The Other Resident
Vin was himself again, lying in the crèche. The dream of being Winston Churchill was over and he understood the meaning of the device as he remembered a passage from Nerdean’s notebook.
The dream experience had unlocked something in him. In a single day, he had gained a whole life as the kind of man he always knew he could be. He remembered the feel and smell of it, the embrace of the supple leather chair, the sweet cigar smoke in his throat and the complexity of the claret chasing it, and the stimulation—the electric, thought-broadening, gut-loosening, muscle-freeing intensity of all that power.
Feeling light, unburdened, he put a shaky hand on the edge of the open casket. He might jump to the ceiling in a single motion. Could it be that every home in the city (in the country? in the world?) contained a secret like this?
Nerdean had called it lucid dreaming, but Vin knew a man named Jackie Fisher now, remembered arguing with him into early morning hours, debating the logistics of an amphibious attack on U-boat pens at Zeebrugge, Jackie endlessly certain of his contradictory assertions, his blue eyes flaming, spit flying from his thick lips.
Equally surprising, Vin knew what Zeebrugge was, and where it was. He rocked out of the crèche and logged-in to the middle computer system and typed the strange place name into a search form. A map of the Belgian port filled the screen. It was where he expected it to be.
He pulled on his fallen jeans and dragged his T-shirt on over his damp hair, then sat again and searched for the term “dardanelles strait 1915.” He read a Wikipedia article titled “Naval Operations in the Dardanelles Campaign” with a sliding sense of déjà vu.
Over the next few hours, he read many articles. The people in his dream—Jackie Fisher, Vice Admiral Carden, and the others—were all real. After that meeting, Fisher had renounced Churchill’s plan and resigned from the government. The swift attack using only naval power had become a ten-month land campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula that caused close to four hundred thousand casualties. Vin’s eyes passed over the number multiple times before digesting its sense. He had a faint recollection of watching an old World War I movie named Gallipoli, about incompetence and carnage.
When he was too tired to read more, he leaned back in the eggshell chair. Nerdean’s machine did more than induce lucid dreaming. It must have both invigorated his imagination and returned endless buried memories—details from the movie, maybe comments captured from school lessons that he could never have recalled on his own, passages of books he’d read and forgotten, knowledge he would never have suspected that he still possessed. It had used all of that to shape a dream that was a fulfillment of Vin’s deepest ambitions. To influence the fate of hundreds of millions. To help move the world forward.
And everything had felt real. The shine on the table that the warlords circled, the subtleties of gestures and postures that were readable the way the bodies of living people are. Those details must have come from Vin’s imagination, but they were perfectly integrated with the facts from his memories.
His dream explained why Nerdean had researched subjective experience during suspended animation and it also clarified the full scope of her project, which was even more daring and impressive than he could have guessed. The crèche had connected disparate circuits in his mind, generating new cognitive capabilities that were able to build a seamless combination of eidetic recall and creative virtuosity. It had allowed him to imagine a new reality. Nerdean had built a device that induced creative genius. She might have even used the ideas behind the machine to enhance her own abilities, in order to build the full device. If Vin was right—and he was sure that he was—then the crèche was an almost unfathomable revelation, and so much more than he had hoped for.
He wanted turtle soup but didn’t have any idea where he might get it. He had left a pizza in the refrigerator though, in case he was hungry after twenty-four hours in the crèche. He carried the box to the card table, flipped it open and eased into one of the folding chairs. The chair felt too light, flimsy and stiff against his skin, almost unreal compared to the soft warmth of the furniture in his dream.
He’d brought the notebook upstairs. He wanted to look for evidence of his new theories about the crèche, but found it difficult to concentrate. He ate the pizza slowly, a cold length of crust drooping over his fingers as he flipped through the notebook’s pages.
Midday light filled the open and empty room like nourishment, the distant water silvered under a gray-white sky, and pain came and went in his throat and chest. He kept feeling a sickening sense of accountability, his mind imagining casualties from that campaign in the Dardanelles that he had been arguing for.
He needed sleep. He dropped a half-eaten slice back into the box and walked to the stairs, but then realized he’d lost the thread of what he was doing. He went back to retrieve the pizza box and began to climb the stairs. Halfway up, his toe brushed a soft and living thing that flicked against his ankle.
He jerked backward, throwing the pizza box up and almost toppling over, only grabbing the railing at the last second and pulling against it to save himself. A fluffy thing with embedded needles had swept through his legs. Holding the railing, he pulled himself close to the wall and closed his eyes as he bent to sit on the low carpet of the staircase.
