9

Janet’s waiting for me when I open the door. She usually doesn’t stay up much past her shift, but she’s sitting on the couch and old sitcoms are playing on the television. She hates sitcoms, so I know she wasn’t watching them, which means I’m in trouble.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

“I was in the middle of something and I forgot by the time I wasn’t anymore.”

“What were you in the middle of at this time of night?”

I’d been so focused on thoughts of Madison and the Serpent’s man and having spoken to Ouroboros that I don’t have an excuse ready, didn’t try to think of one until I was on my way up to the apartment. I guess I should have stopped and come up with one, but I’m so damned tired and I’d hoped that she’d just gone to bed.

I know that Janet can see my brain working. There’s no point in giving an excuse now. Even if my exhausted brain managed to dump out a brilliant one before shutting down completely, she wouldn’t buy it.

“I found out today that Madison is alive and in trouble with some very bad people.”

Her face goes terrifyingly blank. “Did you go to the police?” she asks in an uninflected voice.

“No. I went to check it out myself.”

She nods slowly, not looking at me, then heads for the bedroom. “You should stay out here.”

She walks with such rigid control that her long hair, which usually swings back and forth, hangs limp. She steps all the way into the bedroom before shutting the door behind her.

I go to the fridge and pull out stuff to make sandwiches. It feels like my ravenous hunger is the only thing keeping me from falling asleep on my feet. Once I’ve made a couple of turkey sandwiches and a PB&J, I settle onto the couch and begin to eat and ignore the television.

Ouroboros knew. He knew. I already had the proof that I’m not alone in seeing how crazy the world has gotten, how one thing doesn’t follow from another, but to hear someone else admit it. And with such calm.

He takes people who’ve made terrible mistakes and fixes their problems, and they give him everything in return.

What does that mean? No part of that sentence makes any logical sense. If I were still in my comatic dreamworld, the one that never happened because I never burned myself and so never spent a month in a medically-induced coma. There this would have made sense.

What if I am still there? Things have gotten strange enough. A cult hidden out in plain sight striking dark bargains and carrying on criminal activities with impunity? This isn’t the world I’ve known. Am I dreaming? Am I crazy? If so, the fact that a figment of my imagination agreed with my insane delusions wouldn’t matter much.

I wonder again if I’m even alive.

I try to feel if my body is real, but my head feels like a balloon, my neck a string. I’ve reached the point of exhaustion where my brain’s ability to consistently translate chaotic stimuli into coherence has gone slightly off and nothing feels right. It wouldn’t even if I weren’t doubting the reality of my own existence.

What would Madison call this? Existential crisis? Nihilism? Solipscism? I don’t know. I wish that I were as smart as her.

So far, the only person who’s admitted to me that they have also witnessed these alternate realities is the man on the phone who answered to Ouroboros, a man I’ve been considering my nemesis. He wants me to leave this alone. I don’t feel that I can trust his opinion. I don’t know that he saved me, all I know is that he also has memories of the time when I needed saving.

I don’t want to, but I need to talk to Janet. I need to talk to someone, and she’s stood beside me since Madison disappeared, been so kind and understanding. And this involves her, too.

No, I’m trying to validate selfishly dragging her into this so that I don’t have to experience it alone, and I do feel so alone. She’s the one person I dare to describe what’s been happening to me, in the same way that the cruelest things I’ve ever said have been to people I love, because I know they won’t throw me away for it.

But I do need an outside opinion. I’m too far into my own head. My brain is spinning and it needs something to focus on in order to stop.

So I walk up to the bedroom door, knock, feel ridiculous as I wait for an answer that doesn’t come outside of my own bedroom.

“Janet?” I say as I open the door, as if she might be asleep, but I know she’s not asleep. Still, I don’t turn on the light. I don’t want to see her face as I tell her the things I’m about to tell her.

I sit on my side of the bed with my back to her, lean onto my knees, run my hands through my curls. I sit there for too long.

“Something strange is happening to me,” I blurt out, jumping into it because I know I’ll never start if I wait for the right way to phrase this, the way that won’t piss Janet off and that won’t make me sound crazy, because I don’t believe that particular phrasing exists.

