by Dima Zales
The car behind me revs its engine.
I make a left.
The Charger follows.
Ignoring the red light, I turn back onto Broadway, hoping the larger street will provide more opportunities to lose my pursuer.
With a screech of tires, the Charger turns onto Broadway, squelching any remaining doubt that he’s following me.
Maxing out the gas again, I cut in front of a yellow cab, ignoring the angry honking.
My pursuer switches lanes and soon lines up with me.
I catch a glimpse of the driver’s face. It’s a man in his forties, his skin sickly gray. He looks vaguely familiar, but there’s no time to dwell on how and why I might know him.
It might be my imagination, but I could swear the guy is about to swerve into me.
To avoid the possible collision, I decide on a desperate maneuver. There’s a tiny gap between an SUV and a Lexus to my right, so I twist the handles and pump the gas, hoping the Lexus driver is alert enough not to flatten me.
The smell of burned rubber hits my nostrils as the Lexus driver hits the breaks, shouting obscenities. But as I’d hoped, the gap between him and the SUV is much too small for my pursuer to squeeze through, so I lose sight of the Charger—which hopefully means he loses sight of me.
Taking advantage of my short reprieve, I swerve onto the sidewalk, weaving between confused and annoyed pedestrians as I scream, “Excuse me,” over and over.
If this were rush hour, I’d have run over someone’s foot already, but even as is, I can’t get too far this way.
I notice a thick oak nearby and turn toward it. Getting to the tree, I stop completely and jump off, leaning the scooter against the trunk before running to the Duane Reade pharmacy that’s a dozen feet away.
The guy at the register must be extra slow because there’s a long line. I push my way through until I’m deep inside the store, and then I look back at the road through the giant storefront window.
This is when I see something that will probably make the evening news.
Ignoring the cars and pedestrians in its way, the Dodge Charger is flying at my parked scooter.
Hairs stand up on the back of my neck as I watch the car hit a large man—who flies over the hood and rolls over, landing on the pavement.
The grill of the Charger hits the back tire of my scooter with a nails-on-chalkboard screech.
Pedestrians scatter as the scooter flies at the window that I’m currently staring through. The Charger doesn’t slow, though—not until it catches the poor Vespa mid-rotation and pins it against the window like a butterfly.
Vespa parts rain onto the sidewalk, and the glass shatters into a shower of shards.
The gray-skinned guy’s fate is a lesson in the importance of buckling your seatbelt. Like a crash dummy, he flies out of his broken windshield and topples the Hallmark shelf in front of us as if it were a house of cards. A jagged piece of glass is sticking out of his eye socket—there’s no doubt he’s a dead man.
A woman to my right screams.
I lose my dinner burrito on the floor. When my heaving stops, acting on strange autopilot, I head for the exit, elbowing my way through the gawkers. The idea to leave the pharmacy must enter everyone else’s mind too, so before I’m halfway out, I’m caught in a stampede that carries me out to the street and away from the crash.
Sirens are already blaring in the distance, so I don’t bother calling 911.
Without a firm plan in mind, I jaywalk across the street and sprint toward Canal Street without looking back at the site of the crash.
Two blocks later, I realize I’m not in good enough cardio shape to keep up this pace all the way to the vet, so I rudely steal a cab from a guy in a suit.
When the cabbie tries to say something snide, I thrust a crisp hundred from the stack Nero gave me earlier and tell him, “No change if you can get me to Canal Street in four minutes.”
I don’t get to catch my breath, in part because the cab makes it to my destination in three minutes—clearly an overachiever.
“Please wait for me,” I say as I slam the door behind me. I imagine he will, hoping to get another huge tip.
As I vault over the steps of the vet’s building, I let myself fully register what happened.
A guy followed me, and I think he wanted to ram into me.
Why would someone want to do that?
Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity. Could this guy hate a woman who rides a Vespa, someone I just happen to look like?
With the helmet on, this is semi-plausible.
