by Hodge, Brian
Barrett fumbled his own from a jacket pocket, gave it to her. It was hard enough getting a signal—some interference seemed to blanket the space around them—let alone getting 911 to answer on a day when everything seemed to be going wrong everywhere at once. When someone answered she begged, begged for Barrett’s life as she never could’ve begged the Russian for her own.
But the day continued to conspire. She could’ve begged until her voice was gone, and it wasn’t going to clear the streets. It wasn’t going to get an ambulance here any faster. The worse things got outside, the more reasons people needed one. Realistically? They could be waiting an hour. They could be waiting two.
“What can I do for him here, now?”
Wendy listened, and answered questions. While still on the call, she ran for the bathroom but came back empty-handed. No, of course this wouldn’t be that easy.
“The thing you need most is an antivenin,” she told Barrett after the call was ended. “Until they can get that into you, she said what might help is Benadryl. It might reduce swelling from the reaction to the toxins. Most important, your breathing. It might keep your—” She didn’t even want to say the words. “Might keep your airway from closing up. Do you have any Benadryl around? If you don’t, somebody has to, I’ll beat on doors if I have to.”
He nodded once. “There’s some in a first aid cabinet, I think.”
“Off the lobby? That little office of yours?”
Barrett looked as though he could’ve laughed, if he felt better. He pointed straight up. “Forty-two. The exercise room. The cabinet on the back wall.”
Top floor. After what just happened. She shut her eyes. Sometimes it was easier to process things in the dark.
She had to take a moment. For the first time, she raised a hand to her cheek and skimmed her fingertips over the damage. It was enough to convince her she didn’t want to know any more.
“Let me.” Barrett showed her a handkerchief he pulled from another pocket. “It’s clean. Let’s do this now. I don’t think I’m going to have the dexterity to do it for much longer.”
So she knelt beside him as, with great concentration, he ripped the cloth and folded it just so, and taped the makeshift bandage across the side of her face. He used the rest to dab at the cuts beneath her eyes.
Everything was a struggle. Not thinking about having been mutilated. Not dwelling on the fact that she’d killed someone. Trying to grasp what had just happened here. Even if she could have explained it, where this deluge had come from—these creatures wriggling on the floor, and the tide that swept them here with the mingled smells of salt and chlorine—it had to be more than a coincidence of timing.
This could only be cause and effect.
It was as though she’d cast her heart’s purest, most anguished petition across—how had Maisie put it, across this millimeters-thin gulf of space and time—and the other side of the gulf had answered.
Wendy moved along the bank of ice-encrusted windows until she found a clear spot, where the sheets of cascading water had missed, and the view across the street remained clear. Even the churning heart of the blizzard couldn’t obscure it:
She’d been right. Dear god, Maisie had been right all along.
««—»»
What a dream. What a wonderfully wondrous dream.
It’s a waking dream. Sleep can take you a long way, but still only so far. Sometimes you have to dream with your eyes wide open to go the rest of the distance.
It’s a dream of a world, and all the possible versions of itself that branch off and line up side by side. It’s a dream of a world that dreams itself into being from the events of the day, the things that happen and those that don’t…the big ones, especially, the things that act like the hand of a god reaching in from the cold, black, airless depths of space to give the muck in the crucible another good stirring.
So much for that configuration. Tired of that one. Let’s try it this way instead.
In one version, a comet, an asteroid, a big fast steaming something slams home and hits the reset button. In another version, in the next cubicle over, so close it’s like you can peek across the cubicle wall and see what’s going on, it didn’t. It was a near miss. And holy shit, but does your neighbor over there look different.
But different isn’t bad.
You’re just looking across this millimeters-thin gulf of space and time, and seeing what else you could’ve been, if your ingredients list had taken another path.
Bodies are just bodies, squishy-hard piles of molecules that have been coming together and drifting apart for as long there have been stars to spew them. Form follows function, and function fine-tunes form. There’s a beauty to that, ruthless and efficient.
