by Alex Adams
“So tell me: Am I crazy?”
He breathes deep through his nose then laughs. “Here.” The pad flies across the short distance. My insides crackle with trepidation and excitement.
Milk.
Toilet paper.
Call mom after 7.
Renew gym membership.
Oranges.
The words drip-filter into my brain.
“It’s a shopping list.”
“My secret’s out. I need a shopping list. Otherwise I get to the store and forget what I need. Don’t tell anyone my weakness. My reputation’s on the line.”
“You make shopping lists during our session?”
“Not just yours. And not just shopping lists. Sometimes I doodle. Or I make notes for a research project that’s been floating around in my head since college.”
“So you don’t listen?”
“I listen.” His smile unfurls slowly until I’m awash in its beam, but it’s like sunshine on a winter day, impotent to thaw the growing freeze inside me. “I just don’t take notes. Many psychologists don’t. It’s just that clients feel better if we do.”
“The jar is real,” I blurt. “As real as that chair you’re sitting on.” I rub my face in my hands. “It’s not a dream. It’s never been a dream. It just showed up one day out of nowhere.”
My words tear a hole in our rapport. Like shutters closing, his smile, his warmth, his wanting, flip out of sight, leaving the detached doctor in his place.
“It was never a dream?”
“No.”
Tap, tap, tap. Pen on paper. Not making a list this time.
“Tell me about it.”
We hang in a chilly cocoon of silence. I can’t tell if I’m the only one experiencing the freeze. Do you feel it? I want to ask. Do you feel anything? But to be fair, he doesn’t yet know the nature or scope of my lie.
I tell him everything. The facts. He already knows how it makes me feel. In return, he watches me with regard so cold I shiver in the patch of afternoon sun creeping across the building.
“Why now?”
“I had to tell you. I couldn’t keep it in anymore.”
“Why lie to begin with?”
“I didn’t want you to think I was crazy. Or worse: stupid. It snowballed from there. I didn’t know how to untangle the web.”
“I was on your side, Zoe.”
Was.
Tap, tap, plonk. He drops the pen onto the pad, sets it aside.
“I don’t know what I can do for you. You need the police, not a psychologist. Unless you make a habit of lying, in which case I can give you a referral.”
I stand, back ramrod straight, shoulders back, chin up, and tuck my purse up under my arm.
“Not necessary. Thank you for your time, Dr. Rose.”
I’m out in the hall, almost to the elevator, before I remember I’ve forgotten to pay him. Hastily scribbling a check, I try not to care that our time together is over, that I’ve brought this upon myself.
When I slink back into his office, he’s still there, sitting in his chair, forehead furrowed. He doesn’t look at me as I come in. He doesn’t look at me when I stand in front of him. And he doesn’t look at me when I hold out the check and let it flutter to the floor.
He looks at me when I grab the collar of his shirt with both hands and kiss him like I’ll die if I don’t.
And he watches me when I walk away without speaking a word. At least, that’s what I hope as I stride down the hall with my heart in my shoes.
DATE: NOW
The Swiss catches up to us a mile down the road.
“What’s in Brindisi?”
“A boat.”
“Ah. So there is a man.”
“Sometimes a boat is just a boat.”
“So you’re a doctor?” I ask, sometime later.
“Yes.”
I wait but he doesn’t offer more. “What’s your specialty?”
“Your people would call me a killer, America.”
It takes a moment, but the penny drops and circles the wishing well before clinking onto the pile. “You’re a …” I flail around searching for something not made of blunt, crude edges. “Reproductive health specialist.”
His laugh is a dry hack. “Americans. Afraid to call things what they are. Abortion. Amongst other things. Mostly I am a scientist.”
Don’t do it, I command myself, but my body betrays me. My hand goes to my stomach. Just a tiny movement. Momentary. But the Swiss sees it.
“You are pregnant.”
I neither confirm nor deny.
“You should get rid of it.”
Lisa has lagged behind, her hand resting on the bicycle’s metal tail. The Swiss watches me watching her.
“People are made of dark corners, America.”
“Do you need a break?” I call out over my shoulder.
“It is probably a monster,” he continues, “that thing inside you. Like those creatures in the barn.”
Lisa shakes her head, trots to catch up to the Swiss, curls her fingers around the strap dangling from his backpack. The tap of the broom handle resumes.
“What’s your help going to cost me?”
“I will tell you. When it is time.”
I don’t ask. I don’t dare.
DATE: THEN
The last time I see Ben, he’s hunched over like he’s waiting on a spinal tap. Of course, it’s not like I know I’ll never see him again. There is no Rod Serling voice in my head. This is it. Say your good-byes. You have now entered the Twilight Zone.
“Man,” Ben says when I inquire after his health. “I need a new bed or something. My back’s killing me.”
He sleeps on a couch in his living room, amongst his precious high-tech setup. Ben’s apartment is the belly of a robot, red and green LEDs announcing the health status of the system at any given moment.
“You could just regenerate.” I point to one of the few organic components in the room, a cardboard mock-up of a Borg regeneration chamber.
