I’m staring at a playing card in my hand.
My fingers look strange—bigger and without nail polish.
How odd.
I try to move, but find that I can’t.
Huh?
“Two of Diamonds,” thinks a male voice inside my head with a noticeable British accent.
“Darian?” I reply. “What are you doing in my head?”
No answer.
Instead, my eyes move from the card to take in my surroundings—which is when I realize I’m unable to control my body.
The surroundings are startlingly familiar.
This is the restaurant where I had performed my magic until I was forbidden from doing so—only everything is washed out, for lack of a better term.
It’s as though everything was filmed with an ancient camera, and then someone turned that footage into a virtual reality environment.
The people at the other tables are indiscernible, and even color is drained from most objects.
Without meaning to, I pick up a beer bottle from the table and take a swig.
To my surprise, the dark lager tastes yummy, not bitter as usual.
“Two of Diamonds,” a female voice that sounds like me says, but not out of my mouth.
I look up.
There I stand, holding a deck of cards in my hands and grinning.
Is this another trick by Kit?
It’s possible, though this me doesn’t exactly look like me—and Kit was pretty accurate.
This person looks like my much-hotter sister who had some major plastic surgery and was then photoshopped for a few years.
I zoom in on that face as though she’s about to sprout an angelic halo.
“How did you do that?” I say to the other me in Darian’s voice.
Wait, even my voice is Darian’s?
“Very well,” the supermodel version of me says with a seductive wink. “Now you try it.” She turns to the woman on my right.
Wait a second.
I know what’s about to happen.
The woman is about to choose a card under extremely fair conditions, and I will reveal it to her.
Of course.
This is some strange replay of the day when I first met Darian—the meeting that led to the fateful TV performance and the rest of the madness.
But why am I seeing this memory in such a strange manner?
“She’s so fiery,” Darian thinks inside my head. “Just like Matilda was.”
“Who the hell is Matilda?” I try to ask, but he doesn’t reply—probably because I lack a mouth with which to speak.
The outside me guesses the woman’s card correctly, then names another card chosen under lab-experiment-fair conditions, then another, and another.
“She is so bold,” Darian thinks. “So adaptable and creative.”
My doppelganger names his card. He claps and thinks, “So playful with the audience, so brave… and so bloody gorgeous.”
“Thanks, pal, but seriously—”
My restaurant self hands over the deck and asks me to cut it.
When her hand-model-smooth fingers brush mine, I feel a strange sensation in my groin.
Wait.
What?
Since when do I have that kind of plumbing?
Did I develop some sort of narcissistic schizophrenia? Because this is beginning to remind me of that scene from Being John Malkovich when the titular John Malkovich gets inside his own head.
Then it finally dawns on me.
Somehow—and I have no idea how—I’m inside Darian’s memory of our meeting.
It is his very masculine arousal I just felt.
That makes sense—in as much as such a thing could make sense.
This is why everything around us looks so odd. Memory isn’t a perfect recording of events, and so Darian must not remember all the nitty-gritty, like the colors of things or who else was eating at the nearby tables.
For that matter, this is why the card selection was so much fairer than when I had actually performed this effect. He remembers what I wanted my spectators to recall later, not what really happened.
This also explains why the me in his memory looks so perfect.
It’s me but seen through Darian’s beer goggles—
The scene around me swirls and disintegrates like a mirage, only to be replaced by a new one.