Incursion: Book Three of The Recursion Event Saga

by Brian J. Walton

  “Why would she lie about that?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Arthur says. “But sometimes people just don’t want to be found.”

  I let out a long sigh as I lean back in the booth. “You’re looking for connections that aren’t there. Yes, it looks like her. And there are enough similarities that, I admit, it sounds possible. But how many people have an aunt and uncle named Dean and Janet? That’s not proof of anything.”

  Arthur frowns and snatches up the photos, dropping them back into the envelope. “For twenty years I thought she was dead. And then I saw her picture in the newspaper. I wish to God, for your own sake, that you’re right. And that twenty years from now you don’t see her in a picture the way I just did.”

  He gathers up the envelope and rises from the booth.

  “I’m sorry I can’t help you,” I say.

  He looks down at me. “You have helped. You’ve proven to me that I was right. It really was her.”

  I button my coat as I exit the bar into the cold December air. The temperature has dropped, and the rain has turned into a wet snow that bites at me as I walk down the street, sticking to my face and melting at the touch of my skin. Night has fallen, and the street lights are on, their amber glows reflected in the wet pavement. A mass of humans surge around me, making their way either home or to work, both beginning and ending their days. Their faces stream past me in a dizzying array of shapes and colors and expressions. Women with wild bangs, bright lipstick, and severe shoulder pads. Men in teal buttoned-up shirts under thick, wool sweaters. Before I know what I am doing, I find myself searching for her. Looking for the shade of her skin or the curl of her hair. For that wrinkle above her forehead, or the slightly down-turned lips that seemed to always be slightly frowning. And I see those things. The almond-shaped eyes in that little girl. The slight frown on that older woman’s lips. The dark curls on that college-aged woman out for a night in Manhattan with her girlfriends. But those are only pieces. Poor reflections. None of them are Molly. None of them are the woman I had grown to love.

  I take the N Line, settling into the gentle sway of the train car, letting my eyes sink shut. A group of kids have a boombox, blasting out a song by Rage Against the Machine. I take in a deep breath, trying to shut out the distractions and take a moment to simply think.

  Could Arthur Vandermeer actually be Molly’s father? The pictures were convincing. But why would Molly lie to me about something so unnecessary? Couldn’t she have just said that she ran away from home? No… of course she couldn’t have. Not if she was actually trying to keep that a secret from me. I’m a reporter. I would have hounded her for facts until she spilled it all. If her parents were alive, and she didn’t want me to find out about them, then of course she would have lied. But why lie about it? What was she trying to hide?

  I get off at 57th St., only a few blocks from my apartment. It is quieter and there is almost a stillness in the air. I walk up the short flight of stairs to the apartment and pause at the door, turning around to look out at the night sky. The temperature has dropped even more since I left the diner, because my breath is now bursting out in great clouds and the snow has lost all its wetness, instead falling in perfectly shaped crystals. I stare up at the snow, at the tiny microcosm in each flake, feeling a strange clarity begin to grow. A lightness begins to grow in my, rising up in my chest. And then, without warning, a nagging thought lodges free and blasts, fully formed into my conscience mind.

  Arthur Vandermeer is right.

  I believe it now with the same conviction I’d seen in his eyes. My wife, Molly Gardner, somehow, somewhere, is alive.

  And I’m going to find her.

  I turn back around, opening the door and the scene that greets me takes a moment to register. It looks unreal. Like something out of a spy film. My living room has been ransacked. There’s no other word for it. Couch cushions have been thrown across the floor, and the couch is turned over. The bags of clothing containing everything of our lives have been ripped open. Her clothing lays strewn about the floor. There’s an almost savage methodology to it, as if someone had been trying to make as much of a mess as possible. I move through the debris. Bending down, I pick up a ripped open trash bag and turn it over, emptying it out the rest of its contents. Nothing seems to be missing. I stand, surveying the mess. As far as I can tell, everything is still here. So what did these people want?

  I look up, hearing a noise from the hallway. But nothing is there. The whispers, though. The whispers are back. And the shadows shift and move around me, threatening to close in on me, to smother me, to bury me alive. An irrational fear grips at me. Is she still here? Haunting this place? I step backward toward the open door. I may have buried her earlier this morning, but this place is her real coffin, this moment her real funeral. Turning, I leave the apartment, closing the door behind me. Two things become immediately clear. First, something is going on that is larger than Molly, and me. Bigger still than whatever reasons she originally had for buying that ticket to Chicago. And second, I will never set foot in this building again.

  June 23, 2001

  This can’t be happening.

  Silverware clatters like gunshots, and I am back in Riyadh, and Ibrahim’s face is a frozen mask of terror painted in red, and the blood, oh god, the blood, it’s everywhere.

  I shut my eyes and take in a slow breath. Why is this happening now of all times as I am out on a date with Samantha Cooper of Orville and Strauss? With Samantha of the arbitrations. Samantha of the mighty pen and the wicked tongue. Samantha, who took in hundreds of millions in a class action lawsuit just last spring, or that’s what I’d managed to find in my online research after spending hours digging through a discussion board for Chicago lawyers. I open my eyes to look at her. Blonde, 5” 2’, and couldn’t be much over 110 pounds. Most litigators would never guess her list of accomplishments just by looking at her. That must be her secret weapon.