When his pulse slowed, he blinked and saw a pair of eyes staring up at him. They were round and green and around them was a cream-colored, fur-covered face: a cat was crouching near the bottom step.
He tried to say “Hello,” but his mouth didn’t move and the word didn’t sound. He tried again, saying it softly, then, “Who are you?”
The cat’s eyes narrowed. There might have been movement at its ears.
“Who are you?” he said again, and then, “Who could you be?”
Its gaze shifted so it was no longer staring. It moved a front paw forward and its shoulders relaxed.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, and the cat yawned.
“Come here,” he said. The cat stood quickly and ran up the stairs toward his extended hand, pushed into him as he pet it. Yellowish, medium-length fur, white at the ends of its paws and around its muzzle. The touch of it, its warmth and interest in him were profoundly comforting. He bent forward and continued to stroke as it leaned toward his hand and shin.
A measure of pain that he hadn’t realized he was feeling drained away and the drenching strangeness of the day faded a bit. He saw the pizza box at the bottom of the stairs and felt as if he had just landed inside himself.
He didn’t want to think about Winston Churchill anymore. He stood and the cat stared up at his face. “Let’s go,” he told it, and walked slowly to the second floor. The cat followed.
He fell on his air mattress and folded the sheet over himself. A tuft of cat hair rose and floated off the bed toward the door. “Cat,” he called, and the cat ran over, jumped on the bed and meowed. Its voice was creaky, both demanding and fragile. Vin patted a spot beside him and fell asleep.
He woke hungry and thirsty in the early morning, opening his eyes to see the cat watching him from halfway across the bed. He remembered being Winston Churchill, but the very specific feeling of inhabiting someone else’s body was already fading and he could think of no way to preserve it. After a moment of blankness, he wondered what it would be like to be inside a cat’s body, a cat’s mind, its umwelt. Would he feel the tail rising and falling? Would he be able to follow a cat’s thoughts? Would there be memories? History? The cat returned his gaze. Vin wondered where the cat had come from.
He rolled to the side of the bed. The cat called out loudly. It hopped off the air mattress and hurried toward the stairs, belly swaying. He heard soft pulling noises—its claws catching on carpet as it descended toward the lower floor. Vin showered, shaved and dressed. He heard the cat meowing downstairs.
In the kitchen, near the sink, there was an empty aluminum bowl with a smear of dried cat food. An identical bowl was half filled with water. A few cat hairs floated in it.
He went to the basement and then hurried down the chute, dropping the final few feet into the office. The lights had come on, as they always did. The air conditioner’s hushed whisper was the only sound. A chill shook him as he placed a hand on the transparent pane of the first casket. The mist cleared. Nerdean was still there. She had not gone out and adopted a cat while he was in the other crèche. Where did the cat come from?
Upstairs, he checked the notebook again, flipping through in search of a thing he wouldn’t have been able to describe—and then stopped, having found it. While the page included lines of incomprehensible notation, a beautiful pencil drawing of a medium-haired cat consumed most of it. The drawing was annotated with measurements and underneath was the large, handwritten name, “Sophie.” Vin didn’t remember seeing the drawing, but an intuition, like a stranger in his mind, had pulled him toward the notebook.
He found cat food under the sink and fed the cat and changed her water. Joaquin hadn’t mentioned a cat. Vin didn’t remember “Sophie” at all. He watched her eat as if she were a ceramic lie.
He was rubbing his chin with the back of his hand as he stepped into the living room and saw a wooden cat platform in front of the picture window. It was covered with brown carpet and topped by a cushion. That hadn’t been there either.
He pulled on a windbreaker and left Nerdean’s house, the door’s mechanism catching in the last inches to guide it shut. The day was clear and cool. He climbed the concrete stairs to the overlook at Marshall Park, a small grassy area on the west side of Queen Anne Hill. Wind brushed against him as he sat on a wooden bench and watched the shadows of the massive grain silos below, watched sunlight like chrome dust on the wrinkling water.
After many rings, Bill answered his phone.
“What the hell, man?” Bill’s voice was scratchy with sleep.
“Hey. It’s Vin.”
“Yeah, I know. The phone tells me who it is. Yours does too. That’s what the big name is when the phone starts ringing.”
“Something’s wrong.”
There was quiet.
“There’s something wrong, Bill.”
“Well, you woke me up, so, yeah.”
“No. There’s a cat. In Nerdean’s house. There’s a cat in here. This morning.”
“What?”
“A cat. In Nerdean’s house.”
“A stranger cat? Did it get in a fight with Sophie?”
“What?”
“The cats. What happened?”
Vin didn’t answer. Bill said, “Are you going to apologize for the last time we talked?”
