“What should I do?”
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? On the one hand, nothing matters, because everything that could be done is done. On the other hand, everything matters, everything we do. Because it matters to you, doesn’t it?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She stood, stepped forward so her back was to him and dropped the robe onto the floor of the office.
“Joaquin’s in this world, isn’t he?” she asked, not turning to face him.
“Yes, I guess so,” Vin said.
She started climbing carefully into the third casket. When she was in, as the LED lights on the casket started blinking she said, “Vin, don’t let Joaquin know what’s down here.” A whirr as the door began to lower. “Don’t let him know,” she said again, “and maybe things will be okay.”
A WEEK LATER, JOAQUIN SAT on the other side of the big table, facing Vin and Kim. He was not quite as put together—his hair not as perfectly set, lock on lock, his clothes not as immaculately formed—as Vin remembered. He seemed sad, and Vin noted that the table didn’t surprise him. But then, Joaquin and Kim were from this world. Vin was the interloper.
“So you haven’t found anything?” Joaquin asked a second time. Vin had told Kim that Mona warned them about Joaquin, and now Kim was sitting with her arms folded, giving Joaquin a bit of a stink-eye, though she wasn’t openly hostile.
Vin wanted to be done with Joaquin, who now scared him a little. He wanted more time alone with Kim.
“That’s right,” Vin said. “I think there might be an electrical short somewhere. Inside the walls.”
“I see. And I wonder, have you found any written material, any records anywhere in the house? Anything at all? Any notes or diagrams that might have been forgotten or left behind, accidentally? Or on purpose?”
“No,” Vin said, shaking his head as if he were reviewing everything that happened over the last few months. “No. I would have mentioned anything like that. Just empty.”
Joaquin placed his hand on the leather portfolio that lay on the table in front of him. “This is, um, an interesting place in our relationship then.”
“How so?”
“Well, at this point in your custodial responsibilities, I have been authorized, or rather required”—a house alarm began clanging loudly outside and Joaquin took a deep breath—“I am required to offer you a choice.”
Vin glanced at Kim but she was watching Joaquin.
“What choice?”
“I’m required, by my contract, to inform you that the home—this house—is soon going to be changing hands.” Kim made a small noise of concern, a soft gasp. “If we do not hear from Nerdean within a month, I am required to sell the home. That would mean that you would have up to two more weeks of residency. This requirement becomes effective if a very specific additional condition is not met.”
“Okay.”
“The additional condition,” the alarm was still going and Joaquin shifted nervously in his seat, “is that the house will be sold if you choose not to accept it as a gift.”
Kim’s arms dropped to her sides and she leaned forward. “What?”
“What?” Vin asked at almost the same moment. As Joaquin smiled stiffly in response, Vin said, “Can you explain?”
The house alarm stopped and the sudden quiet lifted Joaquin’s voice. “Of course, I understand it’s a surprise. Nerdean didn’t want anyone house-sitting. I’ve told you that. But she did contemplate the possibility, within my employment contract. The contract is very complex but incredibly well written, marvelously consistent. It is sui generis, a work of art. A thing of beauty that forks with natural inevitability like the limbs of a tree, each new path defining distinct possibilities, each splitting further into new contingencies until in aggregate they form a catalog of every foreseeable possibility within a specific district of the law. It is a document I am grateful to have a relationship with. If there were a museum for contracts, then this contract, this incomparable document, would be its prized possession. I have been so hoping to meet her.” He cleared his throat. “I have even considered breaking the terms so that I could ask a colleague to sue me, if only to test her magnificent contract in court, where its full power might begin to be admired.” He laughed weakly. “I’m sorry. I’ve devoted my life to these things. The simple truth, which I’m sure Nerdean must have anticipated, is that I will abide by the spirit and letter of the contract if only out of respect for the intelligence that created it.
“But, and I didn’t tell you all of this earlier—in a situation in which I believed that the, um, privacy, of the home might potentially be compromised, such as with the possibility of a break-in, then I had the latitude to arrange to employ a house sitter, to protect the house and, of course, to provide companionship for Sophie. In my judgment, employing a house sitter seemed like the correct thing to do. And, Vin, when your father told me about your situation with your company, I thought you would be an excellent choice. An intelligent, resourceful young man. As you know, I hoped you might learn something about the unusual utility bills, and the odd electronics upstairs, which—they do appear somewhat suspicious. Am I not correct?”
“Yes,” Vin said, “that whole setup is really strange. Like Nerdean was trying to hide something.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought as well, and so I hoped you would tell me if you discovered anything of relevance.” He was almost pleading.
“You couldn’t just hire someone to look at the house?” Vin asked, though he knew the answer.
