by Blake Crouch
“Stop it.”
“What?”
She closes her eyes, and the tears squeeze out of the corners and spill down her cheeks.
“We don’t have a son.”
“You swear to me you have no memory of him?” I ask. “This isn’t some game? If you tell me now, I won’t—”
“Jason, we broke up fifteen years ago. Well, to be specific, you ended it with me.”
“That is not true.”
“I had told you the day before that I was pregnant. You needed time to think about it. You came to my loft and said it was the hardest decision you’d ever made, but you were busy with your research, the research that would ultimately win that big award. You said the next year of your life would be in a cleanroom and that I deserved better. That our child deserved better.”
I say, “That is not how it happened. I told you it wasn’t going to be easy, but that we’d make it work. We got married. You had Charlie. I lost my funding. You quit painting. I became a professor. You became a full-time mother.”
“And yet here we are tonight. Not married. No children. You just came from the opening of the installation that’s going to make me famous, and you did win that prize. I don’t know what’s going on in your head. Maybe you do have competing memories, but I know what’s real.”
I stare down at the steam rising off the surface of the tea.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” I ask.
“I have no idea, but you’re not well.”
And she looks at me with the compassion that has always defined her.
I touch the ring of thread that’s tied around my finger like a talisman.
I say, “Look, maybe you believe what I’m telling you, maybe you don’t, but I need you to know that I believe it. I would never lie to you.”
This is possibly the most surreal moment I’ve experienced since coming to consciousness in that lab—sitting in bed in the guest room of the apartment of the woman who is my wife but isn’t, talking about the son we apparently never had, about the life that wasn’t ours.
—
I wake alone in bed in the middle of the night, my heart pounding, the darkness spinning, the inside of my mouth sickeningly dry.
For a full terrifying minute, I have no idea where I am.
This isn’t the alcohol or the pot.
It’s a much deeper level of disorientation.
I wrap the covers tightly around me, but I can’t stop shaking, and a full-body ache is growing more painful by the second, my legs restless, my head throbbing.
—
The next time my eyes open, the room is filled with daylight and Daniela is standing over me, looking worried.
“You’re burning up, Jason. I should take you to the ER.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You don’t look fine.” She places a freezing washcloth across my forehead. “How does that feel?” she asks.
“Good, but you don’t have to do this. I’ll grab a cab back to my hotel.”
“Just try to leave.”
—
In the early afternoon, my fever breaks.
Daniela cooks me chicken noodle soup from scratch, and I eat sitting up in bed while she sits in a chair in the corner with a distance in her eyes I know too well.
She’s lost in thought, mulling something over, and doesn’t notice that I’m watching her. I don’t mean to stare, but I can’t take my eyes off her. She is still so utterly Daniela, except—
Her hair is shorter.
She’s in better shape.
She’s wearing makeup, and her clothes—jeans and a form-fitting T—age her down considerably from thirty-nine years.
“Am I happy?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“In our life that you say we share together…am I happy?”
“I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I couldn’t sleep last night. It was all I could think about.”
“I think you’re happy.”
“Even without my art?”
“You miss it for sure. You see old friends finding success, and I know you’re happy for them, but I also know it stings. Just like it does for me. It’s a bonding agent between us.”
“You mean we’re both losers.”
“We are not losers.”
“Are we happy? Together, I mean.”
I set the bowl of soup aside.
“Yeah. There have been rough patches, like with any marriage, but we have a son, a home, a family. You’re my best friend.”
She looks straight at me and asks with a devious smirk, “How’s our sex life?”
I just laugh.
She says, “Oh God, did I actually make you blush?”
“You did.”
“But you didn’t answer my question.”
“I didn’t, did I?”
“What’s wrong, is it not good?”
She’s flirting now.
“No, it’s great. You’re just embarrassing me.”
She gets up and walks over to the bed.
Sits on the edge of the mattress and stares at me with those huge, deep eyes.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “That if you aren’t crazy or full of shit, then we just had the strangest conversation in human history.”
—
I sit in bed watching the daylight fade over Chicago.
Whatever storm system brought the rain last night has blown out, and in its wake, the sky is clear and the trees have turned and there’s a stunning quality to the light as it moves toward evening—polarized and golden—that I can only describe as loss.
Robert Frost’s gold that cannot stay.
Out in the kitchen, pots are banging, cabinets are opening and closing, and the scent of cooking meats drifts back down the hallway into the guest room with a smell that strikes me as suspiciously familiar.
I climb out of bed, stable on my feet for the first time all day, and head for the kitchen.
Bach is playing, red wine is open, and Daniela stands at the island, chopping an onion on the soapstone countertop in an apron and a pair of swimming goggles.
“Smells amazing,” I say.
