“I don’t even know where to begin.” Those were the first words Jennifer Graham uttered, startling me badly enough to make me cry out.
“JESUS CHRIST!”
She remained leaning against the dresser with her arms folded while I yelled and then began to collect my breath.
“Jesus Christ,” I repeated. “Jesus Christ . . . You scared the shit out of me. You . . . uh . . . I . . . I . . . I didn’t hear you come in.”
She hadn’t moved.
“How long . . . have . . . you . . .?” I couldn’t finish the thought.
She hadn’t moved an inch.
“Right,” I said.
“First of all, are you okay?”
My body felt problematically hot, bathed in a cold sweat and swamped in a fog of uncertainty. This was the physiological chaos that began the most surreal morning of my life. “Yeah. I mean, uh . . . uh . . . I mean . . . What do you mean?”
“Are you medically okay? Do you need a doctor?”
“No.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m about to slap the shit out of you and I want to make sure you’re okay before I do it.”
“You’re upset.”
I wasn’t sure how she could know anything about my situation, about what I’d been through, seen, done, or what happened with Katarina.
“You don’t need to be upset, Jenn. There’s—”
“You’re in here under my name, in a room under my name, as a fugitive under my name!”
“It’s really—”
“JUST SO YOU CAN BAG SOME UNDERFED SKANK!”
“No, I—”
“You lied to me!”
“No—”
“You gamed me! You did! So when you say, ‘Don’t be upset, Jenn, there’s no need to be upset, Jenn,’ what you really mean is ‘My God, this woman in front of me is miraculously calm for someone who has the legal right to castrate me with a hammer.’”
“I’m sorry about the room—”
“I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE ROOM! It’s not about the room! Look at you! What is going on with you?!” She’d come all the way over to the side of the bed. “Lying there all strung out on some bus wreck of a girl, dragging your career through the sewer while you get yourself sick in a foreign country that you’re not even supposed to be in.”
I strained to get up, making the monumental effort to do so despite having zero strength to fend off gravity. “Where is she?”
“You have a real fever, Adam!”
“Trust me, I can explain everything, but right now—Did you see her leave?” The fever. She was right—felt like a volcano bubbling forth from my torso, through my head, scorching my brain. Sitting upright in bed doubled it. I looked around. I’d dreamed they were both in this room together, Katarina and Jenn. The sight of both of them—it felt tangible. In fact, I had to convince myself I wasn’t still witnessing it—the fever having gone to work with a slow boil of my cortex. “Last night I updated Katarina on some details I’d seen and then we . . . I think she’s heading into a severe situation . . . which I know isn’t your . . . You need to understand she’s . . . different. She’s shown me a reality. It’s brutal and powerful. She’s powerful. She’s . . . like . . .”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“I never thought I’d see it.”
“Yeah.”
“The day you’d just shit out your dignity in a bowl.”
“The—?”
“It’s like you’re the cliché of the cliché. As far as you having any hope of—Oh my God, your arm!”
The blood had drenched through the pillowcase bandage, which was now hanging halfway off my body so that we both now had a direct look at the infected region of my shoulder. She saw it. I saw it. We were gaping at the crusted yellow and blazing pink of it.
Her tone shifted instantly. “Oh my God . . . Oh God . . . Okay . . . Lie back . . .”
I slumped down onto the bed, feeling the room still move even after I’d arrived at a standstill. The act of sitting up had churned a vortex of liquid vertigo in me and I was pinned back to the mattress as the fatigue renewed itself. My eyes fell shut for what felt like eighteen dreams in three minutes. I saw Jenn rinsing a hand towel in the bathroom. I saw the hotel balcony. I saw illogical events blending together from different days and people, and when I opened those same unreliable eyes of mine, Jenn was reentering the room carrying a small pharmaceutical bag. She’d exited the hotel and returned before I could comprehend any absence. She made me take the first dose—two pills along with some water.
“Drink,” she said.
“What happened to . . . to . . .?”
“Drink. You’re dehydrated. If you don’t get enough water, you’ll slip unconscious. You should be in a hospital but that’s not an option for you because, congratulations, you aren’t legally allowed to leave France.”
“Where’s . . .?”
I couldn’t think of her name for a moment.
“Katarina?” said Jenn.
“Where is she?”
“She’s not here.”
“She’s . . .? Where is she? What time is it?”
I heard the two of them talking, I swear to God. I witnessed every word they said. I began to see it again, relive it again, their conversation, trying to reassemble the memories in a sequence, like stitching a quilt. It was in the entranceway. Ten minutes ago? Just before I woke up. Katarina returned after Jenn had arrived. Right? Katarina left the room to buy something at a store, then returned with a plastic bag of maybe groceries, maybe something else, and she was set to leave again but she was arguing with Jenn about getting her stuff out of the room. You can imagine how confusing this was. In my state. The two of them arguing near the front door, out of sight from the bed, contesting the practical aspect of whether Katarina was allowed anywhere near me. “It’s just to get what is mine,” she said, pointing to her tote bag on the table. I could see a black cocktail dress draped over the chair next to a pair of glossy pumps. “No,” said Jenn. “The room’s in my name.” Katarina kept asking for it, kept criticizing her: “I don’t expect you to understand. You play by their rules.” Jenn kept stating her side of it: “That’s right, I play by their rules. That’s the only way to change the game.” I craned my neck to peer down the hall. I couldn’t see much except that Katarina had that grocery bag. They argued some more, then finally agreed on something, some kind of compromise, then I heard Jenn approaching me. I was trying as hard as I could to stay coherent. You can’t imagine how nauseous this feels—the walls actually bending inward on you. Katarina would be operating on incomplete information to do whatever she was about to do, bad information, from me, from my deliberate omission of what happened in the rape room—regarding the victims, regarding the hatchet.
I had to stop her.
I’d doomed her.
I started to drag myself out of bed, having heard the front door click shut. I only had a matter of seconds before she left the building. “We’re following her,” I said to Jenn, having mustered the determination.
“Following . . .?”
“C’mon.”
“Following who?”
“Before she gets to the elevator.”
“Who?”
“We gotta stop her.” I was starting to get up. I’d found enough resolve. I pulled my legs across the edge of the bed and planted my feet on the floor, psyching myself up for the upcoming chase.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Katarina.”
“What?”
“Let’s go—”
“Adam!” My sense of time had been completely eradicated. “Katarina left way before I ever got here. She left yesterday.”