TWO EPILOGUES
1
WHEN PEOPLE APPROVED of your interest, it was called a passion.
When they disapproved, they called it an obsession.
They didn’t say Einstein was obsessive. They said he was brilliant. Curie, Mozart, Dickinson, Hemingway. They were all passionate about their work.
But according to his family, his professors, and his therapist, Sam Washington was obsessive. He needed to get a life, focus on school, stop stalking people on the Internet. His fanaticism bordered on dangerous, they said.
He didn’t think he was dangerous because he was completely open about his passions. He didn’t hide his scrapbook in the basement away from prying eyes. He ran a detailed fan website. He’d never threatened anyone. He’d never before even tried to approach the person he was passionate about.
And it wasn’t even a sexual thing. Even with his roommate’s posters of scantily clad women, people still reacted more strongly to the printouts on his side of the room, complete with annotations.
His roommate, Jackson, had moved out months ago.
“Why do you think you’re so interested in Mallory Viridian?” his therapist, Dr. Bridge, would ask. She was a heavy woman in her late twenties who wore handmade dresses and red lipstick and radiated sexy self-confidence that totally distracted him. He had been dismayed when he had learned she would take his case, not because she was so attractive, but because she didn’t read books and he knew she wouldn’t understand.
“I’ve always been into mysteries,” he said. “My parents and I used to watch the old classics, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries; Father Brown; Murder, She Wrote; Midsomer Murders; Poirot; Marple; all those old shows. We used to have bets on who the murderer was, and whoever lost had to do the dishes.”
“Are you close to your parents?”
“Sure, I guess,” he said. “We watched TV together. Dad gave me twenty dollars when I got a good report card.”
She nodded and made a note. Sam worried they would be calling his parents, and he really didn’t want them to. To his relief, she returned to the subject at hand. “But the Mallory Viridian books are allegedly based on true crime,” she said. “That is quite different than scripted mysteries.”
“I believe she technically calls them novels,” he said, “but I’ve cross-referenced every single thing I could in her books with whatever news and public record police reports I could find.”
“Police reports aren’t public record in North Carolina,” Dr. Bridge protested. “How did you find out those details?”
He sighed. She was too smart. “Fine. I bribed someone at the county records office. And took the reporters who covered Mallory Viridian out to lunch.”
“Also a bribe,” she said. “So you have cross-referenced everything involving Mallory’s cases. Again, I ask, why?”
“Because they’re amazing,” he said. “The situations she found herself in, the ways she solved cases! The dusty pepper shaker in the senator’s house! The torn seam in the yoga instructor’s pants! It’s amazing! And it’s a damn shame,” he added, feeling the familiar irritation rising, “that she wasn’t allowed to go for her PI license. Is it legal for the authorities to block that? That doesn’t seem legal. She worked a night shift in an animal hospital and writes books when she would be the most amazing PI in existence. And now she’s left the damn planet forever!”
His face was warm, and he was panting now, and he was just getting heated up, but Dr. Bridge appeared unfazed. “Are you angry that she’s gone, or are you angry that she’s not solving any more crimes for you to read? Are you angry that you never got a chance to meet her and tell her of your admiration?”
He blinked at her, shaking his head. He had gathered one small nugget of hope that this one might understand, but she was like the rest.
“You don’t get it. I wasn’t stalking her. I don’t want to hurt her or anyone around her. I don’t want to fuck her or anything.” Saying the unfamiliar profanity felt like spitting out a tack. “I want to tell her that she got one of her cases wrong!”
HE HAD METICULOUSLY recreated each of Mallory’s murder scenes. He did it in LEGO bricks because after the first one he did with Barbie dolls, people got weirded out. Little blocky murder scenes were much more palatable to his roommate. Before he left, anyway.
He even followed German video game laws and made the bloody scenes green instead of red. He made every effort to not creep people out.
The murder where Mallory had been a pizza delivery woman who had arrived at a house just after a murder had occurred was a sloppy one, but no one could blame her. She had no idea about her future. But, through the novel, the news items he could find, and an unedited manuscript he had bribed one of her first readers to give him, he worked out exactly how she figured out the crime, which clues were important, and which ones were red herrings. He was proud of that one, and had featured it on his site.
He had put toy Mallory in a green jumpsuit work uniform from Space Case Pizza, carrying a flat white square reminiscent of a pizza box, and had managed to carefully paint a black eye on the middle-aged woman answering the door, trying to hide the grisly murder scene behind her. It would have been an obvious case of self-defense, but the woman had killed others earlier in her life—also, apparently, in self-defense—and her efforts to hide the murder, blame a nonexistent home invader, and the . . . efficient way she had killed her husband all came out after Mallory had spotted two key pieces of evidence the cops had overlooked: the ring that had cut her face when the victim had punched the murderer somehow ended up on a chain around her neck (she’d nearly hidden that in plain sight) and the small hairpin in her bun that was the murder weapon that had stabbed so precisely into her husband’s jugular.