“Would you mind stirring it?”
I walk over to the range and lift the lid off a deep pot.
The steam rising into my face takes me home.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Like a different man.”
“So…better?”
“Much.”
It’s a traditional Spanish dish—a bean stew made with an assortment of native legumes and meats. Chorizo, pancetta, black sausage. Daniela cooks it once or twice a year, usually on my birthday, or when the snow flies on a weekend and we just feel like drinking wine and cooking together all day.
I stir the stew, replace the lid.
Daniela says, “It’s a bean stew from—”
It slips out before I think to stop myself: “Your mother’s recipe. Well, to be specific—her mother’s mother.”
Daniela stops cutting.
She looks back at me.
“Put me to work,” I say.
“What else do you know about me?”
“Look, from my perspective, we’ve been together fifteen years. So I know almost everything.”
“And from mine, it was only two and a half months, and that was a lifetime ago. And yet you know this recipe was handed down through my family over several generations.”
For a moment, it becomes uncannily quiet in the kitchen.
Like the air between us carries a positive charge, humming on some frequency right at the edge of our perception.
She says finally, “If you want to help, I’m preparing toppings for the stew, and I could tell you what those are, but you probably already know.”
“Grated cheddar, cilantro, and sour cream?”
She gives the faintest smile and raises an eyebrow. “Like I said, you already know.”
We have dinner at the table beside the huge window with the candlelight reflecting in the glass and the city lights burning beyond—our local constellation.
The food is spectacular, Daniela is beautiful in the firelight, and I’m feeling grounded for the first time since I stumbled out of that lab.
At the end of dinner—our bowls empty, second wine bottle killed—she reaches across the glass table and touches my hand.
“I don’t know what’s happening to you, Jason, but I’m glad you found your way to me.”
I want to kiss her.
She took me in when I was lost.
When the world stopped making sense.
But I don’t kiss her. I just squeeze her hand and say, “You have no idea what you’ve done for me.”
We clear the table, load the dishwasher, and tackle the remaining sink full of dishes.
I wash. She dries and puts away. Like an old married couple.
Apropos of nothing, I say, “Ryan Holder, huh?”
She stops wiping down the interior of the stockpot and looks at me.
“Do you have an opinion about that you’d like to share?”
“No, it’s just—”
“What? He was your roommate, your friend. You don’t approve?”
“He always had a thing for you.”
“Are we jealous?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, grow up. He’s a beautiful man.”
She goes back to her drying.
“So how serious is it?” I ask.
“We’ve been out a few times. Nobody’s leaving their toothbrushes at anyone’s house yet.”
“Well, I think he’d like to. He seems pretty smitten.”
Daniela smirks. “How could he not be? I’m amazing.”
—
I lie in bed in the guest room with the window cracked so the city noise can put me under like a sound machine.
Staring out the tall window, I watch the sleeping city.
Last night, I set out to answer a simple question: Where is Daniela?
And I found her—a successful artist, living alone.
We’ve never been married, never had a son.
Unless I’m the victim of the most elaborate prank of all time, the nature of Daniela’s existence appears to support the revelation these last forty-eight hours have been building toward….
This is not my world.
Even as those five words cross my mind, I’m not exactly certain what they mean, or how to begin to consider their full weight.
So I say it again.
I try it on.
See how it fits.
This is not my world.
—
A soft knock at my door startles me out of a dream.
“Come in.”
Daniela enters, climbs into bed beside me.
I sit up, ask, “Everything okay?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“What’s wrong?”
She kisses me, and it isn’t like kissing my wife of fifteen years, it’s like kissing my wife fifteen years ago for the first time.
Pure energy and collision.
As I’m on top of her, my hands running up the inside of her thighs, driving the satin chemise over her bare hips, I stop.
She says, breathless, “Why are you stopping?”
And I almost say, I can’t do this, you’re not my wife, but that isn’t even true.
This is Daniela, the only human being in this insane world who has helped me, and, yes, maybe I am trying to justify it, but I’m so turned around, upside down, terrified, desperate, that I don’t just want it, I need this, and I think she does too.
I stare down into her eyes, smoky and glistening in the light stealing through the window.
Eyes you can fall into and keep falling.
She isn’t the mother of my son, she isn’t my wife, we haven’t made a life together, but I love her all the same, and not just the version of Daniela that exists in my head, in my history. I love the physical woman underneath me in this bed here and now, wherever this is, because it’s the same arrangement of matter—same eyes, same voice, same smell, same taste….
It isn’t married-people lovemaking that follows.
We have fumbling, groping, backseat-of-the-car, unprotected-because-who-gives-a-fuck, protons-smashing-together sex.
—
Moments after, sweaty and shaky, we lie intertwined and gazing out at the lights of our city.