No, that doesn’t seem right. Plus, I did have the feeling that I’d seen his face before—and now that I’m not in a high-speed chase, I even know where.
He was one of the corpses in the nightmare about the morgue.
That’s insane, of course, but there could be a logical explanation. Perhaps this guy is a serial killer who likes to kill via car crashes à la Tarantino’s Death Proof. For whatever reason, maybe because of the Vespa, he chose me as his victim and has been following me for days. I might’ve seen him in my peripheral vision a few times, and the dream I had earlier was a warning my subconscious mind decided to send to my conscious one.
Something else occurs to me. The pale driver who almost crashed into me this morning also looked very similar to a corpse in the morgue nightmare.
Does this mean I’m facing a team of serial killers? Do they even work as teams?
Whatever their reasons, one man is dead for sure—that glass shard in his eye will haunt me forever. The other should at the very least be hurt, and possibly dead, too—depending on whether he buckled his seat belt, and whether his ancient Crown Vic had air bags. Still, I should call the police and explain what happened to me in case the first guy survived, or the hypothetical serial killer team is larger than two members. But if I do call the cops, will I get in trouble for leaving the scenes of these accidents?
I’ll need to research this when I get home, and maybe call a lawyer.
I open the vet’s office door and greet the receptionist.
A couple of minutes later, Dr. Katz hands me a carrier with Lucifur. The cat is still sedated, but nevertheless looks a million times healthier than this morning. “Our Majesty is weary,” she seems to say with her green eyes. “Quickly, my vassal, take us home, and you may yet avoid the lash.”
“Here.” The doc gives me a small plastic bag with the key inside.
I take the bag with the tips of my fingers and, without overanalyzing, stick it in my pocket. “Thank you for saving her.”
“You’re welcome,” Dr. Katz says. “I’ve already talked to Rose about how to take care of Luci, so you’re good to go.”
I leave the office and find that the cabbie did indeed wait for me.
When we arrive at Battery Park, I give him a great tip, though not as exuberant as before.
On the elevator ride up, I can’t help but come back to the attempt on my life. I’ve dismissed my hazy memory of the attack in the TV studio as a delusion, a nightmare, or a hallucination brought on by Valium—but what if at least some of it was based on reality? Something about that attacker was similar to the guys in the Crown Vic and the Dodge Charger. Also, assuming I did dream up the studio attack, could that dream have been brought about by my subconscious trying to tell me that there’s a third man in the hypothetical serial killer club?
I decide to call the police as soon as I hand over the cat, consequences be damned. Also, I will call Darian and ask him what happened last night. He’ll probably think I’m crazy, and I’ll have to kiss future help from him goodbye, but I need to know.
In any case, would Darian be wrong to think I’m crazy? I feel fine, but people with mental illness don’t always realize it. True, my brain scans were exemplars of perfection, but I don’t think most mental illnesses show up on such scans. And yes, I also talked to a shrink today—but I only told her about the symptoms related to my fear of public speaking. She’d have to be psychic to
diagnose me on what little she had to go on.
Ultimately, it comes down to this: if I’m so crazy that I imagined those accidents so vividly, I’m too far gone. I might as well act as though I’m normal until I wake up in a padded room.
It’s a bit like free will and consciousness. As an illusionist, I find the idea of free will being an illusion—something some scientists and philosophers postulate—very appealing. Minor examples of this abound, such as this morning, when Ariel thought she had a free choice but could really only select the Seven of Hearts for the deck-stabbing effect. On a larger scale, the laws of physics predetermine the state of my brain at any given time, and a powerful enough quantum supercomputer could theoretically predict what state my brain might be in. And yet, I think we ought to act as though we do have free will—like with the “crazy” scenario, it’s the only way to exist that makes sense.
Similarly, some scientists state that consciousness is another illusion. What I think they mean is that our brain is a chemical computer, and what we think of as consciousness is what it feels like for the meat computer to run its computations. But again, in everyday life, the only logical way to behave is as though consciousness is real.
