Romance
Vin jerked upright, pulling sheets over his sweaty ribs, the room strobing red and blue in the darkness. Sophie jumped onto the end of the bed and he pulled back. She was in on it, whatever was happening.
He waited, tried to calm himself. He revisited old memories of Kim. They had gone to the lighthouse at Discovery Park . . . But the memories were disorienting. His thoughts were rippling, unstable. He unbent his sore limbs and slid his legs over the side of the air mattress, his eyes adjusting, pulsing colors gone.
Sophie watched. He knew it was unfair but he didn’t trust her. He walked out of the room, pausing to be frightened of the hallway, his heartbeat surging then backing off. He descended stair by stair to the kitchen. He wasn’t thirsty but was sticky with sweat so he filled a glass with cold water.
He couldn’t stay in the house alone but didn’t want to leave. Kim was in his contact list. He called and she picked up on the first ring.
“Hi. Surprise, I’m still alive,” she said. “Are you?”
“I can’t sleep,” he said. “It’s too much, and I’m wondering where Nerdean went. I dropped off for a while but dreamed I was at a dinner party with Henry James. He was my friend.”
“The writer?”
A soft clattering and loud hissing sound started. The neighbor’s sprinklers turning on, their noise crowding through a window that was cracked open.
“Yes. I have this clear picture of him in my mind, from the years before the war. It’s like I really knew him. In the same way I know you or anyone. And by ‘war,’ I mean World War One.”
“Have you looked up things you remember about Churchill?”
He turned on the tap again, letting the water run for a moment and then putting a hand into it. “Some. I can’t explain but it feels real. Not like a dream. Almost as if I shouldn’t be asking whether I have a decent grip on reality, but whether reality has a decent grip on me.”
“Oh, no. No, that’s not what you should be asking.”
He held his breath, then turned off the water and drank from his glass.
She asked, “Why don’t you tell someone? Maybe you could have that thing analyzed?”
“But—have you looked at it, the notebook?” As he drained the water his head seemed to be clearing.
“I was looking when you called.”
“And?”
“And it’s”—she took a long breath—“alright, it’s amazing. You were right, of course. Of course you were. And, I understand what you’re saying. It’s just completely fucking amazing. I don’t get a lot of it, but what I do understand is . . . it’s just . . . part of it is like ravings though. She wrote, ‘I am Marguerite de La Roque.’ Marguerite de La Roque was a real person. I looked her up. So, what does that even mean?”
“It must have been a dream like I had.”
“But you don’t believe you are Winston Churchill. And then, right away, she’s talking about unified phenomenal experience and cranial alpha wave patterns, and—I recognized some of the terms and I looked some of it up, and, it’s all real. At first she’s a lunatic and then it’s, like, she’s a genius.”
“She wanted to keep the device secret. She hid it all. Maybe there’s a good reason.”
He walked to the island that separated the kitchen from the dining area and lifted the top of the old pizza box. There were only strands of stale cheese.
“I’ll come over,” Kim said, and he heard the fascination and anxiety that were typical of her and that he had forgotten.
She arrived in baggy sweats wearing a dark beanie as if it were mid-winter, the kind she used to wear in high school. “You were kind of goth, weren’t you?” he said as she walked in. “Before? I mean, your eyes, the makeup . . .”
She laughed as she looked at him steadily. “You said that already.”
They were both uncomfortable with difficult questions, so when they carried chairs to the deck outside the darkened picture window and sat in the warm, loitering air they started by talking about Bill and the pharmaceutical sales rep that he had dated in his senior year of high school. He had disappeared with her for days at a time. Then, after he dropped out, she disappeared.
As she sat completely still, leaning slightly forward, her mouth partially open, Vin began to tell her about the road trip that he and Bill had taken after Vin got his bachelor’s degree. Just six months before that, Bill had been living on the street. But he had been trying to stay sober and Vin wanted to support him so he suggested they do something big together. They spent a couple of days meandering around eastern Washington in a Datsun B210 that Bill had fixed up. The car was a mess but it ran great. Then Bill gave it to Vin. Bill said if he kept it, he’d probably trade it for drugs. He said he wanted to get his GED and find work as a mechanic. Then he dropped out of touch again and his mobile number got disconnected.
“How did I die?” she asked abruptly.
There was no scale on which to measure the strangeness of the conversation, no way to know whether he’d gone too far. So he told her about the Thanksgiving dinner when Bill had called out of the blue and asked Vin to lend him ten thousand dollars. Vin was home from college for the first time. Bill called just before they carved the turkey. He was wasted. Vin had to say no to the money three times, and then Bill stopped talking. To get a response out of him, Vin finally said okay, but Bill hung up.
“Bill told me the rest of the story on our road trip. He had memorized it by repeating it so many times for the police. Are you sure you want to hear?”
“Yes. I want to hear.” Vin could see how he must sound, could see her trying to believe him.