“You know Sophie?”
“Are you joking, man? What’s going on with you? Did you forget that you told me not to blow weed smoke at her?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“What’s going on? Are you stoned right now? Look man, are you going to apologize or what?”
“About Kim?”
“Yeah, you fucker.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Okay, apology accepted. I know how you feel about me and drugs. But you don’t really understand it. I’m not an addict. I can stop if I want to, like I did before.”
“Alright.”
“Alright? Don’t just alright me.” A heavy breath. “Shit. Okay, now, you remember the cat’s name? That’s been dealt with? So, what’s going on over there?”
“Bill, I gotta go.”
“What?”
“I’m going to get some coffee.”
“Well, what are you doing later?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, why the hell did you call me then, dammit?”
“I called . . . I called to apologize.”
While he waited for Joaquin to arrive, Vin watched a Bruce Lee video on his laptop. Though the entertainment and martial arts icon spoke with a theatricality that should have seemed like artifice, a confection spun out of condescending B-movie send-ups, he seemed completely genuine. The video was low resolution, a black-and-white close-up of Bruce Lee’s long head against a dark background. He rarely blinked as he spoke and his hands gracefully shaped and emphasized his points, which sounded simple but which he invested with gravity. In an era when every gesture of even passing interest spawned an endless lineage of copies and minor variations, Bruce Lee’s words sounded clichéd, but he struck Vin as authentic, his commitment to what he was saying created a mesmerizing sincerity. He was talking about the way water changes its form as it fills a vessel and he ended the video with an instruction to “be water.”
Such an absence of boundaries seemed irrational, but it was apparently what Bruce Lee believed in, and he was an avatar of human aspiration, a man who had tamed violence and could contain or express it with primal purity. Vin paused the video to respond to the Chickadee’s “Hey Sweetie” call, the doorbell having somehow fixed itself.
After a greeting, as they walked room-by-room through the mostly recovered house, it became clear that Joaquin was uninterested in the damage. He nodded a few times but didn’t question Vin until they reached the master bedroom.
“And, you took each of these apart?” Joaquin pointed at the individual electronics that glowed and blinked around the TV, his index finger moving in precise increments to clearly indicate one after another.
“Yes.” Vin was noticing that the ends of the tassels on Joaquin’s walnut-colored leather loafers were brushed with a light blue accent color. “Of course, I don’t know what all the internals should look like. I just referenced the electronics inside with what I could find on the Internet, and they all look genuine. But they were shut down. They weren’t really drawing the power you’d expect, given the activity portrayed by their”—Vin nodded toward the boxes—“front, blinking lights.”
“So, they have been altered?”
“Yes, but not shorted, like I originally said. Their electronics are just bypassed. The exterior lights are controlled independently. That little one there is the master controller, and it runs them all in patterns. So they’ll look authentic, I guess.”
Joaquin’s leather portfolio was clutched in his right hand. He wore a lightweight, neatly fitted, dark-gray suit jacket, almost navy. The perfectly fitted collar of his white silk shirt was starched but didn’t dig into his neck. His tie was an embroidered paisley swirl of powder blue on a slightly darker blue background.
He half smiled. “So you still do not know what the electrical power is actually being used for?”
“Not yet.”
Joaquin gave him a searching, skeptical look. His voice remained friendly though. “I see. Well, that is too bad.” A note of sympathy from a favorite cousin.
“I’m working on it.” Vin had a clear feeling of letting Joaquin down.
As they walked downstairs, Joaquin said, “Do not worry about damage to the house. I appreciate that you are conscientious. But in the future, as you explore, you do not need to be concerned about putting things right. Do not spend your time restoring things. Your other activities will be a better use of your time. I will make sure that all of the other details are addressed at the proper time, and that the house is returned to its original condition on a schedule that will satisfy Nerdean.”
In the dining room, Vin asked, “How did you meet Nerdean?”
“That is the sort of personal question that my employment contract forbids me from answering.”
“It’s in your contract, huh?”
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t like people to know much about her, does she?”
“Again.”
“Okay. Look, I don’t know if I can stay much longer.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I’m just not sleeping well here.”
“I see that you have not purchased any furniture. Would it help if I ordered a bed? Or, you could sleep in the master bedroom. Although I would understand your decision to leave, I am happy with our arrangement and would willingly support you further by making things more comfortable, if that would help.”
“Okay, but, why do you really want me here? Really?”
“Really? For all the reasons we have discussed, that relate to your efforts to investigate the home’s electrical mysteries. And, of course, to provide some companionship for Sophie.”
“The cat.” Vin’s face tightened and his vision blurred then cleared. He had been trying to decide how to ask about the cat. “I found a cat box, and things.”
