper on the toiletries
case. Several miniature tubes of toothpaste, maybe a dozen plastic toothbrushes still unwrapped.
Gutierrez lifted one of the towels from the wastebasket with her pen and observed that Simon had
opened and disposed of several toothbrushes already. Was he a germ freak, a paranoiac, or
unnecessarily conscientious when it came to dental hygiene? She replaced the towel and finished sifting
through the toiletries case.
There were three plastic prescription bottles at the bottom of the case: triptan, prescription
strength ibuprofen, and a generic antidepressant. So the CIA tough-guy suffered from migraines and
needed a mood stabilizer. Gutierrez wondered if his superior knew about the antidepressant. She
snapped on a pair of latex gloves and pulled out the three plastic bottles to examine their contents. The
chalky antidepressant was stamped with a familiar logo and Gutierrez recognized the triptan from when
she lived with her mother. But the prescription strength ibuprofen didn’t look right. She shook the
contents of that bottle into her hand.
Glossy red and blue pills round as M&M’s, unmarked.
This was not a prescription-strength painkiller. This pill was something Agent Dolores Gutierrez
had never seen before, but she inferred Simon used it to get high.
She slipped one of the pills into a small plastic bag, returned the bag to her pants pocket, and
then poured the remaining pills back into the bottle. The prescriptions were replaced, the toiletries bag
zipped, the door to Simon’s motel room closed and locked.
52
CHAPTER 6
It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.
- Erica Jong
I understood why Linos hadn’t gone back for Elliot, but that didn’t mean I wanted to talk to him
right now. I slammed the front door and walked straight for the stairs.
“Olivia, did you know those guys?” Linos accused.
“I’ve never seen them before in my life,” I snapped and continued walking.
“Then how did they find you?”
“I thought they were looking for Elliot. Or…” And then it hit me. “They might be looking for
Lewis Epps, same as us. We’re just looking in the same places.”
“Olivia, who is Lewis Epps?” Linos demanded. I bristled at his tone but he had a right to know by
now. I plopped down on the stairs, defeated.
“He’s the one who brought me here,” I said. Linos waited, knowing there was more. “He sent
me a letter, actually, confessing to a crime.”
And then I watched Linos’s face transform before me. Everything tightened like a wind-up clock,
his tongue flew over his sore lips, and his hands started shaking.
“You – Lewis is – a criminal?” he hissed.
I conversely became incredibly calm. I had no regrets about searching for Lewis Epps; it was the
only conceivable purpose for me coming here.
“He expressed remorse,” I said. “He wanted to make things right.”
“So you’re Nancy Drew, here to save the day?”
“That’s patronizing –”
“You’re his accomplice, now, Olivia!” he shouted. “And me, too! The government’s going to be
all over this!”
I had concealed the letter, I had received evidence, I had taken god knows what kind of drug…
My mother may have only been a copyright lawyer, but I knew enough about the justice system to know
Linos was right. Whatever Lewis had done, I was now an accessory to his crime. Shit.
I felt my nose dripping and swabbed it with a finger. My finger came away red. There were
little red drops on the wooden stairs.
53
“Holy shit,” I whispered, tasting blood on my lips. I ran to the upstairs bathroom to look in the
mirror.
Blood was trickling from my nose.
I grabbed a wad of tissues and leaned over the sink. The last time I remembered getting a
bloody nose was after falling off a hammock. I was five. I had been afraid all the blood was going to
drain from my brain and I would die. I tried to remember how my mother had comforted me but my
mind was blank.
I reached to turn on the faucet and was surprised by my own bloody hand. Then I saw blood
was leaking from underneath my fingernails.
I screamed, staggering backwards from the sink, and landed against Linos’s hard chest. He
grabbed my wrists and turned me around.
“Calm down,” he said. His eyes were clear green like glass marbles. “You’re letting your
imagination run away with you. Look – your fingers are fine.” He wiped the fingers of my right hand
with a linen hanky, revealing healthy pink nails. He reached past me to turn on the sink. “Now we’re
going to clean off your face.”
“I haven’t gotten a bloody nose since I was five,” I chattered. “I don’t know – I was just starting
to worry about the police or those men…”
Linos wrung out his hanky and dabbed at my lips, stopping me. “The probability of dying from a
nose-bleed is extremely rare,” he said. “Most who die have some sort of clotting disorder.”
For a moment I remembered fourth grade, a wipeout on my bicycle. Alex propped my leg on
the back deck to pour hydrogen peroxide over my skinned knee. I wailed and he stuck on a big band aid.
He promised me he’d buy a glow-in-the-dark one at the drug store.
I quickly pushed that aside. I couldn’t be thinking about my family right now.
Linos withdrew the cool cloth and handed me a towel to dry off. I hid myself in the plush terry
and smelled home. I was lucky to have Linos, even if he was half a stranger. He was part of this house I
called home and patronizing or not he looked out for me.
“I’m going to bed,” I told Linos. I had been awake for more than twenty-four hours, and it was
time to sleep.
He didn’t stop me.
54
When I woke up it was dark outside and I was sweating. I wriggled out of my pants, just trying
to cool off. It wasn’t enough – my skin was pulsing. Then I heard something downstairs – a voice.
“Livy?”
It was my brother Alex, calling my name.
I lurched out of bed, stumbled and fell, slamming my palms against the floors.
Linos must have heard the disturbance – he was somehow already kneeling next to me, helping
me to my feet.
“My brother –” I started.
“You must have been dreaming,” he said. Linos sat me on the bed and I automatically curled
into a fetal position. My head pounded.
“I think I’m sick,” I said.
“Maybe it’s the pill.” Did Linos say that? Did I think that?
Then Linos pulled back the sticky sheets and commanded, “Sleep.”
My memories of the next few hours – days? – are incoherent. I remember watching dust motes
in a shaft of sunlight turn into a swarm of flies. I remember my mother coming in to check my
temperature. I remember the silhouette of a man standing next to my dresser. I remember throwing
my pillow across the room, then someone tucking it back under my head. I remember a glass of water
sitting on my dresser, out of my longing reach. I remember listening to someone play Debussy and
Chopin on the piano downstairs.
I remember dreaming about the day my father moved out. I was used to my father picking me
up from kindergarten, but it was my mother that picked me up from school that day. She was still
wearing her work clothes. I was further surprised when she drove straight past our house and down the
street to the house where my brother took piano lessons.
“Come on, honey, I need to talk to Mrs. Katz,” my mother said, taking my hand. When she rang
the doorbell a woman hollered, “I’m out back! Come on in!”
My mother led me around the back of house, walking so fast I almost tripped. Mrs. Katz had a
small greenhouse attached to her patio, glass door propped open. She lifted her hands from a pot of
dirt and turned.
“Oh, hello, Mrs. Bellman,” she said. She took in my mother’s black pumps and hastily braided
hair.
55
“Hi, Karen,” my mother said. “I’m kind of in a bind here – we don’t know a lot of people in town
– and I need some time…”
Mrs. Katz smiled, went to pat my mother’s shoulder, then remembered her garden gloves.
“Of course, dear,” she said, “I’ll watch her for as long as you need.”
“It should only be an hour or so,” my mother murmured. Then she crouched down and held me
by the shoulders. “I need you to stay with Mrs. Katz for a little while. Okay, honey? I’ll be right back.”
I was too disoriented to speak. I felt hot and dizzy and wanted to cry. My mother drew me into
a swift hug, whispered “I love you,” and walked away.
“Have you ever planted any flowers, Livy?” Mrs. Katz asked. I looked up at her red hair and
wrinkles with panic. Then I stumbled to a wooden pot and threw up. Spiky white and yellow blooms
waved inches from my face.
“Asphodel,” I whispered, and I was awake.
There was a double stack of pancakes with butter and a fork sitting on my bedside table, along
with a glass of water. I used my elbows as leverage to scoot into a half-sitting position and drew the
glass of water to my lips. Pancakes without syrup were my favorite thing to eat when I’m sick, so either
Linos made a lucky guess, or…
“It’s what I like to eat when I’m sick,” Linos said. He was so still sitting in my desk chair that I
hadn’t noticed him. I put down the glass of water, then changed my mind and held it to my head.
“You should eat,” he said. “You won’t get better unless you eat.”
I pulled the plate of pancakes into my lap. My stomach growled despite lingering nausea. I cut
off a lump of pancake with my fork.
“How do you feel?” he asked. As usual he sounded more suspicious than caring.
“I feel well enough to take a shower,” I answered, wrinkling my nose a little. My scalp felt furry
with dirt. “I didn’t know you played the piano,” I added.
“I don’t.”
I blinked. “I must have imagined that, too.”
“No,” Linos answered. “Elliot was here.”
My fork clattered against the plate.
“Elliot was here? He’s alright?”
“He needed to pick up his keys,” Linos answered, missing the point completely. At the time it
didn’t seem strange that Elliot knew where we lived.
56
“So what happened?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how many days had passed.
Linos shrugged. “He got away.” Then he got up and strode out of the room.
I was in the shower when I heard the piano again.
I hurried to rinse the shampoo from my hair and toweled dry, then slipped on a knee-length
cotton nightgown with cap sleeves. Elliot was pounding out “Poem” by Scriabin with concussive force –
a contrast to his previous selections – but somehow he heard me reach the bottom of the stairs. He
stopped immediately and spun around on the bench to face me.
“Olivia,” he said. His collar was undone, his hair disheveled. He stood up and gave a curt bow.
“I was wondering if you might accompany me on a walk today.”
“I’m sick,” I said automatically.
“Pish-posh,” he said, “you’re better now. And it’s beautiful outside!” He gestured to the
window, which Linos had left shut.
“Linos –” I began, but Elliot interrupted.
“Linos can give himself a swirlie. So, ready, sunshine?”
He ran his hand through his hair, tried to tuck his bangs behind his ear. His eyes darted around
the room.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
“Just eager to go,” he answered, and gave me what looked like a sincere smile.
I hesitated. “Let me put some clothes on,” I said.
“No!” he said. Then, “Just throw on a jacket and some shoes.”
“Are you sure you’re alright?” I asked again.
Elliot rolled his eyes. “Yes. Now, shall we?”
I pulled a denim jacket from the front hall closet and slipped into the black and white ballet flats
from the party. Elliot held the front door open for me, then surprised me by linking my arm with his for
support.
We cut across the lawn and started down the street, away from the beach. I had to walk pretty
slowly. As the road wound farther from the ocean the yard sizes increased and Tudor houses and white
country estates peaked behind old-growth oaks. Soon the trees were tall enough to filter the late
afternoon sun and the street was a watercolor of bottle green and gold.
“So you just had the urge to go on a walk?” I asked.
57
Instead of answering he asked, “Have you seen the movie Fight Club?”
“No,” I said.
He gave me a look like I had sprouted a third eye. “Really? Really?”
“No.”
“Damn.”
He mussed his hair with his free hand and furrowed his brows.
“Okay, how about Donnie Darko.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” I said.
“Awesome!” he said, animated again. “So Donnie’s imaginary friend named Frank. He’s –”
“He’s not imaginary,” I interrupted. “He’s the Manipulated Dead according to the Philosophy of
Time Travel.”
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those people that thinks the whole movie is just a big science
fiction,” he groaned.
“Have you seen the Director’s cut?” I argued. “It’s nothing but science fiction.”
“It might be magical realism, but the movie is about mental illness and the tragedy of teenage
relationships – you know what, screw it. The point is, Frank is evil, right?”
He gave me a pleading look from under expressive brows.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
He broke away, raised clawed hands to the sky like a mad scientist, and howled, “Nothing is easy
with you, woman!”
“Elliot, what’s wrong with you?” I snapped.
He grabbed my arm and started walking again, abruptly all cool and focused.
“Olivia, why did you come here?”
I knew Elliot couldn’t be talking about my previous life but my mind went there anyway.
Elliot answered for me. “You feel powerful here, don’t you? All your troubles gone. But they
didn’t just disappear, Olivia, they had to go somewhere.” He stopped walking to look me in the eye.
“Are you following me?”
“I like it here,” I said, though I realized the words were inconsequential. I was too distracted
wondering how much Elliot really knew – and how he knew it.
“So you just want to have fun?” he scoffed. “Listen to what I’m saying, Olivia. Your troubles
followed you here. You’re in danger.”
58
The wind picked up, bringing with it the cold and briny smell of the sea. I wrapped both arms
around my jacket; Elliot just hunched his shoulders for protection.
“Elliot, if you’re trying to tell me something, just say it,” I said. I searched his gray eyes like we
were doomed lovers in some soap opera. Elliot’s eyes were locked with mine, his face was inches from
mine, contorted with – sincerity?
Then he seemed to remember something and patted his jacket pocket.
“I was supposed to give this to you,” he mumbled, pulling out a white envelope. For an
irrational moment I thought it was another letter from Lewis Epps. Then I saw the curly script in violet
ink.
“It’s an invitation to a private ball the Queen is holding at the York Reading Room,” Elliot
supplied.
“I didn’t think we’d be welcome after last time,” I said with a small smile.
“Psht, the Queen loves drama,” he said.
Then I saw there was something else in his hand. He was holding out a flower – not any flower,
but a spiky white asphodel.
I pinched the bloom between two fingers, unsure of the token.
“Just think about it,” Elliot said. I looked up from the flower. “Just think about what I said.”
He walked me back to the house, once again letting me lean against his arm. When we reached
the front steps he lingered near the day lilies, half-facing me as if torn between giving me a hug and
running away.
“I’ll see you at the dance – or, ball?” I asked.
He shrugged, then squinted at the sun. “I’m invited,” he said.
I started backing up. “Then bye, Elliot.”
He made another face at the sun and then he walked away.
I lingered to watch him depart – hunched shoulders, slim frame, wind wreaking havoc on his
hair. I guess he still hadn’t fetched the convertible.
I looked back to the Asphodel in my hand. Any fondness for Elliot was instantly smothered in
loathing for that flower. I dropped the bloom in the dirt next to the front steps and went inside.
59
POSTSCRIPT
Alex Bellman wanted to be awake when his sister walked in the front door. He wanted to be
awake when the police called, saying they’d found Olivia and she was safe. The lights were on and the
TV was tuned to British comedy re-runs, and Alex sat on the couch not watching.
It was his fault Olivia had gone missing, he thought. He should’ve noticed as soon as she was
gone, he should’ve made sure she was having fun. Hell, she was the one who had graduated; he
should’ve cancelled the party, ordered pizza, and played Scrabble with her all night. He didn’t care if she
was an art nerd that preferred watching British comedy over going to the movies, or that she hated loud
restaurants and the highway and carried around a backpack full of medication.
But why did she go in the water? She was smart enough not to swim behind their house, let
alone by herself at night. She must’ve gone with someone, there must’ve been someone she trusted
that lured her away. But the police had interviewed everyone at the party and no one else had left the
house until they started the fire pit.
Then Alex heard her. The front door opened, someone was walking up the stairs, walking in
Olivia’s room.
He bolted from the couch and took the stairs two at a time.
“Olivia?” he called, swinging around the banister at the top. “Olivia?”
But it was only his mother in Olivia’s room, looking at him thunderstruck.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I was just going through her room again, trying to find something…”
“But she was here!” Alex yelled. “I heard her in the front hall!”
“You must’ve fallen asleep, honey,” she said, and returned to searching every drawer, shaking
out every piece of clothing, staying busy, doing something to help. And she wanted to hold her son and
cry, but that was ridiculous because Olivia was going to turn up any hour, now. And when this was over
she could be furious with Alex and cry on Olivia’s shoulder and berate the police for their careless
investigation.
60
CHAPTER 7
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles
- William Blake, “A Poison Tree”
I stepped into the front hall and called, “Linos?”
I expected him to be sitting in the family room, asking where I had been.
The house was silent.
I noticed the door to my mother’s bedroom – where I presumed Linos had been sleeping – was
halfway ajar. I pushed the door the rest of the way open to peer inside.
“Linos?” I tried again. The bed was still made, the knickknacks on the dresser undisturbed.
Then I noticed the reflection in the floor-length mirror was off. It was an antique with a heavy gilt
frame, one of my mother’s prized possessions. I looked closer and realized the mirror was an inch ajar,
like a door.
I looked back through the doorway to make sure Linos wasn’t watching. Technically this was my
house, too, I justified. Then I walked to the mirror and slipped my fingers under the frame to pry the
mirror from the wall.
It was too dark for me to see what lay behind. I opened the mirror wider to let in more light,
then stepped into the hidden room.
The shaft of light illuminated the post of a brass bedstead a couple of yards in. The mattress
was bare. I tiptoed a few feet further and my eyes adjusted to see a zebra print butterfly chair off to the
side and a stuffed animal cat sitting on the mattress. Maybe I had stumbled upon storage.
There was something familiar about that cat… I walked purposefully to the mattress and held
the stuffed cat up to the shaft of light. Black fur, white face, and a hole behind the ear big enough to
wiggle my finger in. It was Boggart, the safety blanket of my childhood, who was lost one summer
moving back from the beach house.
I shifted my weight and my foot brushed against something under the bed. I set Boggart back
on the mattress and crouched to look underneath. A metal pole? I ran my hand along its length. It
ended in a latched cuff, almost like a handcuff. There were other things shoved under the bed – a
61
bamboo pole, coiled rope, and several planks of wood. Then I noticed the scratches on the wood floor,
gouges really, five of them a foot long.
I slowly straightened and noticed the black shadow where the pillow should have been – a piece
of fabric? I lifted up the black material and it flopped open like a small pillow case or a sack. I rotated
the corners, trying to understand the construction, and then realized I was holding a black hood.
I dropped it to the mattress. The crumple of black fabric partly obscured something white and
folded like origami. I twitched aside the fabric, revealing –
A white bloom of asphodel.
Somewhere in the house a door opened. Footsteps.
I yanked the black hood back into place and scuttled to the mirror, slipped out, pushed the
frame closed behind me, then darted to the front hall. The bedroom door had been partially closed – I
rushed back to pull it into place. I needed to slow my breathing.
I heard him close the basement door behind him.
“Linos?” I called, but my voice cracked. I hoped I could pass it off as illness.
He appeared around the corner, running a hand through his messy blond hair.
“You’ve been out,” he stated. I realized I still had on my denim jacket; he was looking at it with
furrowed brows.
“Yes, Elliot came by,” I said. Could he hear my heart pounding? “He took me for a short walk.
And he gave me this,” I said, thrusting the purple-inked envelope at Linos. He took the invitation and
pulled out the card inside. I caught myself staring at his spidery fingers and shifted my eyes to the floor.
My shoes were rimmed with tell-tale dust from behind the mirror.
“What is the invitation for?” I asked even though I already knew the answer.
“A party tonight. So you’re not well enough to go.” He stuffed the card back into the envelope.
“Tonight?” I said, hope only making my heart beat faster. I could find Elliot and escape tonight.
“But I’m fine, I want to go, we should go, it’s only polite, and I’m better,” I said. “I’ll nap until we have to
go; I’ve already showered and everything.”
Linos looked at my nightgown.
“I’ll change, of course,” I amended.
His eyes flicked to my mother’s bedroom.
I’ll go without you. The words were almost out of my mouth when I realized the last thing I
needed was to tempt Linos’s anger.
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“You’re not well enough, Olivia,” he said, matter-of-fact. “You were sick, and you need to rest.”
He reached out and sort of patted my damp hair – the first time he ever touched me. I imagined leaping
to scratch his eyes out, biting his hand, using my magic – but I couldn’t imagine what sort of violence I
could use to protect myself. I’d never even seen a scary movie and the sight of blood sent me into a
panic.
I closed my eyes and drew deep within myself. I only needed to pretend with Linos for another
few hours. I would find Elliot at the party and escape safely, in the eyes of the public, far away from
whatever dungeon Linos was building behind the mirror.
“Please?” I said. Then I opened my eyes. “Please may we go?” I tried to lean into his hand but
only managed to resist bolting in the opposite direction. I focused on his hazel eyes, the same color and
shape as mine.
My eyes.
I felt like there was something vastly important about those eyes, something I didn’t understand
– something Elliot was trying to explain to me, if only I had listened harder.
“Alright,” Linos said, sticking the invitation in his back pocket. “Do you think you have a dress?
It says black tie.”
I was already backing towards the stairs.
“I’m sure I’ll manage,” I said. “Plenty of clothes in the closets.”
I turned and ran up the stairs.
I whirled into my room and closed the door. I slumped to the floor, shoulder blades digging into
the wood. But I hadn’t had a panic attack since I got here, and I didn’t want to start now. I just need to
think.
All your troubles gone. But they didn’t just disappear, Olivia, they had to go somewhere... Your
troubles followed you here. You’re in danger.
What did Elliot know? And why didn’t he just tell me? What was the Asphodel supposed to
mean?
I had to talk to him. I pried myself from the door and faced the closet. I had a party to dress for.
I would have to choose one of the strange dresses hiding in the closet, dresses for all I knew
Linos had stolen with me in mind. I slipped into a tiered apricot cocktail dress because I could run in it,
and chose a cropped black velvet jacket because I might be spending time outside. The rest of my outfit
was theatre.
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I sat in front of the mirror untangling my hair, wishing the time back like the water spilled from a
broken bowl. If only I’d stayed with Alex, if only I hadn’t taken the pill, if only I hadn’t been so distracted
by butterflies and parties and magic.
Should I take anything with me – money or clothes? But my imagination was my suitcase, filled
to the brim with potential so long as I could escape the prison Linos had hidden downstairs. It was still
hard to reconcile that… dungeon with a skinny boy that wore a bicycle helmet in the car and carried bug
spray in a squirt gun. And yet he had been ready to attack me when I first came in the house, and for all
I knew there had been other boobytraps, boobytraps he disabled after my arrival, boobytraps that could
kill.
Sunset came, and so did Linos, knocking on my door.
I opened the door but I was unprepared for the façade Linos presented: an immaculate tuxedo,
black shirt, black tie, wavy hair slicked back. He no longer seemed slight or awkward. He looked like a
villain.
“You look beautiful,” he said. He held out an arm to escort me and I managed to rest my hand
on his forearm. I held my breath until we were past my mother’s mirror and out the front door.
Starlight filtered through the black net of trees overhead. We were traveling through wealthy
residential neighborhoods where only driveways peaked out from between the trees. I recited the plan
to myself: Get to the party. Find Elliot. Get to the party. Find Elliot.
The headlights flashed across the white back of a woman walking in an evening gown. I heard a
jazz band squealing not far off. Linos pulled to the curb next to a stone wall, then cut the engine.
The manor was set back a few dozen yards from the road, sunken slightly into the hill. Every
portcullis and dormer window shone. I stopped myself from bursting out of the car but couldn’t help
speed-walking through the gate. I heard Linos jogging on gravel behind me.
“Slow down,” he said, grabbing my elbow.
“I’m just cold,” I said, pulling my arm from his grasp and slowing to walk. I didn’t look at him as
we joined the press of guests laughing around the doorway.
The Queen was greeting people in a receiving line, kissing on each cheek, fawning over dresses,
swatting the bottom of a man in a tuxedo, twirling her fingers through the hair of Dixie Bull, who stood
next to her in a lace-cuffed shirt and fur.
She clasped my hands and pulled me into a perfume-fogged kiss.
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“Olivia, yes? Did you find your man?” she said with a wink. I felt the heat of Linos only inches
from my back, hovering.
“No,” I said, “The hunt continues with Elliot’s help. Is he attending tonight?”
“Ah, ha! Filling your dance card already!” Dixie Bull interrupted with a wink.
“Yes, go enjoy yourself, ma cherie,” Marie Antoinette purred. She was already looking to the
next guest in line and I was forced to enter the main hall.
The York Reading Room most resembled a dance hall from the eighteenth century. Mahogany
floors matched the exposed beams of the ceiling, which arched like a castle. The jazz band was
squeezed at one end of the hall below a moose head and on the far side of the room a series of glass
doors open to a slender gallery with views of the bay. I needed to ditch Linos.
“Linos,” I called over the band’s rendition of “Jeepers Creepers,” “it’s wicked hot in here. Could
you find a drink?”
He gave a forelock salute and began weaving through the dance couples. I waited just long
enough for his hulking shoulders to fold into the crowd and then ran in the opposite direction, towards
the attached gallery. I darted through a set of glass double doors and almost ran into Molly Ockett.
“Molly, thank God,” I said, grabbing her arms. She had skipped the top hat tonight. “Is Elliot
here? Do you know where he is?”
She eyed my probably ghostly face before answering, “He’s outside on the Ladies Piazza. Go
through that door and down those stairs.”
I was off, sprinting down the length of the gallery and cursing my high heels. I swung through an
exterior door and threw myself down a set of concrete stairs, barely catching myself on the iron railing
before skinning a knee. I took the last steps at a more reasonable pace.
The Ladies Piazza was a deck on the brink of the sea, outfitted with elegant metal tables and
white chairs. Out here the jazz was a muted serenade. Lanterns glowed along the metal railings. Elliot
was on the far side of the broad balcony, leaning towards the sea. My heart swelled with relief.
“Elliot,” I croaked.
The wind ruffled his gray suit, outlining the faces of his body. I walked to him, stopped a few
meters away. He rested a glass on the railing between us.
“Elliot,” I began again, “You warned me, but… Linos is – he’s…”
“I can’t help you, Olivia,” he interrupted. He raised his glass for a swallow.
“What?” I said. “But this afternoon – the flower – you were trying to warn me.”
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“I don’t know what you’re talking about Olivia,” he said in a monotone, still facing the bay.
This didn’t make sense. I was going crazy all over again. And now I was angry.
“Don’t be a jackass, Ellie,” I snapped, “You –”
“I’m the jackass?” he interrupted. “I’m the jackass?” Now he whirled to face me, his pretty face
contorted. “I’m not the one going to parties! Playing dress up! Having a grand old time laying about
the house dreaming about cupcakes and fairies and walking on the air!” He hurled the crystal glass over
the edge. It tinkled on the rocks below.
“Are you talking about magic?” I shot back. “Who are you Elliot?”
Abruptly he strode the two steps separating us and grabbed me by the waist and kissed me.
My mind screamed as my hands hung uselessly at my sides. He tasted of sour-sweet lemonade.
His other hand grabbed the back of my neck, molding my lips to his.
Abruptly he pushed me away, sauntering a step back.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he spat. “Isn’t that what you’ve wanted all along – just interested
in having fun, fooling around, not thinking? Well there you go. Now run along, Olivia. Run away.”
He turned his back on me, returning to stare at the ocean. My lips hurt. My ears were ringing.
This wasn’t happening.
But I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“Elliot –”
“Go screw yourself.”
I don’t have anywhere else to go.
But I certainly couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t stand here another minute in these aching shoes
feeling the heat rolling off him. So I kicked off the shoes and did as he told me – I ran away. I didn’t see
him watching my retreat – and I didn’t see the silhouette on the roof, watching him.
I was too afraid to run along the roads, so I ran down the lawn, to the trailhead of a cliff-walk I
knew well. The path was only two feet wide, crumbling into the cliffs in places, but my eyes adjusted to
the moonlight and I stumbled along bare-footed. The waves crashed a dozen feet below, spitting
pebbles. Part of me knew it was freezing, but I was pumped with enough adrenaline that I didn’t feel it,
just as I didn’t feel the sharp rocks under my feet.
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I was angling towards home. I would find the other pill that had fallen underneath my dresser
and I would take it. Maybe taking another pill would reverse what I had done. Anything to get out of
this nightmare. Anything to go home.
I tore of bracelets and earrings and chucked them at the waves. I yanked the black jacket from
my shoulders and dropped it in a bush. I stripped myself of Linos’s possessions as if they were talismans
he could use to call me to his side. I didn’t realize I was crying.
The path ended with a grass trail back to the road, which I followed. Then it wasn’t far to my
house – or, at least, it wasn’t far when I was on my long-board. I ran.
When I reached the house the lights were off. No car in the driveway. I jogged to the front door
and jostled the knob before I remembered my magic. The door opened underneath my hand.
I didn’t have time to waste on fear. I charged up the stairs and tore into my room, scrabbling
over the floorboards, stripping my bed, moving the dresser. Nothing.
And then my stomach sank. What if Linos had found it first?
I stumbled back downstairs, strode to the full length mirror in my mother’s bedroom, and
jammed my fingers underneath the frame. The mirror groaned with friction as I pried it from the wall.
The moonlight’s reach fell short of the hidden room. I needed a light. I grabbed the lamp from
my mother’s bedside table, willed it to light, and advanced into the secret compartment.
The glow from the porcelain lamp spread beyond the brass bedstead and the worn butterfly
chair to a chipped dresser I had used as a child. I set down the light and opened the top drawer.
It was filled with pilfered clothes. My sparkly fish socks from third grade. My grandmother’s
hand-me-down wool cardigan. My Beauty and the Beast underpants from kindergarten. I ferreted
through the clothes like a rat.
The door slammed behind me.
I whirled around, grabbing the lamp in my left hand.
Linos stood back to the closed mirror. He was still immaculate from the party.
“Looking for this?” he asked. Between two fingers he pinched the small red pill.
My throat was sucked shut. I couldn’t speak. Linos advanced a step.
I lunged at him, crashing the porcelain lamp against his head. Shards clattered and the room
was plunged into darkness. I ran for the direction of the mirror but my ankle was yanked from beneath
me and I fell, smashing my cheekbone against the floor. He pulled me along the floor, hoisting me
towards him like a flag.
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“NO!” I managed to shout and I flailed with my other leg, connected with flesh. Something else
shattered.
A candelabrum ignited on my left, illuminating the path to the doorway. I scrambled to my feet
only to have Linos grab me by the waist and hurl me onto the brass bed. I wheezed, instantly winded.
Then I realized – I hadn’t lit any candles.
Linos could do magic.
“Who are you?” I rasped as Linos squirmed on top of me, trying to still my legs and gather my
hands over my head. My dress was rucked up around my thighs.
“Haven’t you ever wondered who you’re talking to when you’re talking to yourself?” he hissed.
“Well I’m the one holding the other end of the telephone.”
The Asphodel blooms, hinting at memory. Elliot’s warning: your troubles followed you here.
Linos’s eyes – my eyes.
I hadn’t had a panic attack since I got here because my anxiety wasn’t in my head anymore.
It was a person.
The paranoia, the bicycle helmet in the car, the attacks…
It was a crazy idea, but then again I was crazy.
I imagined hitting Linos with the force of a car. He smacked against the far wall, limbs splayed,
but was back on top of me in a blink, roaring. He grabbed my head and hurled it against the bedpost. I
fell back, skull rattling.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he panted.
Through my blurry vision I could see that something was wrong with Linos. His face was
rippling, boiling, and he moaned with pain or ecstasy. His cheek stretched and something white writhed
underneath.
One of my hands snapped free and I slashed at his face with my nails. But instead of blood,
white petals erupted from the wound.
Asphodel.
It was growing beneath his skin.
He yanked the black hood over my screaming face.
Was that a car in the driveway?
Linos wove my hands around the bedstead and cuffed them in place. I kicked again, trying to
throw Linos off, but he clasped my ankle in an iron grip and twisted.
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My shriek was pierced by an explosion of shattering glass.
