Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change

by Robert J. Crane

  “And you’re taking it so very well,” Scott said, brushing that right off. “Listen … when I was … evaporating the lake, I saw … something.”

  “What kind of something?” Sienna asked, brow furrowing with interest. “Like, something related to Captain Redbeard? Because, boy would I like to sink his ship.”

  “No,” Scott said, afraid to look at her for fear of losing his nerve. “You know … all those rumors about you and me … as a couple?” He chanced a look.

  Sienna was watching him carefully, frozen in place. “Uh … yeah?”

  “Kat said something funny about that, too,” Scott said, splitting his gaze between the carpet pattern and Sienna. “That we were together. And then … today, when I was draining the lake … I saw … like a vision.”

  “A vision?” Sienna was holding very still, her face carefully neutral.

  “Of the two of us,” Scott said, struggling to get it out. “Having an argument. And the way it was … it looked like we were … like a couple.” He looked her right in the eye. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “I don’t typically have a lot of visions, no,” Sienna said a little too flippantly, but with just a hint that she was experiencing something else, some other feeling, as well.

  “I don’t feel like it was just a dream,” Scott said, looking away again. He stared off at downtown in the distance, the lights coming on in the Bank of America tower. “It felt real, this argument between us.”

  “We’ve known each other for a long time,” Sienna said quietly. “We’ve argued in the past.”

  “This was different,” Scott said vehemently, shaking his head. “This was us clashing over—over life choices. Not the sort of thing I’d call you on as a friend.” His face tightened. “Sienna … why don’t I remember the rest of that conversation?” He waited for an answer, and when it didn’t come, he prodded her. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  She watched him like she was carved out of stone, her eyes frozen in place. “Yes,” she said finally, the facade cracking enough to show some uncertainty. “Yeah, I remember … I remember that.”

  “When did it happen?” Scott asked, taking a few steps toward her. His head felt foggy just from the effort of trying to jar a memory loose, of trying to pry it out of some dark cranny in his mind.

  “Probably the night of my abortive, horrible interview with Gail Roth,” Sienna said matter-of-factly, lowering her gaze as she did so. He was presented with a view of the top of her head, and the frizzed, barely-dry, electrified mess of her hair. “That’s when it happened.”

  “Why can’t I remember that?” Scott asked. “I mean, I remember seeing the Gail Roth interview on TV, obviously, but—” He shrugged. “I don’t remember seeing you that night.”

  “Well, you were there,” she said.

  “Where?” Scott asked. “At the interview?”

  “Yeah,” she said. It felt to him as if he were wrestling something valuable out of her grasp. Her whole body was filled with tension, and she held herself back slightly, like she was preparing for a blow from an unseen source. “You were watching it unfold live.”

  “How I do not—” He blinked, trying to remember. “How can I not—I don’t even recall—” He looked at her, could read the guilt in the way she held herself. “Did you … Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind me?”

  Her brow creased, her lips turned down. “Did I … what?”

  “It’s a movie,” he said. “About a couple that has the memories of their relationship erased from their minds.” He watched her like he was waiting for her to bust out a signed confession.

  “Oh, well,” Sienna said, rubbing a hand along one of her exposed forearms, “then no, I did not.” She waited a second, fidgeting, then went on. “Because, uh … I only erased …” her voice fell to a much softer timbre, “… your memories.”

  Scott felt like a baseball had streaked through the window, broken the glass, and clubbed him right between the eyes. “Do … do you think is funny?”

  “No,” she said, the answer coming fast, with a rapid shaking of her head. “I don’t now, and I didn’t then, either. I thought it was tense … horrifying … painful … all of those, for both of us, which was why I took the burden of our failed relationship entirely on myself.” She looked straight at him.

  “What?” Scott took a step back, like he really had been hit. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “If it didn’t come from Phillips, it clearly had to come from somewhere,” Sienna muttered. “Stupid universal laws.”