“Don’t mock the Borg. One day we’re gonna be living in a Star Trek world. Not in this lifetime. But one day.”
I hold up the bag in my hand. “How does Chinese grab you?”
“Me so hungry. Hope I can keep it down. It’s been a couple of days since …” He points a finger at his open mouth, mimes puking.
We divvy up beef and broccoli, fried rice, sweet-and-sour pork, and some kind of shrimp I can’t pronounce. I’d pointed to it on the menu to save myself the tongue twist. And while we watch his screen saver contort on the triple wide screens, I ask about Stiffy.
“Don’t know,” he says. “Haven’t seen him.”
My chopsticks catch on the box’s flap. A shrimp flies overhead, lands on the couch. Ben snatches it up and crams the naked crustacean into his food-flecked mouth.
“I haven’t seen him, either. Want me to help hand out fliers?”
“Nah. He’ll show up when he gets hungry enough.”
“I’ll have a look for him later.”
“Whatever, man.”
Thirty-seven is the official number of cats in my apartment building. Forty-one if you consider Mrs. Sark on the sixth floor has four more cats than she lets on. It helps that they’re blood brothers and all answer to “Mr. Puss-puss.”
Forty-one cats.
One day they go wandering, as cats are wont to do, never to come home.
SEVEN
Shit, piss, fuck.” The curses fly from the mouth of a lab technician struggling to grow facial hair with more substance than fuzz. His name is Mike Schultz. “All of them.”
The mice are dead. Like he said, all of them. I know because I found them when I came through with the industrial wet vac.
Jorge is standing across from me, arms crossed, a victory dance of string lights illuminating his eyes. He shakes his head as though this is a tragedy, as if dozens of dead mice matter. And they do —just not to him. I’ve seen the stuffed squirrel heads dangling from his rearview mirror.
Schultz rubs his forehead. “Shit.”
“Looks like somebody screwed up.” Jorge stares straight at me when he says it.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Schultz. “They were like that when I got here.”
“Not your fault.” He stabs a button on the wall panel.
We stand there staring at the dead mice, and I try not to care.
A minute later, footsteps knock out a determined beat on the floor. Then the big guy appears. This worries me because George P. Pope never comes down here. I’ve never met him, but his grinning face greets me in the lobby every morning. Choose Pope Pharmaceuticals, he says on the screen, with a smile that’s supposed to be reassuring, fatherly. Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family. Without it he appears vulpine. Perhaps he really is larger than life, or maybe he’s a physically huge man. I can’t gauge his real size. Either way, we all shrink back to make him fit, even the woman who clings to his heels. She’s a blonde so pale, she blends and swirls until she’s one with her crisp lab coat.
There are rumors about Pope, of hookers and blow and of a wife no one has ever seen or met. Some say she’s a scientist and he keeps her locked away creating the drugs that Pope Pharmaceuticals stockholders love so much. Some say she’s a great beauty who spends her days prowling the streets of Europe for the latest fashions. One thing they all agree on is that no one here has ever seen her.
Jorge and I are invisible for now.
“What have we got?” he snaps at Schultz.
“Dead mice.”
“What, all of them?” Planting himself in front of the cages, he tests Mike’s hypothesis and discovers it holds true. The mice are all dead. Not sleeping. Not faking. Then he realizes Jorge and I exist.
“One of you found them?”
“Me,” I say.
“And you are?”
“Zoe Marshall.”
He weighs my response and finds it lacking. “Did you do anything different in your routine?”
“No.” I run down the list of things to do, which never varies.
“Any new cleaning products?”
I open my mouth to answer, but Jorge leaps in wearing a brown nose.
“No, sir. Same old, same old.”
Pope waits and I know it’s me he wants to speak.
“We’ve been using the same products since I began working here,” I say.
“New perfumes, creams—has anything at all changed? Think hard.”
Only the jar. But that has nothing to do with here and a pile of dead mice.
“No,” I say.
Pope claps once, rubs his hands together as though he’s grinding this incident to dust. “Right,” he says. “Maybe it’s something we’re feeding them, then, eh?”
He strides out, shoulders straight, head up. Fists clenched. Gait absolute. The woman follows. From the bob of her hair I can tell her mouth is busy asking questions his back isn’t answering.
Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family.
Jorge follows me into the changing rooms at the end of shift. “You don’t need this job.”
I say nothing.
“My cousin coulda had it.”
I keep on ignoring him.
“I know you live in a rich-bitch apartment.”
I don’t bother looking at him. “You went through my employee file.”
“I no say nothing.”
“Then you know my mother-in-law left it to me.”
On the way to the train station I see him zoom away in his battered truck, squirrel heads swinging. The truck’s bumper wears a sticker: Jesus Is My Co-pilot.
DATE: NOW
We find a car abandoned on the roadside. There is enough gas to take us twenty-two kilometers. The Swiss drives. During that brief journey, I forget what it’s like to be wet.
When the motor splutters and gives its final death rattle, we keep walking and I forget what it’s like to be dry.
“Tell me about your work,” the Swiss says. I am hunkered down under a tree, figuring out how far we have to go. A hundred kilometers, give or take. Best case, five days. It’s March tenth. That means I have nine days before the Elpis will come and go with or without me, not to return for another month. If at all.