The weight of Linos’s body flew from mine and the pressure of the cuffs vanished. I ripped the
hood from my face and Elliot was there, silhouetted within the smashed mirror, white knuckles wrapped
around a thrashing baseball bat.
The bat connected with Linos’s face and blooms ruptured the opposite cheek. Linos rebounded
with a snarl full of fangs. Before I could process the transformation Elliot threw up his hand and the
drawers of the dresser flew from their hinges, launching at Linos.
Elliot could do magic, too.
Then there was an “YAARGH!” and Molly Ockett leapt into the room, two gargantuan pistols
blazing, a frying pan and cutlass across her back.
“Come on, run!” Elliot yelled, yanking me from the bed. Elliot’s hand was in mine and we were
hurdling over the shattered mirror, running through my mother’s room, and out the front door.
Marie Antoinette was sitting in the driver’s seat of Elliot’s convertible. Elliot vaulted into the
backseat, pulling me after him.
“Allons-y,” Marie chirped, and drew a pair of goggles over her eyes.
She threw the car into reverse, spitting gravel and smoking the tires, then pulled the emergency
break at the end of the drive to skid into a 270. We were going sixty within seconds.
I realized Elliot was pressing my shoulders down in the seat, protectively curled over my head as
if expecting an explosion.
“Elliot,” I prompted, and he released me, recoiling to his side of the car.
“Not Elliot,” he said. “Lewis – Lewis Epps.”
We were hurtling past Long Sands beach, starlight smudging over surf. I felt my stomach drop.
“Lewis? Lewis Epps?” I shouted. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that a week ago?”
“Why the hell did you open your mother’s mail, Olivia Bellman?” he yelled back.
I whipped the windblown hair from my eyes, confused. Then –
“She changed her name,” I said. “Four years ago she changed back to her maiden name – and
we have the same first name. But how do you –”
“She worked as a copyright lawyer for my father. I couldn’t go to the police; she was the only
legal – but why did you take the pills!” he interjected. “Are you fucking crazy? They could’ve been
anything!”
“You said, take these pills,” I pointed out.
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“Yeah, as in ‘take into your possession as evidence,’” he said, throwing up his hands.
“Then why didn’t you just write that?”
“It was a suicide note, not a –”
“What?” I cried. He swiped a hand across his chin nervously, glanced at the back of Marie
Antoinette’s head.
Then our eyes locked again. “Listen,” he continued, “we don’t have time for this. You’re getting
sick, Livy, really sick. You can’t stay here too long or you get sick. You need to go back.” He took my
hand and shoved something between my fingers – a little blue pill.
“But what about you?” I asked. “You’ve been gone for weeks! Elliot – I mean Lewis –”
“Forget about me, Olivia.” He glared one-eyed behind a curtain of windswept hair. “Just forget
this ever happened.”
“No!” I said. “I’m only taking this if you take it.”
“We don’t have time for this!” he groaned, folding into the seat.
“Fuck it!” I said and pressed the pill into his chest, underneath his chin. “I don’t want it either.”
His cold hand reached up to wrap around my own. His cheek was pale in the moonlight and I
was inches from his cheek. He stared at his feet, barely breathing. I remembered his lips crashing
against mine.
“Fine,” he said at last. “I’ll take one, too.”
“You’ll take it first,” I said.
Then he was looking at me again, face desperate. “Just promise me, Livy, promise me no matter
what happens you won’t tell anyone about me. No matter what. Please.”
“I promise,” I said, and he let go of my hand. In a flash he pulled another pill from his breast
pocket, chucked it at the back of his throat, and closed his eyes. I popped my own pill, never looking
away from Elliot. His head lolled on the back of the seat, pitching and bouncing as Marie swerved
through York side streets. Suddenly afraid I grabbed his hand. His fingers curled around mine.
“No matter what,” he whispered. His hair was sheer as spider silk and I could see the starlight
through his eyes. The car doors unfurled and I laid my head on a velvet rest. Elliot’s face blurred into a
pale moon. I closed my tingly eyes.
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POSTSCRIPT
A million screaming nerves. Ringing ears. The rich-sour smell of compost.
I found my limbs one at a time, twitching and numb, and dragged them into a tight ball. The
wind rushed over my body like fire and rattled the world around me. It sounded like I was in a forest.
I opened my eyes.
Elliot’s face was inches from mine, slack, eyes closed.
No – his name was Lewis.
“Lewis,” I tried. My voice was a whisper of sandpaper on grass. “Lewis,” I tried again, loud
enough for him to hear.
He didn’t move.
One of my hands was still entwined with his. I squeezed his fingers but still he didn’t wake. His
hand fell limp from my own.
“Lewis,” I pronounced, pushing his shoulder with my hand. “Lewis!”
Now I was sitting up.
We were in a cornfield and Lewis was on his back, lifeless. White arms poked from the sleeves
of his shirt like sticks. His jeans were slung low on his hips, revealing jagged hipbones. In the span of
minutes Lewis had withered into a starvation victim.
My fingers fluttered against his neck, trying to find a pulse, then I pressed my ear to his chest,
listening.
There! A stutter of beats like a drunk man walking.
Promise be damned – Elliot was dying.
I struggled to stand, numb knees and clumsy feet crumpling. I tried again, bracing my palms in
the soil. I was walking.
Then I was running.
The cold air brined my lungs. My stomach muscles cringed. Each footfall clattered against my
bones. I was deadened, pained, and weak.
My blurred vision registered only they grey cornstalks and twinkling black sky. I didn’t see the
headlights until they blinded me.
A scream of tires, a flash of red metal, a crack, then black.
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PART II
72
CHAPTER 1
The harder you fall, the higher you bounce.
- Chinese Proverb
Three Months Ago.
My father never clarified if I was named after C. S. Lewis or Lewis Carroll. Kind of makes a
difference, don’t you think? Is my life a religious allegory or an example of the literary nonsense genre?
Do I travel through a wardrobe or fall into a rabbit hole? Oedipus complex or pedophilia?
You’d think as a psychology professor my father would’ve thought these things through before
inscribing my birth certificate. Maybe my dead mother picked the name.
Days like these I’d be thankful for the philosophical mandate of a namesake. I’ve been feeling
pretty normal for a few weeks, which in its own way scares the shit out of me. I’m just waiting to fall off
the tightrope.
And now Patrick Freaking Dolan.
So I work – worked – at “Pang’s Chinese Buffet” as the delivery boy. I’m pretty sure the correct
translation is “Fat’s Chinese Buffet,” a theory reinforced by the t-shirt they made me wear. A roly-poly
Chinese guy pirouetting. Barely improved by my leather jacket.
It was Thursday night – Thirsty Thursday to all the fratholes in town – so I was busy. I answered
a call from Dolan’s house around six-thirty. You could tell his mom put a lot of work into the landscaping
– there were daffodils all along the foundation and the rhododendrons had been cut back for spring.
Mom wasn’t home. It was Patrick Fucking Dolan that answered the door. He was wearing a
shirt for the high school football team and low-slung gray sweatpants threatening to expose his junk at
any moment.
“Pang’s Chinese Buffet?” I sighed, holding up the stapled brown bag.
“Dude. Dude? Lewis Epps?” Then he guffawed. “Jesus, guys, it’s Lewis Fucking Epps!”
“What, the delivery boy?” someone asked from the living room. There was a game on. If it was
the Red Sox they’d be too engrossed to give me shit. No such luck.
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“Dude, he’s a shifty motherfucker. Better check the order,” someone else yelled. I had blotted
the names of everyone I knew in high school from my memory.
Dolan grabbed the doggy bag and walked into the living room. I hesitated and then slouched in
after him. They hadn’t paid.
Dolan broke the staple and started unloading dishes.
“Shrimp Lo Mein, General Tso Chicken, Kung Pao Beef, Egg Rolls, Moo Shu Pork, Sweet and Sour
Chicken, Salt and Pepper Squid…”
Jesus Christ, were these guys carnivores?
“Dude, the order’s wrong,” Dolan finally said. Snickers.
I picked the receipt off the coffee table and started comparing. I try not to be an asshole.
Sometimes.
Yige Zhang, the owner, understands English great even if he’s not the best speaker. He had
spelled the Dolan’s name right, and the address, and there wasn’t a fortune cookie missing from that
bag.
“You must have counted wrong, man,” I said. “That’ll be $45.60.” Plus a tip. Please tip me.
Dolan put on a look of mock consideration. “I’ll cut you a deal, Lewis. You cut that price in half
and we won’t call your boss.”
“For what?” I scoffed. “We got your order right.”
“Yeah, well you tried to sell me pot just now. Pretty sure that’ll get you fired. See what I
mean?”
Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the donkey. Just because of a certain incident in sixth grade with some
of my father’s prescription samples.
“You know what, let me check one more time,” I said, all mock civility. I flicked the top off the
Kung Pao Beef.
“One Kung Pao Beef,” I said, and then I hurled the plastic container at Dolan’s face.
And this is why I always wear my Chucks – because any moment I might have to flee the scene
of some cock-out asinine performance.
I soared out the front door and pounded across the lawn to Dolan’s screams. Nobody adds
Szechuan peppercorns and red chilies to Kung Pao Beef like Yige Zhang. I heard yelling and two jocks
collide in the front door but I was already revving the engine. I squealed the hell out of Dodge, Verdi’s
Messa da Reqiuem blasting trumpets and timpani:
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Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeclum in favilla!
Day of wrath and doom impending,
Heaven and earth in ashes ending!
I reached a cul-de-sac and decided fate was primed for another drive-by. I cranked the window
down and flew the bird past Dolan’s house.
“MOTHERFUCKERS!” I yelled, slowing.
And then one of Dolan’s friends smashed my windshield with a baseball bat.
So ended my two-week career as Fat’s delivery boy.
I drove home on residential back roads, which is fairly easy to do in a college town. The
windshield was made of shatterproof glass but it was still difficult to see around the spider web of
cracks.
My father would be at the university until ten. He probably wouldn’t even notice the windshield
was broken. I shed the leather jacket and stripped off the restaurant T-shirt. I turned on
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and lay bare-chested on the cold wooden living room floor
because I’m a melodramatic idiot. My choice of music was ironic because Rachmaninoff dedicated his
second concerto to the psychologist that saved him from clinical depression. To quote Søren
Kierkegaard, “since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I
am ironic – if it is pulled out I shall die.”
I didn’t have enough money for a new windshield.
Life as a high school dropout is excruciatingly boring when you don’t have a car. Which is why I
found myself standing in front of my mother’s jewelry box weighing a string of pearls in my hand. I both
exalted and mourned my humanity, my mother, when I returned the necklace to the box. Part of me
was still pure.
I pissed a few days away sleeping, eating cereal, and reading Russians. My dad was under the
impression I was still working for Pang’s, so I made sure he caught sight of me in clothes now and then.
When I felt myself tipping on the high wire I decided I had to leave the house. I threw on one of my
75
dad’s tweed blazers – he hated it when I borrowed his clothes – and walked to the Durham Market
Place.
The DUMP, as we townies call it, is a grocery store for hippies, complete with overpriced yogurtcovered raisins and an aisle of beer for the coeds. I probably should’ve gone to the dollar store instead.
I was standing in front of a cooler full of ice cream mourning my childhood when I heard it –
“Lewis?”
Quiet, feminine, sharp.
I turned. There she was, leaning on a grocery cart full of vegetables and flower-scented
shampoo and a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips, smiling her full-lipped grin and running a
hand through her thick black curls.
She looked exactly the same.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, “you’re… shaving.” And then she laughed.
I was paralyzed.
The smile was replaced with a grimace and she leaned further over the cart. “I’m sorry – do you
even remember me?”
And because there’s no filter between my brain and my mouth I said, “How could I fucking
forget, Fofi?”
She offered to buy me a sandwich at the bagel shop next door so I milked her for two sausage,
egg, and cheese bagels. I hadn’t eaten a full meal in days. I focused on my plate and kept my mouth
packed. I wanted time to come up with something perfectly horrible to say to her.
“So how old are you?” she asked.
I glared from underneath my eyebrows and answered around a mouth of egg, “Eighteen.” I was
gratified to see she had sprouted some gray hairs – not exactly the same after all.
“Graduating this spring?”
“No,” I said. No elaboration. Then I realized she could probably guess exactly why I wasn’t
graduating. I fumed at my plate and took another huge bite.
“Did your dad ever straighten your meds out?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“When are you taking the GED?” Not a question, not an ‘I’m sorry,’ just all business and
optimism and so Fofi.
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“I’m not,” I said.
Then she quirked a smile. “Writing the next great American novel? You still journaling?”
“No.” It was my first out-and-out lie, but I didn’t want her to think I remembered the journal
she gave me almost ten years ago. I had burned it, anyway. Then, as I wrapped my mouth around the
last of the first sandwich, I thought of exactly what I wanted to say to her. I looked in her pretty brown
eyes.
“But I’m still reading,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? What’s the latest?” she asked, brightening.
“Shakespeare, Sonnet 142.” And then I recited in a monotone:
“Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate,
“Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving,
“O, but with mine, compare thou thine own state,
“And thou shalt find it merits not reproving,
“Or if it do, not from those lips of thine
“That have profaned their scarlet ornaments
“And sealed false bonds of love as oft as mine,
“Robbed others’ beds’ revenues of their rents.
“Be it lawful I love thee as thou lov’st those
“Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee.
“Root pity in they heart, that when it grows
“Thy pity may deserve to pitied be.
“If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,
“By self-example mayst thou be denied!”
Then I tossed my dirty napkin on the table and slouched out of the joint.
I didn’t count on her chasing after me like we were in a Lifetime movie.
“Lewis! What the hell was that?” she yelled. Her use of the word “hell” tripped me – in the two
years she had baked cookies and helped with my homework and introduced me to television she never
once swore. I turned.
“You left. Deal with it.” I shrugged.
She marched forward, one hand on red-sweatered hip, the other pointing at me.
77
“Don’t you talk to me like that, Lewis Jean Epps.” Her hair crackled in the March wind. “I don’t
know what your father told you, but he kissed me. He kissed me, and then he went behind my back and
terminated our thesis agreement because he was ‘so freaking ethical.’ Do you have any idea what that
kind of thing does to a woman’s credibility? It’s a miracle I even graduated!”
I didn’t have an answer to her fury. I remembered back to the last day I saw Fofi, Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving, just like families do. And when I saw them kissing on the couch that night, I thought that
might be what we were. When she didn’t come back I asked my father why. He said she was too busy
with schoolwork. When I gave him a letter to give her, I never heard back. I always presumed that once
she got into my father’s pants she didn’t have any more use for me.
Her description of my father’s behavior was too easy to believe. It sounded exactly like him –
bumbling, well-meaning, self-absorbed.
“Listen, Lewis,” she continued, “I scored two tickets to the Boston Symphony for this Friday.
They’re playing Prokofiev’s Suite Number Three from Romeo and Juliet. You’re the perfect person to
take the ticket. If you’re still into that type of music.” An accusation. “I’m taking the train down – I’ll be
on the platform at 4:30.”
It was so convenient – almost too perfect to be coincidental.
She turned and walked back into the bagel shop.
The Downeaster depot was walking distance from my house, though just barely. I lingered at
home, my love for Prokofiev battling with my enduring disdain for Fofi. The cacophony swelled and the
strains of Prokofiev resounded triumphant, propelling me to my room where I ransacked my closet. A
button-down, my father’s tie, and my leather jacket. I flew from the house.
I cut across the university athletic fields to arrive just as the sun fell below the treetops. The
picnic tables were empty and through the windows of the converted antique train depot I could see
restaurant workers flipping chairs onto tables and washing the floors. I jogged past the ticket window
and under the depot awning to look the length of the tracks.
And there she was, hands stuffed into the pockets of a gray trench coat that swallowed her
petite frame. I slowed to a stroll and waited for her to look my way. She had to squint into the sunset.
“I thought you might chicken out,” she said, grinning.
I shrugged.
78
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, Lewis. I know you’re just here for the Russian.” Prokofiev,
that is.
I brought Anthem by Ayn Rand to read on the train ride. Fofi pulled out a book of crosswords.
When we arrived in Boston she told me she was going to eat at Cafe Jaffa. I refused to order on her tab
but finished her mixed kabob plate when she announced she was full. During the concert I took off my
jacket and loosened my tie. I was a total puddleface during the “Death of Juliet” and Fofi didn’t say
anything. She didn’t interrupt my thoughts as we waited in the quiet station for the eleven o’clock train.
When we took our seats in the empty car I kept my book closed.
The train gathered speed, pressing me into the blue upholstery. The hum of the engine brought
attention to the silence. I heard Fofi unwrapping a plastic snack and I smelled peanut butter.
“You want one?” she asked. I looked at her offered peanut butter cracker. Some things really
didn’t change.
“Why not,” I said.
Fifteen minutes later I had one leg thrown over the armrest, sprawled across the aisle from Fofi.
“Did you ever win that cookie contest?” I asked. Almost every day, it seemed, when she came
to hang out Fofi baked a batch of cookies. She always told me she was going to discover the winning
recipe one day and would enter a national cookie contest.
“Nah,” she answered, “there was no one to eat them anymore. Besides, I was only doing it so I
could win you guys a new oven.”
“What?”
She rolled her eyes. “Did you guys even realize how crappy your oven was? It ran twenty
degrees hot and reeked of gasoline. I was always afraid I was going to light the house on fire.”
We totally still had the same oven. “Why didn’t you just tell my dad to buy a new one?” I asked.
She laughed. “Because then he might learn how to use it, and what good would I be?”
I had a flashback to fifth grade, sitting on the couch with an entire bag of sour cream and onion
potato chips. Fofi had her feet tucked underneath her knees and a pile of DVDs in her lap.
“Alright, Lewis,” she said, “Time for an education. ‘Ten Things I Hate About You’ or ‘Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off’?” She poked me when I didn’t answer. “Come on, only two days ‘til Middle School –
this is what the normal kids do!”
“So, no more high school,” she said. Back to the present.
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I shrugged. “I hadn’t passed enough classes to graduate with everyone else.”
“What’s next?”
“My Dad wants me to take the GED and then plans on bribing the administration into giving me
a spot at the university. He claims I’m just too gifted for public school.”
“The bipolar got in the way of your classes,” she guessed.
I smirked. “One time I skipped three days to write an epic poem about the White Rose under
Nazi Germany. In iambic pentameter.”
“How many lines?”
“Three thousand four hundred and sixty-two.”
She threw her head back and cackled. “So long as you haven’t gone to Vegas.”
“There may have been an incident with the Fibonacci sequence and the New Hampshire Lottery,
but my car could never make it all the way to Nevada,” I deadpanned.
And then there was the letter campaign to bring back the TV show “Firefly,” the series of calls to
1-900 phone sex operators, attacking my dad with a stapler, the forty-eight hours of practicing
Rachmaninoff’s impossible piano concerto, and then slicing the strings of my mother’s antique Steinway.
…Inevitably followed by the days of sleep and eating nothing but a few granola bars, staring at
the wall and listening to the sound of my ears ringing.
“Pride comes before the fall,” I mumbled.
Her face transformed, serious, squinting at me. “You know you could see someone else, Lewis.
It’s not ethical for your father to treat you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m on something now that almost works. So what’s your job?” Changing subjects
smooth as Danny Ocean.
She didn’t look at me when she answered, “I’m working on a government contract.”
I snorted. “What – mind control for DARPA?”
She didn’t answer me. My heart accelerated. “Wait – what – you’re working on mind control?”
“No,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m doing something with the CIA. But, uh, I can’t talk about
it.”
I just looked at her.
She pursed her lips and sent me a sly look. “But I can tell you that the guys I work with are
complete dickheads.”
I didn’t laugh. Instead I folded back into my seat and retrieved Anthem out of my back pocket.
80
“I wish I could tell you,” she said. I didn’t look up from my reading. “Lewis, listen, I really wish I
could tell you.” And I realized she was holding out a folded note like she was thirteen. I gave her one
disdainful look and then snatched up the note, unfolding it on my book.
Unit 302 – 68 State Street – Portsmouth
Monday, 2:00 p.m.
Everyone wants to be a secret agent. By claiming to be an agent from Britain’s MI5, Robert
Hendy-Freegard persuaded several people to pass over their life savings and go into hiding. Fofi didn’t
even have to open her mouth to persuade me to meet her.
So I found myself disembarking at Market Square in Portsmouth on a sunny Monday in March.
The clock of the historic North Congregational Church tolled one. As the bus pulled away from the curb I
once again cursed Patrick Dolan, this time for making me early. I’d have to kill some time rubbing
shoulders with cashmere-coated businessmen and saggy-hat hipsters in the local coffee shop lest I
appear too eager.
State Street was just around the corner from Prescott Park and Strawberry Banke, a
neighborhood of antique houses and gardens regularly invaded by historical reenactors. I didn’t think
Fofi had a passion for history but guessed she was attracted to the status associated with Portsmouth’s
historic waterfront – she was always attracted to money. 68 was a four-story brick building with white
dormer windows constructed to suggest historical legitimacy. I stood outside the front door reading the
names on the placard, recently imbibed caffeine jingling the coins in my pocket.
302 – Stanley Milgram, Ph.D.
I backed up to double-check the gold-plated number on the side of the building. No mistake. I
popped the collar on my jacket against the wind and decided to test the buzzer.
There was no mistaking the voice that crackled out of the speaker.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” I said.
The door buzzed.
“Come on up.”
I jogged through the crown-molded lobby to the gleaming wooden staircase, overly conscious of
my delinquent appearance. Fofi was hanging on the open door when I turned into her hallway.
“Hurry up,” she whined, swinging back and forth, “I’m going gray, here.”
81
I slowed my jog to a walk and sidled past her into the apartment.
“You know you act more like a ten year-old girl than a thirty year-old Ph.D.,” I said.
She pushed past me in the entryway. “What do you think of the digs?” she asked.
The hallway opened up into an open floor plan with granite-countered kitchen, built-in
bookcases, and brown leather couches. Fofi was already turning the corner, breezing past an antique
mahogany dining table and silk-cushioned Louis XVI-style chairs. The room smelled like wine and the
expensive version of Old Spice. Fofi pulled open a pair of glass French doors, revealing a burgundy
office.
“And where is Dr. Milgram?” I asked, glancing at a framed diploma on the wall.
“Oh, right,” she said. “I was inspired by Ken Bianchi.”
“The hillside strangler?”
“Yeah. That guy,” she huffed. She was pushing one of the leather chairs away from the office
desk towards the bookcases. I stood in the doorway, watching. “You know, pose as a psychologist, rent
some office space. So when Dr. Milgram posted an ad looking for a part-time therapist to use his home
office for a little extra retirement income… Here, help me move the desk.”
I moved to grab the opposite end of the elegant black table. She pulled towards the far wall and
I followed.
“But you are a psychologist,” I pointed out.
She grinned and backhanded her curls off her forehead. “That’s what makes the plan so
perfect! As far as Dr. Milgram knows, it’s just a little under-the-table cash between colleagues.”
“But you called me here,” I said, concerned this was morphing into a strange form of
psychological intervention.
“Yeah,” she said, shrugging. “I wanted to talk to you without the risk of any government ears
overhearing.”
I just stared at her. “You’re afraid your house is bugged?”
“I’m a top-secret employee – who knows!” she said, throwing up her hands. Then she folded to
the floor, kicked off her shoes, and tucked her feet beneath her knees. Her smile disappeared, replaced
with a signature Fofi stare. “So, Elliot, do you want to hear about my job or not?”
I leaned against the open doorway and folded my arms. “What’s with the furniture?” I asked
and nodded toward the cleared floor space.
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“Just trust me,” she said. She rested her fists on her knees. “Let me tell you a story, Lewis.
Imagine you could see the thoughts of everyone in this city – see their memory of a building before it
was renovated, see the face of the girlfriend they’re missing, even see their fear like a shadow. Imagine
the thoughts of everyone in this city as perceptible as the architecture of this room, a palace of
memories.”
She uncurled her right hand, revealing a translucent red square the size of a breath mint.
“Our shared memories have constructed a palace, Lewis, and I’ve been working on a ticket
through the front door.”
Silence.
Then I laughed. “Now what – are you going to light some candles and lead a meditation
exercise?”
She smirked. “This isn’t pseudoscience, Lewis. It’s a derivate of lysergic acid diethylamide.”
She was offering me a hallucinogenic drug.
“What’s the matter Lewis – chicken? It’ll only last an hour. Dr. Milgram won’t be back for
another three.”
What the hell, it wouldn’t be my first time.
I strode across the room, picked the red tab from her palm and stuck it on my tongue. It tasted
like cherry chapstick. Then I hunkered down on the carpet, knees up and head on the ground. I laced
my fingers behind my head.
“Don’t let me near the kitchen,” I said. “I’ve been known to attempt baking.”
“Just one thing,” she said, “don’t look in the mirror.”
“Why?” I asked, crunching to see her face.
“Just – don’t.”
I leaned back down and closed my eyes. I watched the squiggles on my eyelids, waiting for the
inevitable rainbows, hating that I degenerated so easily.
An hour later my cheek was pressed to the carpet and I was panting.
“Woah,” I gasped.
83
POSTSCRIPT
Eight hours later at eleven p.m. Fofi lounged on a blue synthetic bedspread in Walter’s discarded
button down. The man himself lay bare-chested against the headboard, smoking.
“What a metonym,” Fofi murmured.
He cocked an eyebrow at her even though he couldn’t see her properly without his glasses.
“You know,” she said, “when one word or object represents or suggests a whole subject. The
naked man smoking a cigarette – it suggests sex.”
He harrumphed. “I thought you were referring to the language disturbance associated with
schizophrenia.”
“I love it when you go all professor on me, sir,” she said, running a hand through the gray hair on
his chest. Her hand snaked up to his throat, then plucked the cigarette from his lips. “And I thought you
quit.”
“I can’t smoke around my wife, Goldberg. I’d appreciate it if I could do so around my mistress.”
“Screw you,” she sighed, “I don’t have time to wash the smoke smell from my hair.” She
reached across to the ashtray on the bedside table and smote the cigarette. His sidearm lay inches
away, still in its holster.
“So, boss,” she began again, “tell me why you’re giving all the lab responsibilities to that newbie
Korean.”
He was prepared for her question. “Dr. Kim is an eminent neurologist. We’re lucky to have him
working on the Project.”
“Why are you cutting my responsibilities?” she asked again. “There’s always more tests I could
do.”
“Jesus Christ, Goldberg, I’m not working with a bottomless budget, here. Though I guess we
could always train you as a field agent,” he smirked.
She flounced out of the bed and went into the motel bathroom.
Field agent, indeed. He knew she’d never take one of those pills – she’d slit her own throat
before she swallowed an LSD derivative. She knew too well that LSD had a way of triggering psychosis in
individuals already at risk for schizophrenia.
Walter had said that just to make her drop the subject. Kim was good, but Fofi had been with
the Project from the beginning. Walter must have had a good reason for marginalizing her role in the
experiments.
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She tugged her hair up into a ponytail and closed her eyes, replaying the dream from two weeks
ago.
She was sitting on the piano bench in her childhood home, leaning on her father’s arm as he
played Erik Satie, head rising and falling with his arm as he traversed the keys. It was a familiar memory.
The front door suddenly opened. Fofi turned to see none other than Agent Peter Simon, Walter’s
protégé spook and Fofi’s primary guinea pig, ogling the scene like a tourist.
Fofi wasn’t an idiot. By some standards she was even a genius. Walter’s equivocation regarding
her decreased lab duties merely confirmed her previous suspicions.
Fofi’s role in the lab was being marginalized because she was no longer the experimenter – she
was the experimentee.
“Just try and make me go crazy,” she whispered. “Play around in my head… Just see what
happens.”
85
CHAPTER 2
The subject adopts a mirror position, enabling him to guess the behavior of his adversary
– Jacques Lacan
“So what’s with the mirrors?” I asked. “Do I lose my reflection like a vampire?”
We both shoved Dr. Milgram’s desk flush with the wall. Fofi backhanded the hair from her face,
a familiar gesture. She was wearing an old college sweatshirt, sleeves rolled up.
“Well, when you’re wandering around the unconscious mirrors don’t just reflect what you are,
but who. All your problems, clear as a little self-reflection in a therapy session. Of course, once you see
them and recognize them they become tangible.”
She picked her purse off of the desk and pawed through the contents.
“Tangible…” I began. “Like touchable?”
“This one guy I work with released a Bengal tiger when he looked at his reflection,” she said.
She gave up digging and poured the purse innards onto the desktop. Burgundy lipstick, latex gloves,
lighter, screwdriver…
“That’s kind of badass,” I noted. “And Freudian.”
“Lacanian, actually,” she countered. “Lacan is the psychoanalyst that wrote about the Mirror
Stage in psychological development. Of course, he never considered it literally.”
She snatched up a plastic bottle of pills from the pile and gave it a rattle. I shoved my hands in
my denim pockets.
“Your first unrestricted, deinterlaced dose – the red pill,” she said. She popped off the bottle
top and shook the contents into her hand – one red pill, one blue. “This red is a one way ticket vacation
instead of a siesta. And you’ll need the blue one,” she pinched the blue pill in her other hand, “to get
back.”
I examined her neutral face.
“What am I doing here, Fofi?”
It had been a week since my first trip. She had refused to talk about what happened after I
woke up. She said Dr. Milgram was going to return any minute, and then insisted it wasn’t safe to talk
over the phone. All I had to go on was this meeting – and believe me, the anticipation had been killing
me.
She sighed and dropped the hand holding the pill. “I need your help, Lewis,” she said.
86
I raised my eyebrows.
She crossed her arms, looking defensive.
“What they’re doing is wrong, Lewis,” she said. “And I don’t know how to stop it, yet, but I
thought if I could bring you into this, I’d at least have some sort of… back up.”
And I was time traveling – back to another day when Fofi was wearing an oversized college
sweatshirt with the tatty cuffs rolled up, hair piled on top of her head, making popcorn and hotdogs for
dinner. She had her laptop open on the kitchen counter, showing me how to download illegal CD rips.
“It’s you and me against the world, kid,” she had said.
Now Fofi was asking for my help.
“What are they doing that’s so messed up?” I asked.
She pursed her lips and then huffed, “I can’t tell you.”
I threw up my hands. “Really? You’re sticking with that line?”
“Think of it as plausible deniability,” she coaxed. “Besides, you have a good imagination, I’m
sure you can come up with possibilities. Trust me, whatever you come up with, the truth isn’t that far
off.”
I considered. There were always the tropes of mind control and brainwashing – PsyOps had
been trying that for decades.
“I’ll tell you if things come to a head,” Fofi offered.
“But you don’t have a plan?” I scoffed. It was still hard to completely trust her.
“I’m working on it,” she snapped. “Besides, you’re hardly a brain-ninja. You have a lot of
catching up to do.”
A challenge, then. I smirked and held out my hand for the pills. She grinned, delighted, and
dropped them both onto my palm.
“How can I take the blue pill with me?” I thought to ask.
“Same way you take your clothes with you. Anything tied up with your neural network’s
concept of self comes along for the ride. So just stick the pill in your pocket.”
“So what’s going to happen when I look in the mirror?” I asked, referring back to our earlier
conversation.
