by Amber Stuart
Christ, I hated myself sometimes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and pulled her just a little closer to me. “Lottie, really, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
She gave me a sad smile, an effort. “It’s ok. You have every right to be angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m just confused. Frustrated. And you won’t talk to me.”
She shook her head again to indicate she still didn’t plan on talking to me, so I kept talking instead.
“And I’m tired. I got like three hours of sleep last night. I keep having these dreams about you. Last night, we were on the beach in Galveston, that time I took the picture of you that’s set as my phone’s background…”
She had started to smile at that phantom in the street as she recalled the memory. I wanted her to hold onto it.
“What was that shell you found?” I asked.
Lottie would have known I remembered, of course. And she didn’t hesitate to call me on it now.
“Dietrich, you could recite the entire Wikipedia page.”
I just smiled back at her. “Hm, I think it was some kind of whelk.”
“Lightning whelk.”
“Right. Turns out it’s our state shell, too. Who knew we had a state shell?”
I probably shouldn’t have used those first person pronouns. It made her uncomfortable.
“I need to leave,” she told me, and tried to pull her hand away from mine, but I wouldn’t let her go.
“Lottie, please, can we go somewhere to talk? Please?”
She had started to shake her head again, but I interrupted her. I had expected her to say no. “Lottie, you can’t just show up here, not dead, tell me you aren’t you, it was a mistake, and then not even tell me why. Do you have any idea how badly this is going to fuck with my head?”
I wondered if she had any idea how badly this was already fucking with my head. She was staring at that invisible spot in the street even more intently now, biting her lower lip in that nervous way of hers as she stalled for time. I waited. I would have waited on the street corner all day if I had to.
I needed some argument, some better reason than, “Don’t completely fuck me over,” for when she said no again, but I couldn’t really think of any compelling reason. After all, she didn’t owe me any explanation. At least, I didn’t think she did. I was half-convinced I was still just losing my mind anyway and this was all a delusion. And I was more than half-convinced delusions don’t owe us anything.
Finally, she looked away from the ghost on the street and met my eyes again, and quietly told me, “Something went wrong, Dietrich. I don’t know what to tell you when I don’t even understand everything myself.”
“You can tell me what you do know. That’s a hell of a lot more than I know.”
She looked like she was going to protest again, so I kept talking, even though that didn’t usually work well for me.
“Lottie, my car is eight blocks from here. We can go back to our… my apartment,” she had started shaking her head again. “Ok, wherever you want to go. Or we can just sit in my car. I don’t care. At this point, is it really going to hurt anything to tell me whatever it is you don’t want to tell me? Because I’ve already seen you. You’ve already told me you’re not… you. Is there some cosmic mystery I’m not supposed to know here? Is this about the rosary at your funeral? That was Eric’s idea. I didn’t even know what the fuck the rosary was for. That was not my fault.”
I was rambling now. I had waited for something revelatory to happen during that ritual, after all; maybe if souls did exist, hers was really pissed off about it not being done properly. Or being done at all. It had taken a while. I guess if I were dead – I mean, really dead – and waiting to move on, I would be pretty pissed off about having to wait around while a bunch of people sat chanting around my corpse.
Her laughter had cut me off. Like little bells, it was infectious and I couldn’t help smiling, even though I had no idea why she was laughing. She smiled at me, and it was a genuine smile, Lottie’s smile. That sarcastic, witty, personality of hers always hidden just below the surface of that smile.
“Dietrich, the rosary was fine. It was nice. It meant a lot to Cathy. Although you didn’t have to look quite so derisive.” Her smile faded.
Derisive? That wasn’t a word I had ever heard Lottie use.
“You were there?” That was going down in my top five list of stupidest questions ever asked.
Lottie pressed her lips together. I knew why. She was trying not to laugh at me. I had seen her do that so many times before, especially when we first met. We were seventeen, and I had only been in this country for three years. I spoke English well, but it was the English of a non-native speaker – the textbook English I had learned in school. I had finished the gymnasium at fourteen and moved to Baton Rouge to go to LSU and was finishing my degrees when I met her; even after three years in this country, I found American idioms, especially south Louisiana idioms, bewildering.
Granted, my anti-social personality didn’t exactly put me in a lot of situations to learn conversational English. Lottie found my confusion over common expressions endearing and funny. I just found it frustrating. Ten years later, I was still trying to figure out why I should “get down” from the car instead of getting out.
“Yes, Dietrich, I was.”
Well, of course she had been there. But her insistence that she wasn’t Lottie was baffling me. There were few things I could be certain of in this world, and Lottie was one of them. But there was something so right and yet so wrong about her.
“And who is that?” I asked cautiously.
She took a deep breath then started chewing on her lower lip again, this nervous habit of hers that never changed whether she was concentrating on studying for finals or picking out flower arrangements for the tables at our reception.
“Ok. We can go sit in your car. It’s starting to get hot out here anyway.”
It didn’t take long in June along the Gulf Coast for the weather to become stifling, oppressive even. She let me lead her back down the sidewalk, not trying to free her hand from mine again, even though I wasn’t holding onto her tightly or assertively, just enough to know that she was still with me. And she kept pace with me, not really seeming to need me to lead her back to the parking garage by my building.