  “Are you trying to play the hero?” Scott asked, the rough horror settling in on him. “‘Taking the burden’ on yourself for our—our—failed relationship? Like stealing my—messing with my mind—gaslighting me—is some kind of—of—noble act?” he sputtered with rage, the clouds that had been fogging his mind darkening, like a storm. “People have been saying things for months about you—my parents, my friends—and I’ve been like, ‘No, we were never together’—and they’d look at me like I was nuts.” He felt the fury course through him. “All along, it turns out you—you just—” He ran a wet hand over his hair. “And now you want to play the hero.”

  “I can play the villain if you want,” Sienna said quietly. “I’ve certainly had enough experiences with them—”

  “Don’t!” He pointed a finger right at her. “Don’t—don’t think you can just deflect away from—from—you stole my memories, Sienna!” He put a hand on his forehead again, sodden and wet, sweat dripping off. “These—these are the things that make me me, and you just made a—a unilateral decision to take them when we were—done, I assume?” He waited until she nodded, slowly, once. “We broke up?” She nodded again. “And you just … stole any memory I had of our … relationship?”

  “I did,” she said quietly. “I’m—”

  “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry,” he cut her off with quiet menace. “You say ‘I’m sorry’ when you step on someone’s foot. You say ‘I’m sorry’ when you do something that you’re actually sorry about, like—I don’t know—steal someone’s favorite shirt in the post-breakup move. You don’t—you don’t take someone’s—” He buried his head in his palms, dampness seeping out, “—everything, it was like you just—took everything—” He looked up, feeling feverish. “You’re not actually sorry you did it, are you?”

  She looked stricken. “I’m sorry that—”

  “That you got caught?” His voice rose. “Because I have to guess this conversation wasn’t going to happen organically, since it’s been—” He tried to think about how long it had been, how long people had been asking him.

  “Four years,” she finished for him, raising his ire even further. “And I was going to tell you. But I haven’t seen you since that night after the Clary family reunion wrecked the campus, and I’ve been busy, and you’ve been busy, and it’s not exactly something I’m super eager to bring up, no. ‘Hey, remember that time—oh, that’s right, you can’t’.”

  “You made an idiot out of me,” he said quietly, the realization fully sinking in. “Everyone must know except me.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Does Reed know?”

  “… Yes.”

  “Does Zollers?” Scott asked, keeping a thin leash on his anger.

  “… Yes, but—”

  “Who doesn’t know? Would that be a quicker answer?”

  “Those are the only two,” Sienna said, looking even more weary, more damaged, than before. “There is no one else who knows what I—”

  “That you ripped my mind apart?” Scott kept his tone surprisingly even, his own anger spent—for now. “That when you were done with me, you just … left me in a heap on the side of the road without even the—the common decency not to—to completely destroy me before you left?”

  “I didn’t pull the trigger on the breakup, okay?” Her voice was husky and full of emotion. “And I left you completely functional when it was over, which was a far cr
y from how you would have been if I hadn’t done what I’d done. You just went back to living your life, without a clue, and I had to—”

  “Oh, pause for tears,” Scott said. “Let’s get them all out there.” He glared her down, and she quit speaking. “No, go on. Tell me how hard it was for you, carrying the burden of our couplehood all on your lonely own. Of course, you wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t shredded my mind on your way out. I really feel sorry for you—oh, wait, I don’t.”

  “I made my choice,” Sienna said. A single tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it on her sleeve, her eyes hard even now. “I’m not asking you to understand—”

  “Good, because I don’t. Maybe if I still had my memories, but—hey, someone took care of that for me. Now I’ll never understand.”

  “All right, well,” Sienna headed for the door, “this isn’t going anywhere good—”

  “Are you going to play the martyr now?” He locked his gaze on her, filling his stare with all the fury he felt, soul-deep. “Because I thought you were okay being the villain.”

