Side Life

by Steve Toutonghi

  William opens a stained green refrigerator and extracts a nearly room temperature Budweiser. When he pushes on the refrigerator door it drifts closed, barely sealing.

  He thinks, “Okay, Vin, I did exaggerate and you caught me. But every answer is an estimate, and my feeling is genuine. So now that you’ve proven to be a more perceptive voice in my head than I expected, can you tell me why you’re not a hallucination? Maybe your story will help me sleep.”

  VIN SPILLS IMAGES AND EVENTS as if he’s confessing and everything he says will be forgiven. William is attentive, and Vin feels him waking mentally, slowly rousing himself from what had been a profound and lengthy funk to pay closer and closer attention to Vin’s story. William is a good listener, and from inside William’s head, it’s easy to convey emotion. William’s rare questions are thoughtful and sensitive and they test Vin’s awareness of Kim’s feelings, and Trina’s. They test his awareness of his own resilience.

  “It seems to me, Vin,” William says at one point, “that you and Kim treated each other well while you were together.”

  “Thank you,” Vin says, dizzy from their many beers.

  William is horrified by Vin’s trip to Armageddon, and when Vin reaches the bloody climax he has just fled, William gasps at each grisly development until, as Vin relates how he loaded Mona into the first casket, William is sighing noisily. Vin has been afraid that William would challenge his decision to use the crèche, rather than call an ambulance. Maybe Mona could have survived. But survive for what? Her phantom responds.

  “You made the right choice,” agrees William.

  Throughout the story, William is an accommodating surrogate, allowing Vin to move his hands and mouth so they can take turns drinking beer. The two of them have kept each other going and drained many of the bottles in William’s sickly but well-stocked refrigerator.

  “Ah, god. It’s so sad,” William thinks as Vin explains how he landed in William’s head.

  “I know,” Vin agrees, and then he’s gasping, weeping without restraint in whatever way a thought process can.

  “We’re so cruel to each other,” William thinks.

  And Vin thinks, “William, please don’t do it. Please.”

  Vin can easily hear thoughts that William intentionally directs at him but the deeper layers of William’s mind are clouded under a mordant, almost fungal coating, a powdery glaucous bloom. Contact with them drains Vin, makes him feel grimy.

  William thinks, “I know a girl who calls herself Nerdean. She’s only fifteen though. We play Go at the Queen Anne Library.”

  “What?”

  “Hey, stop poking around in my thoughts.”

  “But if you know Nerdean, and she’s young, and I just told you about the crèche, then you might tell her. What if I’m responsible for her creating the crèche?”

  William is appalled at how thick Vin is being. “Isn’t that just the point,” he thinks. “Isn’t that just what we’ve been talking about? Shared responsibility? And, anyway, don’t get too excited. There are other ways of looking at it. Infinite worlds is just hand-waving. Infinity isn’t really a number, after all. It’s the distance between math and truth, and I mean that literally. And maybe the crèche, maybe all of technology really, is an expression of an as yet unknown multidimensional geometry of causation, systemic effects we can’t fully perceive. I mean, none of us really invent any of this any more than we discover things. When conditions are right, maybe things, ideas, just grow. Like mushrooms.”

  William has been sitting for too long. He blinks with blowzy insensibility and then hawks up phlegm from the back of his throat. As he cautiously levers himself upright, his mood clears.

  He staggers into his dingy bathroom to pee. “You know, for a bubble in my temporal lobe, you’re actually okay. Interesting even. I thought you were going to warn me about Area 51, JFK and the CIA. Tinfoil hats. It’s nice to have a conversation with my ideas though, rather than just have them pop up. Collegial.”

  William flushes the toilet. He runs his tongue across the outside of his upper and lower teeth as he steps up to a stained bathroom mirror.

  “You,” Vin thinks.

  “What?”

  “You. I know you.”

  “You are me.” William spits into the sink. “No matter what you think.”

  “Do you recognize this?” Vin asks, and he thinks of a black military jacket with yellow piping and gold buttons. He feels a flicker of pleasure vibrate through William.

