by M. R. Carey
The room was dark and empty. Now that they had come to the threshold, Fran was afraid to step over it. The atmosphere of her dreams rose smotheringly, gluing her feet to the ground. It was Zac who broke the spell. He ambled in as though it was nothing, fanning the air in front of his face.
“Wow,” he marveled. “This place reeks.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. A hot stink of earth and damp and mildew welcomed Fran as she stepped inside. It was strangely reassuring. Nobody had disturbed the Perry Friendly’s decade-long sleep before them.
The room was completely empty. The carpet had been torn up, revealing warped and discolored boards with a whole lot more weeds growing up between them. The curtains over the boarded-up window were like the ghosts of curtains, faded almost to invisibility, their pattern persisting only as random blotches here and there on the leprous white. A doorway off to one side led through to what must once have been a bathroom, the white tiles on the walls the only remaining clue. Holes in the floor marked the places where the sink and toilet must have stood, and where pipes had gone through. The bathroom door lay on its side against the wall.
Fran stood just inside the door, struck to silence. She was seeing the past through the holes in the present. She knew the word for this: it was a palimpsest. Something that had been written on, imperfectly erased and then written on again. That was her whole life, right there, in that one word.
“Fran …” Zac sounded uneasy. Probably the look on her face right now was something to see.
“I was over here.” She made herself move, to prove to herself that she could. Away from the door, from the outside world and safety, all the way to the back of the room. She pointed down. “You see the chalk?”
Zac didn’t at first. She had to make him kneel down on the rotted, nearly colorless linoleum. The line was barely there at all now, but Fran traced out with her fingertip the segments that still showed so he could see it for what it was, or at least what it had been. A circle.
“He put me down and then he drew all around me. He told me not to step across the line. When I got tired, I was allowed to sit down but not to lie down—because if I lay down some of me would be outside the circle. When I dozed off, he slapped me to make me wake up.”
“How did you go to the bathroom?” Zac asked, and then immediately he went red and shook his head. “I’m sorry, that was a really stupid question.”
“Actually, it was a problem,” Fran said. “I kept asking him and he kept saying to hold it in. But it got to where I couldn’t. You can only cross your legs for so long, you know? He shouted at me not to pee on the floor. I think he was scared that I’d wash away the chalk. He ran into the bathroom over there, and then back again, two or three times. Like he was trying to figure out a way to bring me to the toilet, or the toilet to me. In the end, he rummaged on the shelves—they were on that wall, right there—and found an old paint tin. I peed in that.”
“Jesus,” Zac said weakly.
Fran walked back to the boarded-up window. She tried to make it casual, but her heart was bang-bang-banging in her chest and her legs were shaking. It was a relief to be moving back toward the door. She sketched out a space with her hands. “There was a kind of a chest of drawers here. From before they made it be a storeroom, I guess. Look, it was screwed into the wall here. You can see where all the plaster came off when they took it out.
“He had this big metal box. Green. Like, army green. It was a tackle box, for fishing, but I’d never seen one so I just thought it was a toolbox like my dad has. He put it up on the chest of drawers, and that’s when I found out what his name was. It said Bruno on the front of it. Not Bruno Picota. Just Bruno.
“He took a knife out of the box. I never saw what else was in there. Just that knife.”
Zac looked at the broken plaster, and then at Fran’s face. “You don’t have to talk about any of this,” he told her.
Fran shrugged. So chilled and indifferent. Such a liar. “I’m okay with talking about it.”
“Really? If it was me I’d be freaking out. I mean, what you went through here …”
“It was a long time ago. Anyway, that’s what I came for. I wanted to see it again. Sort of … test myself against it.” Out of sheer bravado, Fran sat down on the rolled-up carpet. After a moment, Zac came over and joined her there.
“I get nightmares,” she told him. “About Picota, and what happened here. Not everything, just little bits of it. Details. Or not even that. The way it felt, not the way it happened. There are only a few real things that make it into the dreams. Like the knife. The knife he had. That turns up a lot. He didn’t …” Oh boy. Oh boy! She clenched her fists tight. “He didn’t cut me with it but he kept it in his hand the whole time, and it seemed like … you know, sooner or later it was going to happen. But then the police came through that door.” She pointed. “And through the window, right here. Like a kind of explosion, there were so many of them. They got Picota down on the ground and hit him and kicked him a whole lot of times. I mean, they really beat the shit out of him. That part I remember. Then someone—a cop, it must have been—carried me out of the room on his shoulder. I looked back, and they were still laying into Picota. I could barely even see him. Just the nightsticks going up and down.”
“Good,” Zac said.
Yeah. Good enough, if that was all there was. She wanted to tell him the rest, but it was hard because words were all she had and words wouldn’t really carry it.
“In the nightmares, though, there are never any police here. It’s always about the time before. When it’s just me and him. Or sometimes it’s me on my own, but I know he’s coming. Or he’s already here, maybe, but I can’t see him. There was a really bad one where he kind of was the whole place. The room was talking to me in his voice.”