Joaquin blinked. He had turned slightly away, but now he turned back and watched Vin thoughtfully, saying, “Yes?”
“And, so, you were feeding the cat before I moved in?”
“As I’ve said. Yes.”
They exchanged a few words about Sophie. Vin couldn’t read Joaquin well enough to know whether he might have recently brought the cat and was lying for some reason, or whether the conversation was making Joaquin wonder about Vin’s reliability. Joaquin showed a bit of irritation as he walked through some obvious steps for cleaning Sophie’s litter box.
“Alright, I get all that,” Vin said, frustrated by feeling that he shouldn’t ask what he really wanted to know.
“Then I do not understand. What are you asking?”
“I mean—I’m asking if what I’m doing here is, well, if I’m taking care of both the house, and the cat?”
“Yes. Feeding Sophie, playing with her, cleaning her litter box. Yes.”
The next morning, Vin placed an extra helping of dry food near the dish with Sophie’s fresh canned food. He changed her water and put down an additional bowl of fresh water as well. He was wearing a white bathrobe that he had bought the night before. He checked his email and voicemail. No one had an urgent need to talk with him.
He descended to Nerdean’s office, naked except for the robe. When he arrived, he logged-in and checked the status of the second crèche. All of its systems appeared to be operating flawlessly. He spent over an hour looking at the raw data generated by his last immersion. Very little made sense to him, but what did—temperature maps, heart rate, blood chemistry, vasodilation, brain activity—all remained well within the expected ranges that he found in the documents and online.
He stepped to the first crèche and placed his hand on the transparent pane, watched Nerdean floating in the blue liquid. Small bubbles sometimes escaped from her mouth. They rose in the broth and broke into smaller and smaller bubbles as they looped toward a recycling port above her head. All of the questions he had for her were useless while she was on the other side of the casket’s door, unseeing and unhearing.
Yesterday, he had noticed with surprise that Nerdean’s hair color seemed to have changed. It was not the steel gray he remembered, but a very faded auburn, and it was the same color from its roots to its ends. He wasn’t sure what to make of the change. He didn’t believe he was misremembering. He didn’t see how that could be possible. But he also wasn’t sure when the change might have happened. Maybe something about the light in the room and the faintly blue liquid had made the faded auburn look like it was gray. Or maybe the crèche dyed your hair. Maybe it offered other subtle cosmetic services as well.
But he had to face another possibility. His experience in the crèche may have damaged him. It had been an intense, hallucinatory dream. Maybe stimulating creative genius—possibly growing new neural pathways—had also cost him some clusters of recent memories? To put it in Bill’s vernacular, maybe the crèche had fried his brain, just a little.
In retrospect, it seemed ludicrous to have lain in the casket and allowed automation to clamp wires to his skin and snake a tube down his throat, to have trusted his life to a system that submerged him entirely in a mysterious blue liquid. He could only understand his decision as something like a temporary break, a nearly insane choice enabled by the stress of losing his business and all the strangeness that had followed, by the days of looking for the underground room and then trying to understand its contents, by how he had been affected by the bizarre contents of the room, and by his awe at what Nerdean had created. He’d always wanted to invent things that could change the world. Nerdean had made something he wouldn’t have dared to imagine, and she’d kept it hidden. In the end, he’d used the device because he had to know what it meant.
And he had survived, which changed everything. The very last risk was that his mind might have been slightly altered. But even if it had been, if the experience had cost him the memory that he was house-sitting a cat or if it had unraveled his recollection of a hair color, it had been worth it. And he felt good. He wanted another mind-blowing experience.
And this time he knew what to expect. He wouldn’t become disoriented. Maybe he’d be able to control the dream, return to the moment of Winston’s triumph and then, guided by his knowledge of history, reshape world events. He might even figure out how to succeed in the Dardanelles, where even Winston Churchill had failed. And then, maybe, if he could imagine a better world in his dream, could he help create one in reality? Maybe a vision of a better world was what Nerdean had been working on all along. In any case, she clearly believed the device was safe.
Vin stroked the transparent pane. He’d bought a notebook that looked as much like hers as he could find, and had written a complete description of everything he had done. If he didn’t survive a second immersion, then when someone else found the room, they’d find his own story next to hers, a testament to how deeply he understood her achievement and how deeply it had moved him.
He lifted his hand from the glass and with the expected, soft sigh, the mist returned and she was hidden again. He pulled off his robe, hung it on one of the eggshell chairs and entered the second crèche, the one beside her that he thought of now as his own. Once he was settled in, the automation activated and the door above him swung closed.