Bill had called him the next night, but Vin didn’t want to go through it all again so he didn’t answer, so Bill called Kim and told her he needed a ride home. But when Kim arrived, Bill asked her to join the party—Bill, plus three dudes and a chick on a moldy couch with their eyes rolling back in their heads. Bill said one of the guys was a good friend and they were going to go into business together.
Kim insisted he leave. He finally said he would if she helped him finish some lines. He rolled up a five-dollar bill that had a crimson stain on it and teased her into it. Bill said she sucked up the first one “like a demon,” to show she wasn’t scared.
Kim’s face wrinkled up. “What’s wrong?” Vin asked.
“Nothing. Just, that sounds like me.”
But the coke had been cut with almond powder and Kim started to go into anaphylactic shock. Bill had told Vin that he wasn’t too worried at first. He’d thought about her allergy a lot and knew the list of things to do. He called 911. An operator picked up, but then things got confusing. He was high, and people were yelling and he couldn’t hear the operator. Kim fell and crashed into things, clawed at her throat. Bill lost the phone while he was trying to keep her from hurting herself. There was foam on her teeth and lips and she was struggling and jerking. He got her close to the floor but she was suffocating and thrashing, trying to breathe. She hit her forehead on the coffee table. There was blood in her hair and on his hands.
Someone shouted about her heart and a locked pair of hands came down on her chest and made a terrible crunching sound so he took over and he was trying to give her corpse CPR when the EMTs arrived. They surrounded her, moved him away. Later, he remembered the EpiPen in her purse. Using it was the first thing on the list of things to do.
Kim was still staring out at the water. Vin stopped and she looked at him and said, “Shit.”
Her eyebrows went up a little. She was waiting for him to go on. He told her that he and Bill couldn’t stand to spend time with each other after that. Bill disappeared for a couple of years. The next time they really got together was for the road trip.
Kim had begun crying, quietly. Vin waited. After a while, he got up and went into the house, got them each a glass of water. There was no alcohol. He waited inside to give her a bit of time, though not too long. He didn’t want her to think he was avoiding the situation.
He handed her a tissue and then a few moments later, the glass of water.
“How is Bill?” he asked.
She paled. She took a drink of water then leaned forward and set the glass on the deck. Vin sat back down.
“Is he okay?”
She shook her head. “He’s gone.”
It took awhile for her to be able to tell him how Bill died. It was almost the same story, but in her version, which she said Vin had told her, Vin had answered the second phone call, and Bill had asked him for a ride home. But when Vin got there, a man named Lincoln said he wanted to see Vin’s money. Bill got into a fight with Lincoln. At this point, Kim stopped and they waited. Then she said, “He put the gun up to Bill.” She touched her chest, above her heart. “Here. And you said that while they were looking at each other, Bill smiled, and then Lincoln pulled the trigger.”
“I don’t understand,” Vin said, breaking their silence at last, much later, after the moon had slipped through the mottled dark all the way to the edge of the lights that were spreading upward in the south.
Kim seemed to come out of a trance. “What happened to the car?” she asked. “The Datsun.”
“I sold it. I was making money that summer. I wanted a new car. I’m not proud of that. I was in graduate school for about a year before he started texting me again, usually just one word, like, ‘Hi’. Or he’d leave a voice message that was just, ‘Hey man,’ and then I wouldn’t hear from him for weeks. It felt like he was killing himself.”
“But you said you weren’t seeing him. So, why do you say that?”
“When I asked about pot, he always came over. I just think he’s doing more drugs than he lets on.”
“Are you doing them with him?”
Vin understood that from a certain perspective, it might seem as though he was using Bill to maintain his own habit. He said, “Well, yeah. But I don’t think it’s like that. We don’t do drugs. We might smoke a joint.”
She was looking out at the water and the sky again. “How can you be making all this up?”
“In the last couple of years, you know, he came over a lot when things were bad for me. Building the business was hard. I usually couldn’t hang out, but he came over in a good mood and he was funny, and it made me feel better. He was holding down a job. At a grocery store, and then a garage, one of those oil change places.”
“But?”
“I don’t think he ever felt good after you died. Your parents threw him out.”
She whispered, “Did he have any kids?”
“No.”
And the half moon, factotum of secrets, slipped behind distant, hazy lights.
They went inside and sat at the table, neither of them ready for whatever would come next. Vin found some blue corn chips and bean dip and they nibbled at them until he said, “So, I killed him.”
“Did you?” The question and her vehemence surprised him.
“What I mean is, when I went into the crèche, Bill was alive. But, something about what I did . . .”
“Just, just stop with this whole thing, please. This crèche story—”
“You saw the notebook, the machines.”
Her jaw clenched. She shut her eyes and opened them. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I just, I don’t know what to think. When you said you killed him—you know, I’ve thought a lot about that. How things might have happened differently if you didn’t go there. If it hadn’t been you. Did you start the fight with Lincoln? You were the one who always got into trouble. And he would have stuck up for you.”