All right, admittedly, in that diorama he had used fake blood to stain the scene. It had just been too grand.
DR. BRIDGE LEANED forward, her pad tilting in her hand. He could almost see something written there. She caught his eyes with her icy blue stare. “I’m trying to believe you, Sam, but despite your claims, this fixation you have does sound like stalking behavior. It feels unhealthy. You know where she’s worked, and what shift? How do you know she left the planet for good? If you thought she was wrong, why didn’t you write her an email instead of stalking her in person? Surely someone who’s good at digging up facts can find that email address,” Dr. Bridge had pointed out, a frown deepening the dimples in her cheeks.
He shook his head, the denial hot in his throat. “If I’m going to communicate with her, I am going to do it in person. I just wanted to get a sense of who she was, if she would be open to talking. But she tries hard to keep herself from people.”
“That’s not surprising,” Dr. Bridge said mildly. “What do you ultimately want out of this passion you speak of? Mallory is gone, there will be no more books, so far as we know, and you’re a young man in college. How can we move past this?”
“We,” Dr. Bridge had said. As if she were ready to help him when she thought he was as crazy as everyone else did. He just stared at his hands and didn’t look up.
“I just want her to know that she got one of her cases wrong. And maybe I could have emailed her before, but I can’t now.”
“What did she get wrong?”
He shook his head. She would laugh at him. “Never mind. You wouldn’t believe that I solved a case that she had trouble with.”
“Are you interested in private investigative work yourself? Or investigative journalism?”
Sam shrugged. His goal had been to meticulously go through Mallory’s books from the last three years. He was in college because his dad told him he had to go. He hadn’t really thought about the future much.
“Okay. I think we’ve had some good progress here, Sam,” she said. “Thanks for coming in and sharing all of this. I’d like to see you twice a week to start with.”
“Twice a week?” he asked, his head snapping up. “Am I that crazy?”
“ ‘Crazy’ is ableist and rude, Sam,” she said, frowning. “I think we need to talk frequently so that you can learn to refocus your attention on things like college and your future. As you yourself said, this fixation has played out as far as it can go. You can’t read any new Mallory books, you can’t follow any more murders she’s investigating, and you definitely can’t stalk her anymore because you’re on Earth and she’s not.”
He remembered the doctor’s deep dimples as she smiled at him, trying to be comforting and supporting. He had seen her three times after that, trying to tell her what she wanted to hear and barely processing her part of the conversation.
The bill for the next semester was due, and his bank account was full. It was his parents’ money, but Dad liked Sam to get the sense of what a dollar was worth, so even though they provided the money, Sam was in charge of paying the bills. So this time around he took that money and bought into the lottery for a seat on the first shuttle to the alien space station. He was going to go find Mallory and talk to her. He was going to tell her where she was wrong. He was going to help.
Now, sitting on the shuttle to pursue his grandest dream, he thought about his therapist, and her dimples, and her advice to move on. He thought about her advice to email Mallory.
He thought about Peter, the friend on his floor that he had a crush on. They’d had a joke that so many things in TV shows could be fixed if someone just picked up a phone and called someone else. But no, so many things had to be conveyed face-to-face. “I can’t tell you now, not over the link!” insisted Michael Garibaldi from Babylon 5. Then he severed the connection and was shot in the back.
Maybe Sam just wanted to meet her in person. Maybe he wanted to go to space. Maybe he had tried to email her, but it didn’t reach the space station. Maybe—he couldn’t remember any more maybes. He couldn’t remember much of anything except for being on the shuttle and putting together that more than one person had a connection to Mallory. He remembered thinking maybe he shouldn’t just up and talk to someone if he thought they might be a killer. But the Asian woman had given him a pill, and he had stopped caring.
He drifted now. It had been forever since he’d taken the pill and knocked it back with his water, which had tasted a little funky, now that you mention it. It had been a minute since he’d taken it. The woman across the aisle scared him a lot, but he couldn’t remember why. She sat near him, fingering the charms on her bracelet. That famous bracelet, famous to no one but him. Infamous, then. Mallory mentioned it every time she had referenced her aunt, and it featured heavily in the final book.
He thought about Peter, and how he wished he had told him how he felt.
Then the grandest moment of his life happened: the sentient space station Eternity entered his mind to learn about him and welcome him, and then her grasp on his mind slipped right off like it was greased, and she fell into the void.
Then he fell after her.