“No, as I have said, that was forbidden.” Joaquin leaned back, put both of his hands in his lap and nodded slowly in an exaggerated way. “But, you see, I believe Nerdean also anticipated the possibility that I might use the clause that allows for house-sitting as a ruse, if you will, to bring in a gifted and curious individual to inspect the home.” He nodded at Vin. “And so I did. So I did. Her remedy, in such a case, was to essentially fire me by having the house change ownership. When your father first told me of your situation, I felt the risk would be warranted. I had faith in you. But . . . And, we find ourselves here. She is a very determined person, Nerdean. And, perhaps, spiteful.”
So Nerdean had used Joaquin and that contract to emboss her will onto the present. Vin was thinking through the implications of owning the house, and didn’t respond to Joaquin’s wistful bitterness. No matter what Nerdean intended or Mona had said, Vin now wanted to tell Joaquin about the crèche.
“So,” Joaquin continued, “the present state of affairs is that you will have two days to make a decision: whether you will accept the gift or not. If you accept, the paperwork is already prepared. We’ll make a legal transfer. There’s a condition that requires that you not resell the house for a minimum of ten years, and asks that you never resell it at all. The condition is in the contract, but once you have the title, it becomes merely an emphatic request. Though you will need to agree—verbally, in my presence—before receiving the title. And, of course, I must tell you that I’m sure Nerdean hoped you would never sell it. She may yet return, though you would be under no obligation to her. If you decide to reject the gift, then you must move out within two weeks and I will place the house on the market in thirty days.”
“Before I make a decision”—he turned to Kim and paused midsentence. Her face was set, worried.
“Yes?” asked Joaquin.
Kim was staring, trying to tell him something. He lost the thought he had been pursuing, said, “I’m not sure, I need to think about it.”
Joaquin seemed to be waiting for something more definitive, so Vin added, “It’s been a real pleasure living here.”
“Is that what’s giving you pause? Gratitude?”
“Yes,” Vin said. “I think. I’m just surprised. And I’m trying to process it, I guess.”
AFTER JOAQUIN LEFT, KIM SEEMED panicked. She started talking when the door clicked shut.
“He’s going to give you the house?”
“The contract
says he has to, but I think I should tell him about the crèche.”
“But if you tell him, he might not give you the house.”
“You want him to give me the house?”
“Of course I do. It’s beautiful. And didn’t Mona tell you not to trust him? Not to tell him? That he might be dangerous?”
“I don’t know whether we can trust Mona.”
They had walked to the dining table. “We could live here,” Kim said.
“What do you mean?” Vin couldn’t bring himself to repeat the word we.
“This house is big and empty,” she said. “It’s a little spooky, but it’s incredible.”
“What did you mean though?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not trying to push anything. But, if things did work out . . . This decision is important. And, Vin, I need to tell you, I’m”—she stopped herself, but for Vin the moment had the sudden feel of clarifying logic, as if all of the puzzles of daily living had been swept away on a wave of certainty.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Kim started again. “I see what Mona meant when she said that the thing down there is just like a decision. You are the person I know. You smell the same, you look the same, you talk the same. We remember our childhoods together.”
Vin accepted the house and didn’t tell Joaquin about the crèche.
IN THIS WORLD, KIM AND Vin had been dating for two months. She already knew things about him and she treated him with the familiarity of a childhood friend. In the bedroom, she moved as if ignoring the effect of the crèche, and he was both thrilled and distanced by the assumed intimacy, the collision between dream and memory. The full effect was both awkward and erotic, their desire reconnecting them, their bodies familiar and strange.
In the first weeks, Kim talked more freely about her life after Bill died. After barely graduating from high school, she’d started waitressing and she’d saved money obsessively. “I started thinking about what I really wanted and getting rid of every part of me that wouldn’t help with that.”
She was frightened of falling into the kind of poverty that she assumed led her biological parents to give her and Bill up, and she was frightened of becoming what her adoptive mother had said of Bill after he died, “a nothing, nobody.” Those words spoken by their mother, a blunt articulation of something that Kim had suspected her parents of feeling, had dug a trench through that moment in Kim’s life.
She knew it wasn’t quite fair to blame her parents for not saving Bill, but she decided to keep her distance from them. Reading insulated her from the requirements of survival and she specialized in the kind of thick, translated novels that excite academics. In her sole concession to pharmacology, she sometimes downed sleeping pills to avoid the hours after work. After two arid years on her own, she enrolled at a community college in Communications and Digital Arts.
“One thing I did right was to walk, a whole lot. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but I remembered those jazzy, rambling walks you and Bill did around the city when we were kids. I loved that so much.”
She told him that skydiving had been a turning point. She knew when she learned about tandem dives—two people harnessed together rejecting the fable of stability—that she would use a jump to say goodbye to her brother. The stranger who mentioned it in an offhand way became her only friend for three months, and two tandem and three static line jumps.
It took years of inching forward at community college before she accepted the utility of student loans and transferred to Western Washington University.
“But I’ve already told you all of this,” she said.