  She froze on her way out the door, face half-obscured. She pulled herself back in and looked up enough to make plain she was looking at him, but not anywhere above roughly his knees. “If that’s what you need.” And she walked out, closing the door behind her.

  He wanted to scream behind her in fury, to shout something about how cheap and ugly it was to play that card on her way out, something about how she wasn’t really accepting any responsibility for anything at all, but his mind—again—locked before he could say anything, as though a fog had rolled into the space between his mouth and his brain, and nothing came out. Instead, he listened to her urgent footfalls as she retreated down the steps of the hotel suite, and he felt water roll out of every pore, dripping down, masking the tears that flowed freely from his eyes.

  49.

  Sienna

  Well, that was about the most uncomfortable conversation ever, and I include in that the time that my mother decided she had to give me the sex talk. I was nineteen and her boss when it happened, which made it even worse than it probably sounds. I was also not a virgin when it happened, so it had the added bonus of being pointless.

  I didn’t storm down the stairs in the hotel suite. I made my way tentatively, feeling pretty smacked down. I’d just been involved in an incident in plain sight with an incredible number of civilian casualties, after all, and that was following another one at a house party that had resulted in the death of a pretty famous starlet. I didn’t exactly know who Bree Lancer was, but that was because I was a social outcast. I’d seen the news on my phone before it died. She was known. Probably better now that she was dead, but she was known.

  I felt a lot worse about the people in and around MacArthur Park, though, and I couldn’t decide if that made me a better or worse person. It was probably neutral, since—as Scott had just illustrated—I might already be so terrible that there was no more moving the dial in that direction.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as I took the last step down into the living room. Taggert was standing with a big, black guy who was built like he went to the gym every day for hours.

  “This,” Taggert said with some pride, “is Kitten’s new bodyguard.” He beamed at the musclebound man, who was probably like 6' 6" and three-hundred-and-fifty pounds of solid muscle. “Say hello.”

  The new bodyguard nodded at me. “Yo,” he said, soft-spoken, “My name is Butler.”

  “Uhh,” I said, “nice to meet you, Butler.” His hair was very tightly styled around the sides and top of his head, maybe a quarter-inch of curl. His chest was just huge, like Guy Friday’s halfway through a bulk-out using his powers. I doubted I would even be able to wrap both my hands around his biceps. “What are you doing here?”

  Butler and Taggert looked at each other. Taggert shrugged, still smiling. “I’m Ms. Forrest’s new bodyguard,” Butler said to me patiently and still softly.

  “Dude,” I said, looking at him in disbelief, “you know what happened to her last bodyguards?”

  “Ah, the Bruces,” Taggert said, shaking his head as though mildly wistful that the last guys had had their hearts ripped out their backs. “Such a shame.”

  “I saw it on TV,” Butler said. His voice was smooth, like he should have been recording Grammy-winning soul albums.

  “Are you metahuman?” I asked, proceeding down my line of inquiry unbowed.

  “No ma’am,” Butler said.

  “Then are you deranged?” I viewed him with all the skepticism of a doctor in an asylum examining a patient who has been caught eating his own feces. “Suicidal?” I pointed at Taggert. “Did this dipshit tell you what we’re up against here?”

  “Hey,” Taggert said, mildly annoyed, using the exact same word of protest as the psychos in my head. Coincidence? I suspected not.

  HEY! my psychos chorused, yes, in protest.

  “Mr. Taggert spelled out the threat,” Butler said. “But if you’re going to be a bodyguard to the stars, you have to be prepared to take on a few stalkers, you know?”

  “Exactly,” Taggert said, pearly whites just crying out to be removed. He clapped a possessive hand on Butler’s shoulder, which was about as far as he could reach. Butler was huge.

  “Captain Redbeard is not some loser who haunts the Walk of Fame looking for someone to attach his damaged psyche to,” I said, staring at Butler in disbelief.

  Butler frowned at me. “‘Captain … Redbeard’?”