  “Are you okay?”

  Samantha has been staring at me over the rim of her wineglass for… I’m not sure how long. Her wide, blue eyes are saucer-huge with concern.

  “I’m okay,” I say, returning to my Poulet Provençal.

  Shell casings falling even after the gunfire has ended.

  A shiver runs down my body.

  “You’ve been quiet,” Samantha says. She touches a cloth napkin to her lips before returning to her Bouillabaisse. “Let’s keep this easy,” she says. “Why don’t you tell me about your family?”

  “No living family,” I say. “Except an uncle out in California.”

  “Not even your parents?” Samantha asks.

  “They both died about ten years ago,” I say. “Old age.”

  She raises an eyebrow at me.

  “I’m not older than I look,” I add, hurriedly. “They were old when they had me.”

  “I’m guessing that you are actually younger than you look. No, no. Don’t say it. Fifty-five?”

  “Fifty-one,” I say. “But thanks.”

  “It’s okay to look older than you really are,” Samantha says with a smile.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” I say. “And you’re what, late thirties?”

  “Forty-two, and thank-you.”

  “So, it’s okay for me to look older than I am, but still important for you to look younger?”

  “You’re catching on,” Samantha says. “Married?”

  I nod.

  “Divorced?”

  “No, she died.”

  “Let me guess, old age?”

  I choke on my bite of chicken. “God no. She was younger than me.”

  “So, you have a thing for younger women?” Samantha asks. Her face is stony with no hint of a joke on the corners of her eyes and the edges of her lips.

  “I—well—I’m not trying to say—Now hold on!”

  She breaks into a broad smile.

  I laugh, raising my wine glass. “Oh, you’re good. I’ll drink to that.”

  And we do.<
br />
  Samantha sets her glass down and dabs her mouth again with her napkin. “Let’s keep going. Any kids?”

  “None,” I say. “When do I get to ask you questions?”

  “Whenever you want.”

  “Okay. How about you? Any kids?”

  “No kids. I was married briefly. It blew up in our faces. Both of my parents are alive and still living in my childhood home, though I yell at them every week about it. And yes, you’re going to have to meet them if this goes anywhere. There, I saved you the same routine. When are we going to get to the good stuff?”

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “How often do you do this kind of thing?”

  “Blind dates? This is the first, actually.”

  “Since when? Since the… the funeral? Oh god, don’t tell me it just happened.”

  “It was two years ago,” I say.

  “Two years,” she says. “And you haven’t dated. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

  “It’s just fine,” I say.

  “No need to get defensive. I meant that honestly.”

  “You’ve never lost anyone?” I ask.

  “Not anyone close to me, no.”

  I rifle mentally through my rolodex of grief: Molly; Ibrahim, my translator in Saudi Arabia; Gregory Vance; Vance’s girlfriend Aleisha, and her friend… what was her name? Jane…

  “You’re lucky,” I say.

  “I’m a lawyer from a family of lawyers,” she says. “We live insulated, risk-free lives.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “Not really,” she grins crookedly.

  I look down, realizing my plate has been scraped clean. “These fancy restaurants never have enough food.”

  She puts her glass of wine down. “You want to get a hotdog?”

  “God yes. You still have wine though.”

  She tips the wine glass back, draining it in a matter of seconds.

  I smile. “My kind of lady.”

  We exit into a warm Chicago night. There’s a hotdog stand on the corner. Grilled onions, peppers, and mustard—you never use ketchup on a Chicago dog. Samantha’s jaw muscles work vigorously. “Amashing,” she manages between swallows.

  “You want to walk down by the pier?” I ask.

  “You are definitely new to town. But yes, let’s do that.”

  We walk in silence for a few minutes, making our way up Michigan Ave. The street is still awash with cars and pedestrians. The noises of traffic fill the air. There are fewer tourists out at this time of night, but still plenty of commuters move to and from their late-night or early-morning shifts.

  “What was it like?” she asks.

  “What was what like?” I ask, though I already know the answer.

  “Losing your wife?”

  I shake my head. “I will not bring down a perfectly good first date with more talk of my ex.”

  “Is it still that fresh?” she asks.

  “When you go home tonight just as single as you were this morning, you can say, ‘I brought this on myself.’” It was meant as a tongue-in-cheek joke. But as soon as I say it, I know my tone was all wrong.

  “Ouch,” she says.

  “Let me salvage that with a beer,” I say, pointing to a bar up ahead.

  We walk inside, greeted by a crowd of twenty-something college types enjoying their summer break, half of whom are probably here with borrowed IDs. I push my way through to the bar and order myself a stout from a local brewery.

  “I’ll have the same,” Samantha calls out.

  “Are you just saying that or do you actually like stouts?” I have to yell over the noise.

  “Give me a good wine with dinner, but for a Sunday afternoon I am all about the beer.”

  “I’ll cheers to that.” The bartender sets our glasses down. We pick them up and clink.

  “I just saw a table open up,” Samantha yells, pointing urgently across the room.