“A couple of days ago…” I pause as I try to think how long it’s been. Just this morning seems like a week ago. “A couple of days ago I woke up and I had two complete sets of memories of the past two months. The only thing that made one more real than the other is that one led up to that moment waking up beside you, and the other led to a dead end. Up until that second, though, it seemed just as real. In the other set of memories, Madison didn’t disappear. Well, she did to her family, but she stayed in contact with me. What I realized is that the two sets of memories are connected, and I’ve confirmed that since.”

I stop talking, wondering for a moment if I should have checked to be sure Janet was awake. As tough as she acts, and as good as she’s been with my troubles, she has a habit of escaping her own at any cost. She might have popped some pain pills or something and knocked herself out.

I’m about to make sure she’s okay when she says, “Are you being serious?”

“Yes. Trust me, I wish I weren’t, I wish this were some crazy excuse, but it’s real.”

“Okay. Give me the whole story.”

I go over all of it, from getting burned that day and the month of coma and months of rehab, to then waking up beside her as if from the longest, most vivid dream I’ve ever had, to visiting the burn unit after the accident that morning to the Dorset brothers and then the really crazy stuff, the Serpent, being shot in a second round of double memories, Ouroboros, and finally the abandoned cold storage place in the Burnout.

She sits silently for the whole story, but her silence continues after I finish, and it grows heavy, and I become afraid to disturb it, afraid that whatever it’s holding back will crush me.

“Well…?” I say.

“You’re really going to make me say it? You heard yourself telling this story and you’re still going to make me say it?”

“Yes. Say it.”

“Cody, you’ve been under an incredible amount of stress recently, and you’ve held up amazingly. Between graduating, losing your fiance,” I see how it hurts her to say this, “losing your old job prospect, landing this new high-stress job, and maybe even me. Maybe even how fast we’ve moved—the fact that you’ve somehow managed to keep up a calm front is unbelievable. But I’ve seen the toll it’s all taken on you. I think I’ve seen the start of all this for awhile now, and I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything.”

I turn to her, can only just see her in the light coming through the cracked door, sitting propped against the headboard, a look of sadness on her face.

“What do you mean? What are you sorry about?”

But is it sorrow for my sad condition, or is she sorry because she’s somehow a part of this. When I mentioned that I discovered what happened to Madison and her face went blank, I thought Janet was hiding her hurt, but was she hiding something else? Did she know about this?

She says, “I mean that you think you went to bed fine and woke up to all this, but this has been coming, I’ve been watching it coming and I didn’t say anything, and I’m sorry.”

I can barely sit there. I can barely look at her looking at me. I want to run.

“What? What did you see coming?”

She hesitates, looks at me, gives me a big, sincere expression. How many people does it take to do something like this? To change the whole world? Is everyone in on it?

“You need to talk to someone,” she says. “You’re confused. Your mind is mixed up, playing tricks on you because it’s been going so hard for so long without a rest. I can barely imagine how hard this has been on you.”

I’m getting double meanings from everything she says, one treacherous, one caring, and I can’t take it anymore. “You have to talk straight. Whatever you’re saying, just say it.”

She closes her eyes. When she opens them again they’re wet and shiny. “This is your only life, Cody. You’re delusional. These delusions made you step out on your job and then run around the most dangerous part of the city. You’re lucky to still be alive. You need help.”

I relax a bit. “So you think I’m crazy. Why didn’t you just come out and say it? You scared me.”

But I’m still scared. The seed of doubt has been planted and I’d thought Janet was on my side, but now I’m not sure.

She looks confused. These are confusing times.

“You think I made all this up, but how do you explain that I recognized everyone at the burn unit?”

“Did you write down this alternate set of memories before hand?”

“No, why?”

“Then if you were delusional, what makes you think you wouldn’t incorporate what you saw into your delusion after the fact?”

She’s right, but I know she’s wrong. I know it. Don’t I?

“So what can I trust?” I ask.

She curls up to me, pulls me down onto the bed, but I stay stiff. “You can trust that I love you, and other people love you, and that you need to talk to a professional to get perspective.”