Fran plucked a weed up from the floorboards, a single green stem with a froth of pale yellow at the top, and twirled it in her fingers. “In case you didn’t notice,” she said, “I’m a little bit crazy.”
“No.” Zac shook his head with absolute finality. “You’re not.”
“That’s nice of you to say, Zac, but the evidence is on my side. I’m on anti-psychotics. And I’m seeing a psychiatrist, you know? They don’t waste their time hanging out with sane people.”
“The same psychiatrist my mom is seeing,” Zac said. “She’s not crazy and neither are you.”
“Okay, here’s the thing.” Fran heard the edge in her voice, and tried hard to soften it. “The thing I’m afraid of, since you asked.”
She folded the stem of the weed in two, and then in four, and finally in eight—because she knew her hands would start shaking if she didn’t give them something to do, but mostly so she could carry on talking to Zac without looking at him.
“I said he didn’t cut me. But I only know that from being told. And from not having any scars, obviously. I don’t remember it.”
“What?”
“When I think about what happened to me here, it’s kind of just a soup.” She was having to work hard now to get the words out. It was as though something didn’t want them to be spoken. She didn’t know if that something was inside her or in the room. “I was in this place for a day and two nights and it feels like it was just minutes. There are these … holes. Most of it, really, is holes. And they … they’ve got bigger, as I got older. As though it’s a disease I caught here, and it keeps getting worse. Sometimes I’ll reach for a memory of something I absolutely know I saw or heard or felt, and it’s gone. Just not there at all.”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t even remember my mom dying. I was eight. I was old enough, you know, to understand … But it’s just gone.”
“Sometimes we’ve got these defense mechanisms,” Zac offered. “You know, if it’s something bad that we don’t really want to remember. We shut it out.”
“Yeah, but then sometimes I remember things that didn’t happen at all. Falling off a bike I never owned and breaking my arm. It was a pink bike! Like I’
d be seen dead on a pink bike! Fighting with a bigger kid at Worth Harbor when she split my lip and I bit her arm. Except that the kid I remember fighting was Justin Dipper’s sister, and he doesn’t have one.”
She took another deep gulping breath. “And I remember Picota putting the knife right up against my side—like he was finally going to use it. I could feel the point of it, going in a little way. The pressure, and then the pain. High up … on my left side. Where my …”
Heart is. Not that you know where your heart is, exactly, but … The sense of that intrusion. Something cold and sharp and stinging that had no right to be there. The shock of it, like no, no, no, this isn’t something that can happen. Which it didn’t, because when the police took her away there wasn’t a mark on her.
There was a sound that came with that memory. The sound of her feet thumping a ragged tattoo against the floor as she tried to run. Only Picota was holding her and she couldn’t. Couldn’t get moving. Couldn’t get away.
But she did anyway, somehow, and she was gone for the longest time. Days? Weeks? Until she woke up in a bed on the children’s ward at West Penn Hospital, surrounded by more toys than she’d ever seen in her life. Thinking well, this can’t be right.
But what did that mean, exactly? How did you get back to right, when you’d forgotten what it even looked like?
“Do you know what homeopathy is?” she asked Zac softly.
“No.”
“It’s kind of a theory about how medicine works. The idea is if you want to get better you take a little bit of the thing that’s making you sick. Like, you drink poison, but in really tiny doses. That’s what I thought might happen, if I came here. That I might stop being afraid of it.”
“Is it working?” Zac asked her.
“No,” Fran admitted with a slightly crazed laugh. “Not yet.”
She stood, and dropped the broken stem. It fell across a part of the faded chalk line that was still visible, its ragged roots within the circle and its flowering tip outside. “This was really stupid,” she said, her voice sounding eerily hollow in her own ears. The sense of being listened to was even stronger now. Fear was welling up in her as though she was sucking it out of the ground. “Let’s get out of here.”
She walked back out into the courtyard.
But the courtyard had changed into a pristine stretch of paving stones, rose-pink and white. Two big gas barbecues stood at one end of it, under a sign that said SUMMER GRILL SHACK. The billboard was gone, or at least hidden behind a towering conifer hedge. The air smelled of roses, pine resin and someone’s garden fire.
Fran simply wasn’t ready for a change on this massive scale. With a yelp of dismay, she sank down on her knees among the weeds that were there to the touch although she couldn’t see them anymore. She crouched on all fours, head bowed onto her chest.
Zac was beside her at once, his hand on her forearm as gingerly as if she might explode. “Fran, what’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong!”
She had shut her eyes, but the scents were still there. Sounds, too. Faint music with no bass, maybe from a car radio. A man and a woman talking in desultory tones in one of the rooms right behind her, their voices clear enough that they must have left the window open.
“When are you going to tell your folks about us?”
“Soon. Or maybe never.”
“Oh, is that how it is?”
“My mom will freak. She doesn’t like the thought of anyone having fun when she’s not there.”
“Nobody,” Fran whispered. “There’s nobody here.”
“There’s me,” Zac said. “I’m here. I’ll get someone.”