She shrugged. “Nothing the blue can’t get you out of. Oh – and remember to watch out for my
colleagues, though they should stay close to Loring, up north. Avoid men in suits and Bible salesmen.”
Since that made sense.
87
Being a good juvenile delinquent I had a priority for this trip to what Fofi called “the palace of
memories”: visiting a bar.
I was slouched in a paisley-upholstered narrow booth at Captain Coward’s Saloon, back to the
mirror behind the bar. Exposed brick walls, chipped white tabletops, and dollar bills jammed between
antique beams – an untraditional fundraising tradition – belied the cheeky Seafood fra Diavolo.
It was too early for the dinner crowd. A crone in a pointed hat sucked on a scotch while a
redhead in a silk wedding dress giggled in the lap of a pirate. A hood-eyed Frenchman knelt to examine
the bride’s skirts, insisting, “Mais oui, Madame Mary, the fabric is parfait for an aeronautic balloon!”
I had changed into a pinstripe suit without a mirror, but I wanted a look at my head before I
tried to imagine a fedora. I fingered the pewter spoon, tempted. The reflection would be murky and
upside-down, right? I picked up the spoon and scrutinized my visage like a girl, fingering my bangs and
rubbing my chin.
Something flickered in the corner of the spoon. My eyes flitted to the ladybug-sized reflection.
The bride at the bar screamed before my brain assembled the silhouette of the creature
perched in the corner of the ceiling.
It pounced onto the table and my neck detonated with pain. I loped from the booth, wheezing,
and yanked a fork from my throat.
“Aaah,” I gasped. Arterial spray splattered the tabletop.
I managed to fumble the blue pill from my pocket and shove it between numb lips. Propped
against the far wall, blood sweating over my fingertips, I gawped at the gremlin crouched before me.
“What are you?” I croaked. “A pigmy teenage girl?”
“Tristabel,” she chirped, pulling up a saggy striped knee sock.
Fofi would never let me live this down.
And then I was on my back in Dr. Milgram’s office, choking myself with one hand. When I dared
glance at my fingers I saw they were dry and white.
Fofi handed me a glass of water.
“Don’t chug,” she warned. I pounded the water like beer.
“They can’t kill you, can they?” I finally gasped.
“Just torture you, unfortunately.”
“Unfortunately,” I deadpanned. “Right.”
88
Of course I was going back.
I could relive the potent abandon of dreams – and even nightmares – as the Sandman, the
magician, the ringmaster. I was the general in the army of ingénues, poets, and opium addicts. If the
playwright’s pen was a wand, could I run my fingers through Ophelia’s sodden and flower-wound hair?
If metaphor was reality, could I pour the antidote of illumination into a thousand ears and minds?
If I couldn’t die, I was already a ghost, ready to terrify.
Fofi gave me another set of pills to try at home during the week. I waited for Thursday, the day
my father taught in the evening. I took the pill in my room lest I reappear on the kitchen floor while my
father cooked an early dinner. I was fairly certain I had the house to myself until ten, but my father had
been known to dash home between classes. Plus I didn’t want to get stabbed with any more kitchen
utensils.
I was going in on the offensive. Slung in my pocket next to the blue pill was my grandfather’s
antique razor, Sweeney Todd-style. I lay down and swallowed the pill, waited for circles of dizziness to
abate like the foreshortened swings of a pendulum. Then I opened my eyes and rolled from the bed to
my feet, flipping open the razor.
Tristabel stood in front of the bookshelf, gray eyes glinting, teeth bared in a smile, not five feet
tall and wearing a pear of cropped overalls to match her wispy pageboy.
I didn’t hesitate. I leapt forward slashing, catching the blade on her cheek and one of the overall
straps. She threw up her forearms and I slashed twice more before she fell to the floor.
She wasn’t fighting back. She cowered beneath her forearms, clean gouges rippling like parted
lips with each heavy breath.
“Why?” she gasped.
I was a fucking sociopath.
“You started it!” I spluttered. “You stabbed me in the neck! With a blunt instrument!”
“It was just supposed to be a joke,” she cried, “I just wanted to get your attention.”
I slid my finger along the painted edge of the blade, still high on violence but ailing from the
overdose. I forced myself to close the blade and breathe evenly.
She uncovered her face, then, and wiped away the gash in her cheek like a teartrack.
“You can do magic, too,” I noted.
89
Her eyes lit up. “There’s something I wanted to show you…” She didn’t finish, just looked at me
with a ghostly white face smeared with blood like finger-paint.
“What?” I demanded, confused and still sparkly with adrenaline.
“The library. The library at the school. Please?”
Cast off blood spatters sprinkled the book spines and my heart thundered. The library could
very well be a trap. My stomach turned and I decided I was ready for a fight regardless.
“Show me,” I said, nodding towards the door.
I let her lead the way and trailed behind like a bodyguard or a spy, jumping when a pair of sockhopping coeds leapt out of the bushes. Tristabel leapt off the low stone walls landscaping the lawns of
colonial farmhouses, waltzed down the concrete paths of the campus, played hopscotch on the granite
stairs that wound up the hill toward the University library. In the distance horns honked and girls
shrieked, frat houses prepared for Thirsty Thursday. The hills of the campus tumbled with forsythia and
at their peak stood the library, backlit by a golden sunset and gleaming like a chapel.
“You’ll like it, I promise,” Tristabel chirped, grabbing my hand and pulling me up the last steps to
the bank of glass doors. I pulled my hand from her grasp and stuck it in my pocket, fingering the razor
and still ready for a trap.
Inside the lobby a white staircase traversed three floors, pointing towards the vaulted glass
ceiling. Silence was reflected and magnified, clear as the tolling of a bell. But Tristabel was already
running through the lobby, turning past the circulation desk to the doors of the Hubbard Reading Room.
These she flung open, revealing cathedral ceilings and arching windows. Sunshine dizzy with dust and
thick as honey slanted across the regiment of reading tables. Here silence was replaced with the shh of
turning pages like the breaking of waves. A few students still huddled over books, horn rim glasses
dipping, knuckles cracking.
Tristabel stopped, placed a fist on each hip, and smiled.
“Now what?” I hissed.
“Now we vivify one of your favorite poems,” she whispered back, rubbing her hands together
like a mad scientist.
It took only a moment to grasp her intention.
“’In the Library’ by Charles Simic,” I said, and an ounce of my apprehension dissipated. “He
wrote it here?” I asked, aware of his professorship.
Tristabel shrugged. “Let’s see what happens. Recite!”
90
I glanced up at one of the studying students and then took a few steps back towards the door.
“There’s a book called ‘A Dictionary of Angels,’” I began, barely a murmur.
“Would you use that voice to call up the dead?” Tristabel objected loudly. “This is a séance –
use some confidence!”
I rolled my eyes and didn’t bother to shush her. I glanced once again to the students but their
noses remained pinched between pages.
“There’s a book called ‘A Dictionary of Angels,’” I began again, this time as an orator.
I noticed the difference first in a thickening of the sunlight. The eddies of dust slowed and
coagulated, flowing across the desks in waves, each breaker whispering. Then the sunlight trickled off
the tables, gathering like water around the table legs. As I continued books abandoned on the tables
flew open, releasing geysers of golden dust like ghosts. The room was full of murmurs like a brook.
“The sky at dusk used to be thick with them,” I said. “You had to wave both arms just to keep
them away.”
And the golden pigments gathered into elegant hands and Grecian faces, running footsteps and
laughter. They murmured with bent heads in the corner, they ruffled the pages of the books with their
fingertips, they hung suspended and watched. I felt the hair on my scalp rising with their energy and
when I ran my hand through a passing angel my body snapped like I had touched a Van de Graff
generator.
I didn’t manage to finish the poem.
I tread forward with reverence, shirt blowing against my chest, skin of my face taut with the
electricity. I didn’t notice whether the other students stood, or if they even saw what was happening
around them. Weak-kneed I leaned a hand on one of the tables, then raised my eyes to the rafters
where they walked like travelers on an airport escalator.
Suddenly the temperature plummeted and the room filled with screams. Left and right angels
froze like stone and plummeted to the tables, shattering and cracking into limbs and faces and crooked
wings, salt water splashing like blood and burning my eyes.
“No!” I yelled, holding out my arms to catch them, but their glass skin broke against me and fell
like jagged snow. And I was pummeled, fell to my knees amidst a hail of crushed dolls. My arms were
bleeding and stung in the icy cold. The sun was gone.
Stillness. Rain started rattling the windows.
Then I heard a laugh.
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“Fuck you!” I yelled, whirling. The debris shuddered around me.
Tristabel stood at the doorway, clutching her side and hysterical.
“Your face!” she said. “It was just a joke, L.E.!”
She picked a stray hand from a pile and licked it like a popsicle.
“You’re sick,” I said.
Then her eyes blazed. “I’m sick? I’m sick?” She chucked the hand at my head, splattering my
hair with ice water. She charged through the now-soggy body parts. I plucked the blue pill from my
pocket and swallowed it dry, then raised my hands in mock surrender before I fell back into black. For a
moment my consciousness floated in a sea of gray arms and legs, and then I was back on my bed with a
pounding headache.
I didn’t tell Fofi what happened when I went under. Each time we met she would give me a few
tips, then ask what I had experimented with. It was easy enough to skirt the truth. When Fofi asked
what happened when I went under alone, I told her about reciting the poem in the library.
“Ah, so you’ve discovered the power of literature,” Fofi smiled. “Reciting passages is like
reciting a spell. Since so many people have memories of characters and scenes from literature, you can
tap into those memories and use that collective power to summon forth whatever the passage
describes.”
The next time I went under in Dr. Milgram’s office, she gave me some pointers on altering the
environment.
“It’s harder to change places that multiple people have memories of. It would be virtually
impossible to change the White House, for example. But places only you know – those are easy to
change, since no one else is contributing their memories.”
I kept on expecting her to ask me about Tristabel, but she just smiled, chucked another pair of
pills at me for the week, or made a snide remark about bed-head hair. Part of me wanted Fofi to ask, to
offer help. The other part of me was too ashamed to admit what was going on with Tristabel.
I should have been able to control myself – I should have been able to control Tristabel.
The problem was I liked half of Tristabel’s suggestions.
“Want to go to Appledore Island? There was an unsolved ax murder.”
“Meet Edwin Booth – he’s the brother of Lincoln’s assassin and a famous actor.”
“Let’s try crashing a car, Lewis. Since you can’t die, it’d be fun.”
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I could tell I was teetering on the edge again – not sleeping enough, lunch at midnight, breakfast
for dinner, laughing hysterically at idiotic commercials, pounding headaches.
Then my father found the broken windshield.
I knew as soon as I heard his ponderous footfalls on the stairs that he had finally noticed the car.
Any other day he strode through the house, sometimes humming Mozart – a classical composer I had
never learned to like. Tonight he paused outside my room, silent, gathering his neuropsychology-PhDthoughts before he knocked.
“Come in,” I sighed as soon as his knuckles hit the wood. I looked up at him from the floor,
Ender’s Game open on my chest. His face was torn between “you ran over my puppy” and “you ran over
my fucking puppy, asshole!”
“Wassup,” I said, nonchalant.
“How did it happen?” he murmured.
I shrugged.
“How long ago did it happen?” he tried again.
“Two weeks,” I said.
He stared at me for a minute, then pulled off his glasses and rested his hand on his hip.
“You broke our agreement, Lewis,” he said, sweeping back his salt-and-pepper hair.
“You didn’t even notice,” I chuckled.
“I try to trust you, Lewis,” he snapped.
This is what I wanted – a fight.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I sighed. “You delude yourself into thinking I’m thriving.”
He became stony. “You aren’t thriving, Lewis. I let you drop out of school –”
“There was nothing you could do about it!”
“I let you live under this roof!” he yelled.
And then I watched him compress his anger like folding up an origami dragon. He knew playing
the authoritarian parent never worked with me. He put his glasses back on, restoring the milky barrier
between us.
“Lewis, I want you to be open about seeing someone.”
“Who?” I retorted. Say it.
“A psychiatrist, Lewis. I’ve tried to protect you all these years, but I’ve failed as your doctor,” he
stated.
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“Oh, great, make this about you,” I snapped.
“Please, Lewis,” he said.
“Just give me some more pills, doc!” I said, scrambling to my feet. I threw Ender’s Game on the
bed.
“Listen, I’ll pay for the repairs if you just agree to see someone,” he bargained.
I burst out laughing. “That’s right, fall back on the bribe, dad.” Then I brushed past him,
bumping shoulders on the way out the door. “I’m going for a walk,” I reported.
“Do it for your mother’s sake,” I heard him say, but I pretended not to hear.
The pills were already in my pocket.
I didn’t account for the length of our neighborhood. Miles of suburbia, it seemed, of lit windows
and brick paths and wooded lawns. The longer I walked, the angrier I got. I wove my way away from
the direction of the University, finally hacked my way into a sprout of uninterrupted forest and bedded
down in a birds-nest of detritus.
Then Tristabel and I were striding back to the house.
She skipped backwards in front of me, face alight.
“Let’s give him a nightmare,” she said. “Totally fuck up his room – see what it does to his head.”
And when we arrived in the house she charged over the threshold, pounding up the stairs to the
vaulted attic of our tudor house, my father’s sanctum. But I couldn’t enter his room – I lingered in the
doorway, trembling.
Although my childhood memories of my mother were blurry and indistinct, this was the room
where I housed her memory, next to her wooden jewelry box with the painted heron on it.
“I can’t come in,” I croaked. I couldn’t risk seeing her.
Tristabel looked over her shoulder with scorn.
“Fine,” she said, “you can watch.”
I did watch – as she ripped the panels of Chinese calligraphy from the wall and threw them on
the bed, pulled a tube of red lipstick from her pocket and scrawled SCREW YOU on the flat-screen,
overturned bookshelves of academic journals and Dr. Who DVDs, threw the ancient PC monitor out the
window. Then she opened the walnut roll-top desk and pulled out the deck of cards he used to practice
magic tricks when he was stressed – the same deck of cards that got a first date with my mom twenty
years ago. She spewed the cards across his bed and with a snap of her fingers lit the mattress on fire.
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My mother’s jewelry box waited untouched in the center of a glass coffee table. Tristabel saw
me looking at it, and without hesitation picked it up and threw it on the bonfire. Blue flame curdled the
paint, the box glowed like mantel, and then flames ripped out of the lid.
That night I heard my father moaning in his sleep. And that’s how I learned about influencing
people’s dreams.
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POSTSCRIPT
Fofi Goldberg parked a few houses down and waited until Walter’s wife cruised past, her
daughter in the front seat. Then she started the car, cruised into Walter’s driveway, and unlocked the
front door with a copied key.
Wooden floors, white leather couches, a fresh-cut bouquet of daffodils on the granite
countertops. Upstairs in the master suite a telescope stood just inside a pair of glass French doors that
led to a balcony. Sun Tzu’s Art of War sat next to a book about bathroom remodels on the black lacquer
bedside table. The bed linens were white Egyptian cotton.
But Fofi’s interest lay on the opposite side of the stair landing. She stood inside this white
doorway and examined the pale yellow canopy bed, the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, the
miniature white dressing table, and memorized.
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CHAPTER 3
Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be
done for them by My Father who is in heaven. For where two or three have gathered together in My
name, I am there in their midst.
- Matthew 18:19-20
The next Monday I finally told Fofi about Tristabel.
She sighed. Then, “You hungry?”
I just stared at her.
“Adolescent boy – of course you’re hungry,” she said. “Come on.”
We walked to a breakfast diner with red walls and mint plastic seats. A portrait of Saint Marta
hung next to an antique Alka-Seltzer poster and a plastic dummy in a forage cap peaked over the bar. I
ordered the Almond Joy pancakes, Fofi Green Eggs and Ham and a strawberry milkshake – two straws.
The Monsters of Folk played tinny in the background.
After the waitress returned with Fofi’s milkshake I tried again.
“So – do you have any advice for dealing with… my doppelganger?”
“All of our agents have to go to regular therapy sessions; some have prescriptions for SSRI’s or
tranqs.” She shrugged. “The best way to deal is the same way you’d deal in the real world. Think of the
strategies you use when you feel a manic episode coming on.” She twirled her straw and then sucked
some ice cream from the bottom like it was a pixie stick.
Rigid scheduling, discipline, goal-oriented behavior.
I squinted at her. “So what – should I start group project with her or something?”
She laughed her musical cackle, snapping her head back for a minute, then giggling into her
straw for another pull.
“I feel like I’d benefit from having a little sister,” I muttered. I started shredding my straw
wrapper.
Fofi snorted. “Don’t look here – I was an only child.”
Then she grinned again and flipped over the paper placemat, pulling a pen from her purse. She
started folding the placemat into thirds.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
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“Oh, please, you remember this game,” she said. “We’re going to make a monster – you draw
one third, then you fold it over, and I draw the next third… Come on, universal game of children waiting
in restaurants.”
“I don’t get it,” I said flatly.
She waggled her eyebrows. “We’re going to come up with something for you and Tristabel to
do.”
Fifteen minutes later the placemat was spattered with maple syrup and riddled with pen. It
looked like a blueprint designed by Salvador Dali.
“It should be able to take on bad guys – you know, like Freddy Krueger,” I said, scribbling in a
metal fist.
“Ha – he’s a Neanderthal, now,” Fofi snorted. She was drawing heavy chains and hooks from
the armpits.
I was busy adding shading to caterpillar treads we had instead of legs. Our pens started dueling
over an inch of the paper so Fofi started drawing on my arm.
“Hey!” I said, jerking my arm back – and accidentally knocking the rest of the strawberry
milkshake onto her red t-shirt.
Silence. Fofi and I gaped at her splattered boobs.
Then she grabbed a handful of green eggs and threw it at me and burst out laughing.
For the walk home I had chunks of ham glued to my hair with syrup and Fofi looked like she had
vomited on her shirt, but our arms were linked and we were still talking about the robot. The folded
placemat was tucked securely in the breast pocket of my leather jacket.
I knew exactly where I wanted to build this thing. I took a red pill as soon as I got home.
It was usually a forty-five minute drive to York, but with magic pressing on the accelerator I was
there in ten, leaping across miles of asphalt like flipping through frames in a movie reel. I drove the last
five minutes normally because I hadn’t actually been to my grandparents’ house in more than ten years.
I wasn’t even sure the old farmhouse would still be there – I knew my mother’s foster parents had left it
to me in their will, but I thought my father might’ve sold the property.
The white walls were still standing, alright, despite a few broken windows and tipsy shutters. It
was perfect, because as far as I knew, I was the only person who remembered this place.
Tristabel was sitting in the overgrown grass, face turned to the sun like a daisy.
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I slammed the car door behind me and leaned on the hood, smelling the sea.
“You ready for a group project?” I asked.
Tristabel grinned, reading my mind. “Bring on the blow torches.”
I started keeping a timetable in one of my father’s composition notebooks. Each morning my
alarm clock rang at five-thirty a.m. and I would pull on a sweatshirt and flip-flops to retrieve the
newspaper from the driveway. Over a bowl of fruity cereal I’d line up the edge of my journal with the
corner of the newspaper and record the date.
May 3. Wednesday.
6 a.m. – Sunny, 45º
6:30 a.m. – Jeans and Nirvana t-shirt, chucks.
7 a.m.-4 p.m. – Duggar’s Farm.
Fed goats at petting zoo. Greenhouse inventory.
4:30 p.m. - $25 cash to dad’s windshield fund.
That was the deal – I got a new job and my dad would front me for the cash for my windshield.
If I kept the job for six months he’d even refund me the money for the repair. It was a compromise, and
I knew he hadn’t given up on therapy. Meanwhile I’d exhausted my options in the food service industry,
so now I was raking goat poop and weeding the strawberry patch three days a week at a local farm.
The big secret was – I liked it. I liked fertilizing the daffodils by the front sign, I liked counting the
potted basil seedlings, I even liked Maggie Duggar, my hairy supervisor at the farm stand – though I
concede that had to do with the free snickerdoodles she gave me last Friday. I knew that once summer
arrived I’d have to deal with the influx of yuppies and kiddies the farm pandered to, but right now I was
far away from the shrieks of children and the snark of hipsters. I was pounding up the stairs to my
room, unscrewing the plate on the outlet below the window, and plucking out the matchbox hidden
inside. I grabbed the composition notebook and bounced onto my bed, matchbox still in hand. A pen
wedged in the spine of the journal marked the latest page. I glanced at the alarm clock and recorded
the time – 4:45 p.m. Then I tapped open the matchbox and dumped the contents on my bed. Two red
pills, two blue. I wrote the number in my journal, then placed a red pill on my tongue. I leaned back,
laced my hands behind my head, and let the dizziness sluice through my bones.
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“Where the hell are we going to get caterpillar tracks?” I said, examining the placemat blueprint.
I had it pinned beneath a rock, though the wind threatened to blow it into the field.
Tristabel was bouncing an antique dodge-ball against the wooden exterior of the garage – a rare
moment of idleness. Fofi’s plan was working. Now that Tristabel and I had something to do, something
to build, Tristabel threw all her energy into the new toy and stopped tormenting me.
“I’ve got that covered,” she said, not missing a beat.
“You’ve got that covered?” I repeated.
“Sure,” she said, shrugging.
I went back to screwing a pair of bicycle handlebars onto the roof of the VW bug we were using
as the main body.
Five minutes later I heard the grumbles of cars approaching on the dirt track. I spun around on
the metal and held a hand over my eyes to take a look. A yellow convertible wove haphazardly down
the dirt road, preceding a huge cloud of dirt. I heard a faint scream of delight and someone blared the
car horn. Out of the huge cloud of dirt behind emerged the black bill of a yellow trackhoe the size of the
garage. The boom swung slowly from left to right, as if waving.
I slipped off the hood and jogged to meet the parade in front of the house. The convertible
jerked to a stop in a spray of gravel and a stunning strawberry blond with a large nose and cleft chin
ripped a pair of goggles from her face, laughing. Tristabel ran forward in a pair of combat boots and
mod mini dress. The blond swept from the car – an especial feat with her pink pannier skirt – and kissed
Tristabel on both cheeks. I waited to see the digger come to a safe stop before I wiped my hands on my
wife beater and strode forward.
“I give you the Great L.E.,” Tristabel chirped, gesturing at my arrival.
“Ellie,” I revised, suddenly wary of using my real name. “Elliot Caulfield.” I braced for Tristabel
to contradict me, but when I glanced her way she smirked, as if this had been her plan the entire time.
“Marie,” the woman purred.
She extended one small pink hand. I took it and gave it one good shake, which set her to
laughing again.
“Did you see zat?” she snorted. “’E shook my ‘and. We are citizen comrades, then, non?” she
addressed me.
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“Marie is going to fund your project, so long as you agree to a spectacle at her Fourth of July
celebration,” Tristabel supplied, insinuating her arm around the hand I had tucked in my pocket.
I examined the giant piece of construction equipment in the front yard. A woman with a long
black braid and leather leggings waved from the steering house.
“Do we have an accord?” Marie asked.
I couldn’t help but quirk a smile.
“If I get to keep the convertible, too.”
Five o’clock and I was back on Dr. Milgram’s carpet. The sunset lanced across my chest.
My stomach growled and I groaned, sitting up.
“I always get the munchies after,” I griped.
“The body nourishes the mind, not vice versa,” Fofi said. She gripped my hand and pulled me to
my feet. “If you stayed there too long you’d starve to death.”
The head of my robot was sitting on Dr. Milgram’s desk. I blinked at it, then looked back at Fofi.
“Shit,” I whispered, then rubbed my eyes.
I was hallucinating.
“What?” Fofi asked. Her voice was sharp – anxious.
When I opened my eyes the robot head had disappeared from the desk.
“I thought I saw – never mind.”
“No – tell me!” Fofi demanded. Her eyes were narrowed.
I furrowed my brows and answered, “Lazarus’s head. The robot head.” I pointed at the desk.
“You named it?” she asked, momentarily distracted.
“Yeah – why not? But…” I stared at the desk. It must have been a trick of the light – right?
“Well I forgot to warn you,” Fofi went on. “Extended intervals under the red pill may lead to
certain side effects. Hallucinations, for instance. Also headaches, weight loss, diarrhea…”
“Hallucinations?” I asked, voice strangled.
“A variation on LSD flashbacks. You’ll see flashes of the collective unconscious now and then.
You probably saw the robot head because I was working on the design.” She pulled a piece of scrap
paper from the desk and held it up for my inspection. Two headlamp eyes, several colanders welded
together like the plates of a skull, and a faucet nose.
“Do you like it?” she asked, giddy as a kid with a crayon portrait.
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“Yeah, um, sure. Hallucinations?” I repeated.
She shrugged. “You only have to worry if they happen the majority of the time. That’s called
Hallucinogen-induced Persisting Perceptual Disorder.”
She gave me a sweet smile.
My life became a series of awakenings, of rising and falling like sit-ups in an exercise video. I laid
down on Dr. Milgram’s carpet, in my bed, in a pile of leaves, I rose in my grandparents’ farmhouse, in my
room, to see Fofi’s smirk. The difference between dreaming, walking in the collective unconscious, and
sleepwalking in reality became a formality. The journal traveled with me everywhere, now, and I
became a bookkeeper, balancing the credits and debits of sleep and food.
I rose in the farmhouse garage, my mother’s pearl necklace clutched in my hand, at four o’clock
on a Friday. Sun blazed through the coke-bottle brown windows, illuminating the giant’s head in front
of me. I clipped the string of pearls into a bucket, then pressed each pearl into the metal like clay.
Behind me Tristabel riveted forks for fingers. She was humming Semisonic.
I rose in my bed at three a.m., sweating and with phantom sunburn still tingling on the back of
my neck.
The alarm clock blared at six a.m. and I rose from my pillow, grabbing the journal tucked
underneath. My jeans from yesterday, only a little crusty from the greenhouse, were already folded
next to a clean t-shirt.
I awoke in the back seat of my car, rising with the sun. I had pulled over when the yellow lines
started dancing – must’ve spent the night asleep in the car. My journal was splayed on the seat
underneath me, so I sat on it for the ride home to flatten the pages.
I rose from Dr. Milgram’s carpet, hand already outstretched for Fofi’s weekly ration of pills.
I rose from my bed at two a.m., too keyed up to sleep despite the deprivation, and walked to
the bathroom to take a shower. I smelled like month-old deli ham. As I was passing the mirror I saw
Tristabel leaning in the doorway to my father’s bedroom.
I wheeled around, kicking the door shut with a slam and falling on my ass, barely missing the
porcelain sink with my forehead.
My dad barged in a moment later, white as a skull and with epic bed head.
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“What are you doing taking a shower at two a.m.?” he asked. Then, helping me to my feet,
muttered “You smell like a sty.” I let him turn the shower on for me, testing the water like I was a kid
again. “We’ll talk in the morning,” he said, but I was out the door before he rose for work.
I wasn’t just balancing on the high wire anymore – I was jogging across. Less sleep meant more
time I could spend under the red pill, feeling powerful and free for the first time in my life. So I slept less
and drove fast and gorged myself on Chinese delivery and ice cream in between, playing chicken with a
manic episode. I could handle a little crazy in the real world so long as Tristabel didn’t sabotage my new
real life.
The landline was ringing.
I pulled myself from the wood floor and tossed the throw pillow back onto the couch. I picked
up the call in the formal dining room – which for all its use should really be called the telephone room.
“’Lo?” I said.
“Lewis? Thank God you’re the one that picked up.”
The voice bounced around my groggy brain for a few moments.
“Fofi?” I asked.
“Yes.” Heavy breathing, like she was walking fast. “I need you to meet me – tonight. Can you
meet me tonight?”
“Yeah – what’s – what happened?”
“Zion’s Gate Church, in Kittery. Do you know where it is?”
I grabbed a piece of mail from the nearby kitchen counter and scrawled the name on the back.
“I’ll Google it. A church?”
“Just be there, Lewis. Eight o’clock. Don’t try calling me back – This is a burn phone.”
And then she hung up on me. How’s that for a spook?
My father was at a banquet at the college, so I didn’t bother to give him a call. I printed out
directions and got in the car.
Zion’s Gate was located on a sparsely populated strip of state highway, a punctuation of white
modern architecture among strip malls and trailer parks. The church was set back a few yards from the
road, sheltered by trees. Dim yellow light emanated from a glass steeple reminiscent of the work of
Robert Delaunay. There were only two other cars in the parking lot, and I realized I had no idea whether
one of them belonged to Fofi.
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I pushed open the glass double doors and wandered up the stone steps to the sanctuary. Pine
pews knelt before a white glass altar and a driftwood cross hung from the ceiling on clear wires – very
new-agey.
A soft blond man in a clerical collar appeared from between the white pillars of the far aisle.
“Lewis?” he asked.
I stiffened, nodded.
“Your sister is already in the Reflection Chapel. Let me show you.” He smiled and extended an
arm to lead me. I avoided his touch but followed him through the nave to a pair of pine and frosted
glass doors to the side of the sanctuary. “You may stay as long as you like,” he said. “Just tell your sister
to find me in my office when you are complete.” He placed a soft hand on my arm and said, “May the
Lord God bless you and your father and keep you.”
When I opened the door I didn’t see anyone. Three floor-length teal and yellow stained glass
windows reflected the light of two candles placed on a small altar. Before my eyes adjusted to the
gloom Fofi leapt from a wooden chair in the corner.
“Jesus!” I yelped, then felt an uncomfortable aftershock of guilt. Fofi swept the door shut
behind me and flipped the deadbolt.
“Did he go back to his office?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” I said, “he said we should get him when we’re done.”
I squinted, trying to get a good look at her in the green moonlight and orange candlelight. She
had piled her hair into a messy bun and was biting a nail. Her cheeks looked flushed.
“So what’s going on?” I asked, gesturing with my hands still in my coat pockets.
“He thinks we’re praying for our father, who’s undergoing surgery to have a brain tumor
removed,” she answered.
“Yeah – what are we really doing here?” I snapped.
Then she turned her full on Bambi eyes. “It’s the people I work with, Lewis. They’re trying –
they’re – they’re in my head,” she hissed, clutching at her hair for dramatic effect. “I keep on having
nightmares and I didn’t want to tell you because it’s not your problem and, quite frankly, none of your
business –”
I cut off her nervous laugh. “What exactly happened,” I demanded.
Her face crumpled like a paper bag and then inflated again just as quickly. She gripped my lapels
and I threw my hands up defensively.
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“I realized they’re trying to make me go crazy, Lewis.” She stared me down. “I thought we had
more time, but I’m an experiment.” I took a step back and she let me go. She wiped a hand across her
forehead. “And the scariest thing, Lewis, isn’t that they’re doing this to me. It’s that I’m just a guinea
pig. They want to be able to do this to anyone.”
The candles guttered momentarily in a draft.
“What do you want to do, Fofi?” I asked.
“Our robot, Lazarus,” she responded instantly. I was irked a little by the possessive pronoun but
didn’t push it.
“How?” I asked. I still wasn’t even sure what I was going to do with it.
“If we both – both, together – imagine, it’ll happen. But I don’t want to tell you–”
“English, Fofi,” I instructed.
“If I can hypnotize you, I can lead a simultaneous visualization that will guarantee success,” she
stated.
I made a face.
“Please, Lewis, just do this one thing for me.”