She lays her cheek on mine, but I can’t feel back. She’s wrong about what I can trust. If I can’t trust what I’ve experienced first hand, how the hell can I trust what other people say? According to this theory, I’m capable of making people up entirely.

Then I remember the phone. I do have proof. I jump up, pull it from my pocket, flip to the pictures of Madison.

“Look,” I say. “That’s her.”

Janet looks at it. “These pictures aren’t very good. Are you sure?”

I cough up something resembling a laugh. “Yes, I’m fucking sure. I’d know her anywhere.”

If she has doubts about this, she keeps them to herself. Well, almost. She has doubts—I can see them all over her face—but she doesn’t speak them.

“How do you know these were taken recently?”

“The files are date stamped.”

“And that couldn’t be changed?”

I’m about to say no, but I hesitate. “I don’t know,” then, “But the tattoos on the backs of her hands. These had to have been taken after she disappeared, because she never had those tattoos.”

“How do you know those are tattoos and not drawings?”

I don’t. “But can’t you see how much older she looks?” I point to the screen. “Look at the lines around her eyes and mouth.”

“It’s blurry. I honestly can’t make out that kind of detail. But even so, she’s only been gone a few months. Doesn’t that make it seem like this maybe isn’t her at all?”

She’s right. I don’t know why I thought that proved my point. I’m so damned tired.

But she’s wrong. This is Madison, and she’s in trouble.

I hold out my hand for the phone. She looks at me for a moment, hesitates for a moment, then puts it in my hand.

“If that’s her, you need to take it to the police. They probably have ways to tell who owned the phone, when it was used, where it was used. You don’t.”

The police have done nothing so far but look at me with suspicion. That’s the best effort they could manage, pursuing “the boyfriend/husband probably did it” angle. Giving them this phone will result in one thing: them scrutinizing me again.

“I guess you’re right,” I say, slipping the phone into my pocket. “I’ll go talk to them in the morning.”

Janet curls up on my chest as I force my muscles to relax. Her hair smells so nice, and in just a few minutes she’s breathing the slow rhythm of sleep, and I’m so, so tired.

* * *

My bladder wakes me up. I look at the clock. A little after six in the morning. The events of the previous day hit me and I’m awake and even though I’m dog-tired I know I won’t be going back to sleep.

At some point in the night Janet rolled off of me to her side of the bed. She’ll probably sleep for another four hours if I can get out of the house without waking her. Having fallen asleep while still fully dressed makes this easier.

This time I take a flashlight.

Outside in my car, I pull out the phone full of Madison’s pictures and flip through them. Janet’s right, in that I’m not equipped to solve this, and yet I think I’m the only one who can. This puzzle has pieces that exist in two different worlds, and I’m the only person who walks in both. The police couldn’t solve this because the police live in a world where the Serpent and Ouroboros don’t even exist.

Talking to Janet didn’t help. It wasn’t right for me to bring her into this last night. Hell, it wasn’t right for me to bring her into this months ago, when I was mourning Madison’s loss and feeling persecuted by everyone who thought me responsible for it.

There’s one person in my life who I felt I could never fully please, and he seems like the only person who can offer me advice right now.

My mom starts work at seven, my dad at eight. If I go right now, I can catch him.

* * *

He opens the door with confusion in his eyes but a real smile on his face. I haven’t come around enough since Madison disappeared.

“Hey, Cody! Is everything okay?” He steps aside and let’s me in, gives me the pat on the shoulder that from him counts as a long hug.

I don’t know what to say. The fact that he asked means that my face is showing my distress more than I realized. This is when I would usually say that everything is okay and switch to a light topic, and I almost reflexively say, “Yeah, fine.” But I’m not here for small talk.

“Things are kind of tough right now,” I say.

“Your mom already left for work, but her shift hasn’t started yet. Do you want me to call her and ask her to come back?”

“No. No, I wanted to talk to you.”

His eyebrows rise. “Okay, well, I was about to eat. You hungry?”

“Not really,” I say as I follow him into the kitchen and sit at the mottled-green Formica table.