But spirit, soul, consciousness, whatever it is that makes me me and doesn’t care about calendars and clocks…whatever it is that doesn’t break apart on impact…this transcends. It goes on. It goes on, and latches onto what it finds waiting. It moves in like a hermit crab that finds an empty shell on the ocean floor, and makes it its own.
I know what you’d say, Dr. B, if you ever got a look at this. The diagnosis would drip from your tongue, and you’d salivate at the prospect of writing a paper on me for some peer-reviewed journal you actually think matters in the grand scheme: body dysmorphic delusions the likes of which the likes of you have never seen.
You’ll never get the chance. I’m cancelling my next appointment, and all the rest, too, my first deviation onto a new path.
I’m a quantum point that has begun to oscillate between two worlds, and the oscillations are getting wider.
I just don’t know what to do with the knowledge. It’s too much for one person, for one head, for one neurotic nut case that no one would believe.
Strip away the bullshit, though, and I would know myself anywhere.
««—»»
Barrett wanted to see it too, so she helped him to the window, where he stood like a boy staring through a toyshop window where all the toys were smashed. It hurt to wonder if he was taking in what he could, while he could, in case he had no later.
It was more than just the Krammer Building.
When she’d heard the sounds of destruction, felt the shaking of the building’s bones, she wondered if a plane had struck. How small she’d been thinking. Across the street and down the block, maybe beyond what the storm let her see, it was as if buildings themselves had flown into one another.
Here on the twenty-seventh floor, they looked down on it all. From high above, far below, it looked as if they bisected each other, jutted into and from each other—the smaller neighboring buildings that were already like familiar faces, and otherworldly towers she’d only read about in a forsaken journal. Like stone, only not, because no stone she’d ever heard of formed in ridges at right angles to each other.
From their junctures they spewed steam and disgorged water that was freezing into huge jagged sculptures like icicles from a downspout. It was a merging of worlds, so close yet so distinct, shaped in two ways from the same raw materials, but that were never meant to be together.
“We’d better go,” Barrett said.
“We?” She started to object. No. Don’t. Just stay here and rest. Let me do this on my own. But she could tell it would do no good. This was about more than retrieving medication. The Krammer and its people were Barrett’s life. He would have to know what happened to it. He would have to know what happened to him.
She didn’t argue. It was only an elevator ride away. She grabbed ice to hold over her swollen eye and they left. Then the last of her heart plummeted when they found that the elevator didn’t work. They would have to take the stairwell.
“Barrett,” she tried again. “I can run. I don’t think you can. Fifteen floors, that’s a lot of stairs.”
He was clearly in pain. His afflicted hand had swollen past the wrist like a glove filled with water. He’d vomited once, as she was getting the ice, and looked as if he might again.
“T
hose Salvadoran women just lay back and died. We know that doesn’t work. I’m going to at least try.”
So be it. She took him by the arm and they began the ascent.
The steps were wet and filthy, the stairwell having turned into a canal. Their shoes crunched on grit, layers of silt and mud and the glittering fragments of seashells. They were here, too—creatures meant for water, the hard-shelled and the soft-bodied alike, strange conglomerations of flippers and fins and carapaces. She and Barrett were careful to dodge the maroon ones, and everything else that looked as if it could pose a menace.
But all of them, she sensed, were waning, as surely as Barrett was.
When he faltered, they rested. When he breathed heavily, the sound was painful to hear, as if a wetland had formed within him as well, brittle and bubbling, a sound of reeds and water. When he coughed, it was never just once. Stair after stair, landing after landing, he clung to the railing with one hand at all times, and two when he needed it, until the pain of the sting grew too great, and he couldn’t use the hand anymore.
A few floors from the top they began to encounter debris, chunks of concrete and masonry, tiling and insulation, a junkyard of materials ripped from within the ceilings and walls, then washed away with the rest. A corpse hung tangled in the railing that zigzagged down the stairwell’s central core. Barrett lingered over him, tilted his head so he could see the face, then patted him on the shoulder with a sigh.