Who was I kidding – I had agreed as soon as I picked up the phone.
“Okay,” I said.
“Come on, sit down,” she said, folding like a pretzel in front of the altar. I followed, crossing my
legs, and she took up my hands. I raised an eyebrow but her eyes were already closed.
“Close your eyes, Lewis,” she said. I didn’t. “I mean it, Lewis,” she insisted, frowning around her
own closed eyes. I obeyed with a sigh.
She took a deep breath and then began.
“I want you to breathe very slowly, Lewis, with my counts. Breathe in, two, three, four, five,
hold it, two, three, four, and out. Nothing but the sound of your breathing. In, two, three, four, five,
and hold it. That sound is the ocean, each wave in – and breathe out. Nothing but the sound of the
ocean.”
A clap of lightning.
I’m riding Lazarus, feet in the bicycle stirrups and white-knuckling the handlebars. Tristabel is
wrapped around my back like a monkey, light as a backpack and for once silent. I can just see over the
gleaming robot head but I’m navigating by the GPS unit at the base of the skull. The gears of the treads
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roar and I realize I never knew tanks could be so fast. We power past grocery stores lit up like Broadway
and Colonials dark as haunted houses.
“Take a right on Maple Grove,” Fofi instructed in a monotone.
We speed into a residential neighborhood lined with maples and pine. The houses grow larger
and retreat from the road, throwing up picket fences and hedges like barricades. I lean into the turns like
I’m riding a motorcycle but my whole body vibrates with the machinery swiveling and churning beneath
me. Lazarus’s head lamp eyes roll to illuminate each bend in the road.
“You take another right onto Almond Circle,” Fofi intoned.
Lazarus barely makes a turn, banging against a stylized lamppost which extinguishes
immediately.
This is a planned neighborhood, with low stone walls and occasional street lighting. The lawns
are mowed in contours and the concrete driveways are stained to look like stone. The houses sprout
additions like tumors.
Another prompt from Fofi: “Number 1248.”
We plow across a lawn, tracks chewing the sod. This house is not especially large, but the white
shutters and extra-long windows are straight from the pages of Martha Stewart. When Lazarus pulls
even with the house I’m face to face with a second-story window. In the moonlight the yellow paint
inside is gray, the lace bedspread silver.
The chains rush through Lazarus’s arms, hooks snare in
the siding, and we rip the window from the house.
“There’s a small girl in the bedroom. Her name is Abigail.”
The form of a person inflates the bed clothes like a balloon, and a round face flickers into being.
Her almond eyes flutter.
We gouge a larger hole in the side of the house and then Lazarus shoves his head in, metal
screeching and needle tongue flickering. We extend our hand.
“I want you to take a deep breath – hold it… and out. Now open your eyes.”
My ears were ringing, blood sloshing.
Blood trickled in a thin stream from the altar. Long brown hairs swirled like silk on the floor. I
raised my eyes to Fofi to see she was drenched in blood like a kid in a Carrie costume.
You’re hallucinating again.
I dug my palms into my eyes and gagged.
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“Lewis?” Fofi whispered, touching my arm.
I jerked out of her grasp, stumbling to my feet. My back collided with a metal offering plate and
I yelled as it clattered to the floor.
“Lewis – Lewis!”
I felt a cool trickle down my face. My hand came away red.
“Are you crying?” she asked, scoffing. She advanced and I cringed.
“How could you do this to me?” I croaked, wiping my hands compulsively on my shirt. “Shit.
Shit,” I muttered. I was crying. And I just might throw up. “How could you even come up with that –
that –”
“I needed leverage, Lewis,” she murmured. “Besides, it’s not like I asked you to murder
anyone.”
I choked on an ironic, maniacal laugh. “Right,” I croaked and strode for the door.
She grabbed my wrist. “Come on, Lewis, don’t you care more about me than some stupid kid?”
I snapped my arm out of her grip and ran.
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POSTSCRIPT
The next night Fofi was on top. She handcuffed Walter’s hands to the headboard and bit his
shoulder as she came.
Five minutes later she pulled his unbuttoned shirt over her shoulders and sat on the edge of the
bed facing the mirror. She ran a finger along her lips, removing smudges of lipstick.
“You going to unlock these cuffs?” Walter growled.
Fofi smirked, then turned to crawl her way up his chest. She started kissing behind his ear.
“So how’s your daughter?” she asked. “Abby, right?”
She felt more than heard his affirmation.
“No more nightmares I hope,” she whispered.
It was a moment before the tendons in his neck snapped taught and she recoiled to his hips. His
mouth ticked. Fofi smiled.
“You’d never take the pills,” he snapped.
“You’re right,” Fofi agreed. “I never would.”
He jerked against the cuffs once, hard, and the headboard banged against the wall.
“Careful, you’ll wake the neighbors, Walter,” Fofi purred.
“Who the HELL do you think you are!” He roared. She braced on all fours, pinning his legs
beneath her as the mattress shook.
“Call off your dogs, Walter. Get out of my head, or your daughter has a nightmare like that
every night for the rest of her life. You’ll be lucky if she doesn’t kill herself before she reaches twelve.”
“Not if I imprison your terrorist ass,” he snarled.
Fofi laughed, tossing her head to the side. “Good luck finding my accomplice. They stop hearing
from me and your daughter dies every night for the rest of her life.”
“Not if you can’t find her, here or elsewhere,” Walter said, a glint of confidence returning to his
eyes.
Fofi rolled her eyes. “I’ll always find her, Walter. You know I can. I learned from the best.” His
struggles stopped but she new better than to put down her guard. She stayed on his legs and held his
gaze. “Be rational, Walter. Not a gambler.” She let him absorb her words.
Then she jabbed a finger into his chest. “You get your agents the hell out of my head. You know
the terms. Then you decide whether or not you want to keep me on the team. Personally, I think you
could use a little psychopathic ambition, but I could always defect to China.” She smiled.
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Then she leapt off the bed, placed the key to the cuffs on the motel dresser, and started pulling
on her jeans.
“I’ll call Agent Simon to pick you up. You’ll have a few minutes to think over my offer.”
She left the motel door unlocked.
Fifteen minutes later Agent Peter Simon was knocking.
“Sir?” He stuck his head in and snickered. “There’s a joke in here somewhere.” Then his eye
twitched and he grimaced. Walter knew Simon was looking at more than the tangible evidence. “I
knew she was a bitch, but I never pegged her for a sick fuck,” Simon finished.
Another man shouldered into the room behind him – his partner, the ugly foil to Simon’s
straight nose and shiny chestnut locks. He kept his sunglasses on, even in the dark.
“Sir,” he said, rushing for the key and then unlocking the handcuffs with dispatch. Simon, in
contrast, lobbed a pair of pants at Walter’s head.
“You’re lucky I’m knee deep in HPPD and crazy or I’d so be applying for another job right now,”
Simon sighed.
But Walter wasn’t indulging Simon’s rude banter like he often did. His jaw was clenched and his
breathing was labored. When he finally spoke his tone reinstated every vestige of authority he might
have lost with his pants.
“Dr. Goldberg is aware of the experiment. Furthermore, she has supplied a civilian and
committed treason.”
“So we accelerate the project,” Simon said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “And or ship her
fine ass to GTMO.”
Walter shook his head once, running his belt through the loops with violence. “Goldberg would
never reveal her accomplice.” He snapped the buckle closed and reached for the white undershirt. “We
lure Goldberg into a false sense of security, let her expose the accomplice herself. She implied regular
contact between them when stating her demands.”
“Demands?” Simon prompted.
“None of your goddamn business,” Walter snapped. He was moving his family to a gated
community in Montana – tomorrow. Then his eyes darted to Simon’s partner. “Royce, you investigate
Goldberg’s accomplice while you’re under the pill. Sniff out the strangers in a strange land.”
“Wait – what about me?” Simon whined.
“You’re point on real-time surveillance.”
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“Oh, please, Fofi will smell me from a mile away,” Simon whined.
“That’s why you’ll have a new partner,” Walter said. Fofi had stolen his shirt, so he shrugged
straight into his suit coat. “I’m calling the FBI first thing tomorrow morning.”
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CHAPTER 4
“Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to
be controlled by good people, by people who love you.”
- Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
I was flooring it. Trees shook and leapt past each turn, signs flashed, and the engine whined.
I reached home far too soon. I drove to the end of our road, then through the connecting
neighborhood, then back to my driveway again.
The clock on the dash glowed 9:48. My dad’s car was sitting in the carport.
I cut the engine and just sat there.
For some reason my mind wandered back almost ten years, to another nighttime rendezvous.
Fofi had dragged me up to the attic for a night with promises of catching a recording of a ghost on my
father’s old tape-deck. She plied me with Oreos and hot chocolate, keeping me awake in my sleeping
bag past midnight.
“It will be our adventure,” she said.
How had things gone so wrong?
For now if I could just manage to play my dad for two minutes, the night would be mine to
breakdown in every direction.
I opened the car door and tramped in through the backdoor to the dark kitchen. Newspapers
were stacked waist-high next to the door, waiting to be recycled. A plastic container of leftover storebought coffee cake sat on the counter, probably a pity gift from a coworker.
He was listening to Beethoven’s Mass in C Major in the living room, most likely grading papers.
There was no masking my footsteps on the wood floor.
“Lewis,” he said as greeting, head bent over an essay. “You’re home late.”
“I was reading at the bookstore and lost track of time,” I lied.
He still didn’t look up, just laughed once. I waited in the doorway.
“That’s my boy,” he muttered, and spared me a knowing glance. “What book?” he asked.
“A Separate Peace,” I said – the first book that leapt to mind.
“Hmm,” my father said, then quoted, “I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral,
and you do not cry in that case. I remember underlining that quote in high school. Probably something
Freudian.” With that he smirked like he was including me in an inside joke.
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I felt nauseous.
“Care to stay for the Credo?” he asked, nodding towards the speakers.
I shook my head. “No – I’m going to go write, I think.”
My father clearly suppressed a smile. I know he dreamed about me becoming a writer. I
ducked my head and strode from the room before the guilt turned into vomit. I jogged up the stairs and
closed my door behind me.
I grabbed a Bright Eyes CD and turned it up loud to drown out whatever happened next. Organ
and mandolin skirmished with the French horns downstairs.
I had to get her off me. I yanked off the leather jacket, threw it on my bed, then pulled the
composition notebook from the waistband at my back and added it to the pile. Then the envelope with
Zion’s Gate scrawled on it and the printed directions crammed in my back pocket. I grabbed the
screwdriver from my dresser and attacked the outlet plate below my window. Out came the matchbox
of pills, crowning the pile.
My scalp was still creeping and sweaty.
I grabbed everything off the bed and strode to the bathroom. I dumped it in the sink, trying to
stuff the sleeves of the jacket in the bowl, pressing it down to the drain. There was an old hotel
matchbook in the medicine cabinet – I snatched it from the shelf and snapped two matches before I got
one to light. I dropped it into the sink, waiting for the shit to ignite. The match snagged on the jacket
cuff, guttering, and then the leather started smoking like burnt rubber.
What are you doing!
I turned on the water, splashing the jacket and spattering the notebook. As the water was
sucked up by the pages the ink bled and blossomed on the edge, then dripped in dark drops to the
drain.
I turned off the water. The ink pooled, dangled, and dripped.
A whine of and click of metal needles, a black spatter like Braille on the headboard.
I lunged for the toilet and threw up. I trembled on the edge of the bowl, gripping the porcelain.
Her hair snagged – blood –
I heaved again. My stomach lunged again until nothing came out but a thin stream of mucus. I
rested my forehead on the seat and listened to Beethoven wafting through the pipes.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
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I looked at the faded yellow linoleum and remembered the morning we first entered this house.
It was a few days before Halloween and I insisted on wearing my Batman costume everywhere.
Everything was white. Everything echoed. There was so much room in this house.
Now I was sleeping beneath a pile of dirty laundry and above long overdue library books. My
mother’s records melted in the attic and her antique piggybank was smashed, raided for quarters for a
trip to the arcade ten years ago. The fridge held leftover pizza and whole milk, the walls of my room
were covered in crayon poems, and the suit my father bought me for court had a blood stain on the
collar. Angels fell and my father’s room burned. And outside Patrick Dolan was going to college for free
and Abby was dreaming about choke pears and pain.
I’d been trying to balance the scales for years, taking away a good night’s sleep in favor of a
finished English assignment, eating nothing but cereal for two days but applying for a job, trading a
pilfered beer at a college frat party for a skipped class or two the next day. I’d bargained my way down
to pure subsistence, a part-time job, barely keeping up with the laundry, eating and sleeping when I had
to.
And when the scales settled, my magnum opus was a monstrosity.
Not only had I ruined myself, I had destroyed someone else in the process.
The only way left to balance the scales was to destroy myself for good.
Once I made the decision my nausea subsided. It’s always easier to do things than to think
about them, and I knew what I was going to do. I stood up, rinsed my mouth, and combed back my
sweaty hair.
I gathered the evidence from the sink – all of that would have to be destroyed with me, or else
my maleficence might survive the grave. Then I returned to my room and searched my closet for a box.
Beneath a pile of too-short jeans I found the old shoebox from fourth grade. I emptied the contents on
the floor, pausing on some entries: the piano sheet music from Star Wars, a dead butterfly frozen in an
empty spice jar, my first CD – a Cake album. I spilled the contents of a plastic bag into my hand: seven
paper thin oblong disks, shiny as a dull mirror.
Running to place a nickel on the tracks, then running back to the platform to watch the sparkling
nose of the train edge closer. Dad sits at the picnic table a few yards away, eating black raspberry ice
cream in a Styrofoam bowl.
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Someone grabs me around the shoulders with both arms and drags me back a few steps into the
shade.
“Not too close, kiddo.”
Too close.
Fofi.
Pain pounded behind my eyes. I chucked the pennies aside and started refilling the box. My
new evidence all fit inside, though the sleeves of the leather jacket hung like tongues from the side.
I stared at the box another moment, then threw aside the top and retrieved the journal. I
ripped out a page and started writing.
Despite my intentions I am guilty of tormenting a little girl and blackmailing her
father. I will never be prosecuted for this crime.
I paused. Then with a sour smile I wrote the ironic truth:
By the time you read this letter I will no longer be in this world.
My pen dangled over the next sentence. Despite everything that had happened, I couldn’t write
Fofi’s name. But someone needed to know – or else I’d be destroying the truth along with myself.
Please uncover my accomplice, so that justice won’t be entirely annihilated.
They needed a clue – an address, perhaps, though I didn’t want to implicate Dr. Milgram, who
would surely be the obvious suspect. Then my eyes fell on the matchbox of pills.
Take these pills to find the truth.
Let them test them in a goddamn lab – hell if I knew what was in them.
I crept up to my father’s room to pull an envelope from his roll-top desk. I kept the light off –
not so much for stealth but because it weirded me out to see the panels of calligraphy, psychology
journals, and bedspread untouched. I navigated his office by the moonlight pouring in from the elliptical
window over his bed.
I had finally found an envelope between the post-it notes and marked tests when my fingers
stumbled across the spine of a book of sheet music. I slipped it out from between his papers.
Percy Grainger: The Complete Piano Works
My father must have bought it for me. I flipped through the first few pages, fingers plinking
across the notes, already vaguely hearing the melody.
“It may be a little soon, but they were written for children.”
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I take the tea-stained music book from my father’s hands – “Bartok’s Piano Pieces for Children.”
When I open the cover there’s a name written in labored cursive: Acadia Blue Whitfield. The book
belonged to my mother.
I slammed the book shut and hid it back underneath his papers.
I didn’t want my father finding my suicide note.
I leaned both fists on the desk and thought. I couldn’t leave things unfinished with Fofi –
someone needed to know. But for all I knew the people Fofi worked with could intercept any sort of
police investigation. I needed someone on the outside – someone trustworthy, someone who wasn’t
too close. I flicked through acquaintances in my head like scanning a photo album. I considered the
series of University students I had as piano teachers, my recent boss Mr. Zhang, even the in-school
detention monitor Ms. Wagner, but none of them actually gave a shit about me – and I didn’t trust them
to find the truth.
Then for some reason I remembered a finger-crushing handshake, severe blond hair, and a
steady stare – but not the name that went with it. Baker? Bell? I snagged my father’s datebook from
the mess and flipped to the contacts, hoping for a lucky shot in the dark. My father had scrawled her
name in the B’s:
Olivia Bellman – lawyer
When I was in middle school my father got into a minor dispute with the university over a book
he published. Bellman swept in with leather portfolio and practical ballet flats and saved my father the
trouble of going to court. Besides hello she had one thing to say to me:
“The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions,” she joked. “Or the
lawyer, anyway.”
I scrawled her address on the envelope, took a stamp from the roll coiled around an embossed
letter opener, then replaced the datebook and closed the desk.
I snuck out at 3 a.m., long after my father had gone to bed and more than an hour before
sunrise. The world was empty, as if I had already crossed into the borderlands: only the relics of the
living remained. I stopped on Main Street to slip my letter into one of the big blue mailboxes sitting in
the light of a lamppost. Then I got back in the car and drove my daily route to Duggar’s Farm in Epping,
New Hampshire. The ride seemed shorter than usual with Mark Kozelek on the radio.
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There was an overgrown utility road in the forest behind the corn field. I pulled in, rumbling
over poison ivy and holly, past the turn, until my headlights bounced on the rusted horse-drawn plough.
I parked behind it, traveling as far into the wooded hollow as I could, bumping the nose on an oak. I
killed the engine.
Nothing but birdsong. My feet made muffled crunches on the forest floor.
I made a perfunctory attempt to throw some branches and leaves over the car, make it blend in
with the scenery, but I stopped after a minute – it’s not like I was going to come back for a ride. So I
took my shoebox of evidence from the front seat and started the trek to the field.
Cold mist rose from the corn. The plants weren’t even knee high, but by the time September
rolled around they’d be tall enough for Duggar’s corn maze. I counted a hundred paces between the
rows, crouched, and sunk my fingers into the wet dirt. I started digging.
I killed a few mosquitoes. The back of my neck prickled with sweat and something else. I could
feel my mother here, even if I couldn’t remember her – the foster kid raised on a farm, the biology nerd
with a minor in English, the dead one. The farther I walked away from my father, the closer I walked to
her.
By the time I had a hole big enough for a baby the sky was dirty pink and the corn shoots kelly
green. I opened the evidence box and popped open the matchbox of pills. I shoved a few pills in my
pocket, too apathetic to count, then tossed the matchbox back in and replaced the lid. I nestled the
shoe box in the dirt, shoved a pile of earth over the top, and buried it.
I picked two red pills from my pocket – I intended to double dose just in case. I wasn’t coming
back. I rolled the pills around in my palm and some of the red pigment rubbed off in the sweat and dirt.
Just like M&Ms. Black gulls wheeled over golden clouds and the peepers sang. More than a mile off a
car cruised by. My cheeks were wet.
It’s you and me against the world, kid.
“And now it’s just me,” I said.
I chucked two pills at the back of my throat and laid back to watch the sunrise.
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POSTSCRIPT
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh --but smile no more.
- “In the Greenest of our Valleys,” Edgar Allen Poe
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PART III
118
CHAPTER 1
“To think that the spectre you see is an illusion does not rob him of his terrors: it simply adds the
further terror of madness itself – and then on top of that the horrible surmise that those whom the rest
call mad have, all along, been the only people who see the world as it really is.”
- Perelandra, C. S. Lewis
He staggered through the corn, clothes sagging against his bones and earth under his
fingernails. His vision swayed like a pendulum, legs folding and tramping, winding and revolving like
clockwork, unwinding with each step, counting down.
Not much farther, now – just to the forest, and then down the old dirt utility road, just to the
bend in the road, just to the bend…and then a car that could take him away from her, as far away as
possible…
From me.
My eyes flew open, heart clutching from the nightmare.
I wasn’t in my room.
No windows, a strip of light underneath the doorway, the white noise of machines buzzing, stiff
sheets.
The hospital. I’m in the hospital for observation.
I sat up, crackling the sheets, and rested my head on my knees. I started breathing deeply.
In, two, three, four, hold…out, two, three, four.
My breath stuttered and my eyes stung.
No – keep it together. Just keep it together until morning.
I lay back down, knees still drawn up to my chest, and kept breathing. I had to fall asleep again –
I had to or this wave of panic would crest. My eyes flicked to the dimly outlined trashcan by the door, a
reflex – in case I had to vomit. I closed my eyes.
I was sitting in my history classroom, next to Amanda Beaton.
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My wrist was itching. I scratched, but the itch spread like wildfire, up my arm, my face. I felt the
hard mumps rise on my cheek but couldn’t see them. I looked at my arms, white with hives. I scratched
furiously, but no one in the class noticed. Then my fingernail snagged and the skin split like cellophane,
erupting with white flowers.
A quiet cry escaped from my mouth. The sheets stuck to my skin like peels.
The light was on.
I yanked my arms from beneath the sheets – and saw the white buds rippling beneath the skin
like maggots.
I really screamed.
“She’s ripped out the IV.”
People were checking machines and touching my throat and smoothing back my hair. But it was
one voice that cut through the chaos.
“Olivia. Breath. In, and out. Come on, Livy.” My mother – firm, confident. I obeyed her call
and looked at my arms.
They were just a smooth pale pink – except for a khaki brace on my left wrist. I remembered
that – a sprain from the near miss with the truck.
“I’m just going to give you a little something to calm you down, okay, Olivia?” The voice of the
doctor.
“No – I’m fine – I was just startled – I have an anxiety disorder –”
A prick pinched my upper arm, cutting me off. I felt my chest relax like a deflated paper bag.
My arm was tingling. My mother was holding my hand.
When I woke up the third time all the lights were on and my mother was sitting in the plastic
chair with a manila folder open on her lap. The sheets whispered and she looked up. For a minute we
just stared into each other’s eyes.
The door opened and Alex spun backwards into the room, a coffee in each hand.
I smiled at him, a nervous reaction.
“Hi,” he said, like we were just introduced.
Then I looked to my mom and asked, “Take me home?”
“I’ll go get the doctor,” Alex said. He set the coffees down on a countertop and left again.
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My mother tossed the folder onto the next chair and rose. Her eyes were glassy but her cheek
was dry as she pressed me against her in a hug. I couldn’t cry – I couldn’t let go or let my guard down – I
was too afraid of what would happen when I did.
When my mother pulled away she ran her hands over my head, brushing back my hair and
holding my chin.
“You’re safe, now,” she said. “You’re with me.”
My stomach fluttered and my thoughts buzzed, flitting away from memories I wasn’t ready to
deal with.
Five minutes later I was staring into the doctor’s ophthalmoscope. My brother was waiting
outside. I heard the door to the room open again. Someone said, “Ms. Saks, could I have a moment?”
The doctor switched the ophthalmoscope to my other eye and I glimpsed the guest: a
policewoman. My heart rate accelerated and the soft beeping of the machine picked up. If the doctor
noticed she didn’t let on.
My mother closed the door, leaving with the policewoman.
“Alright, Olivia, lets take a look at the bump on your head.” The doctor lifted off the medical
tape and gauze.
I wasn’t paying attention. The police. I should’ve realized they would be involved. What should
I say? Did they find Lewis? How long had I even been gone?
“I don’t know what day it is,” I said.
The doctor replaced the bandage and picked up the file from the table next to the bed. She was
graceful despite looking like a young, rosy-cheeked Viking.
“Do you know what month it is?” she asked. She pulled the pen from the pocket of her white
coat and opened the manila folder.
“June?”
“Are you asking me?” she said, not raising her eyes from the file. I stared at the highlights in the
part of her blond hair.
“June,” I said.
“How about the name of our current president,” she instructed.
“Obama,” I answered.
“Do you remember who is here with you at the hospital?” the doctor asked.
“My mom, Olivia Saks,” I said. “And my brother – Alex.”
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“Do you remember coming to the hospital?” she prompted again.
“Yes,” I said. “I remember being strapped down, next to the ambulance, in the road.” I vividly
remembered waking up to the EMTs. If I hadn’t felt like a broken baby bird I might have protested.
“Great,” the doctor said. “Now I want you to remember back. You’re seeing the EMTs, you’re
being strapped down, you’re in the road in Epping. Now what’s the last thing you remember before
that?”
Epping?
I started counting my breaths unconsciously, trying to steady my heart rate. Then I lied. Just
one, easy, all-consuming lie.
“Monday night,” I said, “Two days after my graduation so… June twenty-second.”
“Okay,” she said, the look of alert neutrality glued in place, “It’s Saturday, June 26, and
approximately 12:30 p.m. You were medivac’ed to this hospital after you ran into oncoming traffic.”
I started hyperventilating. I wasn’t faking it. She reached out and touched my shoulder.
“Olivia,” she said, “I want you to take slow breaths. Okay? Count with me.”
I humored her.
“Transient global amnesia, or temporary memory loss, can be a side effect to a head injury,
although yours wasn’t very serious,” she began. “Your memory will probably return fairly soon. We’ll
schedule a CT scan to check up on you. But there might be another cause.”
She closed the file and for a moment she just stared at me. I felt my skin flush – a reflex
reaction.
“Now, Olivia, I don’t want you to say anything until I’m finished. You don’t need to explain
anything. I’m not the police, I’m a healthcare provider, and all I care about is your health. We did some
extra tests for your blood work, and there were indicators of lysergic acid diethylamide – that’s LSD – in
your system.” I was determined not to break eye contact. “Now, as your healthcare provider, I need to
tell you that LSD has serious adverse effects. For a person like you, who has an anxiety disorder, it’s very
likely to cause an extreme panic attack. It can interact with your anti-anxiety prescription and cause a
psychotic break, or cause the onset of schizophrenia. There’s also evidence that LSD can cause what’s
called ‘dissociative fugue,’” she placed finger quotations, “in which the individual temporarily loses their
memories and often has an impulse to wander, which is of course extremely dangerous. Usually the
person will come out of the state and regain all of their memories except for their experiences during
the fugue.
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“Now I can’t tell you exactly how you lost your memory. I’m here to take care of you now. The
police are the ones that want to sort out what already happened. But if you chose to take LSD, these
are some of the consequences.”
She wasn’t smiling. I was hot all over and my fingers were tingling. The heart monitor was
chirping. My eyes started stinging again.
“Are you going to tell my mom?” I finally croaked.
“No,” she said. “You’re eighteen and this is all between you and me. Legally, the police will
have to get a court order for your medical records.”
I just nodded. I didn’t want to thank her. I wanted to die of humiliation.
And evidently the doctor didn’t have a problem with that – she got up and opened the door
without a word of comfort.
“I’m going to go get your checkout paperwork,” she said. “Other than a bump on the head and
a sprained wrist, you have a clean bill of health.”
What an incredible understatement.
But before the doctor could exit a hand extended across the doorframe, blocking her path.
“Doctor, I was wondering if I could ask Miss Bellman some questions, now.” The policewoman.
“Let’s talk outside,” the doctor said, and then she closed the door as if all her talk about me
being eighteen had never happened.
All I could think was – let’s get this over with.
When the door opened again the doctor was flanked by my mother and the policewoman.
My mother opened.
“Olivia, this is Detective Bower. She’d like to ask you some questions, but the doctor and I
agree, you don’t have to answer anything if you’re not up to it.”
“I’m up for it,” I said, not looking at the police woman, Detective Bower.
“I’ll go get the paperwork,” the doctor said, and left.
“My mother stays,” I said, finally looking the policewoman in the eye. “If not as my guardian,
then as my lawyer.” I didn’t glance at my mother – would she be proud, or suspicious?
“That’s fine,” the Detective answered. “I want to make this as comfortable as possible for you.”
And with that she grabbed one of the plastic chairs and pulled close to the side of the bed. Detective
Bower was average height, only an inch below my mother, with a curly blond mullet and chiseled
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features like a hawk. I thought she’d make a good meter maid. She pulled a notebook from her back
pocket.
“Alright, Olivia, the doctor already told me and your mum about the amnesia, so don’t worry
about that. All I want from you right now is to take me back to Monday. Just take me through that day,
starting in the morning, when you and your brother arrived at your beach house. Okay?”
All of the important parts of the story were easy to omit. I found a letter. I took a pill. They
were cut from my history as easily as if I had imagined them. And for the first time it occurred to me:
maybe I had imagined them. I shunted that thought aside.
“And then I went outside,” I said, “because I hate parties and was sick of the music. The last
thing I remember is sitting on the lawn, looking at the house.”
“You weren’t drinking?” Detective Bower asked. She looked up from her notebook. No one
should be able to look that intimidating in bubblegum pink lipstick.
“Maybe a little,” I hedged. They must have known everyone at the party was drinking.
“Sarah said she offered you a cup of wine and we found a wine bottle wedged in the rocks with
your fingerprints on the neck,” Detective Bower said flatly.
I rubbed my hands over my eyes, determined not to look at my mother. Alex and I were so
going to get it.
“Yeah,” I said, “I took a bottle of wine outside with me.”
“You must’ve known the alcohol would interact with your medication,” the Detective prompted.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, unsure of where this was going.
Then she changed tacks just as quickly. “When you were sorting the mail before the party, were
there any letters addressed to you?”
Careful. “Um, maybe some junk mail. I don’t remember anything in particular.”
“Any other mail stick out to you?”
“No,” I said, “lots of junk, credit card offers, stuff like that.”
“What about the letter we found with the bottle of wine?” Detective Bower crossed her legs.
I wedged the wine bottle in a crag; in a brief moment of clarity I remembered Lewis’s letter and
jammed it next to the bottle.
Shit.
I forced my mind to go blank. “I don’t remember any letters,” I said slowly. “Was it a piece of
litter, maybe?”
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“Did you write the letter, Olivia?” she asked. She wouldn’t ask me that if she knew it was from
Lewis, right?
“No…” I said, just looking at her.
Detective Bower swept some of her blond curls over her shoulder and changed tacks again.
“Your mum told me you were having some trouble thinking about college. You were anxious and
depressed, feeling a little overwhelmed, right? That’s gotta be tough.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. I pinched the blankets between my fingers and then released, pinched
and released.
“Anyone would want a break from all that pressure –”
“Wait – you think that was a suicide note?” I interjected.
Detective Bower shrugged. “You might not have meant it – you just wanted a break. A little
vacation.”
“What – so now I ran away?” I asked. And then I realized – that’s exactly what I did. Recklessly
took some drugs, trying to mess up, mess out of the reality I was stuck in. And for the first time during
the interview I looked at my mother. She looked sad and… sympathetic? Angry? She thought that was
exactly what happened. God, I didn’t want her to think that – think that little of me – even if it was the
truth.
“I don’t remember any letter, and I don’t remember anything after…”
“After you started drinking,” Detective Bower said.
“Yeah,” I said lamely.
“While also on some pretty heavy anti-anxiety medication.”
And, evidently, LSD.
“Yes,” I whispered. “It was very stupid. I made a mistake.”
I thought she was going to start hinting at a psychotic break or maybe even guess about the
other drug.
But I guess I had given her what she wanted.
“Alright, that’s all for now, Ms. Bellman. Thank you very much for your cooperation. And we’re
very happy to have you home.” She flipped shut her notebook. “Ms. Saks,” she nodded at my mother,
and then left the room.