Of course, Lottie would have known where I was going. But she was and wasn’t Lottie. She had said so herself. Sort of. And for every movement, every detail of her body, every mannerism, and speech pattern and smile that made me know this was Lottie… there was still this tickling in the back of my brain, something that kept whispering, “This isn’t right. Something’s not quite right. Something is different. She is different.”
We walked in silence, moving with the crowd this time, so it was easier to walk back, passing by the coffeehouse where we had only been… I wondered how much time had passed. It had seemed like hours, but I knew that couldn’t be true. The line was to the door now. No rest for the weary baristas. Lottie glanced forlornly at the door but didn’t stop walking. I could guess what she was thinking. She was, and wasn’t, Lottie after all. She had never had a chance to drink her coffee.
“I can get you another one,” I offered.
Lottie paused but then picked up her pace again.
“No,” she sighed, “with that line? Besides, I have to go back… home today.”
“Where is that?”
Silence. Of course.
“Ok, mother ship?” I joked. At least I think it sounded like a joke. I couldn’t always tell.
But Lottie just looked at me, puzzled, inquisitive. “No, no mother ship,” she answered.
We were only two blocks from the parking garage now. Knowing she planned to leave Houston today, I wanted to walk slower, drag these moments with her out longer, even if trying to talk to her was frustratingly difficult and increasingly confusing. She was close enough to Lottie, I thought. Close enough, that i
f she would just stay here, if she could just… pretend… perhaps, one day, I would find myself resurrected. I knew it was terribly unfair to even think that. But I had never claimed to be selfless.
She started slowing down before me as we neared the parking garage and finally let her hand drop from my fingers. She crossed her arms defensively over her chest, that pained expression returning. She didn’t want to have this conversation with me, and there was nothing more in the world I wanted to do right now than hear everything she had to say. One of us was going to be incredibly disappointed.
She knew my car and spotted it quickly on the first floor of the parking garage. She should know it. She had picked it out. I was going to get a Passat like hers, but she wouldn’t let me buy a German car. She told me it was entirely too clichéd for a German to buy a German car, and really, I didn’t care as long as I didn’t have to work on it. I wasn’t mechanically inept but that didn’t mean I liked it. So she had picked out an Accord, a Sport edition to make it look less like a family car, but I knew her well enough to know that she had made sure it had excellent safety ratings and would fit car seats in the back… just in case. I only intervened when she tried to order an Obsidian Blue Pearl – seriously, the girl was obsessed with tormenting me about my blue eyes – and we compromised on Alabaster Silver Metallic, which I thought was a really dumb fucking name. But when we went to pick up my new car, I had to admit: she had done a pretty damn good job.
I unlocked the doors, and Lottie slid into the passenger seat, closing the door and locking it, and for a moment, I wondered if she had changed her mind about us going somewhere to talk privately. But she didn’t move to put her seatbelt on. Lottie was just like that: after having grown up in Baton Rouge and having lived in Houston, she never got into a car without immediately locking the doors. I started the ignition anyway to turn on the air conditioning. The clock lit up and told me it was only 7:55. Still so early. What time would she be leaving? How much of it would she spend with me? How long did I have? Even though the air was cooling off, it was starting to feel even more suffocating inside my car than it had outside in the hot, humid Texas summer.
“So,” I said, knowing I would have to start somewhere but not knowing if I was in the beginning or middle or end or somewhere in between, “you say you’re not Lottie, but you are. Can you just start there?”
Not-Lottie reached out to turn a vent toward her, and I noticed the rest of her bun had completely fallen out now. Her long brown hair was hanging loosely around her shoulders, with those curly baby hairs that framed her face waving wildly in the current of the air blowing from the vents.
God, she was so beautiful. My stomach rolled. I would not throw up.
“No, I’m not your fiancée,” she said quietly. “I just look like her, that’s all.”
“And sound like her, and smell like her, and feel like her… you’re one hell of a Doppelgänger.”
“It’s her body.”
“I know it is. I’ve been telling you that for the past hour.”
Lottie was getting exasperated with me now. “No, I’m… I needed her body to survive. That’s how it works. When we get to a new place, we have a short amount of time to find a body that hasn’t been dead too long. We can heal it. Make it work again. And then it becomes ours. We’re not supposed to remember anything…”
She sighed and rubbed her eyes as she leaned back into the car seat. She was also confused and frustrated, so full of this aching sorrow.
I desperately wanted to reach over and hold her, comfort her, no matter who she claimed she was. She was still Lottie. She had to be. She tried again. “We’re only supposed to have our memories, not the person’s who died. I shouldn’t know anything about Lottie except for the two days I saw her at the funeral home and cemetery. And even then, I would have known more about her family and friends than her. None of this should be happening. I don’t understand how it is.”
She looked over at me, her eyes wet, and I thought if she started crying again, I would lose whatever self-control I had managed to retain. I would break down and try to hold her and comfort her in German because Lottie had always found it soothing even though she didn’t speak much German, she just liked the sound of my voice. And then not-Lottie would most definitely beat the shit out of me and take off, probably yelling for the cops as she did.