“I can tell you need some of this, though. You look like crap.” He grabs a mug and fills it with coffee, sits it in front of me. I mix in sugar and creamer. He drinks his black. I think he can’t possibly enjoy this, but then again I thought that about his penchant for drinking his scotch neat, and now I’ve grown a taste for it. Maybe in ten years I’ll be drinking my coffee black and my scotch neat and nursing a stomach full of ulcers.

“So what’s up?” he asks.

I don’t know how to start. I thought I did, but now everything I thought to say sounds stupid or insane.

Then I realize that the advice I want isn’t about my particular situation. I don’t want to know what he thinks of Ouroboros and the Serpent and all that. What I want to know is what I’ve always wanted to know from him: how to behave like a man.

“Dad, what would you do if mom were in trouble?”

His brow knits, and he sets his piece of toast down. “Is this about your mom?”

“No, it’s about Madison.”

“Have the police discovered something?” He never doubted me. And that means something to me, because unlike my mom, my dad never had any delusions about my ability to do wrong. He saw my fallibility, and he still never for an instant thought I was responsible for Madison’s disappearance.

“No, they haven’t found anything out.”

“They’re useless. Absolutely useless. Do you feel more or less safe when you see a cop? I think that’s the test for a police state, and I think we fail that test pretty badly.” My dad grew up in a different time and was treated differently than I have been.

“I just want to know, what would you do if mom were in trouble.”

“There’s nothing you could have done, Cody.”

“I know, Dad. I’m asking about you.”

“Anything. I would do anything.”

“What if, say, she got in trouble trying to help you?”

He gives me the look again, the look that says that he knows that I’m up to something, and that he’ll figure it out sooner or later. “What is this about?”

“I’ve got all these thoughts spinning around in my head and I can’t seem to find stable ground.” I take a long gulp of coffee that burns my tongue, then stand up. “This was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

“No,” he says. “Sit down. I can only imagine how hard this has all been on you. Okay, if your mom got in trouble trying to keep me out of trouble? I wouldn’t let her.”

“She already did. Would you undo what she’d done to get her out of trouble?”

“I’m having a bit of trouble imagining the scenario, but yes. There’s no way I’d let her take a fall for me.”

“Even if she wanted to? Even if it meant so much to her that she gave everything? Wouldn’t you respect that?”

His eyes turn inward, and I can see him really thinking about the dilemma. “I see what you’re getting at: am I sacrificing for her if it would make her unhappy? Should I let her sacrifice for me? What happens when a couple who would give everything for each other both try to give everything?” He’s silent for a minute. “There was a story I read when I was in high school that stuck with me, a Christmas story where the husband sold his watch to get his wife a hair trinket, and his wife sells her hair to get him a watch band. It’s like that, but without a happy ending.”

“Yeah, I remember that story, too.”

He snorts a short laugh. “So they still have kids read that. To answer your question: I wouldn’t let your mother sacrifice herself for me. From the terms you gave, I have to admit that it would be out of selfishness, that I couldn’t live with myself.” He stops short, looks at me, trying to stare into my brain. “I don’t like giving advice when I don’t know what it’s about. I’m not sure that was the right advice.”

For some reason, the memory of him giving me the stack of burn victim memoirs hits me like a brick. I remember how angry it made me, and looking into his concerned face, all I can feel is ashamed. I’m not the man he is. The words don’t even matter. Who he is, that’s the advice I need.

“Don’t worry, Dad. I just needed some of that parental concern.” I finish my coffee, take the cup to the sink. “Thanks for the coffee.”

He stands, puts an arm around my shoulder and shakes me a bit. “Call us or come around if you need to talk. Your mother misses you.”

I nod. “I will. Have a good one.”

“You too,” he says as I walk out the door.

* * *

It’s weird driving downtown in rush hour traffic, considering I live downtown. It’s not something I usually get to experience.

The drive gives me time to think, time to talk myself out of what I’m about to do. It doesn’t work.

My phone rings. It’s Janet. I let it ring.

By the time I arrive downtown my bank is open. I go in and withdraw five thousand dollars in twenties and fifties. Then I get on a bus and ride it as close to the Burnout as it will take me.