When the door shut I couldn’t look at my mother.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m really, really sorry.”
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I wasn’t sure which part I was apologizing for.
“Just promise me you won’t do it again, Olivia,” my mother said. Her voice was calm and firm,
but I wasn’t sure exactly what she was referring to either.
“I promise,” I said. And I meant it – I wasn’t going to do any of this, ever again.
The doctor was talking about timelines for my wrist, pain medication for my head, fluid intake,
circumstances under which I should go immediately to the emergency room, handing me packets with
all the information and a phone-number highlighted at the bottom. My mother was asking dozens of
questions about the amnesia, flipping through the packets in my hands with the keen eye of a lawyer,
and opening her datebook to find time for the CT scan. True to her word, the doctor never mentioned
the LSD, though in every other respect she was allowing my mother to helm my healthcare.
“Besides the CT scan, I want you to schedule an appointment with Dr. Bee Brennan over in
mental health. I know therapy makes some people uncomfortable, but think of this as you would any
other medical appointment. Between this past week, the anxiety, and the amnesia, this is just another
part of your overall health. Okay?” And then she smiled with teeth, which almost made her look more
human than polar bear.
“Thank you so much, Doctor,” my mother said, standing up and gripping the doctor’s hand in
both of her own. I hoped my mother gave her one of her knuckle-crunchers.
“Just call Bee’s office to make the appointment. I’ll let her know I’m sending you along. And call
me directly with any concerns – Olivia.” She nodded and left. I couldn’t tell if her parting words were
supposed to be comforting or threatening.
Then my brother busted in with a wheelchair.
“Come on, Nanners, we’re leaving in style.”
Alex popped wheelies, pretended to steer me into a water fountain, ran with me down the hall
and then let go to see how far I would roll – before a nurse snapped at him to knock it off. I was happy
to see Alex, too – especially because he was pretending everything was normal.
I kept my eyes closed for the ride home, watching the abstractions of light on the back of my
eyelids without searching for patterns or meaning. I must’ve fallen asleep because it seemed only
moments before the car stopped and we were home.
Home. The cottage was untouched, static and dirty with the details of the real world.
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My mother rushed around the side of the car to help me out of my seat. As she shepherded me
into the house I steered my eyes away from her open bedroom door. The house was cool and shady
despite the sunshine.
“Alright, straight upstairs, then I’m going to scramble you an egg. After you’ve eaten I’ll give you
your first dose of medication.”
My mother had made my bed in my absence, but my clothes were still in duffel bags. I stood in
the middle of my room, listless. But when my mother started tugging off my clothes, dressing me like a
toddler, I told her to go downstairs and start the eggs.
I pulled on purple sweatpants and a York Beach t-shirt and lay down over the covers. The
distant sound of crashing waves swept through the house like a draft. Downstairs my mother clattered
pans and murmured with my brother. My eyes drifted to the closet. If I opened it what would I find
inside?
I buried my face in a navy blue pillow, driving the thought from my head.
My body consumed time like a narcotic. I slept like Sleeping Beauty, drunk on the prick of a
needle that changed her life. I didn’t dream. When I was awake my head throbbed, my wrist itched
underneath the brace, and my stomach burned with hunger. I had to eat at regular intervals, but never
too much at once. I had to drink at least eight glasses of water a day. When I wandered around the
house my bones felt hollow and fragile, like bird bones. I sat on the couch watching old Buffy episodes,
ignoring everyone and everything.
And in a way I was peaceful. According to everyone else I was in a state of crisis – which meant I
could abdicate complete responsibility for my future. My mother had taken on the role of the Bellman
Surgeon General, counting pills and cooking meals. She brought up Dr. Brennan once, but I put her off
with an excuse about not feeling well enough. Surely no one would make me do anything now. Like go
to college.
But underneath the apathy ran a current of apprehension like electricity. Something tapped at
my shoulder, like a name on the tip of my tongue. The first night I was home I couldn’t fall asleep until I
wedged a chair underneath my doorknob. I always had to jog past the door to my mother’s room when
I reached the bottom of the stairs. I locked the door every time I showered. I told myself that was fine –
being a little nervous was fine. I’d get over it. And if I didn’t… well, it’s not like my mother would kick
me out.
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Then one day I woke to the sound of a few plinked notes on my grandmother’s out-of-tune
piano. For a moment I lay motionless, seized with terror and hope. Then I rolled from the sheets,
dragged the chair from the door, and scuttled downstairs.
Alex turned around on the piano bench when he heard my footfalls in the front hall. I stopped
in my tracks.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Just fooling around.”
“Well – don’t,” I said. Then I shuffled to the kitchen, pretending I only came down for a bowl of
cereal. I spent the rest of the day in bed, propped on my side and staring at the untouchable ocean.
That night I was brushing my teeth when it happened.
I bent down to spit and when I came back up I saw him in the mirror.
Adrenaline slammed through my veins. I gave a dry shriek and whirled around. He was still
there. Toothpaste water dribbled from the corner of my mouth.
His skin had healed over the fissure in his face but his arm was still covered in irregular white
bumps. He ran a hand through his hair and smirked. Then he turned into the hallway and sauntered out
of sight.
“Olivia – Olivia?” My brother was rushing out of his room.
I ran out of the bathroom and into my bedroom. He was gone. I threw open both doors of the
closet, tossing out folded sheets, then dropped to the floor and ran my head along the floorboards to
check underneath the bed. Nothing. I charged out of the room, shouldering my brother out of the way.
“Olivia – Jesus!”
I thundered down the stairs and threw open the door to my mother’s bedroom.
She was already halfway to the door, reading glasses on the tip of her nose and finger marking
her place in a paperback. I strode straight for her full-length mirror and started running my fingers
around the edge. The mirror bumped softly against the wall. I grabbed the frame and pulled, revealing
solid white plaster beneath.
“Olivia – what are you doing?” my mother cried.
I dropped the mirror back into place, grabbed the porcelain lamp off her bedside table, and
threw it at the mirror.
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Porcelain and glass exploded simultaneously. The mirror cracked like a spider web, then fell in a
waterfall of chunks to the floor. The shards of the lamp rattled and tinkled against the floorboards.
And within the empty frame of the mirror, nothing but an expanse of white wall.
There was no secret room. There was no secret world. And for all the concrete evidence I had, I
might have imagined everything after all.
And now full-blown hallucinations.
I sat down abruptly with a thump.
“Olivia.” My mother. “Tell me this instant what is going on.”
I hid my head in my forearms. I heard my brother leave the room.
“Olivia.”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. A tsunami of tears was gathering behind my eyes. I was actually
going crazy.
“Then why did you just shatter my antique mirror?” my mother pushed. Her voice was strained.
“I didn’t want to look at myself anymore,” I mumbled. It was a lame excuse, a lie. I just wanted
to be left alone.
“Olivia – talk to me.”
I wiped my nose on my forearm and closed my eyes.
My mother waited another beat. Then, “I’m calling Dr. Brennan and making an appointment for
tomorrow.”
“No!” I cried – unfiltered panic.
“Well then what the hell am I supposed to do, Olivia? Huh?” I kept my eyes squeezed shut.
“Olivia – Olivia, look at me!” And suddenly she was in front of me, prying my arms off my face and
glaring at me. Her face was red. She was livid.
“I don’t know what happened to you, Olivia. I don’t know if you ran away, or had a psychotic
break, or if you were kidnapped, for God’s sake. I’m terrified, Olivia, but I’ve been trying to give you
time, not – drive you away, if that’s why you left! But you have to do something, Olivia! I can’t do this
alone, Olivia, you have to help me, because I’m worried sick!”
Tears were running down her cheeks. I was panicking. I was hurting her – and it felt terrible.
But what could I do? It wasn’t like I could tell a therapist about Lewis and Linos and LSD…
And then everything was clear.
“Give me one more week,” I croaked, “And then I’ll meet with Dr. Brennan.”
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She sighed, frustrated.
“I promise,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Just one more week. Or you can put me in a straight
jacket and drag me there yourself.”
She closed her eyes, nodded, then stared me down one more time. “I’m holding you to that
promise, Olivia.”
Then she wrapped me up in an awkward, crouching hug. It hurt a little. She smelled like lilies of
the valley and salt.
Tomorrow I would begin the search for Lewis Epps.
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POSTSCRIPT
Agent Gutierrez dropped her pen. She didn’t need to write this down to remember it.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Absolutely. It’s definitely some derivate of LSD, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Where did
you say you got this?”
“I didn’t,” Gutierrez answered and switched the cell phone to her other ear. She knew Jamie
had a big crush on her – big enough to sneak in some tests without alerting his supervisor at the FBI lab.
But that didn’t mean she trusted him.
“Save the report and the sample,” Gutierrez instructed.
“Hey – wait – this isn’t just another drug bust, Lola.” She cringed at the nickname. “We’re not
talking some ergotamine tartrate and an Erlenmeyer flask in grandma’s RV. Whoever manufactured this
would need some pretty heavy lab equipment.”
“Got it, Jamie.”
“Back-up, Lola. Okay? Wherever you’re going, get back-up.”
“I’ve got back-up. Agents Glock and Sig Sauer.” She hung up.
She stayed seated in the armchair, tapping her index finger against the closed phone. Then she
decided – why wait?
She exited the motel room and knocked on Simon’s door. It was raining lightly and past eleven,
but she could hear a cooking show blaring inside.
Simon answered the door in matching CIA sweatpants and t-shirt.
“Can I come in? It’s freezing!” Gutierrez said, rubbing her arms for emphasis. She was still in an
impeccable black suit. Simon backed up and Gutierrez closed and locked the door behind them.
“So what’s this about?” he asked, turning with arms crossed.
“I found LSD in your bag.”
Simon laughed. “Ho, ho! Cut right to the chase, why don’t you? And how exactly did you find
this alleged LSD?” He wiggled his fingers for dramatic effect. “An illegal search I presume? What a little
Narc you are!”
“I’m not going to call the police, Simon, I’m going to call your superior. I don’t think he gives a
damn about your legal rights.”
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Simon stopped laughing, but he didn’t seem frightened. In fact he was staring at her almost
smugly. Gutierrez shifted on her feet, feeling the electricity in the empty air between her fingers and
her firearm. She didn’t like this.
“Alright, let’s deal,” Simon said. This was the answer she was expecting, but his body language
was all wrong. “What do you want? You must want something, or you wouldn’t be telling me this.”
“I want to know where you got it,” Gutierrez said.
“Fofi Goldberg,” Simon supplied.
Gutierrez was silent. Her sister always joked about her being the “strong and silent” type.
Gutierrez knew knowledge was power – and when she didn’t have the power, she knew to shut up,
watch, and learn the situation. She spent her childhood on Miami Beach silent, tailing her older sister
Guanina, watching how Guanina slicked on her Coco-Loco lip-gloss, watching Guanina dance Salsa in the
mall dressing room when she tried on her brillando la hebilla skirt, watching the Cacos that cruised the
Bee and yelled muy bello, following Guanina to parties and watching Rulz meet with the man from the
Creole Connection, sitting on the white concrete steps of her mother’s house painting her toenails and
watching the boys with the feezy bling selling on the corner. At the age of thirteen she made her first
thirty-five dollars as a police informant. Officer Romero paid her in singles and popsicles he hid in the
break room freezer. Sure she was a Narc, but she was powerful. No one suspected little Lola Gutierrez.
Now she had to think quickly to keep her footing.
“Is this why I was really brought up here?” Gutierrez finally asked.
Simon threw up his hands in mock defense. “You weren’t supposed to investigate me.”
“Right,” Gutierrez said. “Well I’m going to need you for the judge’s warrant.”
“Arrest warrant?” Simon asked.
“No – search warrant. And now you’re going to tell me the location of Goldberg’s lab.”
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CHAPTER 2
“Such body lovers have,
Such exacting breath,
That they touch or sigh.
Every touch they give,
Love is nearer death.
Prove that I lie.
- “Her Anxiety,” William Butler Yeats
I watched from the dormer in my room as my mother pulled from the driveway. Once her
headlights whipped around the end of the drive I pulled the miniature backpack from my underwear
drawer and started packing.
iPod.
Hair elastics.
Worry stone – far preferable to stress ball.
The Tranqs – clonazepam, lorazepram.
Hot pink plastic water bottle.
Certified copy of my birth certificate I filched from the drawer in my mother’s bedside table.
I missed my Chucks but there was nothing for it. I yanked the laces on a dusty red pair of Keds.
Lastly, sunglasses.
This was war.
I tugged on the backpack straps and marched downstairs. My brother was sprawled on the
couch with a bowl of Pops. He did a double-take when he realized I was fully dressed for the first time in
days.
“I want you to take me to get my driver’s license,” I said. “Now.”
He gave me saucer eyes.
“Please,” I added. I slung my thumbs through the straps.
Alex leaned forward to rest the cereal bowl on the coffee table then squinted up at me.
“Dude. Are you messing with me?” he asked, face contorted with confusion.
“No,” I stated. “I want to go get my license. Now.” Before I lose my nerve.
“You never even took driver’s ed,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
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“I know,” I replied. “I’m eighteen. I don’t have to.”
“…And you haven’t been driving in weeks,” he added.
I rolled my eyes and jutted one hip to the side. “I’ll practice on the drive over. Besides – what
are you worried about? Worse case scenario I freak out, throw up on the evaluator, and you drive me
home.”
I popped Remi Nicole into the CD player and insisted on singing along all the way across the New
Hampshire border. Consider it the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling “LA LA LA
LA LA” when you don’t want to hear what someone’s saying. And I was not at all interested in hearing
what my “anxiety” had to say. Alex stayed shunted to the far side of the passenger seat, alternately
gaping at me and providing navigation directions from his cell phone.
The driving was surprisingly easy. Sure, I stayed off the highway, but I found all the local road
practice with my mother came back to me like riding a bicycle. When we pulled into the driveway of the
DMV I breathed deeply, imagined the slow serenity of a humpback whale migrating north to feed, and
tried to channel the nonchalance I always associated with my idol, Peggy Oki.
Just keep breathing, I chanted to myself. One step at a time.
The worst part by far was waiting in line, just waiting. When my knees started jiggling like I had
Parkinson’s I reminded myself that I wasn’t doing this for me, I was doing it so I could find Lewis. And as
the bureaucracy clunked forward, processing each of us with all the personality of Windows 95, I
realized that even if I ran out of here with my underpants on my head, everyone would probably
continue without me as if nothing had happened. I could think of nothing more reassuring.
Then it was just a matter of obeying the evaluator’s instructions, focusing on one step at a time,
and swallowing if I had the sudden urge to puke on his pleated khakis. As he directed the car through
the intersections (don’t forget the NO TURN ON RED sign at the second stop), the adrenaline thundering
through my veins, the constricted throat, the sweaty palms, somehow started to seem like excitement. I
was really doing it, even if my stomach was in the process of trying to turn itself inside out.
The guy didn’t even make me parallel park. I wasn’t worried about acing the written test, either
– I’d read the driver’s manual cover to cover and knew the safety regulations better than anyone in my
family. I could taste victory like butter on my tongue.
I had to seriously contain the desire to throw a gang sign and pose for my license photo like it
was a mug shot.
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When I returned to the waiting room, license in hand, Alex leapt from his chair and broke into a
totally embarrassing rendition of “Weeeeeee are the champ-ions, my fri-eeeend!”
“Alex! Shut it!” I hissed, running to grab his arm as the panic boiled up a little in my throat. He
laughed but let me pull him outside, saying, “To be honest I thought I’d be driving you around like Miss
Daisy for the rest of your life.”
I shot him a withering look.
“Hey, it’s over,” he said, punching me in the shoulder.
But this was just what needed to get done first.
My hands were shaking on the steering wheel. I started breaking several football fields before
the next stop-light. I could hear my heart in my ears like the wing-beats of a helicopter.
Why is this so much harder?
“Because it’s an hour away and you’re alone in the car,” I answered for myself. “But that
shouldn’t make a difference. You’re just driving along, in the car, like you did this morning.”
As far as Alex knew I was taking the car out for a victory drive. First I stopped at the post office,
where I ripped one of the lime green fliers with a picture of the preadolescent Lewis Epps from the
bulletin board. At the bottom was the name I was looking for: Duggar’s Farm in Epping, New
Hampshire. Lewis and I had landed in a cornfield in Epping so the farm seemed like a logical place to
start, especially since I was too chicken to call his house. I first needed proof Lewis was alive.
I was leery of reading directions from my cell phone while driving, but I promised myself I could
pull over if I needed to read when I wasn’t at a stoplight.
The light turned green and I barely inched forward. At this rate, it would take me twice as long
to get to Epping.
“The faster you drive now, the sooner it’s over,” I encouraged. I pressed gently on the
accelerator and turned up the stereo even though Remi Nicole no longer quite fit my mood. I wanted
company in the car.
…Or maybe that was the problem – I didn’t feel alone. I had the itching, sneaking, creeping
feeling that someone was lurking behind me in the backseat, no matter how many times I looked in the
rearview mirror.
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“Fuck off,” I muttered, glancing in the mirror again. Then, louder, “there’s no one back there,
Olivia! Snap out of it!” I pounded a palm against the steering wheel and started singing along again –
loud.
My voice guttered out as I saw the adorned sign signaling my turn. I slowed, passing a white
wooden gate and gravel road that welcomed tourists to the farm stand. There was a greenhouse, a
farmer’s market under a tent, and a sign for a petting zoo. A few cars were parked in front of the row of
sunflowers but I wasn’t looking for the main entrance. I tapped the accelerator and began surveillance
of the surrounding farmland.
There was a field of strawberries and a small apple orchard. A stray seagull wheeled overhead,
bombarded by two jealous sparrows. I took a right turn at the T-intersection and continued past a field
of what I guessed were young pumpkin plants, minded by tanned shirtless workers swinging hoes.
Then, more than two acres down the line, the corn field began. I saw a turn up ahead and cleared the
corner before I pulled over, screening my car from the view of any farmhands. The corn was already
chest-high.
I grabbed my small backpack from the front seat and exited the car. I was hit by a hot summer
gust like opening an oven door. The corn ruffled and whipped in the wind and I smelled the moist, bitter
scent of the earth, so different from the crispy, sour seaweed smell I loved.
I slipped my arms through my pack, pushed my sunglasses up my nose, and surveyed the length
of the field. The corn sprawled across several city blocks, ultimately backing up on young, brushy forest.
I was going to need a clue if I ever hoped to pick the right row. I started walking the dusty, pot-holed
road, looking for some evidence of the swarm of emergency vehicles that had descended a week before.
Then I saw the black crescent skid marks. I ran towards them, knelt beside them, placed my
hand on the piping hot pavement. My nose stung with the smoky smell of baking asphalt.
A scream of tires, a flash of red metal.
I withdrew my hand from the scene of the accident and looked back towards the cornfield. I
had found my row. I set off down the alley of stalks.
What was I looking for exactly? Any footprints I had left in the earth were gone. Did I expect to
find Lewis’s withered skeleton? A forwarding address?
No sooner had the thought flitted across my brain than I caught a glimpse of something blue
between the stalks. I jogged forward, weaving my head to keep my eyes on the blue box one row over.
But just when I drew parallel, the box seemed to disappear. I pushed myself between two stalks and
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stared at the ground where the box should have been. I glared at the earth, wondering if I had simply
seen a bluebird… or anything at all.
Then the wind blew and the dirt crumbled and shifted. And like the glimpse of the 3D image in a
Magic Eye picture the blue box appeared, flickering between the grains. I crouched and shoved my
hands into the soil, digging, trying to grip the corners of the somehow invisible box. I didn’t question my
sanity – I had already seen Linos in my bathroom mirror, after all. For now, I was willing to do whatever
it took to find Lewis – including believe in magic.
By the time my fingers stumbled across blue cardboard my hands were mealy with dirt and my
scalp was itchy with sweat. I still had to pick at the dirt around the sides before I could pry the box from
its hole. Then finally the shoebox was in my lap, moldering and damp on my legs. I hooked my fingers
under the lid and flipped it open.
A composition notebook sat on top, a name scrawled on the cover in familiar handwriting:
Lewis Epps
A tingle bristled from my scalp to my funny-bones.
I had the good sense to fish my phone from the backpack and check the time. Hours had passed
since Alex and I left this morning – I needed to get back home before my mother returned from work. I
replaced the spongy cardboard lid, picked the box up with two hands, and made my way back to the car.
I couldn’t look in the box while I was driving – that would be totally distracting and dangerous.
The box sat on the front seat, goading me like an annoying sibling on a long car ride. I found myself
staring at it during every stoplight, noting the shoe size (seven), the shoe color (red), the price ($16.49
on an orange sale tag).
When I finally stopped in the driveway I accidentally threw the car into reverse, letting the car
creep backwards several feet before I realized my mistake, hopped back in, and parked. Then I was
bounding in the front door and tripping on the stairs as I tried to simultaneously kick off my shoes.
I set the shoebox in the middle of my bed and ran back to close my bedroom door. Alex was
listening to something loud in the basement but I wanted to ensure I wouldn’t be disturbed. I tossed my
backpack at the foot of the bed then scurried onto the covers, drawing the shoebox between my knees.
I carefully removed the lid, set it by my feet, and began my investigation.
I opened the composition notebook to find the pages swollen with water damage, half of the
writing smeared away. I flipped to the next page, and the next, but the damage only worsened. Some
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of the journal seemed to have been filled with timetables, the rest with narrative, fragments of a Charles
Simic poem, and loose sketches that may have been pieces of the robot I saw at Lewis’s farmhouse. I
stopped arbitrarily on one page and tried to read.
…side effect. I found myself waiting behind
……I turned around. If Fofi says hallucinat…else am I to do? She’s helping me with
………glad I’m not in school. What a
…robot with my mind? Need to look online
I gave up.
I set the journal next to my right knee and pulled out the next item in the shoebox: a well-worn
leather jacket. I searched the pockets first, fuzzy and soft with wear, but withdrew only a broken black
shoelace and two pennies. Then I ran my hands along the lapels, still cool from lying underground, and
fingered the cuffs, where some dirt had caked in the seams. I knew it was silly but I slipped my arms
into the backwards jacket, collar sitting below my chin. I closed my eyes and breathed in the buttery
smell of leather, bitter earth, and just the slightest tang of sweat. My fingers peaked from the cuffs,
curling around the worn edges.
There were only three items left in the shoebox. First, a matchbox with the colors rubbed off. I
tapped the box open from the side and revealed a small stash of rattling red and blue pills. I snapped
the box back closed and slipped it underneath the journal, afraid of getting caught even though Alex was
occupied far below. Then I pulled out the two remaining items: a paper with printed directions and an
envelope from a newspaper subscription. The envelope gave me the Epps’s address, but I still wasn’t
ready to go knock on the front door. I flipped the envelope over to find a scrawled name: Zion’s Gate. I
held the directions up in my other hand. The first half was water damaged like the notebook but the
second half was intact, including the final line: Destination will be on the left: Zion’s Gate Church.
I held the two papers before me and considered. What was so important about Zion’s Gate
Church that Lewis buried the directions in a field? Did the church have something to do with his
confessed crime of “tormenting a little girl” – a crime I had already begun to doubt?
I could ask my mother to borrow her laptop to search the internet but then she’d want to know
what I was doing. Usually I didn’t mind the social and technological isolation of the beach house – I
wasn’t your normal teenage girl, seeking the totally-anxiety-inducing entanglements of online
melodrama. I preferred lying on the beach, reading a book or listening to my iPod, maybe boarding to
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get some ice cream or watching Buffy re-runs. But I had less than a week to solve this mystery. Maybe I
should go to the library, maybe even look for old newspaper articles about missing girls.
I started repacking the shoebox, reluctantly pulling the leather jacket from my shoulders, aware
that my mother would be coming home soon. I faltered when it came to hiding it all, ultimately shoving
it in the empty duffel bag in my closet.
No sooner had I closed the closet than my mother rapped on my bedroom door and stuck her
head in. I yelped and leapt backward several inches, crashing into the closed closet. Real sneaky, Olivia.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” my mother said, entering all the way and crossing her arms. I
threw a hand to my chest, trying to steady my breathing before I tumbled into a full-on panic attack. My
mother cocked an eyebrow.
“So. You got your driver’s license,” she said.
Oh. That. I tried to remind myself that the proper reaction to acing a driver’s test is pride.
There was no reason for me to be feeling sheepish.
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“What brought that on?” she asked, shifting her weight to one hip.
“Well,” I said, “I just wanted to… take control for once. I guess.”
She looked at me, waiting for more.
“I wanted to show you… I’m trying,” I added, referencing our conversation from yesterday.
She furrowed her brows. “Why are you acting like you’re hiding something?” she asked.
I had to stop myself from stepping away from the closet. “Why are you treating me like I did
something bad?” I countered.
She opened her mouth, then laughed once. “I have no idea,” she said, shrugging out of her
hostile posture. “I’m just surprised,” she continued, walking towards me for a hug. She squeezed me
once then backed up again. “We should totally do something to celebrate.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Something we used to do. How about eating at the Sun and Surf?” she offered.
I rolled my eyes. “It’ll be packed with sandy tourists.”
“So? We’re tourists more or less. And if we leave early, we can eat on the deck… Come on, it’s
such a perfect day!”
139
So I gave in, even though celebrating wasn’t the first thing on my mind. And somehow, between
the Fried Haddock ‘N’ Chips, the sunset on the far side of the restaurant and the ocean shhing and
shuddering just beyond the breakwater, I was having fun.
We bought ice cream cones – orange sherbert for me – for the twilight walk back along the
beach. Most of the tourists had packed up for the day and it was dog hour, so the sand was scattered
with labs, collies, and terriers, leaping at Frisbees and galumphing through the surf. Mom even took off
her flats, prompting Alex to chase her into the water with a piece of seaweed on a stick. He always was
one for the classics. When he came after me I just grabbed the slimy, mustard-colored greens and said,
“Knotted wrack, very terrifying. I want to be a marine biologist, remember?” and threw it in his hair.
A soggy tennis ball landed between my feet and a Jack Russell Terrier wove between my legs,
tail thumping. I reached down, ruffled the dog’s ears, then tossed the ball back to a waving owner.
I wasn’t feeling normal – I had traveled too far in two weeks to feel anything close to – but in the
moment I felt content. I had a purpose, at least in the short term: finding Lewis. And with my driver’s
license snug in my back pocket, I was finally making progress.
I looked down along the beach, towards the rocky cliffs that ended with Nubble. The lighthouse
flickered like Tinkerbelle, hovering on the edge of the sea.
Lewis must have buried that church address for a reason. Tomorrow I would make a visit.
I was able to modify the directions to the church so I could stay off the highway. Anyways
Kittery was closer to York than Epping, so I didn’t have too long a drive. For some stupid reason I had
pulled on Lewis’s leather jacket before I left, and I was a little hot even with the windows open. But it
was worth it – the grungy, war-torn leather made me feel stronger. There was a thicker skin between
me and whoever might hurt me.
It was a Saturday and I was surprised to see four cars in the parking lot. I always imagined
churches shutting down during the week. I parked close to the front, poised for a quick getaway if I
chickened out, then picked up my backpack from the front seat and exited the car. I slipped through
one of the glass doors and lingered, scanning fliers on a bulletin board next to the front door. Did Lewis
worship here?
“Hello, can I help you?”
I gasped and stuttered back. The blond man with the clerical collar reached out to steady me,
face softening with concern.
140
“I’m sorry I startled you!” he said, smiling. My brain raced to catch up.
“Uh – um,” I wheezed.
“I’m Pastor Dan,” he said, extending his right hand and bracing my shoulder with his left. I gave
him a perfunctory handshake. Then inspiration struck and I swung my backpack around to the front.
“Actually, you could help me,” I said, unzipping the pouch and pulling out the lime green flier. I
folded it so only Lewis’s picture showed. “Do you know this... guy?” I asked – ‘boy’ just didn’t sound
right. “The picture is kind of old, but his name is Lewis…”
The pastor perked up when I said the name.
“Why of course,” he said. “Are you a friend of the family?”
“A friend of Lewis,” I hedged, slipping the flier back into my pack.
The pastor composed a soft face. “I hope you can convey my condolences to Lewis.”
My heart was galloping in my ears. “Actually,” I said, “I was hoping you could help me find him,
to talk to him.” I pulled an apologetic face and bit my lip.
The pastor steepled his fingers before his lips, thinking. Then, “His sister is here today.” Lewis
had a sister? “She’s praying in the Reflection Chapel. If you wish to speak to her, you could wait here.”
For a moment I froze, unready to actually confront a member of Lewis’s family. I should have
done some research to figure out who I might encounter! Then I decided it was now or never. If I could
talk to a member of Lewis’s family alone, without raising suspicion, I might be able to find him today.
“Thank you,” I said, “that would be perfect.”
“Who should I say is here?” he asked.
“Livy,” I said, and instantly wondered if I should have given a fake name.
“Allow me just a moment,” he said, extending a hand to indicate I should wait where I stood. He
turned and walked back into the sanctuary. The sunshine pouring through the glass steeple lit his path.
He passed the glass altar and pressed open a pair of frosted glass doors. I heard murmuring.
The pastor reemerged, holding one of the glass doors open for me.
“She’d love to talk to you, Livy.”
I mounted the three stone steps to the sanctuary and tread down the carpeted aisle. I tried to
catch a glimpse of the person behind the frosted glass but the pastor’s shoulders blocked my view.
As I walked past he let me hold the door, then backed away saying, “May you find what you are
looking for. Peace be with you.” As the door closed I watched him meander down a side hallway,
presumably towards his office.
141
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the green and blue light of the stained glass windows.
There was a woman with dark curly hair sitting in a wooden chair, facing the small altar. But she wasn’t
looking at the cross – she was staring at me.
And she looked nothing like Lewis Epps.
“Nice coat,” she said. Her voice was sharp and clear. She must have recognized the jacket – her
eyebrows were raised.
“Thanks,” I said, still standing just inside the door.
“I’m Fofi,” she said, and stood up to offer her hand. But when she stood up she revealed what
had been sitting at her feet – a very familiar giant robot head, carved from melded colanders and with
inset pearl teeth. Except this robot head was spattered glistening red.
I looked at her offered hand and saw it was painted in red, too. Covered in… blood.
You’re hallucinating.
I closed my eyes and took one long deep breath.
“I’m Olivia,” I said, exhaling, and opened my eyes. I didn’t take her hand. She snorted and
shoved her still bloody hand in her jeans pocket.
“So what brings you to this church?” Fofi asked.
I have to get out of here.
“Looking for a friend,” I answered, words tight in my throat. “You?”
“Playing Lady MacBeth,” she answered cryptically. We stood in silence for a moment, gazes
locked. I couldn’t look away because I didn’t know what else I might see.
“I think I can help you find your… friend,” Fofi started again, unwrapping a piece of gum and
popping it into her mouth. I felt my face freeze as the blood from her fingers dripped onto her lips. “But
I need you to do something for me in return.”
My hand slipped to rest on the door handle, ready for an exit. She chewed with her mouth
open, tonguing the gum so she could stretch it between her teeth.