  “Sure. And you know about the rest too, right?” William plods to a long closet and opens a sliding door on a collection of uniforms. He finds a black jacket with yellow piping that’s hanging over blue slacks. “You mean this one. I collect them. My fingers are too long, my knuckles are ugly and knobby, and I have thin shoulders, a wide rump and a roll of fat around my waist. Uniforms hide all that.”

  “I need air,” Vin thinks. “Can we walk?”

  “I was going to sleep, but okay, I guess.” William grabs the uniform’s jacket. As he steps outside, Vin convinces him to draw in a deep breath. The dark, fresh breeze feeds him but also makes him dizzy. He sways for a few moments then starts walking west, toward the water.

  Vin thinks, “This is you,” showing William his memory of the man who interrupted the barbecue.

  “Yes. I suppose it is. So what?”

  Vin doesn’t know how to have the conversation he’s desperate for. In some worlds, William merely interrupted the barbecue, but in others he wounded Hanna and killed Trina.

  William thinks, “You know, I’m hearing you think about all that. You’re saying all of those things inside my head.”

  “Okay.”

  They walk. In his thoughts, Vin can’t help connecting Trina’s death to Kim’s journey in the crèche and to the destruction of his own marriage.

  William thinks, “Okay, I get the picture.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help it. My thoughts just—”

  “No, I understand. You’re saying I’m going to murder a little girl who I don’t know but already love.”

  “Given your state of mind, I wasn’t going to tell you.”

  “Well, that’s not one-hundred percent true. You were thinking about hiding it from me so I wouldn’t feel worse about myself. Which I appreciate. But you probably would have told me, if there was a chance that it would stop me from hurting her.”

  Vin realizes that William understands him too well for even subtle deceptions.

  “Yes,” William thinks at him, “that’s right. I do.”

  WHEN WILLIAM/VIN REACHES MARSHALL PARK, he sits on the bench and watches darkness begin to loosen its grip on the breezy reaches above the water. William has been planning to kill himself because he views humanity as a plague, an animal with the same narcissistic perspective as every other animal, but one that has uncovered the protean pliability of the material world and is rapaciously and incontinently bumbling through oceans and forests, smugly convinced of its own transcendence from the systems responsible for the creation and nurturance of all life, an animal that “discovers” components and attributes of the natural world as if they were separable from the circumstances they inhabit.

  “I know it’s depressing,” William thinks. But the thing he feels is more urgent than depression. It’s more like the despair Vin felt when Bill dropped a bag of meth on the folding card table. William feels it toward the species. He earned graduate degrees from MIT, won awards for his research. “But the species that honored me, or at least its inevitable idea of progress, is a toxin.” William says this out loud. “And that’s how I ended up here, feeling this way.”

  “But can’t you find a way through your depression? Can’t you fight it?”

  “Like Mona did?” William thinks. “Like Armageddon? Run from the black dog of depression the way Winston Churchill did, or Teddy Roosevelt? Did you know that Roosevelt felt the same kind of overwhelming anxiety and fear of the future as Churchill? Should I be like them and keep myself so
busy that I don’t ever have time to think? Blunder through the world breaking and killing things because I’m trying to outrun my own depression? That would make me a part of the illness.”

  “I don’t know. Is that your only choice?” Vin suddenly feels a surge of frustration. William is a sad sack, lost and damaged, a man Vin shouldn’t give a damn about. But he’s unique, specific and alive, and being here in his head, even with his depression—he’s beautiful. Vin wants him to live.

  “By the way,” William is speaking out loud again, “Sophie was right about you neglecting her. It seems to me that animals we don’t care enough about to kill, we sometimes adopt.”

  And William and his depression are now part of Vin’s life. There’s nothing Vin can do about it. He might even be happy about it, the strangeness of it. No matter whose mind he’s been in, it’s always been his life. The shots are him, not side lives where he can dodge reality.

  A brisk chill from the water sweeps over William, silencing both his thoughts and Vin’s. High above, the black fabric between clouds is rent by the closest, most energetic and violent stars. They fade as dawn restores the limits of the visible world.