When they approached the top floor, Barrett paused for a moment and sagged a bit, then looked at her with a smile both warm and sad. “I was going to tell you I forgot my keys.”
But the joke was on them. There was no more door. No more doorway. There was only rubble to pick through, fragments and blocks and slabs. Whereas some fit the setting, the rest came from another place in time. They’d all been thrown together as if by a mad engineer, pieces whole and pieces smashed, while others appeared to have fused together, a hybrid of structures from this world and the next.
Underfoot, clay tiles merged with a smoother pathway, lustrous and iridescent. She walked it with a mounting sense of déjà vu. She had been here before, if only in borrowed dreams. Beyond this mystery, past rising steam, past the snow descending from rents in the roof and gusting through shattered window banks, Wendy saw an enormous structure that was new to her in every way. Curving and bulbous, it rose from the floor and punched through the ceiling, the roof, into the frozen air, a creamy color woven with spirals of brown.
At first it reminded her of an onion dome on a tower from the east, until she saw it for what it truly was: what people would build if they built not with concrete, but the minerals of seashells. One side was crawling with half a dozen of the mollusks the color of dried blood—what, trying to repair the damage of this collision between worlds? It was as good a guess as any.
“I’m really seeing this?” Barrett said. “This isn’t…it’s not from…?” He held up his hand. The puffy skin of his palm and fingers was no longer reddened, but pale, the sickly white of an old callus, a place where blood no longer flowed.
“You’re seeing it.”
But seeing did not mean understanding. Wendy barely grasped it herself. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to. To admit the reality of this meant opening up to the possibility of so much more, so much worse. To acknowledge it meant that any stability in life was a façade waiting to be ripped open and flooded with whatever grew in the dark of your ignorance. It was better not to know. It was better to be blind.
“Maisie. It’s where she went, I think,” Wendy said. “And I think she just came back.”
There would be time to think about that later, if she was lucky. For now, it was all about Barrett. He was the one thing she could focus on that would keep the rest at bay.
Splashing through standing water, weaving past wreckage, she made her way into the exercise room. The equipment was in disarray, knocked aside or toppled over, free weights scattered underfoot and treacherous, like stones in a stream.
The first aid cabinet, though, was still latched closed. It held bandages and disinfectant for later, if she needed them, but for the moment she ran her finger along bottles of painkillers and antacid and hydration salts. And there it was: Benadryl. She snatched the box and had three of the pink pills squeezed from the blister packs by the time she got back to Barrett.
He had nothing to drink to wash them down, and she didn’t trust the brackish water on the floor. But melt-off from the snow was drizzling through the damaged roof and skylight. She caught it in her cupped hands and fed it to him, enough that he could down the pills one at a time.
Barrett nodded to her, more gratitude in his eyes than she’d ever heard from anyone’s lips. Then he looked around, a slow pan over the devastation and wonders, and seemed content to stay where he was.
“Barrett.” She tugged at his elbow. “We should go.”
It was difficult for her to look at him now. His face streamed, no telling which was water and which was sweat. His eyes were darkened rings, stark against a bloodless face. Bloodless and, surprisingly, stubbled. She’d never seen him when he didn’t look freshly shaved.
“Maybe they’re downstairs now. Or maybe they will be when we get there.”
He didn’t move. “What about Maisie?”
“I don’t see her anywhere. All I see is you.”
“It doesn’t mean she’s not here.” Did she dare hope his breathing sounded a bit better already? “And if all you can see is me…you’re not looking.”