“He’s in the Portsmouth hospital,” Fofi continued. He’s alive. I felt a rush of relief I wasn’t
anticipating. But how did he get so far from Epping? “You’ll need the room number.” She reached for
my hand and I recoiled. She laughed, clicking a pen in her other hand. “Come on, it will help you
remember.” I let her grab my hand, horrified, and watched as blood smeared with the ink across my
palm. But when I drew my hand away, it was clean. I brushed it on my shorts anyway.
“And in return?” I asked.
142
She shrugged. “Just give him a message for me. Tell him – tell him to stay hidden.” She
stopped chewing, as if thinking, then added, “And tell him I messed up again.”
I nudged open the door behind me, backing away from the pool of blood that was trickling
across the floor towards my toes.
“And you might need these to do it,” she suddenly added. She reached into her pocket and
tossed me an opaque white Ziploc baggy. I bent to catch the bag with two hands, then stuffed it in
Lewis’s jacket pocket. Fofi gave me a mock salute. I flung open the doors and strode from the room,
barely staying my footsteps in the echoic sanctuary, then sprinted to the car.
I flipped through page after page, sitting on the floor beside my closet. Her name was
everywhere. Fofi. Fofi. Fofi Goldberg.
Please uncover my accomplice, Lewis had written.
Tell him I messed up, she said.
And now Fofi’s name was scrawled all over a journal Lewis had hid underground and her hands
were covered in blood.
I was too afraid to open the white baggy at a stoplight, paranoid I would be caught on traffic
camera with some sort of incriminating evidence in my lap. Now I reached into the pocket of Lewis’s
leather jacket, peeled open the bag’s seal, and peered at the contents within.
Sure enough, I found three round red pills.
I quickly resealed the bag, dug the blue shoebox from the duffel bag, and stuffed the pills in with
the other contraband. I re-zipped the duffel then piled an old towel and several shoes on top for good
measure. Then I closed the closet, drew my knees to my chest, and thought.
Something important had happened at Zion’s Gate. I had literally caught this Fofi red-handed,
but I wasn’t about to put faith in my new, occasionally-prophetic-but-most-likely-schizophrenic
hallucinations.
But then there were the pills…
Fofi had only given me red pills. A one-way ticket out of this world.
I tried to think of a logical reason why she wouldn’t give me any blue. Perhaps she thought
Lewis had plenty. Or she thought there was a viable market in blue pills. Or maybe she was a gobetween who had no idea what was in the bag.
…Or maybe she was a psychopath and didn’t want either of us to come back.
143
I uncurled my palm on top of my knee and looked at the room number Fofi had written there. I
had found what I was looking for, but now I had more questions than I began with.
I squeezed my palm shut. Lewis Epps was the lighthouse of constancy between all the worlds of
the past two weeks. The next step was to talk to him.
I had never visited a sick grandparent or schoolmate in the hospital so I based my expectations
on TV shows and movies. In the movies it always seems the receptionist turns the desperate lover or
cold hitman away at the front desk, saying they can’t divulge confidential patient information. In fact,
since I came during visiting hours, there wasn’t any resistance at all.
My own stay at the Exeter hospital near Epping was still crisp and green in my mind –the
cottony smell of disinfectant, twilight interior lighting, the pervasive buzzing of machines and
fluorescent lights like the high keen of a muted TV. This hospital was no different. I traced my hand
along the interior wall, avoiding eye contact and reminding myself that doctors don’t have the power to
imprison. My heart was galloping but I still wasn’t panicking. I was on a mission.
Lewis was in the long-term care unit, which made sense considering the condition I had last seen
him in. I heard the music from down the hall before I reached his room – Tchaikovsky’s first piano
concerto, though I didn’t know enough about music at the time to recognize it. The jubilant
introduction encouraged my entrance and I sped up, letting my hand slip from the wall. Everything
came down to finding him, to truly finding him for the first time. And this acceleration of my heart was –
excitement.
I traced my fingers along the plastic number plate outside his frosted door, hesitating for one
more moment, then turned the knob.
Lewis was in a hospital bed, barely a wrinkle beneath the sheets, tubes threading his arms,
bandages slung across his head, a broken leg. Unconscious.
And as I pushed the door all the way open, there was a man, sitting in a chair at the foot of the
bed.
He stood up, clearly as surprised by me as I was by him. My eyes darted to Lewis, machines
clicking with each breath, then back to the small man with glasses and a five o’clock shadow.
“Uh – can I – help you?” he asked. The music was still blaring.
My body was paralyzed in the war of fight or flight. If you leave now you’ll never know.
144
“I was, just, here to visit Lewis,” I said. I hadn’t run away. Just keep talking. “I’m kind of a friend
… from school.”
The man reached for an iPod connected to portable speakers, abruptly silencing the music. My
heart beat all the louder but still I stood my ground. I glanced again at Lewis, who seemed paler and
waxier with each look.
“I didn’t realize Lewis had friends – at school.” The way the man stuttered made it sound like
Lewis didn’t get out much. Like me. “How did you hear about the… accident?”
Accident?
I shrugged. “I don’t know – the news just gets around.”
I was careful to take slow breaths. I waited for him to recognize Lewis’s jacket, but maybe he
was too distracted to notice.
“Please, sit down,” the man said, offering the plastic seat next to his. I hesitated, then slung my
backpack from my shoulders and sat on the edge of the chair. The man ran a hand through his hair and
then slumped down next to me so both of us were staring at Lewis. In the moments of tense silence I
noticed details beyond the heart monitor and music: the University of New Hampshire fleece blanket
tucked under Lewis’s arms, a toothbrush and deodorant in a plastic grocery bag hanging on the
doorknob, a stack of what looked like ungraded papers beneath a vase of daisies on the last unoccupied
chair.
The man caught me staring. “They were his mother’s favorites,” he said. I didn’t see any other
get-well-soon balloons or gifts. I felt the tug of an incoming wave of some emotion.
“I’m surprised he could sleep through the music,” I said, although as soon as I said it, I knew it
was wrong. The man just shrugged.
Now I knew Lewis was in a coma.
I sat on my hands to hide their trembling.
Then suddenly the man brightened. “I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Lewis’s father,
Andrew Epps.” He stuck a hand between us.
“Livy,” I responded, taking his offered hand. I noticed his eyes were keen and sparkly, but laden
with crow’s-feet and low brows – Lewis’s eyebrows. I looked away and shoved my hand back
underneath my leg.
“So how do you know Lewis?” asked Mr. Epps.
145
“I saw him playing the piano in the music department,” I answered, surprised by my own
fluidity. I hoped the lie would stick – simple but specific. When I saw Lewis’s father was waiting for
more I demurred, “I didn’t really know him that well.”
Andrew Epps shook his head once, eyes distant. “You know his mother played,” he said. “And
one day Lewis just decided to sit down at the bench and figure it out. He was always like that – things
were just too easy for him.”
Though I had only known Lewis a few days, I had never once thought his life seemed ‘easy.’ I
glanced again at Lewis and thought, he certainly hasn’t made things easy for me. But his father was still
talking.
“Anyway he got the music from her. I don’t know if he remembers that – there’s so much about
her… I should’ve told him about her – about her death.”
His voice caught. Should I touch his shoulder? Would that just encourage the tears? I didn’t
want to hug a stranger. My heart was accelerating again and my face was taut with fear and…
something else. I needed to cut to the chase.
“Do you mind if I ask what happened?” I prompted.
“What – to his mother?” he asked, leaning back, confused.
“No – to, uh, Lewis,” I whispered back.
“Oh.” He smoothed a hand over his forehead. “To be honest, I’m not… sure. But it ended with
a car accident. He drove right past a guard rail and into the Oyster River. They think he probably passed
out at the wheel.”
We both stared at the wrinkle Lewis’s body made in the sheets. You can’t stay here too long or
you get sick. I believed Lewis now. And I believed he would’ve passed out if he was trying to drive – but
how the hell did he get in a car in the first place?
“Well, I just wanted to come by and offer my… support,” I said, standing up. “I hope…” He
doesn’t die? I was terrible at this. I took a step back towards the door, backpack in hand.
“Thank you for stopping by, Olivia,” Mr. Epps said, and he reached out to touch my arm. I
slipped my hair behind my ear, nodding, and stepped backwards from his touch.
“Tell Lewis I stopped by, if…” I didn’t finish.
“Sure,” Andrew said. “And hey, stop by again some time. It was nice to meet you.” But I didn’t
like talking to strangers – I never wanted to come back to this room again. I rounded out the door and
fled the hospital halls, the strains of Tchaikovsky chasing me all the way back to the waiting room.
146
I realized my face was tingling with the heat of unshed tears. I busted past the waiting room
doors and jogged to the car, fumbling with the zippers of my bag, looking for the keys.
I didn’t realize how I had been completely counting on Lewis telling me the answers until I saw
him there, comatose, brittle and flat as a leaf. I needed someone to tell me I wasn’t insane, that I hadn’t
made up a crazy story to explain a really bad LSD trip. Someone to explain the blood spattered in a
church, to promise me that a little girl wasn’t still out there somewhere, kidnapped or worse, and… to
teach me how to fight Linos.
My body flushed with adrenaline and cold sweat at the very thought of him. I could feel my
bowels speed up with stress and I slipped an arm around my chest, as if I could hold myself together. It
was the first time I’d thought about Linos directly since I’d come back to the real world.
I’d reached the car so I threw the backpack on the hood and closed my eyes.
Breathe in, two, three, four, hold…
The vision of Lewis unresponsive on the hospital bed filled my mind. And swift on its heels came
the irrational thought, Now he’ll never kiss me again.
My deep breathing collapsed into a sob.
I let myself sit in the car in the hospital parking lot for a little while, just crying. I knew that if I
let myself carry on long enough I’d really lose it; I was a snowball of trauma with enough momentum to
roll down the hill and crash into an insane asylum at the bottom. I had to find something to combat all
the wild conclusions and hazy fears leaping to mind.
You’re crazy. You never even met Lewis; you’re just one bad trip away from schizophrenia. If
you’re going to lose it anyway, why not just get it over with?
The image of Lewis frowning at the beach sunshine, hands in his pockets.
Just be thankful he had charity enough to save you from Linos. He’d never want an emotional
retard like you in the real world anyway.
The memory of throwing up on the sidewalk outside Mary Prince’s birthday party, age eight,
skin flushed with the heat of anxiety.
Maybe you should seize this moment as your last hurrah – romance and adventure in a dreamworld, followed by merciful suicide.
My mother, trembling with tears as I huddled on her bedroom floor.
What now? Pretend it never happened?
147
I roughly wiped my eyes on my sleeves and scrubbed my face with my hands.
Think, Livy! Step up!
There was one other person who could answer some of my questions about what had happened
to me.
I had crossed back over into Kittery Maine when I saw the sign for the Rice Public Library – it was
closer than driving all the way home. I followed the quick turns past yellow Colonials and a gas station
pizza joint, arriving at a formidable brick Victorian with tall skinny windows like a prison or a cathedral. I
pulled into the parking lot and jogged past the park greenery, eager to finally get in touch with the
internet.
I punched Fofi Goldberg’s name into Google and started searching.
She was a famous psychologist – or neurologist – or did she have a PhD in both? She was
interviewed a few times by psychology magazines and had published a book with a title I didn’t
understand. She didn’t seem to have a criminal record, but I wasn’t sure that sort of information was
available on Google. No resume or Facebook page, no faculty webpages. All I had left was an address
listed on a white-pages website with questionable veracity. An address, ironically, in York Beach, Maine,
an address close enough to home that I might have been able to make it there on my board. But I took
the car, new page of printed directions resting on the front seat.
When I drove past her house I couldn’t stop – I couldn’t dare to. I only dared slow long enough
to count the cop cars: four, including the unmarked sedan.
148
POSTSCRIPT
“Detective Bower? This is Agent Gutierrez with the FBI.”
“I wasn’t aware my superiors contacted the FBI about the Bellman case.”
Gutierrez paused. “They haven’t. I was put through to you regarding assistance on executing a
search warrant and probable arrest.”
“I’m sorry. Run that by me again.”
“Do you mind if I ask where your partner is?” Detective Bower said. She was sitting in the
passenger seat of Agent Gutierrez’s rented sedan.
Gutierrez snorted, considered her answer. “He had to recuse himself.”
They were parked four houses down from Goldberg’s residence, a modified Cape a few blocks
from the beach. It wasn’t a large house, but the beach location would increase the value considerably.
Gutierrez had requested a quick scan of Goldberg’s financials and determined her home was the most
likely location for a lab. The only other possibility was a small yacht. Gutierrez didn’t have the
manpower to dedicate to surveillance, so if the lab wasn’t in Goldberg’s home, hopefully some clues
were. At any rate, Simon expressed the belief that Fofi did her cooking at home.
The sun oozed through the windshield, baking the rubber steering wheel even though Gutierrez
had the air conditioning on full blast. Detective Bower had suggested opening the windows to the ocean
breeze, but Gutierrez hated the pungent, briny funk of the New England coast.
“Okay, here we go,” Detective Bower said. A Toyota pulled into Goldberg’s driveway. A small
woman with dark curls emerged, purse slung over her shoulder. Goldberg – Gutierrez recognized her
instantly from the newspaper photo.
Goldberg seemed to fish for her keys a long time. She looked down the street towards the
unmarked car, and for a moment Gutierrez thought they were made, but then Goldberg finally found a
key, shoved it into the deadbolt, and disappeared inside.
Gutierrez started the car.
“You ready? I don’t know if she’s a flight risk,” Gutierrez said.
“I’ll be around back,” said Detective Bower.
Gutierrez glanced in her passenger’s lap.
“Is that a taser?”
“I believe there’s always a good time to use a taser,” Bower answered.
149
Gutierrez pushed her sunglasses up her nose and accelerated the last few yards before a swift
stop in Goldberg’s driveway. She and Detective Bower popped out of the car. Gutierrez strode to the
front door, one hand on her sidearm.
Three knocks. “Ms. Goldberg, this is the FBI.”
No response.
“Ms. Goldberg I have a legal search warrant for this address.”
She unholstered her gun and turned the knob.
Pale blue walls, big windows, chic cottage furnishings and a gas fireplace in a great room that
connected living room to kitchen. Not to mention Bunsen burners, glassware, plastic tubs, taped
cardboard boxes, several blinking hard drives hooked up to a plasma TV, wires running along the ceiling
and taped flush with the carpet.
“STOP! POLICE!”
Gutierrez ran towards Bower’s growl, busting out the back door in time to see Goldberg stumble
to the grass, back sizzling with current. Bower, taser still in hand, jogged to Goldberg’s side. She placed
a knee on Goldberg’s back while she pulled the cuffs from her belt. Goldberg’s eyes were watering a
little but she hadn’t passed out. She was breathing hard.
“Ms. Goldberg, you are under arrest for –”
“What the fuck!” Goldberg’s eyes swiveled to Gutierrez, who was unimpressed by the outburst.
“Do you really think I’m stupid enough to commit a crime in my own home? That’s an orgy of evidence
in there – do you really think I’d leave all that out –”
“Oh, so you’ve been framed,” Detective Bower crooned. “I understand, honey. Now come on,
stand up.”
Gutierrez continued. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used
against you in a court of law.”
Goldberg tried to spit some grass from the corner of her mouth, aiming at Gutierrez’s shined
FBI-issue oxfords. “You dumb bitch,” she yelled. “You’re just getting played – the boys in charge are just
using you to screw me. Just using you – do you really think they’ll promote you for this? You won’t get
shit. They’re just playing us pussies off each other. You, too, Billy Ray.”
Bower yanked Goldberg forward by the arm, walking towards the side of the house. “Come on,
you’re gonna cool off in my back seat.”
“Call in some officers to secure the scene,” Gutierrez said.
150
“Did Walter call you?” Goldberg called back over her shoulder. “Or did he send his pet Peter
Simon?”
Gutierrez knew her expression was hidden behind the mirrored lenses of her aviators, so she
turned to look at Goldberg. The woman laughed, then, seeing she had Gutierrez’s attention, and
quirked one mirthless smile before she turned back around.
The back of Gutierrez’s neck was itching, and it wasn’t just the midsummer sun. She jangled the
change in her pocket, weighing the options. She had to stay for the search, keep an eye on Bower’s
officers. It would be hours before a team could come up from the Boston regional office. How much did
she trust Detective Bower?
Gutierrez made a snap decision. Gutierrez called, “Detective Bower, I need to leave – forty-five
minutes tops. Can you cover for me?”
Detective Bower squinted. “Did you get a call?”
“I just – have a bad hunch.”
“Alright,” Bower said.
Gutierrez was already jogging to the car.
The motel was ten minutes away if she hit all the green lights. She had left Simon there,
watching the Food Network, not an hour before.
She left the car running when she banged on Simon’s door.
“Simon – come on, open up.”
She pressed her ear to the door but couldn’t hear the television. She’d left him without a car –
surely he wouldn’t just wander off on foot?
She returned to the car and killed the engine, then jogged to the office.
She flashed her badge at the concierge. “I need you to key me into 4A – it’s an emergency.”
The man behind the counter scratched his beard and adjusted his Red Sox cap. “Ayuh, I cahn do
thaht, but the gentleman stayin’ they-ah checked out about an hour ago.”
“I’d like to see it anyway,” Gutierrez said.
She followed the Mainer out the office, hand on her gun when he unlocked the room. He
pushed open the door, gesturing for her to enter. Gutierrez swept past him.
The TV was off. The bed was made. No monogrammed garment bag. She turned into the
bathroom, sure she would find towels in the waste basket and unwrapped toothbrushes on the sink.
151
Nothing. The waste basket didn’t even have a plastic liner. The shower had been cleaned and
smelled of chlorine.
Agent Peter Simon had disappeared.
152
CHAPTER 3
“We may be young, but we’re not powerless. We play by their rules long enough and it becomes our
game.”
- Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I drove carefully, minding my turn signals and staying five miles below the speed limit. I had to
think.
I wondered if the cops were arresting Fofi Goldberg because of whatever crime was perpetrated
against a small girl. Or maybe the cops simply caught Fofi with the same LSD derivate I had hidden in my
bedroom closet.
I kept on glancing in the rearview mirror, convinced I would catch sight of red and blue lights
following me. My eyes were red – would they think they were bloodshot from drugs?
My thoughts turned to Lewis, unconscious in a hospital bed.
Then Fofi’s words returned to me: “you might need these to do it.” And then she had thrown
me a packet of red pills.
Could she mean that Lewis was conscious in the other world without taking the pills?
I evaluated the option as I navigated the last streets before home.
There were people in the otherworld who could answer a lot of my questions – people besides
Lewis. It might be my last chance for answers. And if I could wake up Lewis, I owed it to him to try. He
had saved my life – and for that I owed him a lot of good will.
Sure I was afraid of Linos. But this wasn’t about me, anymore. This had become a lot larger
than just me and my helmet-wearing, chap-lipped, paranoiac mental baggage. I slammed my hand
against the steering wheel, encouraging the anger. Of all the emotions I had felt in the last hour, it was
the only one that made me feel strong.
It was easy to play normal at home. I just stayed quiet. Mom busted out the old propane grill
and crouched on the back lawn to barbecue hotdogs for dinner. Alex spent the half hour before we ate
blowing up zombies with his old Playstation. I took my sketchbook and a dull pencil out to the back
deck, curled up on a chair against the Atlantic wind, and tried to distract myself by drawing the seagulls
that pecked and preyed in the tide pools of our rocky beach. My unconscious mind steered the tip,
though, and soon the jagged rocks and swirled waves outlined Lewis’s heavy brow and gray eyes, or his
sour smirk, or his wind-buffeted frame skinny and elegant as a blade of sea grass. I realized I longed to
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talk to him. It seemed like if he could only open his mouth and speak my mind would clear and my heart
would rise from the pit of my stomach.
Alex went out with friends after dinner. My mother caught me on the stairs before I
disappeared to my bedroom for the night.
“You okay, Livy?” she asked. She had her reading glasses on the tip of her nose. Did she sense
the reticence? Were my hands shaking a little at dinner?
I nodded and tucked my hair behind my ear. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m gonna go read for a while,
probably go to sleep early. I’m still not one-hundred percent.”
“Alright,” she said, “I’ll just be reading over contracts in my bedroom if you need anything.”
I gave a half nod and scampered away. She’d probably turn her light out around ten thirty,
manila folders tossed on the empty space in bed next to her, glasses dangling from her hand. Alex, on
the other hand, wouldn’t get home until after midnight. One thing was certain: I was not taking the pills
in this house. With my luck I’d wake up to Linos dragging me by my hair.
I dug Lewis’s leather jacket from the closet, then picked out one red pill and two blue – just in
case, for Lewis – to zip into the front pocket. I looked at the mini backpack at the foot of my bed,
evaluating. The tranqs and worry stone inside weren’t weapons I could use in the other world. I
unzipped the pack and pulled out my iPod. Then I plugged in the earbuds and curled up on my bed. I
had to wait to leave until my mother fell asleep.
Remember a time on the beach.
It was one of the favorite relaxation exercises I had on my iPod. Totally corny and hypnotic
synthesizers echoed behind the alto voice. Yes, people, I am a freak.
Remember the warm sand sinking between your toes. Maybe you feel a cool ocean breeze.
Remember the waves that sound like breathing. In, and out. In, and out.
It was always easy for me to slip into my memory of the beach, but for this exercise I was always
alone. No vacationing baby boomers playing the Beatles on an old tape deck, no toddlers crying, no
teenagers shrieking and flirting in the waves. Just me, standing in the sun-shimmering surf, the sound of
wind and water in my ears.
The sunlight warms your whole body. You are safe here, and as the warmth sinks from the tip of
your head to the tip of your toes you feel the connection between your body and the earth below you.
You are completely grounded. The warmth starts at your scalp, then spreads to your forehead and your
eyelids. Your mouth and jaw relax. The warmth spreads to your neck, then your shoulders…
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Sometimes in my imagination I was lying down in the sand, feeling the waves rush up my sides,
tickle me under my arms, and then tug back at my skin. I used to wander in my imagination – wade
deeper into the surf, jog along the beach, or explore the rocky coast – but as I spent more time with the
exercise I realized that part of the point was to stay still, in one place, and just focus on the sensations
without searching for more.
Now as you breathe in you also take in the positive, healing strength of the sunlight that is
bathing your body. And when you breathe out, you expel all your fears and negativity. Right now they
can not touch you.
And at this point I always inserted my own mantra: I am an island. I’m not sure what inspired
the saying, but to me it meant that no one had the power to really get to me. No one could truly touch
the sentient, emotional core that gave me my self.
I stood alone on the coast of a small island, sunshine in my hair and ocean air in my lungs, and I
was strong.
I opened my eyes. The relaxation exercise had ended a long time ago and I had just kept on
deep breathing, imagining my island. I lifted the iPod still loosely grasped in my hand and checked the
time – 10:43 p.m.
I plucked the earbuds from my ears, shimmied from the bed, and grabbed my longboard from
where it rested against the dresser. Slowly I turned the knob on the bedroom door, wary of the snaps
and groans of an old house.
All the lights were out. I could hear the rush of the waves outside the open bathroom window,
the peepers in the pines, and the fridge turning on downstairs.
I crept down the stairwell, not daring to even pause outside my mother’s closed bedroom, and
slipped out the front door. The night was cold and I was glad for the skinny jeans and leather jacket. I
jogged across the front lawn and started a trek down the road – I’d give it a hundred meters or so before
I put down the board. The rumble could get pretty loud once the wheels hit the pavement.
Then I dropped my board and started to build momentum.
I didn’t have an exact spot in mind, but if I traveled inland the roads became more densely
forested. All the houses were white or gray, pops of yellow light gleaming from windows. The black
trees loomed over the streets, drawing stripes on the pavement. I fell into a familiar rhythm, rocking
from heel to toe, weaving my way forwards without taking my feet from the board.
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Just an errand, I told myself. The relaxation exercise had disciplined my mind and body but I
was still tense and extra alert. There was no need for me to see Linos tonight; I was looking for Lewis. I
might not even find him this time. All these things I told myself, expertly dancing their circuitous routes
around my fears.
I passed a particularly dark thicket of trees and abruptly leapt from my board, chasing after it as
we both ran out of momentum. Then I picked it up by the trucks and jogged back to the spot. One
more glance down the street and then I plunged into the forest, crack-snapping and hacking my way
into the brush. I stopped only a few meters in – I was wearing all black and didn’t think I’d be visible
from the street. I sat down with crossed legs, unzipped the pocket of Lewis’s leather jacket, and pulled
out the pills. I held them in my open palm towards the moonlight, careful to pick out the one red. My
hands were shaking a little. As I stuffed the other two back into the pocket I realized I had forgot to
bring water.
“Bottom’s up,” I muttered.
I placed the red pill on my tongue and swallowed. I could feel it going down like a lifesaver
candy. Then I leaned back and closed my eyes, unwilling to see the freak show of hallucinations before
the transition. I squeezed my board to my chest, determined to take it with me and glad to have
something to hold on to, even if it wasn’t as cuddly as a teddy bear.
I am an island, I am an island, I chanted to myself. I could hear my heart whooshing in my ears
and see flashes of color on my eyelids. The peepers seemed to slow down, warbling the soundtrack to a
science fiction movie. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter.
And then it was like waking up. I wasn’t aware of having fallen asleep, but suddenly I was
opening my eyes and the world was back to normal – or the peepers were, anyway, and besides a small
headache I wasn’t experiencing any unusual sensations.
I sat up and realized I was still clutching my board. I eased my grip, tucking the board under one
arm, and lumbered into a standing position. The wind rushed, sending shadows flying. I crunched
towards the street, tugging a leaf or two from my hair, and then broke onto the open road.
I stood half-crouched in the shadows and examined the length of the road for any sign of
visitors. Could Linos sense that I had arrived? Time to move.
I dropped my board to the pavement and started riding towards Long Sands Beach. It wasn’t
long before the trees thinned, making way for marsh cottages and trailer parks. I kicked hard, increasing
my speed, and began the descent down the final hill before the beach.
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The strip on Long Sands twinkled like a length of Christmas lights. The streetlights glowed, the
big hotels blazed, and the doors of smaller inns were lit by historic lanterns. Eleven o’clock was too late
for most of the seaside ice cream shoppes, but teenagers still lingered on the sidewalks, eating fried
dough and sharing cokes. The bars were still open, too, leaking orange light, drunk fisherman, and the
muffled sounds of a baseball game. What was unexpected, however, were the stragglers in their
pajamas, wandering down alleyways and winking in and out of existence like ghosts. A brunette
stepped out of a diner doorway completely naked, though she seemed unaware. Next to her a man in
striped pajamas, polished black shoes, and briefcase in hand, summoned a yellow taxicab out of a black
fog. The visitors spoke with the locals, leaned down to pet a fisherman’s mut, and ordered food from
the sidewalk vendors. The people looked like they were living their dreams – and with a lurch I realized
my mother might be among them. I had to keep moving.
I made my way towards the public bathrooms about halfway down the beach, where there was
still a working payphone. I was traveling fast but took in every face I passed, noticed every shadow
stirring in the alleys. As I neared the cement building a man wandered into the circle of light cast by a
lamppost. He was mumbling to himself and had to lean on the post before walking. I slowed, then
picked up my board, loitering a few yards away. The wind was hard off the ocean and I tucked one of
my hands into the opposite armpit, trying to keep the fingers from going numb. I looked back over my
shoulder for any followers. At last the man turned and ambled away. I trotted up to the payphone set
into the concrete wall and rested my board at my feet.
You could argue that what I was about to do was pretty stupid, but I didn’t have a better plan.
So I picked up the receiver and dialed 411, hoping that where I had a will this magical world would
provide.
“Information. How can I help you?”
I was surprised that I had made contact with another human being, but then again, I doubted
the phone system in this world obeyed the laws of physics and economics I was used to.
“Um, I was wondering if you could give me the phone number for Marie Antoinette… the, uh,
Queen of France?”
“Just a moment please.”
I was expecting the operator to return to the line, but instead I heard ringing. The operator had
connected me directly.
Then, “Hello?”
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A pause. “Hello?”
“Hello? Who is this?”
No French accent. I stuttered, surprised. “Um, this is Olivia Bellman calling for Marie
Antoinette.”
The phone crackled with a heavy sigh. “Oh. You. We thought you might be calling. This is
Molly. Hang on – I’ll get Antoine.”
The phone clunked against a hard surface. I could hear a heavy dance beat in the background.
The wind picked up again and I turned my back to the sea, rubbing one hand on the opposite arm for
warmth. I scanned the opposite side of the street. A block down a man exited the second floor of a
motel, leaned on the balcony, and lit up a cigarette. Nubble Light flashed like lightning across the black
waves, briefly illuminating a white zeppelin hovering over the bay.
Someone picked up the phone again. “Ayup it’s Molly again. She says we’re close enough we’re
going to come pick you up.”
“Close enough? Where are you?”
“We’re on the Wendameen. You still in York?”
“Yes.”
“We’re a little north of York Harbor. Just stay by the Sun and Surf Restaurant. We’ll find you.”
And then she hung up.
We’re on the Wendameen. Did she mean they were on a ship?
The Sun and Surf was another length down the beach. I set my board down, already eager to
get out from under the light of the public bathrooms. I kicked off and tried to think of a good place to
hide until Molly arrived. The Sun and Surf sat on a pile of rocks that cut into the beach like a
breakwater. A brightly lit gray motel complex occupied the other side of the street. The best I could do
was swoop into the empty restaurant parking lot and choose a concrete picnic table with a clear view
north and south, beach and road. A girl was playing hopscotch on the sand but she was crying; her legs
were sinking into the sand. I bounced my knees compulsively, working off adrenaline and trying to keep
warm. Any time I heard footsteps approaching my thighs tensed, ready for flight.
I first noticed a little rowboat in the flash of Nubble Light, and then it took several seconds
before my eyes could readjust to the dark. The boat bobbed in the black waves, growing from the size
of a peanut to the size of a shoe in the span of a minute. I stood up from the picnic table, board in hand,
and started scrambling down the rocky incline to the sand.
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My shoes hit the sand with a hiss. The tide was out so it was a good fifty yards before I hit the
gleaming packed sand right before the surf. Someone with a long braid leapt out of the rowboat into
the waves and started pulling the boat towards the shore. She wasn’t getting very far.
“Molly?” I called. Sure enough, the woman looked up from her work and yelled back, “Well,
don’t make me stand here, then.”
I hesitated, but it was clear she intended me to wade into the water. So I would get wet – big
deal. I had the foresight to take of Lewis’s jacket lest water seep into the pocket that contained the pills.
Then I held the jacket and the board over my head and waded out.
As soon as I stepped into the surf the ice water gushed into my shoes, making my toes sparkle
with pain. I sloshed forward, gritting my teeth against the cold that rushed up the inside of my jeans,
numbing my thighs. I was hit with one more swell that soaked my armpits before I was able to toss the
board and jacket into the rowboat. Molly was a full head taller than me and held the opposite side
steady while I vaulted awkwardly into the boat. I landed with a squelch and scrambled onto the slender
wooden plank that served as seating. I didn’t see Molly’s graceful landing but heard her pulling the oars
from the hull.
I was convulsing with shivers. Was there a way to magic my clothes dry? It was worth a try. I
closed my eyes and tried to block the sensation of soaked cotton cleaving to every inch of my skin.