The elevator doors ding and bring me out of my Intro to Philosophy musings. I pick up the carrier and make my way to Rose’s door, realizing I’ve never visited her after work before. What if she goes to sleep at nine p.m., like my mom? But no. Even if she usually goes to bed early, today she’d certainly wait for the cat to return.
I ring the bell.
There’s no response for almost a minute. Maybe my early-to-bed theory was spot on after all?
The door opens.
Rose isn’t at the door. A man stands there instead.
A man I’d expect on a cover of a magazine, not in the apartment of my elderly friend.
He has an imposing brow, and his pale face is extremely symmetrical, as if carved out of ivory. Nothing this mathematically flawless can be biological, can it? His shiny black hair flows down to his shoulders, the waves reminding me of posters at salons, and his eyes are so dark that they seem to absorb the light of the hallway, like black holes. His alluring lips are set in a disapproving line as he stares at me. It’s as if nature wanted to practice that dark and brooding look on his face and came close to perfection.
I clear my suddenly dry throat. “I’m here to see Rose.” I raise the cat carrier as explanation. “Who are you?”
“Sasha,” Rose says over the man’s wide shoulder. “I thought you’d just be getting off work right now.”
The handsome stranger turns to let Rose see me.
“I left as soon as I got the call from the vet,” I say, and when I catch her gaze, I look very pointedly at the chiseled face that should be our main topic of conversation.
“Oh, where are my manners?” Rose takes the carrier and looks worriedly inside it, then glances up at us. “Vlad, meet Sasha. Sasha, this is Vlad.”
“Hi, Vlad,” I say, giving him the charming smile I use to put spectators at ease before blowing their minds with a particularly devious effect.
“Hello, Sasha. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He pronounces my name with the same hard “sh” as Felix’s parents—which they tell me is the Russian, not Uzbek, way of saying it. Despite that, and his Russian-sounding name, he has no detectable accent. “Rose told me a lot about you,” he continues.
I’m tempted to say, “She never mentioned you,” but depending on who he is to her, that might sound rude.
“Vlad is my nephew,” Rose says, discerning my confusion. “He goes to Whole Foods for me.”
Until now, I thought she was using an online grocery delivery service, like my roommates and I. Whole Foods—or “Whole Paycheck,” as Felix insists on calling it—is indeed more Rose’s style, so I’m glad she has this secret nephew to help her out. Though if he is her helper, where was he this morning, when the cat needed the vet?
Rose steps away from Vlad and lets the cat out of the carrier. Lucifur stumbles out drunkenly, hisses viciously at Vlad, and heads toward the kitchen.
Okay, so maybe Rose didn’t ask Vlad to help because the cat hates his guts? Then again, I don’t think the cat is a huge fan of me either.
“You should join us for dinner,” Rose says before I can head back to my place. “I have the table all set up.”
A new theory occurs to me. Is Rose playing at matchmaking?
She’s asked about my love life a few times in the past, so maybe she’s disappointed by my lack of a boyfriend and has decided to take matters into her own hands. If that’s what’s happening, I have to hand it to her—Vlad is an impressive specimen. Though Rose should’ve realized that a guy this good-looking wouldn’t settle for a non-supermodel me.
Could this be why he looks so morose? Because he’s disappointed with her matchmaking?
I’m about to politely refuse the offer of dinner when my treacherous stomach rumbles so loudly that the cat comes back to give me a narrow-eyed stare.
Oh, well. My dinner burrito did escape before I got a chance to digest it, so even though I don’t feel particularly hungry, I should probably force a meal into my stomach—else I risk waking up to rummage through the fridge in the middle of the night.
When we enter the kitchen, the table is set with candles and a vase with fresh flowers—a romantic ambience that supports my matchmaking theory. On Rose’s left is a barstool, and Lucifur is sitting there. A tiny tea saucer with Fancy Feast on it indicates that this is Her Majesty’s personal eating space.
Rose makes me sit to the left of the cat, with Vlad to her right. Being so far apart from Vlad doesn’t support the matchmaking theory, but maybe Rose has some reason for this.