Daniela’s heart is banging away in her chest, and I can feel the bump-bump of it against my side, decelerating now.
Slower.
Slower.
“Everything okay?” she whispers. “I can hear the wheels turning up there.”
“I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t found you.”
“Well, you did. And whatever’s happening, I’m here for you. You know that, right?”
She runs her fingers across my hands.
They stop at the piece of thread tied around my ring finger.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“Proof,” I say.
“Proof?”
“That I’m not crazy.”
It becomes quiet again.
I’m not sure of the time, but it’s definitely past two in the morning.
The bars will be closed now.
The streets as quiet and subdued as they get with the exception of snowstorm nights.
The air creeping through the crack in the window is the coldest of the season.
It trickles across our sweat-glazed bodies.
“I need to get back to my house,” I say.
“Your place in Logan Square?”
“Yeah.”
“What for?”
“I apparently have a home office. I want to get on the computer, see exactly what I’ve been working on. Maybe I’ll find papers, notes, something that will shed some light on what’s happening to me.”
“I can drive you over first thing in the morning.”
“You probably shouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Might not be safe.”
“Why wouldn’t it—”
Out in the living room, a loud bang rattles the door, like someone pounding on it with their fist. The way I imagine cops knock.
I ask, “Who the hell is that at this hour?”
Daniela climbs out of bed and walks naked out of the room.
It takes me a minute to find my boxer shorts in the twisted-up comforter, and by the time I pull them on, Daniela is emerging from her bedroom in a terrycloth robe.
We head out into the living room.
The pounding on the door continues as Daniela approaches.
“Don’t open it,” I whisper.
“Obviously.”
As she leans into the peephole, the phone rings.
We both startle.
Daniela crosses the living room toward the cordless lying on the coffee table.
I glance through the peephole, see a man standing in the hallway, his back to the door.
He’s on a cell phone.
Daniela answers, “Hello?”
The man is dressed in black—Doc Martens, jeans, a leather jacket.
Daniela says into the phone, “Who is this?”
I move toward her and point to the door, mouthing, It’s him?
She nods.
“What does he want?”
She points at me.
Now I can hear the man’s voice coming simultaneously through the door and through the speaker on her cordless.
She says into the phone, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just me here, and I live alone, and I’m not letting a strange man into my home at two in the—”
The door explodes open, the chain snaps and flies across the room, and the man steps in raising a pistol with a long black tube screwed into the barrel.
He aims it at both of us, and as he kicks the door closed I smell old and recent cigarette
smoke wafting into the loft.
“You’re here for me,” I say. “She has nothing to do with any of this.”
He’s an inch or two shorter than I am, but sturdier. His head is shaved and his eyes are gray and not so much cold as remote, as if they don’t see me as a human being, but rather as information. Ones and zeroes. The way a machine might.
My mouth has gone dry.
There’s a strange distance between what’s happening and my processing of it. A disconnect. A delay. I should do something, say something, but I feel paralyzed by the suddenness of the man’s presence.
“I’ll go with you,” I say. “Just—”
His aim shifts slightly away from me and up.
Daniela says, “Wait, no—”
She’s cut off by a burst of fire and a muted report not quite as loud as a naked gunshot.
A fine, red mist blinds me for half a second, and Daniela sits on the sofa, a hole dead center between her big, dark eyes.
I start toward her, screaming, but every molecule in my body seizes, muscles clenching uncontrollably with stunning agony, and I crash down through the coffee table, shaking and grunting in broken glass and telling myself this isn’t happening.
The smoking man lifts my useless arms behind my back and binds my wrists together cruciform with a zip tie.
Then I hear a tearing sound.
He pats a piece of duct tape over my mouth and sits behind me in the leather chair.
I’m screaming through the tape, pleading for this not to be happening, but it is, and there’s nothing I can do to change it.
I hear the man’s voice behind me—calm and occupying a higher register than I would’ve imagined.
“Hey, I’m here…No, why don’t you come around back…Exactly. Where the recycling and Dumpsters are. The back gate and rear door to the building are both open…Two should be fine. We’re in pretty good shape up here, but you know, let’s not linger…Yep…Yep…Okay, sounds good.”
The excruciating effect of what I assume was a Taser is finally relenting, but I’m too weak to move.
From my vantage point, all I can see are the lower half of Daniela’s legs. I watch a line of blood run down her right ankle, across the top of her foot, between her toes, and begin to puddle on the floor.
I hear the man’s phone buzz.
He answers, “Hey, baby…I know, I just didn’t want to wake you…Yeah, something came up…I don’t know, might be morning. How about I take you to breakfast at the Golden Apple whenever I wrap up?” He laughs. “Okay. Love you too. Sweet dreams.”