Instead I imagined the crisp, airy, warm feeling of jeans fresh from the dryer, then a shirt to match.
I half succeeded. My shoes were still sopping wet but I had a dry shirt and jeans. I picked up
Lewis’s jacket, laid it on the bench beside me, and started unlacing my shoes. I looked up and realized
Molly had intelligently worn a wetsuit. Her corded arms pulled hard against the waves, steering us out
to sea.
She saw me watching and said, “We have dry clothes on the schooner you could probably
wear.”
In the distance I saw a gleaming white sliver with a series of triangular sails.
“Is that the Wendameen?” I asked.
Molly didn’t have to look over her shoulder to answer, “Yes.”
As we approached the wooden yacht I heard the beat of LMFAO bouncing across the waves. I
looked back towards the beach one more time. As the silver crescent thinned and shrank I felt my
muscles relax a little. Once I was traveling on the schooner I would be farther than ever from Linos. The
rowboat rose and fell with each swell, rocking like an oversized cradle.
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“Do you guys have a phone on the ship?” I asked, turning back.
Molly looked down her nose at me. “Ever heard of a cell phone?” she asked.
“Oh.” I guess there wasn’t any law forbidding the Queen of France from enlisting modern
technology.
I placed my unlaced shoes in a pile on top of Lewis’s jacket. Molly was whistling and flexing her
feet, which I saw were bare like mine. Behind her the Wendameen grew larger, until I could see a few
figures dancing on the golden decks, cocktails in hand. Someone took a running leap for the edge of the
ship and dove into the ocean.
“Alloooooo!” someone called, and I saw a curly blond waving from the port side of the ship. In
hot pink neoprene bathing suit and ikat flares it could only be Marie Antoinette.
Molly steered the rowboat next to a rope ladder hanging over the side of the schooner. I
clambered up the side like a monkey, bare toes gripping the cords, then reached back for my board,
shoes, and Lewis’s jacket, which Molly handed me. She pushed off from the ship with an oar and
steered towards the stern, where presumably she would secure the rowboat.
Suddenly I was spun around and attacked with a kiss on each cheek.
“Ah, dear Olivia, I am so glad our last meeting ‘ad an ‘appy ending!”
Marie pushed me back and took a cocktail from a male model in a speedo.
“Lemonade? Iced Tea? Something stronger?” she asked.
I shook my head, damp hair flicking my jaw. “Actually, I’d like to talk to you if that’s alright. You
said you were… expecting a call?”
Marie made a face over her drink, then cleared her throat. “Ah, yes, perhaps we should…” She
gestured to the fore of the schooner.
I followed, ducking under the boom and maneuvering around the hatch. The schooner was
probably only seventy feet, but Marie Antoinette had two dozen friends on board and in the water. We
passed a pale black man in buckled shoes performing magic tricks with a deck of cards, a man in swim
trunks with bushy brown hair that looked suspiciously like Don McLean, and of course one of Marie’s
coon cats crouched on a mast with a switching tail. Although the bow didn’t really offer privacy, our
voices would be drowned out by the music pumping from the boom box on the bulkhead. Marie turned
her back so she could rest her elbows on the railing. I still clutched my board and wet clothes,
wondering if I should set them down somewhere.
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“I’m looking for Lewis – well, you probably know him best as Elliot,” I said. The last song
stopped and a Depeche Mode song started.
Marie flipped her hair in the wind. “Tristabel said you would come looking for ‘im.”
“Who’s Tristabel?” I asked, completely sidetracked.
Marie looked at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Ellie’s doppelganger of course.”
I was starting to slowly catch up. “Doppelganger?” I prompted, heart pounding.
Marie sighed, then pitched the rest of her cocktail into the ocean. “Like Linos.” The hair on the
back of my neck prickled and I tossed an involuntary glance towards the shore. “You magicians. Richard
Potter likes to play at being one of you,” she nodded towards the black man doing card tricks, “but zee
real things are so much more complicated. You pop into our world and you give birth to all zees
baggage… I would regret getting involved with you – except you are so much fun.” She flashed a
menacing smile.
My head was spinning. I clutched my board tighter to my chest – I didn’t care that the wet
shoes were soaking my shirt.
“How did you – how do you know?” I asked.
She waggled her brows. “Ellie promised me some tricks in exchange for a special… acquisition.”
There was a wolf whistle from the far side of the schooner. I looked in time to see Molly Ockett
slither out of the water, then flip-off the men catcalling. She strode to us, squeezing out her braid as she
walked.
“You asking for Elliot?” she asked, stopping a few feet from our tête-à-tête. I nodded, still
scrambling to grasp that Lewis had, well, a Linos – a doppelganger – of his own. Molly sighed and
squinted towards the south. “Should we weigh anchor then?” She was addressing Marie.
Marie nodded. “Eet will take an ‘our or so – we might as well.”
Molly turned, placed two fingers in her mouth, and gave a sheer whistle. “Let’s go!” she
ordered, and the swimmers obediently flocked towards the ship.
“Where are we going?” I asked Marie.
“Zee Isles of Shoals. Smuttynose Island, to be precise. That eez where Tristabel told us you
could find Ellie.”
Molly took charge of the wheel and yelled orders at the partiers to fish the anchor and slacken
braces and sheets. I gripped the bow. Marie snapped her fingers and the speedo man reappeared with
another cocktail.
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“How did Tristabel know I would come looking?” I asked.
Marie shrugged. “She eez Ellie’s keeper. Or vice versa.”
“But if she’s like Linos, why would she want me to help Lewis – Elliot?” I persisted.
“Maybe she eez not like Linos,” Marie pointed out, weighing the option with two hands. The
schooner was moving, dashing against the waves and cutting a swift line south. The Isles of Shoals were
split down the middle, half in New Hampshire, half in Maine. I knew it would take very little time for us
to arrive at Smuttynose.
…And then do what? Carry on with my plan of finding Lewis and try to bring him back to the
real world? Would I have to fight off Tristabel, like Lewis fought off Linos?
Then another thought occurred to me. I swept my hair from my face, grasping it in a fist. “How
come I never saw her – Tristabel?” I asked Marie.
At this Marie’s face darkened. She looked out at the starlit crests of the black waves. “Zee
longer Ellie stayed ‘ere, zee longer I knew ‘im, zee… stronger Tristabel became. Eh, bigger.” Marie
gestured unhelpfully with her hands.
I asked Marie, “What do you mean bigger?”
She swirled her Martini glass, a quizzical look on her face. “I can not think of zee English words.
Elle se transformait en croquemitaine.”
The French did nothing to help me.
Why didn’t Lewis tell me about her? I wanted to ask the question, but it seemed petulant and
demanding. It wasn’t in my nature to be pushy, and there wasn’t a good reason for Lewis to share his
whole life story with me anyway. On the other hand, it would’ve been nice if he just came straight out
and told me that Linos was the embodiment of my neurosis and was secretly preparing a prison-slashtorture-chamber for me. Lewis had been keeping a lot of secrets.
I finally settled on a question to ask Marie. “Should I be afraid of Tristabel?”
Marie gave me the clearest of blue stares. Then, at last, “Je ne sais pas. She was always friendly
with me, but we knew each other only briefly.”
The Isles of Shoals appeared first as a distant glimmer on the ocean. Then as we approached I
could distinguish the metric notches of light that were the windows of the historical Appledore Hotel.
Appledore Island, twinkling pleasantly and no doubt full of famous tourists from Ralph Waldo Emerson
to Celia Thaxter, was not our destination tonight. The Wendameen was headed for a desolate spit of
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rock lurking somewhere in the inky night beyond Appledore. Smuttynose was so dark, in fact, that I
didn’t realize we had arrived until the white surf caught the moonlight and the rocky coast loomed
before us. I stared out at the black strip of rock, looking for any sign of life. I could only barely make out
the silhouette of a shack in the distance.
Molly was giving orders again. I could hear the screeching, whining, claxon calls of the seagulls
the nested all over Smuttynose. Marie, who had disappeared below for a few minutes, climbed from
the hatch with a pair of galoshes.
“’Ere, Livy, I think zese will fit you,” she said. I had forgotten about my bare feet. I took the
boots and mechanically slipped my feet into them.
“Molly will row you to zee dock,” Marie said, taking my board. I kept Lewis’s leather jacket,
shrugging into the slightly damp sleeves. I’d need the pills in the pocket.
The adrenaline was flowing, again, oiling my bouncy joints. My neck and jaw were already
aching with the pain of being clenched. I strode towards the stern, ignoring the partiers that had gone
quiet in the island’s shadow. Molly gave me a firm nod and helped me into the same rowboat she had
fetched me in.
“Bon chance!” Marie called from the deck. She had regained her jovial persona. “We will wait
in zee bay until sunrise.”
Molly pushed off from the schooner with an oar. Shrieking seagulls flapped and flashed in the
moonlight – there must have been hundreds of them, all clustered on the rocky point.
School history lessons were tugging at my memory. “Wasn’t there an ax murder on this island?”
I blurted.
Molly continued her steady rowing and appraised me with a raised eyebrow. “You’re just now
remembering this?”
Great.
It seemed mere seconds before the rowboat pulled even with a rickety wooden jetty. I was
shivering. Molly pulled the oars into the hull and looked at me.
“Well?” she prompted.
I shot her a look, silently wishing she would come with me, but it was clear she was going to stay
seated. Maybe she had reached her limit when she helped Lewis rescue me.
I pulled myself from the seat, wobbling unsteadily, and then took a giant step onto the wharf.
Molly pushed off almost immediately, oars moaning and rushing as they cut through the waves. I was
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too electrified with adrenaline to linger – I had to keep moving or else I’d chicken out entirely. My boots
clunked against the wooden planks, then found purchase on rock. I had officially made land on
Smuttynose.
I strode in the general direction of the tiny cabin, which was the only possible hiding place on
the island. Then suddenly one of the tiny windows filled with the glow of a lantern. I stuttered to a
stop, surprised not by the light, but by the two filmy figures illuminated before me.
In the waxy lantern glow I could see two semi-transparent women, holding hands. The first
wore a dress with full skirt and stomacher. She couldn’t have been much older than me, with a pretty
round face and tumbled curls. The second wore only a long, loose nightgown and was much older, or
had lived a much harder life. She had a long, hard face with prominent cheekbones and small round
eyes that disappeared into black.
“Are you Olivia Bellman?” the first woman asked. Her voice was soft and sweet but distorted, as
if coming from underwater.
I nodded, afraid to speak.
“I am Mary Teach. Tristabel told us you would come,” she said. “Only you may have passage.”
Then she turned her somber gaze to the second woman, whose long braid was blowing in the wind. The
second woman nodded to Mary and then released her hand, stepping forward.
“I am Maren Hontvet. I will show you where to go.” And she stepped off into the darkness.
I hurried to catch up – as she walked away from the light she grew dimmer.
“He will return!” I turned back, startled by the soft cry, but saw Mary Teach was walking away
from us, arms clutched around her middle. I was already forgotten.
Maren took long, confident strides, and I had to lengthen my steps to keep up. The seagulls
squawked and hissed, furious to have us treading on their nesting grounds, but took to the air as soon as
Maren approached. Maren was leading me to the very edge of the rocks, such that my boot skittered in
a hank of knotted wrack and I almost fell. Salt spray prickled my face and my hands burned from where
I caught myself. Maren headed to an outcropping rock that pointed upwards at a forty-five degree
angle and bent to clamber under the sheer face. I followed and was surprised to find an inky hole just
big enough for an adult to crawl through.
It seemed incredible that no one had ever found a secret cave on this island – I knew the Isles of
Shoals were always crawling with pirate treasure-hunters. Then again, maybe that was the point; the
cave was only in imagination.
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Maren was waiting for me.
“You aren’t going in?” I asked.
She just shook her head.
I stared into the aperture, willing the moonlight to reveal something of what was inside.
Then I remembered – magic, idiot.
I called to mind the flashlight from back home, the one we kept in the bathroom cabinet for
when the power went out and we had to pee. My finger found the switch and I angled the light into the
hole. The beam bounced off a low ceiling and then tumbled below into darkness.
I lowered myself to all fours and started crawling. The lip of the rubber boots snagged a little on
the stones, but I managed to shuffle my way through the hole. Once inside the path declined. I
shimmied down the damp stone slide and landed on more rock.
I angled the flashlight back towards the entrance, but Maren’s ghost was gone. My beam just
slipped across green seaweed, silver rock, and white surf. I paused on the angled rock I had climbed
down from; hopefully my rubber boots would have enough traction to climb back out.
I turned the beam back towards the passage before me. The hole in the rock quickly widened
into a cave at least fifteen feet across and ten feet high. I could hear the ocean booming outside and the
walls glistened with moisture. Would have to worry about the tide coming in?
My footsteps were the only sound disturbing the heavy cave air. The flashlight’s beam stopped
on a rock wall and I obediently turned a corner, winding deeper into the island like a snail into its shell.
My foot splashed into a puddle and I reached down to dip my finger in the water. I brought it to my
tongue and tasted salt – this did not bode well for the tide. I supposed I could try to magic up some
diving gear, but I also didn’t think I had enough knowledge to create it.
Then I noticed a dim glow out of the corner of my eye. I snapped off the flashlight and sure
enough silver light seeped from around the next turn. I sloshed through the puddle and back onto dry
stone, traveling towards the light.
The tunnel opened into a large cave. Moonlight streamed from a well-sized hole far above,
illuminating the white streaks in the rock and the still pools of water that lingered on the stone floor.
And in the middle of the cave, lying on a slab-like altar, was Lewis Epps.
“Lewis!”
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I ran towards him. He was as pale and skinny now as he had been in the hospital, one leg bent
awkwardly and an arm crooked over his chest. He was wearing the same jeans and t-shirt from the
cornfield. I grabbed his shoulder and shook.
“Lewis – Lewis.”
His breathing picked up and a feeble groan rumbled in his chest. One eye slit open and the pupil
turned to me. I felt my heart swelling like a balloon. Just holding his hand I felt a little piece of
resolution, a little tug untying the knots in my stomach.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said. His fingers squeezed around mine.
I felt a tickle on my leg and looked down to see an Asphodel bloom nose up from a crack in the
stone.
And then Lewis croaked, “Run.”
A shell skittered across the ground behind me. I whirled around, still clutching Lewis’s hand, and
saw Linos.
He looked exactly the same as when we had first met but wilder, big eyes and shaggy hair a
distortion of my own appearance. His face was alight but he wasn’t smiling. Just watching.
“What are you doing here?” I said. It was a stupid question, but it came out anyway. I choked
back the words that wanted to flow after – go away, don’t touch me, leave us alone – the pleas of a
victim.
Linos answered, “Waiting for you.”
I heard a distant whir and a thunk, like a machine turning on, then silence. I glanced around the
room, looking for the source of the noise, but didn’t see anything. I backed up so my thighs were flush
with the stone slab on which Lewis lay.
“How did you know I’d be here?” I demanded, but I was seconds away from guessing the
answer. “Tristabel,” I said. “Tristabel told you.”
I felt a touch soft as butterfly wings on my arm and realized Lewis was batting at me,
whispering, “Get out – go.”
“No,” I pronounced, not looking at him.
Suddenly he yanked on my arm. Too late I realized he was trying to pull himself upright. I
slipped on a stone and took a lunge forward, pulling Lewis with me and off the ledge. He cried out as his
body smacked against the stone floor.
“Ha! Ha ha!” Linos said, not actually laughing.
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I crouched and threw an arm around Lewis’s back, trying to help him upright. His legs folded
beneath him, weak as a marionette’s.
“Look at that!” Linos laughed again. “He’s not fully here, he’s not fully there, so he can’t quite
get up the strength to go anywhere.”
I managed to drag Lewis up far enough that his back rested against the altar.
“Go away now,” he hissed, glaring at me.
I wanted to slap him, I was so angry and terrified. But when my hand reached his cheek all I
could do was pinch his chin and hiss back, “I want answers.”
I stepped up from Lewis’s side. “Where’s Tristabel?” I demanded.
“Are you sure you want to get her involved?” Linos asked. “She was so very angry with you after
you took Lewis away. She told Lewis not to help you, but somehow you found out and saved little Lewis
anyway.”
“He saved me,” I protested.
“You saved each other,” someone else chimed in – a girl.
I felt Lewis slump against my leg. “Too late,” he whispered.
She emerged from the tunnel behind Linos, twirling in cropped pants and a men’s shirt that
went past her knees. This had to be Tristabel, but I didn’t see anything big about her, as Marie had said.
She was a pixie. She sidled up to Linos and slipped in between his right arm and his body. Then she
leaned up to place a kiss on Linos’s cheek – he bent down so she could reach. She turned back to me
and said, “You both have such a messiah complex. So I decided to make that work for us.”
“What do you want?” I demanded.
“You’re here to set right what you made wrong. Lewis and I had a deal.” Tristabel lifted up her
hand to examine her tiny painted nails. “He’d stay here with me, and I would make his life the least
miserable possible. Then you took him away.”
“That’s not a deal,” I scoffed.
“On the contrary,” Tristabel snarled, “I could’ve ripped him to shreds. You see, sweetie, I’ve
discovered something about our kind,” she continued. “All that time Lewis spent here, he thought he
was taming me. But as he spent more and more time in my world, the sicker, the weaker, he got. Then
Lewis came to me and said he wanted to stay here. He said that if he stayed long enough he’d die. I’m
reasonable enough – I was willing to give Lewis’s suicide a chance.” Tristabel smiled.
“Wouldn’t you just die, too?” I pointed out.
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Her smile became colder, more like bared teeth. “To the contrary, my dear. Remember that
discovery of mine? I didn’t only discern that Lewis got weaker and weaker the more time he spent in
our world. I realized that the weaker Lewis got, the stronger I became.”
My memory flashed to Linos’s strength battering my head against the bedpost. I willed myself
to focus on the girl in front of me. I recalled Marie’s words: Zee longer Lewis stayed ‘ere, zee longer I
knew ‘im, zee… stronger Tristabel became.
“So that’s what you want,” I asked, “to imprison us here, to – what – steal our life force?”
“In the long run, I suppose,” Tristabel answered. “But the longer Lewis lingered in my world, the
more I started to think about other ways to weaken your kind. Of course, I’m not a savage – I honored
my bargain with Lewis.
“And then I conveniently found Linos.” She rubbed a hand on Linos’s arm. He didn’t seem to
notice – I could feel him staring at me. “When you two showed up Lewis immediately saw what Linos
was and wanted to warn you. I told Lewis to stay out of it or the deal was off. Then I invited Linos over
for tea, instead.” She paused for a coquettish laugh. “Lewis actually tried talking to Linos at the
farmhouse, the night before you visited, Olivia dear.”
I flashed to a memory of the Asphodel bloom in Elliot’s – Lewis’s – farmhouse garage.
“And
what did you tell him, Linos?” Tristabel prompted.
“I told Lewis I’d stay away from you,” Linos said, addressing me, “if you’d stay away from me.”
I refused to look at Linos. I was sick at my own stupidity.
“We had it all planned,” Tristabel sighed. “Linos started preparing the chamber according to my
suggestions. I considered both physical and mental ways to weaken a human. I included the classics,
such as the rack favored in the Tower of London, as well as forms of sensory deprivation used in modern
military interrogations. Meanwhile there was no need to imprison you so long as you stayed willingly.
“But little Lewis, the guilt-ridden turd, just couldn’t let it – you – go,” Tristabel continued. “And
as soon as I turned my eye away at that party he ran after you.”
“You were at the party in York, too?” I interrupted.
She smirked. “Oh, I’m sure you didn’t see me. I wasn’t in costume.” She gestured at herself. I
didn’t understand. “So after all that effort, Lewis saves you, and then in less than five minutes you
convince him to drop the gig and go home,” Tristabel continued. “Of course, Lewis was already half
dead, so it wasn’t long before he was back here with me,” she pointed out. Half-here, half-there, halfdead.
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Lewis was whispering again. I thought I heard the words, “I’m so sorry.”
I finally built up the courage to turn my gaze to Linos. His amusement was gone. He looked
hungry, focused as a predator, and I saw the skin on his arms was bubbling with what could only be
Asphodel blooms. Fear was batting at my heart, trying to get in, but I focused on the hatred instead, the
anger at him for planning my torture, planning to do that to anyone.
“So what now?” I asked.
“Now,” Tristabel said, “I get to conduct an experiment as planned. But let’s speed it up a bit –
what happens when the ‘doppelganger’, as Marie so kindly called us, kills the human?”
And with that Linos roared, teeth sliding into fangs, clenched fists exploding with blooms.
“Wait!”
We were all startled by Lewis’s cry. The echo of Linos’s roar reverberated around the chamber,
almost drowning out Lewis’s words.
“It won’t work,” Lewis said. He was hunched over, breathing hard, but talking clearly. “I asked
Fofi. After you stabbed me in the neck.” He nodded towards Tristabel, the one he was talking to, and I
felt my eyes widen. “She said you can’t kill us. Just hurt us. Not kill.” He was out of breath and had to
stop for a moment and grip his gut. Tristabel raised an eyebrow. “You don’t believe me?” Lewis spat. “I
thought you’d know your master well enough to recognize the truth. But if you don’t believe me, go
ahead and try – on me. You, and me. Leave Olivia out of it.”
For a minute I thought Tristabel had gone catatonic – she had a completely blank look on her
face. Then she blinked and said brightly, “I accept the new terms of our agreement.”
Her smile was widening. In fact her entire jaw popped from its hinges, making way for a second
set of metal teeth. Then the plates of her scull expanded, revealing seams of machinery, and her left
eye rolled back, replaced with a headlamp. Her body was expanding, too, spine uncoiling like a
corrugated tube, shoulder blades snapping into armored plates, legs lengthening as veins twined with
silver cords, chains swinging from her fingernails.
At the end of her transformation she stood at three times her previous height, chains clanking
and gears whirring. So this was Lewis’s nightmare.
She swung back an arm and whipped the chains at the altar. I dove to my left as chips of stone
hailed. I smashed into the ground and scrambled away, tried to see Lewis in the dust cloud –
I was slammed from the right, suddenly airborne. I thudded against the stone floor again,
sliding several feet. My left arm stung and my eyesight sparkled.
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Linos.
I scrambled to my feet in time to catch his next blow, breaking his karate chop with my left
forearm. We both paused, surprised at my strength. Then I swung my right fist into his jaw. Blooms
erupted under my fist and Linos reeled, almost falling. I shook the pollen off my fingers, enjoying the
prickle where my knuckles had struck.
“I’m stronger than you,” I said, realizing it was the truth.
Then we both ran at each other. Linos fell to all fours like a wolf. I smashed my feet against the
ground and then leapt, bouncing off Linos’s shoulder and landing behind him. Was he slower or was I
faster? His claws screeched against the stone and he turned around for another pass. I danced
backwards, taunting him.
“Looks like getting my driver’s license and taking control had some side effects, didn’t it, Linos?
Here I was, thinking I was fighting for Lewis, but looks like along the way I was fighting against you, too.
Guess the exchange of power works both ways.”
Then Lewis screamed, and the sound came from everywhere.
A chain flew out from the maelstrom of gears that was Tristabel, splattering my face with blood.
Linos charged.
I heard his pounding footfalls and leapt out of the way at the last second, slamming my bad side
again. Would I have bruises tomorrow, or just a really bad headache? I rolled to my feet and zeroed in
on Linos, across the cavern and gearing up for another charge. I had to deal with him first.
This time instead of dodging the stampede I ran towards Linos, ducked under his leap, and
rammed my shoulder into his solar plexus. He flew backwards and I chased, finishing my assault with a
two-handed thrust that smacked him against the rock wall. I pinned his shoulder with my left hand and
imagined (of all things) a wooden stake into my right hand.
I jammed the stake into Linos’s chest, thrusting my mind into the wood, imagining roots that
crackled through the stone, thrushing through salt and granite, seeking water and sun.
“I’m the stronger one, Linos,” I said, power rushing through me so hard it made my bones burn
with heat. “And I won’t give up the fight until I get Lewis out of here.” I could feel the pulse and
shudder of the growing roots under my hands, where I still held the stake to his chest. “This one isn’t
your fight,” I said, and then I backed away, releasing my hands.
Linos stayed staked to the wall like the bloodsucking vampire he was – glaring at me, heaving
breaths – but still.
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I backed up two more steps, ensuring Linos was neutralized, and then I turned to see the battle
between Lewis and Tristabel.
Except it wasn’t a battle – it was Tristabel pinning Lewis down by his neck and peeling the skin
from his chest. Lewis’s screams were hoarse, now.
“STOP IT!” I yelled, which of course did nothing. Tristabel merely inserted a pair of pliers to
leverage open Lewis’s ribcage.
No stake leapt into my hand, no brilliant idea struck telling me how to overcome a giant android.
So I simply ran into the fray, yanked away the metal arms pinning Lewis to the ground, and threw my
body over Lewis as a human shield.
The machinery clicked and whined. I turned my head around to look Tristabel in her one human
eye. I realized the clanking and accordion-like wheezing was laughter – or at least her mouth was open
in what looked like a smile.
“You can’t defeat me,” she said, her voice magnified to sound like woman, giant, alien, and child
all in one. “Like you said to Linos – this isn’t your fight.”
I was so close I could feel Lewis’s breath on my neck, feel his warm blood slip under my hand.
“Try a poem,” Lewis croaked.
“What?”
“Recite a poem!” he hissed again.
This didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. But I found myself reciting the only poem I
knew, a poem I had to memorize for a test in French class.
“Comme les anges à l’oeil fauve, Je reviendrai dans ton alcove…” I sped through the words in a
nervous whisper.
“Say it loud!” Lewis interrupted, speaking over me.
“Et vers toi glisserai sans bruit avec les ombres de la nuit,” I announced. And then I felt it – the
icy brume, a black fog sweeping in from every corner of the cave. “Et je te donnerai, ma brune, des
baisers froids comme la lune et des caresses de serpent autour d’une fosse rampant!”
Snakes surged out of the darkness, swept over Lewis and me, and surged up Tristabel’s legs. I
shrieked and rolled aside, my body wriggling in horror. Tristabel shrieked, too, grating, and I looked up
to see the snakes twine themselves between gears and around coils, clogging her machinery with scaly
flesh.
A hand burst out of the fray and seized my own – Lewis.
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I pulled with my newfound strength and slung his arm over my shoulder. Then we were on our
feet and running, Lewis’s feet only glancing against the floor with each of my bounds.
We made it into the tunnel before Tristabel could once again maneuver her colossal robot legs.
I could hear the ocean banging against the rock, my footsteps clapping, and the groan-thunk groanthunk groan-thunk of Tristabel’s pursuit. My free hand skittered against the wall, warning me when the
passageway made a sudden turn. I slipped on the wet rocks, almost dropped Lewis, and spent a
precious second leveraging us both back upright. I was stronger here than I had ever been but my
throat still burned and a pain was probing my side. We ran again.
There was a screech of metal and the rumble-roar of a minor rockslide behind us. As the tunnel
shrank Tristabel would have to fight her way through the passageway.
Suddenly the slanted boulder marking the exit loomed before us, painted with starlight. A wave
crashed and saltwater splattered into the hole, stinging my eyes. The tide was coming in.
“Come on, Lewis,” I said. He clung to my shoulder, barely staying upright.
Another explosion of rock behind us.
“You have to climb up that hole, Lewis. You have to do it.”
Another wave broke, this time sending only a trickle of water down the stone face.
“You don’t give up, do you?” Lewis panted.
“No,” I snapped. He rolled his eyes but his face set with new determination.
We stumbled together towards the angled boulder and I pushed him upwards. One of his
sneakered feet gripped the rock, and then another. I kept a hand on his back and hoped whatever
adrenaline Tristabel had stirred up would be enough to pull him out of this hole and into the light.
The rock was probably only four feet high but Lewis crawled up like it was a cliff, fingers
fumbling and then gripping, feet inching. The waves broke again and he came away soaked, but still
holding on. At last he reached the opening and crawled through, feet wiggling and then disappearing
from view.
I practically ran up after him, saltwater gushing down my shirt and blurring my vision. I heard a
keen of metal, and debris rained against my back. As I clambered through the hole the lip of my boot
caught on the rock. Another wave struck and the boot filled with water and slipped off. I didn’t care.
As soon as the wave withdrew I thrust outward, almost stumbling into the raging sea.
The sky was dark gray – sunrise was coming. Lewis was splayed on his back a few feet away,
barely above the water line.
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“It’s not over yet! Come on!” I yelled, yanking him once again to his feet.
We lurched together towards the hut; I was still carrying most of Lewis’s weight. My head
reeled as I searched for Marie’s boat. I saw the white yacht, lit up like a Christmas tree, bobbing in the
bay between Smuttynose and neighboring Appledore.
“HEY! HALOOOOOOO!” I yelled, and then remembered my magic. The flashlight was back in my
hand, beaming. I waved my arm like crazy, trying to signal.
I heard a faint call and then my light snagged on Molly’s little rowboat, still bobbing only a
couple of dozen yards from the shoreline. She had waited for us.
Rock exploded like a geyser behind us, pelting our shoulders with stones. I didn’t pause to
assess Tristabel’s progress. I dragged Lewis to the outcropping of rock that reached closest to her boat
and waved for Molly to pull closer. But she stopped several yards from us and yelled something.
“WHAT?” I yelled back. The waves seethed and roared, splashing my bare foot with ice water.
“…CAN’T COME CLOSER…THROW YOU…”
I couldn’t make it all out, but then I saw an orange life preserver splash in the water a few feet in
front of us. She wanted us to jump.
“Can you jump?” I asked.
He nodded and said, “Together.”
“Alright – count of three,” I said. “One – two – THREE!”
We ran over the edge, my legs flailed, and then I was encased in ice, ears pounding.
I surged to the surface, expelling water from stinging nose and mouth. I felt my hand still
clamped around Lewis’s and pulled, using my other limbs to drive us towards the life preserver. It
bobbed forward on a wave, and then my arm hooked through the loop.
“LEWIS!” I yelled. Water poured into my mouth but Lewis surged up beside me. There was a
tug on the preserver and I realized Molly was pulling us in with a rope.
She told me to climb in the boat first, and then I served as counterweight as she yanked Lewis
over the side. By the time she rowed away our direction had changed, and I couldn’t even find the rock
hole we’d climbed from.
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POSTSCRIPT
[Transcribed excerpt of the second interrogation of Dr. Fofi Goldberg]
SPEAKER 1 [HEREAFTER REFERRED TO AS AGENT]: Let’s return to some of the items seized during the
search of your private residence in York, Maine. Forensics catalogued all of the substances
here… ephedrine, ergotamine tartrate… phenylpropanolamine, red phosphorous…
SPEAKER 2 [HEREAFTER REFERRED TO AS SUSPECT]: Let me guess, now I was cooking meth.
AGENT: Is that a confession?
SUSPECT: What’s that elegantly simple saying? Ah, yes, I don’t shit where I eat.
AGENT: How exactly did you come to own your private residence, Ms. Goldberg?
SUSPECT: Doctor. Doctor Goldberg.
AGENT: Real estate in York doesn’t come cheap, and you haven’t filed income taxes in the last two
years. Where’d you get the cash?