Without asking, she puts a mound of something on my plate.
“It’s buckwheat with an assortment of mushrooms,” she explains as she gets some for herself. “The herbs are from my mini-garden.”
She doesn’t give Vlad any food, and when she notices my glance at the empty space in front of him, she rubs her intricate pearl necklace and says, “Vlad already had his meal.”
Vlad grunts disapprovingly for some reason. Are his eating habits a state secret?
“Do you like history?” Rose asks me. “Vlad was just telling me fascinating stories about Catherine the Great.” She gives her nephew an adoring look. “He’s a huge Russian history buff and tells it so vividly—as if he were there.” She chuckles at something that I assume must be an inside joke, but he looks even more somber.
“Sure.” I taste a spoonful of the grain, enjoying the flavors exploding on my tongue.
“Her Russian was horrible in the beginning.” Vlad puts his pale hand on the table in front of him, his eyes firmly on Rose’s face, as though I’m not in the room.
“You have to give Sasha context, dear.” Rose puts her hand over Vlad’s and looks at me. “In case you didn’t know, Catherine wasn’t Russian; she was born Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst.”
“And she allowed those close to her to call her by that name.” Vlad looks distant as he says this. “One of the many rewards she bestowed upon her lovers.”
The word “lovers” makes Rose frown for some reason, but Vlad just delves into a story of how Catherine the Great gifted one lucky ex a thousand serfs—which leads into a history lesson about the Russian serfs of that era, and how they could be treated like slaves and gifted among the nobles.
As I listen, I wolf down the buckwheat with undignified gusto, my appetite having returned with a vengeance. I also observe a strange pattern of behavior that becomes more obvious throughout the history lesson.
Rose and Vlad are acting way too incestuously for aunt and nephew.
She touches his hand a lot, he actually smiles at her (which looks out of place on that grimly handsome face), and there’s a chemistry between the two that’s not platonic at all. Did I misread the whole thing as matchmaking in a bout of wishful thinking?
Could they be together?
Des
pite the evidence, I find it hard to accept. Their age difference is huge. He looks to be in his late twenties or early thirties, which makes Rose old enough to be his grandmother. Also (and I know it’s a shallow logic), Rose looks great, but not Vlad-great. Going by the photos on her walls, she was in his league when she was young, but no matter how well she has taken care of herself (and it’s clearly an obsession of hers), there comes a point when the decades stack up and entropy catches up with us.
It briefly occurs to me that this could be a fetish hookup for Vlad, but as I study them closer, I dismiss the idea. They mesh together like best friends, reminding me of an old married couple who’s lived a long “happily ever after.” Does this mean they’ve been together for a while?
Could Rose have seduced him when he was in high school?
I begin to feel like a voyeur in the middle of what Rose clearly keeps as a secret relationship. So I finish my plate, look for a pause in the Russian history lesson, and say, “That was so yummy, Rose, but I hope you don’t mind if I go. I’ve had a crazy day, and I want to be in bed when the food coma hits me.”
“Of course,” Rose says, looking so startled I wonder if she forgot I was there for a moment.
“It was nice to meet you,” Vlad says in the friendliest tone he’s used with me tonight. Clearly, he loves the idea of me leaving. “Thank you for taking Luci to the vet.”
“No problem, and thank you for dinner,” I say. “And for the entertainment.”
“Get some good sleep,” Rose says as I head out of the apartment. “We’ll talk soon.”
Exiting out into the hallway, I plod toward my apartment, my legs heavy with the encroaching food coma and the post-adrenaline slump.
As I pass by the elevator doors, the light above it lights up, indicating an arrival.
I stop to look at the door because it could be Ariel—she arrives around this time. It could also be Felix, though it’s a bit early for him.
The doors start to open, and a putrid stench hits my nostrils. It’s so strong that I’m instantly on the verge of losing my second dinner.
The doors slide farther apart, and I gape at the arrivals in shock.