  HE HAD FELT THINGS THAT William felt but he wasn’t sure he really understood William. Maybe William would kill himself. Maybe he wouldn’t. These were Vin’s first thoughts when he woke in a mild, air-conditioned version of Nerdean’s office. Waking there meant that he had survived the shot, which meant that in the world where he left the corpses of Kim, Trina, Mona and the person sometimes known as Joaquin, the police hadn’t ended his shot prematurely, and the crèche’s battery power had lasted.

  With his first step outside the casket, he felt a familiar stiffness in his leg. As he walked to the terry cloth robe heaped on one of the chairs—a midnight-blue robe—he became reacquainted with his limp.

  His thoughts were darting, restive. He was trying not to reflect on his experience, didn’t trust himself to draw conclusions. But his mind wanted answers, its default intoxicant. He would have to make an effort to deny himself at least for a while. If he didn’t do that, he might pass more time searching, traveling from one world to the next, and his life would all be lived in Nerdean’s office.

  There was no one in the other two caskets. Upstairs, the card table wasn’t in the dining room, but neither was the beautiful big table that he and Kim and Trina had lived with. Instead, there was a modest maple table with rounded ends. The chairs that surrounded it were functional, squarish, with cushioned seats. There was a sectional in the same place that Kim had once placed one, but not as nice. There were a few other uninspired furnishings. On the largest wall in the dining room hung a big canvas he didn’t recognize, a painting, the outlines of a car and driver in spreading black strokes, defined and slashed through by playful geometric scrolls and a collision of faded prime colors.

  There was no cat food under the sink. He realized with a pang that Sophie wasn’t in the house. The odd cluster of electronics was not in the master bedroom, but he did find a phone charging on a black, wrought iron bed stand beside a queen-size bed. He unlocked the phone with his PIN and looked through the contacts. Bill was there. Kim wasn’t. John Grassler was in his list, as well as Corey Nahabedian and even Brant Spence. He was surprised to see Hanna Dawkins—Kim’s co-worker who had come over for their barbecue—in his list of contacts. When he checked his recent calls, there were several to and from her.

  He sat on the bed and stared at the shiny phone screen. Outside his window, unfiltered morning sunlight was sharpening its bright knives against the slate-gray waters of Puget Sound. He thought he should probably read his email and try to catch up on how events developed in this world. Instead, he took a deep breath and called Bill.

  THEY ARRANGED TO MEET FOR brunch at the restaurant in the Space Needle. Bill’s idea. On their phone call, he’d told Vin that after finally receiving the largish check for their small investment in Sigmoto, he and Charlotte had been discussing what they should do next. She wanted to buy a few acres on one of the islands and start a small organic farm, raise their own food to sell at farmers’ markets. Bill wasn’t so sure.

  Bill’s voice was relaxed, and he laughed with an oblivious, unforced ease. Vin decided to save the in-depth questioning for their face-to-face. After hanging up, Vin spent several moments appreciating the fact that Bill was apparently sober in this world. He walked the distance to Caffé Vita, warming up his trick leg.

  Trina had liked this walk. They’d often passed dogs leading drowsy owners who carried blue plastic baggies of poop. She called the route, “Going down the hill the long way,” in her child’s voice—the sound that was the unique cryptographic hash that had once authenticated his life. But there was no contact number in his phone for childcare.

  The crèche was a technology that could change the world, disrupt culture, but technology followed its own logic, indifferent to the human arithmetic of suffering. Believing in it, relying on it was like worshiping a volcano. He had knowledge and skill. How should he use them? What good could he do?

  He was walking by a line of ants that were shuttling pieces of something yellow past a watchful crow.

  AS HE WAITED FOR A barista whom he didn’t know to make his drink, he thought of a question for Bill. He took the latte outside, sat in one of the metal café chairs and called. A wall of dark clouds began to draw itself up against the blue distance.

  “Hey, when was the last time you talked with Hanna?” he asked.

  “Your Hanna?”

  That would explain the calls on Vin’s phone.