She bent forward in her chair, her arms folded around her waist. He leaned toward her. “No, I wasn’t there,” he said. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt him.” He took a breath and felt that something that had burrowed into him a long time ago was wriggling free. “But if I had to choose,”—he said—“if I had to, I would have chosen you.”
“What?”
“If only one of the two of you could live. I think, I might have let Bill go.”
“That’s not—. Don’t. Don’t ever say that.”
“But why? If it’s real. And what if I made this happen? Somehow, with that machine?”
Kim sat back and looked away from him. “What does it say when you log in? Does it say you can change things?”
“No. It has system information and construction details. The files describe how things happen. They show how to monitor the crèche, but the notebook is the only thing that talks about what it does.”
“So, you have lucid dreams when you go in, and they uncover memories. Then you dream a world that includes your memories. Don’t you think there might be a side effect? That it might alter your memory?”
“And when I come out it only feels as though things have changed? Because I have different memories.”
“Yes.”
“I did think that might be happening, in a small way. But, I would notice a big change. There would be too much that was different. It doesn’t seem possible. Right now, I feel like I can’t trust anything I remember. But I know this is real, here and now. And I know it is because you’re here. We’re both experiencing it.”
“I hope there are other ways for you to know this is real,” she said. They were close, both leaning on their knees, thinking about how to respond to the device, the house, the awful eeriness of it.
Vin said, “I was alone in the house before. If I went in again now, it wouldn’t be the same.”
“What?” She sat up. “No. What are you saying? No. You’re experimenting with your brain.”
“You’re here. This can’t change,” he said. She sat back in her chair. “We’re in this,” he said. “We can’t back down. To find out what’s happening, we have to go forward.”
“That is—just—the risk. This—” Kim put a hand to her forehead. “Don’t. Oh, god. Nothing changes when you go in except you. What’s real doesn’t matter if you don’t see it or believe it. Do you really believe that the only reason you can’t bring Bill back to life is that I’m here?”
“Of course that’s not what I’m thinking. But I want to know what the crèche is doing. I’ll write down the details, what’s here and how it works. When I come out, I’ll see it in my own handwriting. And I would have to believe what you say. We could learn what’s happening.”
“But what is there to learn? You know what’s happening. I’m here, right now.”
“I can almost see him.”
“See, that’s it. You’re trying to make reality fit your guilt. A machine won’t fix that.”
“Do you have the notebook?” he asked.
After a pause, Kim stood, walked to the glass door beside the picture window, where she’d left her bag. She got the notebook and put it at the end of the table, her hand pressing down on it.
“You didn’t write this?”
“How could I?”
She shook her head, her mouth half-open, a look of disbelief. “I don’t know. You’re getting a PhD in mad science and this is your doctorate? You tell me.”
“No. I didn’t write it.”
There was an orange sticky on the cover with his name, Vin. Questions were scribbled on it—“Where are things stored?” “How does breathing work?” It was her handwriting, tall up and down strokes. He’d forgotten her handwriting.
“What about you?” he asked. “Do you have kids?”
“I don’t know what to think of you.”
“I could show you Bill’s emails. But they’re gone. And his messages to me. They’re gone.”
She said, “You don’t remember?” He looked confused. “Me,” she said. “Not as a kid.”
“What should I remember?”
She looked at the notebook then pushed it toward him.
“I’ll change this,” he said.
“I don’t think you will.”
But he could see that she wouldn’t fight him.
He lay in the crèche thinking about lucid dreaming as the system whirred to life. Wikipedia described a lucid dreamer’s “awareness of the capacity to make decisions,” but Vin hadn’t made any decisions. The one possible exception was urging Bucky to throw the lighter and Bucky might have done that anyway. This time, he wanted to focus on making decisions and taking action.
As for everything else, his world had changed in dreamlike ways. He had tried to see through Kim’s Kim-ness into what was really happening, but the person he had been talking with had an individual particularity that was so precisely like Kim that she reminded him of many things he had lost when she died. The person was very intensely Kim. Element Kim.
And he couldn’t think of her alive without seeing Bill’s shadow stretching out behind her. The thing that would always bring Bill back from a bender was Kim asking him to stop. Vin had a brother and sister who were much older, but his blood siblings only paid attention to him when they were embarrassed by him. They were faded still images compared to Bill and Kim.
Bill and Kim had always been patient with him, and with his temper. Over time, he’d figured out how to avoid the bigger tantrums, how to avoid breaking things and scaring people, but his family remembered and would recite a litany of incidents they maintained by consensus. His howling meltdown when the Cinerama reopened and they wouldn’t refund him for the box of Mike and Ike that had all the candies fused together. The time he flipped a desk, shouted over and over that his biology teacher was a sock puppet, and stabbed himself in the thigh with a pencil. Their voices and laughter ignored his reasons and exaggerated the humiliating details, blurring away the real Vin until all that was left was the thing they believed or wanted him to be. Bill and Kim remembered, but they also listened to his explanations. They heard him when he told them he knew what was happening but couldn’t help himself, and when he promised to change. Element Vin. Element Kim. Element Bill.