I fold up the map, stow it in my backpack. “There’s nothing to tell. I clean. At least, I used to.”
“A cleaner who knows Darwin.”
“I know a lot of things.”
On the other side of the tree, Lisa is opening cans of mystery meat.
My stomach growls.
“What did you clean?”
“Floors. Cages.”
“At Pope Pharmaceuticals,” he says. “This is what you told me at the barn.”
“Yes. Have you heard of it?”
“It is well-known in the medical community. What did you do before?”
“I had a job where someone else did the cleaning.”
He watches me eat.
When we’re moving again he asks, “Who is the father of your child? Do you know?”
“Yes.”
“Too many women don’t.”
Lisa is limping.
“Blisters,” he says. “Tend to them, otherwise she will get an infection and you will have saved her for nothing.”
DATE: THEN
The envelope arrives on a Friday. It’s clean, white, has my name printed on the front in a masculine hand I instantly recognize.
I place it on the coffee table and stare at it, unopened. The room bulges with elephants: first the jar, now this.
The phone rings. The machine picks up.
James’s voice floods my apartment. “How’s my favorite woman? Listen, Raoul asked me to call. He wants to know if you’ve opened the jar yet. If not, we’ll pick you and it up and X-ray it. What do you think? Say yes. I’ll be your best friend.”
I pick up the envelope. Light. Flimsy. Although maybe it contains the emotional equivalent of anthrax within its paper walls. My finger catches the tacked flap and tears.
Zoe, I can’t accept this, we didn’t finish the session. Whether it’s a dream or not, open the jar. Truth is best.
It’s signed simply: Nick.
My check falls from the envelope, floats and sways to the floor.
James answers on the third ring. “Zoe!” he says; then: “Raoul, he’s not here.”
Raoul calls, “Socrates, Socrates,” from another room.
“Hey, I can call back.”
“No, no, it’s nothing. You know cats. They come home when they’re ready.”
Unless they don’t.
I think of Stiffy, and how he hasn’t shown up yet, and how Ben doesn’t care.
“So you and Raoul …” The question dangles.
“Oh, it’s on. Or it will be once he gets better. That’s why I’m at his apartment. He’s sick so I’m making my fa-a-a-mous chicken soup. So, can we do it?”
“When Raoul’s feeling better, sure.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Are you sure no one at the museum will mind?”
“They won’t know. And even if they did, they like a good historical mystery same as the rest of us. If it’s some kind of missing link like Raoul thinks, the board might ask if they can acquire it. Something that important would put us on the map.”
If I give it away, it won’t be my problem. But a problem passed on to other hands makes it no less so.
“Let’s do it, then.”
“Honey?” he calls into the belly of Raoul’s apartment. Raoul’s reply is distant, but moves closer as they play this affectionate game of Marco Polo. “Honey? Zoe gave us two thumbs up.”
“Maybe just one,” I say, and he laughs.
“Just one thumb.”
Raoul snatches up the phone. “We’ll take it.”
“I hope you feel better soon.”
“You’re a peach,” he croaks. “No wonder James adores you. We were supposed to fly to Miami next week but there’s a maybe-hurr
icane forming.”
Then he retches.
A spider crawls up my spine.
DATE: NOW
Lisa’s screams jerk me out of a hard sleep. My watch says 2:24 a.m., my body says 8:15 p.m., which is fifteen minutes after I laid my head down on my backpack, beneath the tree’s generous sprawl.
She’s different now. Bits of her have broken off. More than an eye.
I blame myself. My rational self tells me I was exhausted, that sleep was coming for me that night whether I was willing or not. Sometimes the Sandman collects what’s his regardless of the price. But my other self tells me I could have done more to protect my flock of one.
Two.
“What’s wrong?” My throat is thick with sleep fog.
“Just a dream,” the Swiss says. Tonight he keeps watch.
Two. Lisa and my unborn child. Although it’s not really a child yet, is it?
What’s happening in my belly now? I can’t remember. The events between conception and birth blur the harder I try to separate them into their individual weeks. There’s a heartbeat now, I know that. And fingernails. But I remember that from a movie, not from the skeleton crew at the makeshift clinic nor from the book the medic told me to steal because he didn’t know diddly about childbirth. He gave me vitamins and wished me good luck, because that’s all he had to give. Pregnancy isn’t important. Not now. Birth isn’t high on the priority list when everyone is dying. New life does not replace the old.
I could ask the Swiss. He would know which cells are dividing and congealing into organs, the ratio of human-looking to alien. He would know if the tiny flutters are normal.
I consider asking, but the Sandman is coming again. He’s striding across the field, one hand in the sack, digging for dust. He’s here beneath the tree, standing over me. Sleep, he says, and the fog envelops me in its arms. It pulls some of the now along with it. Just words in the Swiss’s voice.
“Stop it, England,” he says. “Dreams are for the weak.”
“Did you plan for your baby?” the Swiss asks. It’s just we two awake, suspended in that slit between darkness and light.