  A shock of memory tore open the mild day, splitting it in two while somehow leaving it whole. Kim and Trina’s bodies in the dark basement. Vin saw himself pressing the silver blade against the soft flesh of Mona’s throat, saw the deadness in her eyes as they stepped to the precipice of her murder. But he hadn’t hurt her. As a part of her own story, she had saved his life. At the world’s terrifying edges, the rumors of endless shadow worlds trembled. Vin squinted into radiant air, felt sleeping moisture on the slow-moving wind.

  “Vin?” Bill asked again, his voice bringing Vin back to himself.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Well, yeah, Hanna called me after you guys broke up. Said that you were going through a hard time, and that, knowing you, you might not reach out.”

  Vin was fighting to regain a place in his body. A heavy bulldog stepped toward him and began licking the bottom of his jeans. Thick-necked, pug-nosed and gentle, the dog’s flat tongue maneuvered like a separate animal. The bulldog looked up at him, grunted or sneezed, then turned to enter Caffé Vita. Its owner nodded as he followed the dog in. Vin wondered whether he knew either of them in this world.

  “What do you know about the crèche?” he asked Bill.

  “Did you use it again? You said you were done with it. You said when you came out your cat had disappeared, along with her scratching post, all her cat food and her dishes. Sophie, I think you said. You were freaked out.”

  “And that was all?”

  Bill laughed. “Yeah. But that seemed like enough, right? You said you liked that cat.”

  “I did. I miss her.”

  “Okay, but like I’ve said every time you bring her up, you never had a cat. Right? That thing has bad mojo, man. Really bad. I think you should turn it over to the university. You’re never going to figure it out on your own and you have the money from Sigmoto. It’s not like you need the house.”

  “No. I probably know everything I need to know about it.”

  “See you in a little bit?”

  “At the Space Needle’s elevator. Sure.”

  “Yeah. Okay. And, hey, I’m glad you called. You know, that you reached out. I know how hard you and Hanna tried. I know how hard things must be for you right now. You’ve never really wanted to talk about this stuff though. Like I said, I’m glad you called.”

  “Thanks Bill.”

  “Oh, and hey, I saw Kim this morning. She told me to say hi.�
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  There was a pause before Vin managed to say, “And, how’s she?”

  “Great. That paper she coauthored? It got accepted. Her first publication. I bought her a new pen and a scientific notebook to celebrate.”

  HE WALKED WEST ON ROY Street, aiming by default toward what he still thought of as Nerdean’s house. He had mumbled something to Bill and hung up, ending their conversation, too stunned to keep talking. Wasn’t this what he had wanted for years—all three of them alive, and Bill healthy? But what did he and Kim mean to each other now, in a new world where they were barely friends?

  He wouldn’t go back into the crèche, at least not anytime soon, but not because Kim and Bill had both survived here. Trina was still missing. Living in the same world as his daughter was what he wanted. But he didn’t believe he could find her without destroying himself and possibly her, and he wanted a life, whatever that might mean. His feelings might change or they might not but for now, knowing what he wanted was enough.

  At Counterbalance Park, sunlight was soaking into the teak decking and warming it so that steam rose in thinning spirals. The air was fresh, cleansed by the recent rain. Gray and rose canyons and bright buttes of cloud drifted above.

  He decided not to go directly back to the big house. Instead, he turned up the hill, walking fast so that he ran short of breath and felt his body laboring. In this world, he hadn’t taken very good care of himself.

  THE SUN HELD OUT ALL the way to the top of the hill and then the day cooled as he turned toward the park and the daylight turned blue-gray. What are the forces that transform a person? What makes one thing possible and another impossible and what moves those limits? Beyond the obvious, what was now out of his reach and what was within it?

  The house across the street from the West Queen Anne Playfield looked to him exactly as it had when he and William left it, only a few hours before and years ago. But this wasn’t the same world, and that wasn’t really the same house and Vin didn’t know what to expect. Ghosts? Or violence? Ordinary people with unanswerable questions? He walked up the broad concrete stairs and turned left before the wooden porch, walked to the side of the house with the dull white door at ground level. Blackout curtains like he remembered at William’s place. He knocked twice but no one answered. He waited and knocked again.