For Vin, Kim possessed a glow of germinal irreality that set her apart from the strictly factual world. Her existence demonstrated an incoherence in space and time, a contradiction in the structure of the universe. And he had been changed by his experiences in the crèche, his mind darkened by the shadows of the events and longings he had encountered there. There were moments when he observed himself like a third person, enjoying his time with Kim in a way that he wouldn’t have understood before he went into the crèche, almost as if it were a food they shared.
When she finally did say, “I’m pregnant,” he didn’t have the courage to tell her what he was really thinking—“the body that I’m in fathered your child, but I didn’t.” And anyway, she already knew that. She had brought it up during their conversation with Mona. And it really didn’t matter, did it? The child would be his. No matter who had fathered it, he would be its father.
CHAPTER 11
Settling Down
Their new home rested on a foundation of mystery, its security reliant on a willingness to dampen their curiosity and accept that what lay below them shouldn’t play a further role in who they became.
Since Mona had told them that the worlds in the crèche were real, Vin had been thinking about how his hosts had felt his presence. Had he been a voice in their heads, a current of desire, an inclination, an obsessive focus? And how much of him was exposed? The ideas made him feel porous, as if influences with undetectable agendas might transit through him and change him, as if awareness might be a colloidal presence, shifting in interactions with a boundless expanse of mind.
“I don’t think we can use it anymore,” Kim said one evening, interrupting his reverie. “We shouldn’t even log in. I want our lives to mean things that make sense. And that thing isn’t right. I don’t want to think about it any more than we have to, to take care of Mona.”
“No,” Vin agreed, realizing that his experience with the crèche and the reality of having Kim in his life had made him a different person. He felt indebted to Nerdean, and strengthened his commitment to maintaining her secret. Rather than start a company, he found a good job as a software developer, one that allowed him to work almost entirely from home. The people he knew all seemed unchanged from the people he remembered and he didn’t notice anything different about the world itself, but that didn’t quite make sense. He assumed there must be differences he hadn’t discovered or couldn’t detect.
He tried to enjoy planning a future with Kim, but a persistent feeling of looseness in the linkage between events baffled him. How could he fully embrace this life when he was not entirely sure how it came to be? There were stretches when it felt like time was passing so quickly that it became a blur, a roar in his ears, and others—often at night—when he lay in the sleepless and broken reality of a passionate desire just to see an hour end, and in the whiplash between those two he wondered what he had landed in, and what he truly was.
After her internship, Kim took a job as an event planner at a small game company. She captured how he felt one evening after a late dinner. “It’s like I’m a skipping stone,” she said. “I’m completely there, and then I lift off and skip to the next thing so fast it feels as though nothing happened. Big changes happen, are happening, but I only make a choice and then move.”
They converted the basement into an apartment with a separate entrance. He negotiated time to remodel before starting his job so he and Kim could do sensitive work themselves. The plumbing and electricity were already in place.
They put walkie-talkies in the apartment and their master bedroom, and stocked the apartment with canned and boxed food. Vin never told Kim that Mona had warned him about herself. When he suggested adding a second deadbolt to lock the apartment door from the outside, a one-inch cylinder with a hardened steel core that couldn’t be unlocked from inside, Kim didn’t comment.
They agreed to visit the apartment two times each month, together, but Kim only went a couple of times and the visits became his responsibility. He started adding an occasional, unscheduled visit. Concerned that Mona might be getting thinner, he took a few pictures to create a visual baseline. Within a few months, he had settled into a routine of making one short visit each week.
KIM WAS DETERMINED AND SURE of herself as the challenges at her work increased and Vin watched her build t
he foundation of her career. She traveled and worked late and on weekends but they managed a few overnights in the mountains, in Eastern Washington, and Las Vegas. They were married during Kim’s eighth month in a small ceremony attended mostly by family.
Vin fell in love with the complexity of her pregnancy, her needs, her vague grumpiness and the imprecise mutinies of her body. He was delighted by moments of contentment that arrived like unexpected weather when she relied on the bond that still surprised him and leaned close so he could comb his fingers through her hair.
No matter how cool their room was, Kim sometimes threw off the covers. One night, after shifting about for an hour or more, she lay on her back, propped on extra pillows, with her arms around the top and bottom of her belly.
She didn’t usually talk when she woke, but she asked, “Are you awake?” He moved a hand to her side in response. She said, “I’ve been thinking about . . . What if it isn’t possible for Bucky to throw that lighter unless you’re inside him? Then the worlds where he kills Matt aren’t created unless you’re there.”
He felt the stillness of the room seeping into his body, filling him and defining his borders. “From what I felt,” he said, “it was possible for him to throw it.”
“But we don’t really know, because you were there.”
He bent his legs and shifted to relieve pressure on his shoulder, then turned away from her and lay on his back.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You probably think about that sometimes.”
“It’s a good question,” he said. “Whether it would have been possible for him, emotionally, without me there.” They stared at the geometric plane of the darkened ceiling.
“Are we doing the right thing,” she asked, “for her?” They knew their child would be a girl.
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