It was true. She’d been so intent on staying focused on what was in front of her, when there was more than she’d ever dreamed of beyond. There was more than just a city out there, past the broken windows and buckled roof. Waiting was an unspoiled world of shallow seas and limestone towers, of titan shells and coral trees. Not close enough to touch, maybe no place she could even access from here, but it was out there. She might not have even seen it on a sunny day, but against the white of the snow and the bleached depths of the sky, it stood out, ghostly and ethereal. The colors beckoned even though from here they looked washed out, desaturated. Up close, they must have been brilliant.
It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t.
“Five minutes,” Barrett said. “Let me rest five minutes. Then we’ll go.”
She found one of the deck chairs caught in a snarl of rebar jutting from a buckled section of the floor, and freed it for him to sit in.
“Five minutes,” he said again. “It’ll be quicker going down, anyway.”
Three hundred seconds to find Maisie, to keep that promise while she could. No one would expect it of her, not now, and that was why she had to do it.
The cold flowed in like a malign river, driven by winds that skirled and shrieked through the breaks. The top floor had been mostly open space, and even now, in chaos, there were only so many places Maisie could be. Then Wendy thought of the deluge pouring down the side of the building, and her heart skipped—what if Maisie had been caught up in that, swept forty-two floors to the street? She hurried to one shattered bank of windows, pelted by snow as she peered out and down, but visibility was poor enough that she couldn’t even clearly see the street and sidewalk below.
She retreated to the edge of the pool to make sure Maisie wasn’t floating below the surface. The water was murky now, if still clear enough to make out the designs on the bottom—figures from Neptune’s palace, she’d fantasized—but only the shallow end looked as it had before. As she traversed the long side of the pool, following the slope toward the deep end, the bottom faded from view, as if plunging into an abysmal blue well whose depths thickened into currents of indigo darkness.
She backed away. No. This couldn’t be.
It was getting harder not to fear the worst. What if Maisie had drowned? Or lay crushed beneath rubble? What if she was lost amid the debris in one of the other buildings caught in this overlap of worlds?
Five minutes wasn’t going to be enough.
Moments later, in the
silence and surrender, she was reminded why sometimes you found what you sought only when you stopped looking for it.
Wendy saw her standing along the top floor’s lone wall, before one of the doors, staring back across the floor. Startled? Yes. Frightened? That too. Maisie had a feral look about her now, a quality not yet cultivated in the photos of two and more years ago, as if she could turn and bolt and never be caught. Or stand and fight like a Fury.
But it was her.
And as Wendy closed the distance between them, with slow and tentative steps, it seemed the recognition went both ways.
“I know you,” Maisie said, when they were but steps apart. “I dreamed of you in a bed I left a long time ago.” She nodded, softly, confirming this to herself. “From the pictures, too. Blake’s old pictures.”
The sauna. Maisie was standing at the door to the sauna. That was where she’d been concealed. She looked for all the world—this one and the next—as though she were guarding it.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
Wendy touched her blackened, half-shut eye, then the bandage on her face; probed her tongue along the swollen split in her cheek. The bleeding had stopped a long time ago, the pain had ebbed to a dull throb, and there were moments, surreal moments, when none of it felt as if it belonged to her.
She found this a disorienting thought. She’d grown so familiar with pain, with the sight of her own blood, that she wasn’t sure who she would be without them.
“I dreamed you were hurt, too,” Maisie said, then glanced about as if trying to remember the top floor the way it used to be. “And now…this.”
When Maisie’s gaze settled on her again, it was as if for the first time.
“You did this,” she whispered. “You did this.” There was accusation in it, and anger, and fear. “But only because I did it first. I didn’t mean to, either.”
Wendy knew her only from her journal, from photographs, from the remarks and conclusions of others. No composite had ever seemed more outdated. The unruly hair was gone, hacked into something more manageable without a care for symmetry or style. Her clothes were for a warmer climate, stitched together from swatches of leather that seemed to have come from the hides of animals lost deep in some undiscovered country. She was thinner than she’d appeared, and shades browner, and as near as Wendy could tell, her eyes were clearer, even as they darted about as though she were still trying to will herself out of a dream.