  “It’s what I’m calling this douche.” I paused. “Because of the beard and the hair—”

  Butler just kept frowning. “Yeah, no, I get it. I just—he looks kinda more like Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover, I think.”

  I had to concede on that one. “Maybe,” I said, “but ‘Red-headed Zach Galifianakis’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue the way ‘Redbeard’ does, you know?” I shook my head. “You seem like a bright guy, Butler. What are you doing here?”

  Butler shrugged. “It’s a career move.”

  “It’s a career-ending move, I think you mean, and also a life-ending one.”

  “Butler’s got this,” Taggert said. “He’s got experience with bodyguarding.”

  “Does he have experience with people who can rip his heart out with their bare hands?” I folded my arms over my chest. “Because that’s what we’re dealing with. A guy who can pass through bone and rip your innards out. He did it to a whole subway train full of people just today, in fact.”

  “I heard,” Butler said. This guy was a cool customer, I’d give him that.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You don’t exhibit any obvious signs of a frontal lobotomy, so let me spell this one out for you—this guy is murdering people by the train-load. The police can’t stop him. I’m having some trouble even stopping him. You will be a tragic footnote in this whole thing, a number in the official report if you persist in taking this job.”

  “I know what this job entails,” Butler said with a nod. “I get to do my first work on-camera.”

  I felt utterly dumbstruck, maybe even dumber-struck than I had been a few minutes ago when my ex had confronted me about the fact that I’d ripped all his memories of our relationship away when we ended things. “Pardonnez moi?” I asked, in French, because English wasn’t getting the point across.

  “I made him a deal,” Taggert said, making me want to wipe the perpetual smile off his face with a hammer of the sledge variety. “The crew is gonna be here in a few minutes. Butler is on-camera for this, the new face of Kat’s human security detail. It’s a choice role, brings some diversity to our otherwise lily-white inner circle—”

  “It’s going to bring some red,” I said, “as in blood, when he gets killed—”

  “You’re such a pessimist,” Taggert said, dismissing me.

  I wanted to act like a college girl for a minute and say, “I CAN’T EVEN,” but I couldn’t even (ha ha) muster that. I felt drained, maybe even more drained than I’d f
elt when I’d been brought back from the dead by Steven only a few hours earlier. “Forget it, Sienna,” I muttered to myself, “it’s Los Angeles.”

  “Ah, the Chinatown quote,” Taggert said, brightening, “and nice delivery, by the way. We’ll make a star out of you yet.”

  I couldn’t figure out how to answer, and a knock at the door meant I didn’t have to. Taggert yanked it open before I could suggest otherwise, revealing Flannery Steiner, the former Disney Channel star turned just-above-juvenile delinquent. “Hey, is Kat here?” Steiner asked, the very image of what I considered to be a Valley girl—perfect nails, short skirt, hair beautifully done, and an expression like all the Botox she pumped into her face couldn’t eliminate the stink of something unpleasant. She looked right at me, and I realized that I was the reason for her distaste. I mean, I hadn’t been until that moment—before it was probably the nubs of the stick up her ass—but seeing me all ragged and dirty was what was ailing her presently.

  “Yeah,” I said, weaving around her on my way out of the suite. “She’s here.”

  “Hey!” Taggert called after me. “Where are you going?”

  “Butler’s got this,” I said, on my way to the elevator. “You said so yourself.”

  I made it to the elevator just before the doors closed, not waiting to hear any reply from Taggert, Butler, or that druggy whore Flannery Steiner, either.

  Screw this town.

  Screw Scott.

  Screw Kat—Klementina Gavrikov—Forrest, too.

  Screw it all.

  “I quit,” I whispered to myself. But I didn’t quite believe me.

  50.

  I’d barely gotten my new phone activated at the store when my first voicemail came through. Activating a new phone was a process I was quite familiar with by this point. I kept hoping someone was going to make a waterproof, fireproof, shockproof, physical damage-proof, basically invincible phone. But apparently the industry thought insuring phones was the way to go.