“No!” She grabbed his hand with her own and held it tight. It felt like a lifeline right then because he belonged to the real world and he was still there. He was a weak-ass anchor, but he would have to do.
“Tell me what you can see,” she muttered between her teeth.
“What?”
“Shit! What’s there, Kendall? Just look around and tell me!” She was panicking now. It was as though the Perry Friendly had done this to her on purpose, as a show of force. You think the little changes are bad? What if you couldn’t see the real world at all? What if all you could see was me?
There was just Zac’s breathing, for a moment or two, and hers. And the music in the background, a song she vaguely knew but couldn’t place.
“I see … the motel,” Zac said. “The arch we came in through is over on the right. A sign on the side of the arch says reception, and another one says ice machine. They’ve both got arrows, pointing. And there’s weeds everywhere, obviously. An old billboard that’s more or less falling apart. Flies. Lots of flies around. Clouds in the sky, but not that many of them. It’s still real bright.”
He went on and on for a long time, naming things. The sounds and the smells came right again one by one as he was talking. Finally, Fran opened her eyes, and found that the world had reset. The changes had stopped.
She let go of Zac’s hand and stood up on legs that shook.
“Thanks,” she muttered.
“You’re welcome,” Zac said. “Can I …?” He paused for long enough that she turned to look at him. “Can I ask what that was?”
“That?” Fran let out a long, uneven breath. “I told you I was crazy, Zachary.”
The look he was giving her was troubled. Uncertain. But it wasn’t disgusted or amused, so that was something. “What were you seeing, then? If it wasn’t this?”
“It was this. Just a different this. That’s the way my craziness works. If the amnesia and the false memories weren’t crazy enough. I see the world changing its mind.”
This got the same look from Zac. Except that maybe his forehead creased up a little bit more as he tried to think his way around that one. “Could you maybe give me an example?”
“I saw the motel as if it had never closed down. As if it was still going strong.”
“Like, an alternate universe?”
“Like a hallucination.” She looked at her watch. “We’d better get going. It’s almost seven.”
She walked toward the archway. She was aware that Zac had fallen into step beside her, although she was looking at the ground rather than at him. “So this homeo thing.”
“Homeopathy.”
“Maybe if it didn’t work, it was because you didn’t get the dose right.”
“I think once was enough.”
“I don’t mean you should come back here,” Zac said. “There are other things you could do.” He was so serious that Fran almost laughed in spite of how threadbare and raw her brain still was from the changes. He was trying to compensate for how badly her big experiment had worked out by being more on her side than she was. It was kind of sweet.
“Share your thoughts, Mr. Holmes,” she said, but she needed to put on a voice to make the line sound funny, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that yet.
“You’ve got gaps in your memory. And the memories you do have don’t fit together the way they should. That’s your problem, right? And maybe your mind reacts to that by making other things not match up—like what happened to you just now. But everything that happened to you here is written down somewhere. It’s got to be. There would have been a thousand news articles about Picota, and you, and the whole thing.” Zac held up his phone by way of a prop for his oratory. “You don’t have to come back here; you only have to go online. Get the facts. Nail it down.”
Fran gave him a curious look. It was actually a pretty good idea, and she was kind of amazed that it had never occurred to her. “When you read the news, you don’t always get the facts,” she said, but she was just being a dick. You could triangulate. If two sources disagreed, you went back to their sources. She knew how to research.
Beyond that, though, Zac had just thrown in—as casually as if it were obvious—a possible explanation for the changes. And it made really good sense. Trauma had bent her memory out of shape, just about that one terrifying day she spent with Picota a
nd his knife. So her mind rebelled by bending everything else.
Maybe the truth really would set her free.
Jinx was still waiting where they had left her, lying at the end of the driveway with her head resting on her forepaws. She jumped up when she saw them coming and trotted quickly back and forth until they joined her.
You’re all right! What happened? I’m so glad you’re all right! Tell me what happened!
Later, Fran mouthed. And she gave Jinx a quick smile to show her that everything was okay.
Or at least, that it might be.
What finally tipped the scales for Liz was something a lot smaller and more trivial than the dead pigeon. Coming home from work a couple of days later, she found that someone had poured molasses into her mailbox. There wasn’t any real mail in there: just a Reader’s Digest mailout telling her that she might already have won a million dollars and a couple of bills which would reliably come back around. But enough was enough.
Liz called Beebee on her cell rather than on the department’s number. “I’ve got a stalker,” she said. “I think maybe I need some help.”
“I’m there,” Beebee said.
She came right on over, and she brought another cop with her to make it clear that this was official. It was Lowenthal, the officer who had been with her when she responded on the night Marc was arrested. They took Liz’s statement on the sofa in the family room. Zac sat in, or to be more accurate he prowled around. He picked up the story whenever Liz flagged, with more hand gestures and heavier emphasis.
Beebee scribbled in her notebook the whole time, getting the details down. When they were finished, she looked up at Lowenthal, who nodded his head to indicate she should speak first.