SUSPECT: You didn’t find my fingerprints, did you, agent…
AGENT: Pope. So now you’re back to the “I was framed” story.
SUSPECT: Have you ever heard of Doctor Mengele, Agent Pope?
AGENT: Yes. Famous Nazi doctor. Role model of yours?
SUSPECT: ‘The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.’ Dr. Mengele said that.
Now have you heard of MK ULTRA?
AGENT: I have a feeling you’re going to tell me about it either way.
SUSPECT: MK ULTRA was a CIA project in the 1950s and 60s. Agents conducted extensive experiments
on unwitting human subjects regarding the effects of LSD as a possible truth serum. Among
other exploits, they set up fake brothels as part of Operation Midnight Climax. They dosed the
johns and then filmed the results on the other side of a two-way mirror. They chose the
demographic because they thought the victims would be too embarrassed to contact the police.
Read the report of the Church Committee.
AGENT: So this was before you became privy to information that would incriminate the C.I.A. and
exonerate you.
[pause]
AGENT: What I can’t figure out, Ms. Goldberg –
SUSPECT: Doctor.
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AGENT: – is whether this is some crazy ploy to be declared criminally incompetent, or if you really are a
paranoid schizophrenic.
SUSPECT: Fortunately, Agent Pope, they have more qualified individuals to conduct that evaluation.
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CHAPTER 4
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
- Sylvia Plath
I thought my chattering teeth my shatter my skull. I kicked off the one rubber boot and then
peeled off the soaked leather jacket – and panicked.
“No – no, no, no,” I said, unzipping the jacket pocket. My fingers fumbled and then I felt the
pills. I pulled out both, rolling them between my fingers to ensure their solidity. Somehow,
miraculously, they had survived the ocean.
Behind me, Lewis sighed.
I turned around, ready to let him have it for everything that had happened, but my reprimand
withered on my tongue.
Lewis was pulling his torn, sopping shirt from his chest. Even though I could see the goosebumps on his skin and the valleys between his ribs he was… handsome.
Lewis misinterpreted my stare. “It wasn’t real,” he croaked. “It’s all just imagination, in here.”
I turned away, convinced the heat of my blush would effectively dry my scalp.
“Hey, where’d you get that jacket?” Lewis asked.
I was suddenly aware of the jacket still clutched in my hands. “I… well, I kind of dug it up in the
field,” I muttered. “I had, like, a vision.”
“Hallucinations are just a side effect of the LSD,” he said.
On one level I was happy to be reassured that I wasn’t turning into a schizophrenic. On another
I felt like he had sucked the magic out of life.
Marie had unloaded her partiers on Appledore and was now manning the wheel. Molly
appeared with a stack of L.L. Bean blankets. She pulled a flannel nightgown from the top and held it out
for me. My teeth seemed to chatter harder at the sight and I automatically tugged up the hem of my
shirt.
“Hey, tsk,” Molly said, looking at Lewis. He rolled his eyes but turned his back on me.
Otherwise I wasn’t worried about modesty – I could barely see where the tortoiseshell sky turned into
the black ocean. I kicked my shirt and jeans into a pile but kept the leather jacket, holding the damp
collar with two fingers. The pills were still in the pocket.
Molly tossed Lewis a lace-cuffed shirt and wool trousers. He held up the shirt.
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“Seriously?” he asked.
Molly just threw a blanket at him, which he caught with an oomph. Then she turned to swaddle
me in another and led me astern.
When Lewis reappeared I was huddled in the shelter of the quarterdeck and had a cup of New
England coffee in my hand. Lewis had chosen to remain bare-chested but held the blanket close as
mummy wrappings.
“Coffee,” was all he said. I nodded to the thermos Molly left on the deck next to me. He poured
himself a cup and sat down, pressed close enough that I felt the nudge of his bony shoulder. I told
myself he was certainly sitting so closely to absorb my body warmth. That didn’t stop my heart from
quickening, though – my emotions were all over the place and I was exhausted.
“Why were you trying to get rid of me back there?” The question, though perhaps not the most
immediately important, simply popped out.
Lewis rested his elbows on his knees and gave me a sidelong glance. “I was trying to save you.”
I made a face. “That didn’t look like prince charming to me.” He raised his eyebrows. “I was
trying to save you,” I pointed out.
He guffawed. “Ha! Good luck with that!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Wow, Tristabel was right about the messiah complex, wasn’t she?” he said. “No offense, Olivia,
but some people just can’t be saved.”
“Yeah?” I retorted, “I think I did a pretty good job back there.”
He grabbed the blanket it both fists and exploded, “I don’t want to be saved!” He licked his lips
and continued, “I told you to leave it be – that was the deal. You promised you’d leave me be.”
He rested his chin on his arms and sighed.
“I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone about you,” I murmured. “That was the deal. And I’m sorry if
you don’t appreciate my help,” my voice tightened, “but I need answers, Lewis. I need to understand
what happened to me.”
“Fine,” he deadpanned. “Ask your questions.” He wouldn’t look at me.
“The thing with the poem,” I started.
“It works because you’re drawing on other people’s memories, so you don’t have to use all of
your own power,” Lewis answered. “What was that, anyway, Latin?”
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I rolled my eyes. “French. I had to memorize it for a test. It’s called ‘The Ghost.’ The snakes are
a metaphor. Does that work with any poem, then?”
“Any piece of literature,” Lewis answered, “so long as other people remember it.”
I seized the next question that popped into my mind. “Who’s Fofi Goldberg?”
Lewis’s eyes widened. “What do you know about Fofi Goldberg?” he demanded, glaring at me.
I wasn’t going to be intimidated after everything we had just been through. “She was written all
over your journal and then I found her at Zion’s Gate Church with bloody hands and part of your robot.
Not – literally, of course. I mean, I’m pretty sure I was hallucinating.” I fingered Lewis’s jacket, folded in
my lap. “But she’s been arrested. I drove by her house and she was in the back of a cop car.”
There was a long pause during which Lewis was probably deciding which revelation to attack.
“You read my journal?” he finally said.
“Whatever,” I answered, “that’s what you get for flinging me into another universe, then out
again, then abandoning me before I found out I was dosed with LSD and was hallucinating and – so why
was Fofi arrested?”
“Shouldn’t you be the one to answer that?” Lewis snorted. “Probably she wasn’t as smart as she
thought she was – the tragic flaw of most smart people. I can guarantee she deserved it, though.”
“She’s the accomplice in your letter?” I asked.
The wind picked up and Lewis tightened the blanket around his chest, scowling. “I guess this is
karma for sending that letter in the first place,” he said. Before I could respond he continued, “Fofi got
me to build a robot, then hypnotized me to sick it on her boss’s daughter.”
“What – like a hallucination?”
“Like a nightmare. The things that happen here can have an affect on dreams. Fofi always said
this place represented the collective unconscious – that’s a psychology term if you don’t know what it
means. My dad’s a psych professor and I’m never sure if other people know what I’m talking about.”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. Then, “is that how you’re here? Because you’re having some sort of
dream while you’re unconscious?”
He just shrugged and took another drink from his coffee. Either he didn’t know the answer or
he wasn’t in the mood to answer all my questions. I tried a different one.
“But how could Fofi’s boss know she was responsible?”
“Because he’s part of the team that discovered the pills,” Lewis sighed. “Him, Fofi, and a bunch
of other creepy shadow government cronies dreaming of truth serums and mind control.”
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“Mind control?” I interrupted.
“I don’t really know,” he muttered. “I only have Fofi’s word. She told me they were trying to
make her go crazy, like an experiment,” he continued. “She said we could use the robot to intimidate
them into stopping. Make a nightmare for her boss’s daughter and then blackmail him.”
“Wait – so that’s what you’re guilty about?” I asked. “A little girl’s nightmare? She probably
won’t even remember it.” I wanted to laugh – the last knot in my stomach untwirled. Lewis was
innocent after all.
But he scoffed and gripped his hair like a madman. “It wasn’t just her nightmare, Olivia. I was
there. I did it.”
“Okay, so Fofi hypnotized you,” I said, still relieved that no one had been physically harmed.
“How do you even know it worked?”
“Seriously?” he said, ungripping his hair. “Why do you think those government guys were
crawling all over the farmhouse?”
It took a moment for my memory to catch up – he was talking about that day at the farmhouse,
when I first saw the remnants of his robot, when I still thought he was Elliot Caulfield.
“So – what is this really?” I asked, “Atonement or something for a little girl’s nightmare? You’re
so wracked by guilt you’re just going to throw in the towel, slowly starve to death while Tristabel
tortures you?”
“It’s not… just that,” he hedged. “They know what happened. Fofi’s arrested. They’re looking
for her accomplice. They found my grandparents’ farmhouse, which is under my father’s name. They’ll
probably just arrest me like Fofi, but maybe they’ll turn me into a human experiment instead. Wouldn’t
take a lot to make me go crazy,” he finished, face going slack. “You think I want to go back to that?
Some brave new world.”
Then I had an idea.
“I could make an alibi for you,” I said, sitting up higher and drawing the blankets closer.
Lewis rolled his eyes. “They’ve engineered an LSD derivate, not built a time machine.”
“Well, maybe alibi isn’t the right word. But I could take a pill and travel here, then do something
or go somewhere only Fofi’s accomplice would know about. Meanwhile, back in the real world, you
would have an alibi, and couldn’t be responsible. They’d have to rule you out as a suspect.”
Lewis was already shaking his head. “It would only be a matter of time before they figured out
who you were, too. You were a missing person and they’re the goddamn CIA.”
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“It wouldn’t have to be me,” I pushed. I looked to Marie, minding the tiller, and Molly, standing
at the bow. “We have friends here, Lewis.”
“The only way this is going to work is if you go back and I stay here,” he said, demarcating with
his hands. “Like I said the first time, just forget about me and don’t tell anyone.”
“God, you’re stubborn!” I was losing my calm. “Now what? Why do you want to die, now?”
“Don’t you care about how I lied to you?” he said. “Now that you know what they were
planning? Hell, I was the fucking bait!”
“Okay, first, you were coerced,” I pointed out. “Second, you ended up saving me anyway.”
He rolled his eyes.
“But you did,” I insisted. “And I’m not just talking about the first time with the baseball bat, or
the poem tonight. When I started looking for you I had to do all sorts of things I was afraid to – finally
getting my driver’s license, for starters. And when I faced Linos today, I realized fighting for you had
made me stronger. So in a way you saved me.”
“I hurt everyone around me, including you,” Lewis hissed.
Was that really all he had gotten out of my little speech? That was it. “You just don’t want to go
back,” I said, abandoning the previous strategy. “You know it would take effort to go back to living, to
trick the bad guys, and you just don’t want to put the effort in because it would be hard and you’re a
coward. You were always a coward – you can’t even commit to suicide. Why else would you have some
blue pills handy at my rescue? And you botched it again this time.”
Suddenly Lewis laughed – hard. “Oh, please,” he chuckled. “You’re one to talk. Anyone with an
ounce of self-preservation would’ve fled the cave – when Linos first showed up, when Tristabel showed
up, when I told you to run, when Tristabel turned into C-3PO’s inbred cousin for heaven’s sake. Not to
mention swallowing unmarked pills you get in the mail. Admit it. You might be just as suicidal as I am.”
His laughing dwindled to a half-smile. “Not that I blame you. I’ve seen Linos – your life must be a
peach!”
My anger crashed into melancholy. I knew instantly that what he said was at least partly true.
But I was speaking again, voicing my thoughts even as I puzzled them out.
“It’s normal to think about suicide sometimes,” I said, voice trembling. “Everyone gets
overwhelmed and imagines the relief of just giving up, or the revenge of hurting the people around us,
or the thrill. But we don’t do it. We hold on, because of evolution, or the people who love us, or God,
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or cowardice. And that’s the human condition – surviving when logically death is inevitable and there’s
no promise of reward in life. We hold on.”
We were silent for a while, staring in parallel out at the ocean. There was a line of pink on the
horizon and the crests of the waves glimmered gold. My coffee was lukewarm by the time Lewis said
anything.
“So what is Linos anyway?” he asked – without the usual taint of hostility.
I let out a shaky laugh. Why not bare my soul? After that fight in the cave I was fragile and
resonant as glass – ready to ring with the emotions around me or shatter. “I have a crazy anxiety
disorder,” I said. “And the irony is, despite coming here to save you and fighting Linos and Tristabel, I’m
still scared shitless about going to UNH in the fall. I mean, I’ve never not lived at home, let alone living
three feet from a bunch of strangers and having to share a bathroom with them…” I couldn’t believe I
was telling this to Lewis. I hadn’t told anyone this before, hadn’t even put it in words to my mother.
And my voice was starting to get thick and shriller with a lump in my throat, which was mortifying. “You
know this whole crazy other-world madness distracted me for a little while, but I realize now that it
doesn’t really change anything. I’m still going to see a therapist in less than a week, and move out in
two months and… and I thought maybe – you’d know something, about here, or there I guess, that
would change things, somehow.” I stopped, cut off by my own emotion. I gritted my teeth and focused
on a buoy bobbing in the distance. “It seems like something this drastic should change things, but
nothing’s changed at all, has it.”
I glanced at him but he was looking at me blankly. I would have hit him just to make him react,
but his apathy was infectious and I was subdued by a wave of my own hopelessness. I tucked my head
into my knees and wiped my eyes on my forearms. I wanted this boat ride to last forever, like nevernever-land, and at the same time I wanted it over with, so I could get away from Lewis.
“Hey, stop that,” Lewis said. I ignored him.
Then I felt his hands picking apart some strands of my hair. I raised my head enough to wipe my
nose on my forearm and said, “Don’t bother. I’m going to have to wash the salt out.” I set my chin on
my forearms and took a deep breath, determined to calm down.
He was chuckling.
“What?” I demanded.
“You look like a five year-old. Flannel nightgown, red nose, messy hair.” I batted his hand away
from my head. “Nah, it’s cute! I swear!”
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“Says the boy who’s prepubescently skinny,” I retorted. Then I felt a little bad because Lewis
had basically starved himself. “Sorry,” I said, and turned back to look at him. His eyes were bright and
he was smiling a little.
“Do you want to be friends?” he asked.
“What?” I said. Were all boys this confusing?
“My dad works at UNH.” As if this explained everything. “If you want to be friends,” he
continued, “I’ll stay long enough to see you out of your cave.”
It took my tired mind a moment to puzzle through his metaphor. Then I asked, “So you’ll come
back again?”
“So we’re friends?” he countered.
Lewis was the one who had got me into this mess. The one who had lied to me about Linos.
The one who had saved me from Linos. And now he was offering to be my friend. After all we had been
through it seemed insufficient.
And exactly what I needed.
“Deal,” I said, and stuck my hand out to shake.
“Do you want to spit on it?” he teased and I pulled my hand back into the blankets. His gaze
made me a little uncomfortable so I pulled the leather jacket into my lap.
He stilled my hand before I unzipped the pocket with the blue pills. “I didn’t take any red one to
get here, so I don’t think I should put a blue one in the mix,” he said.
“Then how are you going to get back?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The same way I got here – just like falling asleep. I didn’t want to be conscious
anymore, and Tristabel still had a piece of me. But in this moment I’m awake. I feel like… I can go.”
Inexplicably he broke into another grin. What did I do? What had I given him to live for except
another sorry basket case to hang out with? A damsel in distress? Were boys really that simple? Or
maybe, like me, it was easier to fight for someone else than to fight for himself, at least for now.
Or maybe he’d slit his wrists as soon as he woke up. Despite all we had gone through, we were
still mostly strangers.
“Seriously, how are you going to get back?” I pressed. “Because I need to get back before my
mom wakes up for work.”
Lewis closed his eyes and turned his face to the light. The sun had yet to slip over the horizon
but the whole eastern sky was golden, now.
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“I’ve been sleeping in that cave this whole time, in the dark. I think once I see the sun I’ll go
back.”
“I’ll be here watching,” I said. “I’m not taking this pill until I’m sure you’re not going to trick
me.”
Suddenly Lewis was serious again. He turned my face with his hand. My stomach was
fluttering… it almost felt like anxiety, but that wasn’t possible here – Linos was far away.
“No more tricks,” Lewis said. We were so close that when the wind blew my golden hair tickled
his cheek. “I didn’t know, Olivia,” he said, and I was momentarily confused. “Well, part of me must
have known; but I never knew exactly what they were planning. If I had known, I never would have let
you stay in that house. I hope I’m not that selfish.”
“I know,” I said, automatically. Did I know? Linos had planned something horrific,
unforgiveable, and I still had to think that through. But for now I felt safe, and somehow relieved to be
so close to Lewis, at last.
I could see each freckle on his nose. The sunlight pierced the strands of his glowing hair. Then
where his hand touched me started to tingle and itch. I could see the gray ocean through his eyes. He
was going, and I felt a twist of sadness in my chest.
“I know where you live,” I threatened.
“Hold onto the jacket for me,” he said. And then he splintered before my eyes like the puff of
dandelion seedlings, his hair, the threads of his clothes, the freckles on his nose all dissolving into the
wind.
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EPILOGUE
Olivia told me to meet her at the Short Sands arcade, of all places. I hoped she wouldn’t be too
disappointed when she saw the fuckit bucket instead of a yellow convertible.
It was 9:30 p.m. I parked beneath a streetlight in front of the arcade and leaned against the car,
recreating the pose from our last meeting here. Houses twinkled up and down the rocky coast and the
motels opposite the beach blazed light. Some adults in oversized sweatshirts huddled around a bonfire
by the water while shrieking teenagers in the midst of an ice cream fight ran past.
I saw Olivia long before she arrived, swooping down the sidewalk on her board. I had to
suppress a smirk when I saw she was wearing my leather jacket. Man, I had it bad.
She jumped off the board and ran after it a few steps, curtailing her momentum before she
picked it up by the trucks. She jogged across the rest of the parking lot to meet me.
“I finally brought your jacket,” she said, and started to slip out of her backpack straps.
“Keep it,” I said. “It looks cuter on you.” And does wonders for my ego.
She blushed and hid her face, tucking her hair behind her ears. I couldn’t tell if she liked my
compliments or not, but either way they were going to pop out. I’m not known for my brain-to-mouth
filter.
“Alright,” she said, looking at her watch. “We have to keep this up at least until 11:30. Our
mutual friends should start things at eleven, so another half hour will give a cushion to our alibi.”
I was unnecessarily excited for tonight. Livy and I had hung out plenty over the past few weeks
but those visits were either in my hospital room or at the coffee shop in Portsmouth after a physical
therapy session. Of course the real reason for our meeting tonight was to create an alibi.
Ah, yes, the alibi. Livy refused to tell me what Marie and Molly would be doing tonight –
“plausible deniability,” she said. Presumably the activity would point to Fofi’s apprentice. Livy and I
would appear uninvolved and innocent, eliminating us as suspects.
Livy dropped her voice to a murmur. “Are your friends here?” she asked, referring to the sedan
with tinted windows that had been so subtly shadowing me for several weeks. We needed witnesses for
the plan to work, after all.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I brought the chaperones.” I nodded at the opposite end of the parking
lot, though she was smart enough not to turn around.
She set her mouth and gave me a sharp nod. I half expected her to pull a full itinerary from her
back pocket, complete with mandatory activities.
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“You hungry?” I asked, redirecting the conversation.
“Uh, sure,” she answered.
“Come on.” I jerked my head in the direction of the small downtown. I had scoped out a place
called Goldenrod Kisses before she arrived, even though she probably knew the town better than me.
The antique train station on the corner of the parking lot had been converted into a saltwater taffy
factory and you could watch the taffy machines in their windows. I was more interested in the oldschool soda fountain.
Livy ordered a brownie sundae; I got a root beer float. We were practically the only people in
the place and I wished there was a jukebox so I could pick a song for a dance.
Livy kicked her heels against the barstool and twirled her spoon in the hot fudge. I could tell she
was a little nervous because she wasn’t digging in. That was the one thing I hated about knowing Livy in
this world – I hated seeing her quiet, shoulders tight and up by her ears. It wasn’t her I hated, of course.
I guess it was Linos, or God, for smothering the carefree adventuress she was in the other world. I just
had to remind myself that that girl was still in there, too. I’d seen her come out once she got distracted
and relaxed.
Part of me also knew that if it wasn’t for her crazy bits, she probably never would’ve given a guy
like me a chance. I was smart enough not to point this out to her.
I shuffled my brain, trying to think of the things we’d talked about in the past. There was the
first time she came to my hospital room, when she was tense as a gerbil and I was still deciding if we
were angry at each other. We ended up watching the TV in silence – The Empire Strikes Back.
Eventually I invited her to share the space on the raised hospital bed because the chairs were crap and
at a bad angle. I totally pulled the casual-stretch-put-your-arm-on-her-shoulder move and I swear she
sniffed my t-shirt.
The next time she came to the hospital she brought cookies – cookies – and a copy of Ender’s
Game. She said she saw the book at the farmhouse and offered to read to me, like she was freaking
Catherine Barkley or something. I even ate a cookie, though the nurse had told me I’d probably throw
up any solid food. Olivia and I got off on a discussion about the character Petra Arkanian and it came
out that we’d both read the whole series. She still brought the book every time, though, even when we
started meeting in the coffee shop. Like she needed an excuse to meet me. I wouldn’t be surprised if
she still had it in her backpack.
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The one thing we never talked about were the very things that had brought us together – Fofi,
Tristabel, Linos, and the collective unconscious. I don’t know why she avoided the topic, but I for one
suspected our conversations might be monitored. Now, in the almost deserted restaurant, I realized we
could finally talk about it.
Suddenly the music changed – that annoyingly sentimental Aerosmith song from the movie
Armageddon. I thought, what the hell.
“Care to dance?” I asked, and pulled her out of her seat before she could object. I held her in a
loose waltz position because that’s how Gatsby would’ve danced.
“I don’t think they can hear us, now,” I whispered. She rested her head against my shoulder and
for a minute I thought it was just because she liked me, but then I realized she wanted to whisper in my
ear.
“Who’s Tristabel?”
I knew it wouldn’t be fair to spare her the truth.
“I’m bipolar. Also reckless, angsty, and a self-flagellating shit, as you’ve pointed out.”
I felt her lips smile and she said, “I’m an obsessive, flighty neurotic.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” I said.
She sighed. We spun slowly on the spot. Then she pulled her head away and asked, “How the
hell did you end up in a car?”
I snickered. “It was parked in the forest behind the field. I knew if they found us together there
would be all sorts of complications – especially regarding our friends in the sedan. The ambulance sirens
woke me up. I crawled to the car and then drove until I passed out.”
She punched my shoulder.
“Ow! Fuck!”
“You forgot to mention death wish. Reckless, self-flagellating, and with a death wish. No more,
you got it? I’m counting on you.”
“Sure, sure,” I said. I gripped her waist tighter. She was the only thing keeping me around, but
she was keeping me nonetheless. The strong chin, the little nose, the eyes that broke down everything
around her into the colors and lines supporting the world. She was easily as intelligent as Fofi, and yet in
those important ways she was different – upfront and honest to the point of comedy, quietly sarcastic
but quick to apologize with a smile, oblivious to most pop culture yet more interested in reading a good
book on the beach than debating existential philosophy. She was my new lease on life.
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And then sometimes I’d catch her staring at me with a desperate vulnerability and I knew she
was relying completely on me, too, if maybe in a different way. When she went to the bathroom at the
coffee shop I flipped through her sketchbook and found almost every other page was a sketch of me. I
was the distraction from her impending move to college in the fall, the link through that transition, and
a reminder that there was more than the limited life she had experienced in high school.
The cynic in me said this can’t last – we can’t be each other’s sole reason for living, and the
novelty will fade. But then she’d wear one of her plaid sundresses and I’d slip on my Ray-Bans and we
were Bonnie and Clyde again, ready to picnic in the park or take over the world.
“Alright,” I said, releasing the dance hold, “the ice cream’s melting.”
When we sat back at the barstools she didn’t touch her sundae – still nervous. I sucked my float
dry, making sure the dregs bubbled and gurgled as loudly as possible, and then turned to face her.
“In your face or on it,” I announced.
“What?” she asked.
“Last chance.” I was grinning. She was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I grabbed her spoon and swiped it from her nose to her chin.
“Lewis!” she shrieked. It wasn’t really all that much – a bit of fudge on her nose and across her
lips, a dot of vanilla on her chin.
Then I did something impulsive and stupid. She grabbed a napkin to swipe the fudge off her
nose, but I leaned in to kiss the vanilla off her chin. Then I rose another inch and cleaned the fudge off
her lips.
She was stiff as a board and when I pulled back she wasn’t looking at me.
“I – uh,” she stuttered, “just need a moment outside.”
She slipped off the stool and strode out the front door.
Stupid! Olivia wasn’t a body-glittered Ashley Green or a pink-haired Judith Cannon and this
most certainly wasn’t the high school janitor’s closet.
I slapped some bills on the counter, grabbed her board from where she leaned it against the
stool, and jogged after Livy. She had wandered a few feet down the sidewalk and was looking across the
parking lot at the beach.
“Hey – sorry,” I said. “Did I mention I was impulsive?”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said and crossed her arms. “I’m a total freak and… and that was the first
time anyone kissed me… here.”
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She cut herself off and I knew she was thinking about the kiss at Marie’s party. When I was
trying to get rid of her because I knew Tristabel was watching from the roof.
“Hey, at least I got a redo,” I said without the humor I intended.
She threw her face in her hands. I barely made out the words, “I’m so embarrassed.”
Okay, it was a little funny, so I laughed. I shoved her shoulder and said, “Come on, let’s forget
about it. I promise – hands off. I won’t ever kiss you again.” She dropped her hands and she actually
looked devastated. My heart lifted a notch. “Unless you kiss me,” I added. “I’m very irresistible.”
That gave her an excuse to glare and shove me back. I seized the moment to change the
subject.
“Now you’re going to teach me how to ride this thing.”
“What – my board?”
“Oh, please, I know you’re dying to see me fall on my ass.”
Let me just saying that riding a skateboard (“long-board,” Livy interjects) is not nearly as easy as
it looks. I compared it to having one foot on a banana peel and the other on baseball. She chased me
along the sidewalk, laughing, sometimes stealing the board back to refine her instructions.
I finally realized we had traveled all the way back to Long Beach Avenue. The last time I had
been on this stretch of road I was reclined in the yellow convertible, Marie at the wheel, Livy’s hand in
mine. A few moments of peace before several weeks of agony.
And then I took a dive. The board shot out from under my feet and I landed on my ass, as
promised.
“Ah, God,” I groaned, and leaned back on the concrete to throw my hands over my eyes.
Livy chased after the board and called over her shoulder, “Are you okay?” It would’ve been
better for my pride if there had been a hint of humor in her voice.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, and sat up, elbows on knees. “Crikey, can you break your ass?” I
demanded.
“Absolutely,” Livy answered. “You should’ve seen the bruise I had on my tailbone –” And then
she cut herself off, clearly embarrassed for putting the image of her derriere in my mind. “Come on, the
cool sand will feel good,” she said.
I let her pull me up by the elbow and hobbled after her down the concrete stairs that led to the
beach.
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The tide was out, revealing a silver plain. Livy twirled a few steps in the sand and then kicked
her shoes off and settled down. I followed suit and was surprised to find the sand as cold and soft as
she promised. Everyone else had gone to bed and almost all of the shorefront was closed for the night.
The only light came from the streetlights, the moon, and Nubble Light, flickering across the waves.
“So I’m seeing a therapist,” Livy said. “I wanted to tell you, even though you seem like one of
those people that resents therapists. And psychologists. Or psychiatrists.”
“Like the majority of Americans?” I quipped. “Nobody likes a shrink.”
I didn’t need to consult Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to know we had entered
dangerous territory.
A seagull cried and dove for the surf, plucking dinner from the rocks. Livy traced spirals in the
sand between her feet.
“Actually I did used to be one of those people,” I said. “Seeing someone for your mental
problems requires humility and trust, which of course I have in abundance.” She didn’t laugh at my
sarcasm. “Nah, I’m just resentful of my dad,” I added, conciliatory.
In truth I had met with a psychiatrist for the first time two weeks ago at the hospital. My logic
was swift and simple. I didn’t completely trust Olivia’s plan of creating an alibi. The Men in Black
probably wouldn’t risk the spectacle of abducting me from my home, but they sure as hell could launch
an attack in the unconscious. It wouldn’t take much meddling on their part to push me over the edge, I
was sure. I thus intended to make my mind as formidable as possible – which included recalibrating my
neurotransmitters or whatever-the-hell. Sure I still had mixed feelings; both Fofi and my father had
pushed me to see a psychiatrist. It was difficult to assure myself that this decision was my own. Seeing
Olivia helped, although obviously I still had some hang-ups if I didn’t want to tell her I was seeing
someone at the hospital. I think maybe a small part of me was jealous that she could speak so openly
about it.
“We haven’t talked about anything that… already happened, of course.” She meant our time
under the red pill. “But we’ve talked a lot about next year. College.”
She got that drawn look on her face again, and I knew she was having trouble imagining what it
will be like, how she’ll get through such a dramatic life change. But she already fought one battle, and
I’ve never known reality to be worse than a nightmare.
“You’ll do it, you know,” I said. “You survived the assault of a monster. And then you came back
for more, for me, and you skewered that beast with your bare hands. You’re a fucking gladiator.” She
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gave me a small smile. Her hair was dark silver in the moonlight, flaxen gold in the streetlight. “And I’ll
be there with you,” I continued. “Even if you completely lose it. I’ll have the getaway car ready, and I’ll
whisk you away to Disneyland. Or, you know, home.”
She surged forward and kissed me.
She totally caught me off guard. For a moment I was as responsive as a frog, but then I turned
into a prince and kissed her back. I slipped my hands into her metallic hair and savored the sweet kisses
and gasps of salty air.
After what seemed only a moment she slipped her hands from my neck and said, “Come on –
it’s almost time, we have to keep moving!”
She was up and running and I was forced to chase after her burst of life. Soon whatever plot she
hatched with Marie and Molly would unfold, while most of York slept and dark agents watched. I didn’t
dare ask her what she had planned, lest an enemy overhear. But it would turn out that I didn’t need to
ask.
That night I dreamed I was running along the coast. With each rapid footfall I plunged harder
into the sand, propelling myself forward until my strides were as long as parking lots and I was running
faster than a gazelle, faster than a car. In moments the end of the beach loomed before me so I vaulted
onto the rocks of the seawall and leapt along the sloping cliffs. Vaguely I knew I was traveling north, and
where the coastline surged east I traveled inland, darting between trees, staying straight on my path.
Just north of Ogunquit I noticed the fire flickering between the trees. I angled back towards the
beach and stopped on a wooded outcropping before the sand. A path blazed up and down the coast like
the tail of a dragon. Shrieking people the size of ants threw driftwood and firecrackers onto the blazes,
making the flames color and spark. As far as I could see the bonfires sparkled. I let my eyes adjust and
realized the snaking flames were letters aimed inland, a message repeated over and over up and down
the beaches. A part of my unconscious mind knew this was right, that this was somehow planned, but
that didn’t stop the shiver of excitement and fear. And every dreamer that tread the beaches tonight
would know:
“Fofi Lives.”