  The high-backs of the booth mask a majority of the noise. Samantha lets out a sigh. “Much better.”

  I glance around at the crowd of young people. “Are we old?” I ask.

  “Yes we are,” she says. “But like a fine wine, we improve with age.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I mutter.

  “That’s strike two with the negativity,” she informs me.

  “Will a third strike mean I’m out?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I’ll pay you back with an answer to your question. The truth is, you never stop believing it didn’t happen. Even when you settle down into a new routine, there are still a million little things that bring you back to the time before.”

  “I…” she asks.

  “Sorry?”

  “You’re a writer, so what’s with all the second person? Aren’t you supposed to be telling me how you feel?”

  I can’t help but smile. “Nothing gets past you does it, Samantha Cooper of Orville and Strauss?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, just something I was thinking of earlier.”

  “What next?” Samantha asks, draining her beer.

  “I feel,” I say, “that it might be nice to head over to my apartment.”

  Lights flicker on, revealing my sad excuse for an apartment. The front door opens into the bedroom furnished with a futon bed, a lamp, and two laundry baskets for clothes—one for clean, and one for dirty.

  “There’s no hiding in an apartment like this,” I say. “You get to see the dirty laundry first.”

  “It’s nice,” she says. “Simple.”

  “Let’s go get something to drink,” I say, quickly.

  Past the bedroom is a short hallway with doors to a bathroom and closet off to the left, and then the hallway leads to a combination kitchen/dining/living room.

  There's a floating bar separating the kitchen and living room. Other than that, I have an easy chair, a bookshelf with a stereo on it, and a desk in the corner, which is bare, save for a PC laptop. A glass door opens up onto a patio. The blinds are open, letting the lights of the city spill inside.

  “No TV?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I wouldn’t watch it if I had one.”

  “That’s nice,” she says. “Simple.”

  “If we go outside, we can get a great view of the ‘L’ train.”

  “Where did you get your furniture?” she asks, glancing toward my desk. It’s small and hastily assembled from some dubious looking wood panels.

  “Have you heard of Ikea?”

  “That trendy new Swedish furniture store?”

  “More like the holy mecca for recent college grads, parents of three under three, and divorced bachelors.”

  “As well as recently widowed ex-journalists turned college professors.”

  I don’t mention this is the third time she’s brought up the issue of my dead wife. At least this time feels like an attempt at humorous deflection. “There are a few of those, too.”

  She sets her purse down on the floor. “At least you live close to work. NU’s school of journalism is downtown, right?”

  “It’s half the reason I accepted the job. Living in Evanston may have killed me.”

  “I didn’t know you do photojournalism.” Samantha says.

  I follow her gaze to my cameras, sitting on the bookshelf next to my desk. There are three of them, all film cameras, with a variety of lenses.

  “It’s a hobby,” I say.

  “Really?” She picks up one of the lenses: a Nikon telephoto 70-200 mm zoom lens. “This doesn’t look like something a hobbyist would use.”

  “I’m a pretty advanced hobbyist,” I say. “Let me show you something.”

  I lead her back to the hallway closet and open the door. Multiple shelves line the back wall, stocked with my tanks and bottles of solution, and an enlarger for making prints. Two lines of wire are strung across the ceiling for drying my prints. I flip on the light, bathing the closet in a dim, red glow.

  “Quite the
hobby,” Samantha says.

  I reach up, taking down a picture I had printed the previous day. It’s a shot of the Sears Tower.

  “That’s amazing,” Samantha says.

  “It passes the time.” I take the picture and clip it back on the line.

  “Take my picture,” Samantha says.

  I turn to her, feeling a flash of guilt.

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “I think you can,” she says. “I think you’d take a really good one.”

  Conflicting emotions wash over me: the desire for tonight to go well, and the guilt over letting her into this part of my life—this private part of my life.

  “For that we need those drinks I mentioned.” I turn to the kitchen, remembering that my cabinets are as bare as the rest of the apartment.

  “I would offer you a glass of wine, but…”

  “You don’t have any.”

  “Nope.”

  “So, what can you offer me?”

  “How about scotch?”

  “Sounds yummy,” she responds. “Make it a double.”

  “A double?”

  “Does my taste in alcohol have you doubting my femininity?” she asks as I pour us both doubles.

  “I would leave right now,” I say, “except this is my place and I’m not sure, as a man, that I have much of a right to be insulted by insinuations of misogyny.”

  “Spoken like a true professor.”

  Smiling, I move to the kitchen, open the cabinet above the sink and grab the scotch. I pour the shots and hand her a glass. She takes a drink, then smiles at me over the rim of the tumbler. “No getting out of this. You’re taking my picture.”

  “All right, all right.” I set down my own glass and grab a camera. There is still film in the camera from this morning. “Over by the window.”

  Samantha obliges taking, her whiskey with her. She stops at the window, turning back to me. “Hold on, we need music.”

  She rushes to the stereo, hitting play. Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden spills out through the speakers.

  “Ooooh,” Samantha says. “This is moody.”

  “I like to stay in touch with what my students are listening to,” I say.

  She turns back, moving rhythmically to the music until she reaches the window. “Should I set down the glass?”