“You must hate me.” Her voice was so weary.
Of all the things she could have said, I was the least prepared for that.
Startled, I responded, maybe too forcefully, “What? No! Why would you even think that?”
Lottie shrugged. “Maybe because I stole your fiancée’s body. You should have never known, but I have these memories, mostly of you, I thought they were just dreams at first. That’s what Lydia told me, that I was probably just dreaming and that I probably remembered seeing you at the funeral and my new brain was making up… these dreams about us. She was so adamant about them not being real memories because it is supposed to be impossible that I dropped it, and I never told her I was still having them. And then I came here… not to see you but to see the city because it seemed so… familiar. I screwed up. You were already devastated and now I’ve done this.” Lottie motioned to herself like I was supposed to know what this meant.
“Who’s Lydia?”
“My best friend. She took Jamie’s body. She doesn’t have any weird dreams about Jamie’s life either, by the way.”
“That’s probably for the best. She was kind of a bitch.”
“Dietrich!”
I knew that tone of voice. That was the kind of half-hearted reprimand she always used when I said something inappropriate but she secretly agreed with me. If she remembered Jamie at all, she probably did secretly agree with me, even though Jamie had been her best friend. They had met soon after we moved to Houston, and while Jamie was always good to Lottie, she didn’t treat everyone else the same way.
“How many memories do you have? You seem to know a lot about her. And us.”
Lottie turned thoughtful and looked out the windshield. There wasn’t really anything to look at, just a gray cinderblock wall with red numbers and letters spray painted on them.
“Not many,” she finally said.
I could usually tell when strangers were lying; I could always tell when Lottie was lying. But she already didn’t want to be here, talking about any of this, and pointing that out now would rank at the top of my stupidest things ever said list.
“So… no mother ship. But… you make it sound like you’re not… well, where are you from?” I couldn’t bring myself to ask her – no matter how strange this situation actually was – if she was a fucking alien. Some things are so absurd, even when right in front of you, that giving voice to them will only make them seem that much more absurd. Or real. And maybe that was the bigger problem.
That half-smile pulled at the corner of her lips again and she glanced back at me. She looked so tired now.
“No mother ship, Dietrich. We’re obviously not from here, but as far as I know, there’s no such thing as real space travel. Not like in your books and movies, anyway. I don’t know how it works. I’m not a scientist and it’s unbelievably complex. I don’t know, you would probably understand it if someone could explain it to you properly. You’re the genius. You love physics. I just think of it like this: imagine if I handed you a piece of paper, and I had folded it up into little squares until I couldn’t fold it anymore. And then I gave you an ice pick and told you to stick it through. When you unfolded that piece of paper, you would see all those squares, all these little holes. Imagine I told you to put your finger on the top left corner, and that was my home. Now, imagine trying to touch the bottom right corner with the same finger – that’s Earth. It’s impossible. But if you fold it up again, you can reach through those holes from corner to corner, from my planet to here. There are no spaceships. Just… folds.”
Her brow was furrowed, that look of intense concentr
ation on her face and I wondered if she’d just made the paper analogy up on the spot. When she shook her head and insisted that was a lame attempt to explain physics she couldn’t possibly understand, I realized she had just made it up and I reassured her it was a much better explanation than she thought. It hadn’t actually explained much other than she was claiming to be from another planet, didn’t travel on a spaceship, and somehow, somewhere, someone was –what, folding the universe up like a sheet of paper to travel incomprehensible distances? And what were these holes that were letting them get from one place to another? Was she seriously talking about wormholes?
And then there was that whole “we revive dead people” aspect of her story. How long was I even going to have a conversation about alien body snatchers? I was pretty sure that was a really old, really bad movie anyway. Lottie would have known. She knew much more pop culture than I ever did. But no matter how insane this conversation had turned out to be, I wanted her to keep talking to me, because I was sitting in my car with Lottie. I would have talked about rainbow shitting unicorns if she had wanted to.
“What usually happens then? You said something went wrong. What did you expect to happen?”
I don’t think I wanted to hear, “I expected to steal your dead girlfriend’s body and have a life without you in it. So stop being so goddamned nosy.”
Lottie turned the A/C down. I hadn’t noticed it had gotten cold in the car. I’m pretty sure the parking garage could have caught on fire and I wouldn’t have noticed.
“Normally, we just go on with our own lives. Our bodies change but that’s it. They have to in order to survive in different places, but we are still who we are. We don’t know anything about the person whose body we took. Their memories, their personalities, all of that is gone. We can get the body functioning again, the brain functioning again in some respects, but we have to learn certain things for ourselves too, like speech. How to behave around other people. But we learn quickly.
And it only works once. Once we’ve crossed over – anywhere – we have a short amount of time to find a body or we will die. All the… energy… that we are can’t exist on its own outside of our planet. We would just get weaker and weaker until we cease to exist. That’s why we have to do what we do. Once we become part of that body, it’s just as much ours as yours is you. If you kill me, I don’t get to go home. It’s a one way ticket.”