by Joseph John
“First, we secure success. Next, we focus on—”
“Get down!” Sam screamed. “Get off the stage!”
Shawn Jaffe stopped on the top step. He reached into his blazer.
Goldberg and Hoyt backed away from their podiums in confusion. Secret Service agents rushed forward, converging on the two men, but no one recognized Jaffe as an imposter.
Sam drew his pistol, but his bandaged fingers fumbled it, and it fell to the ground. “No!”
Jaffe drew his own pistol. Unlike Sam, he didn’t drop it but pointed it at the senator. The gun bucked twice in his hands.
Goldberg’s legs gave out beneath him. He fell, dead before he hit the stage.
The world froze and melted away until only Jaffe and he remained, suspended in time. Why? Sam wanted to ask.
Jaffe returned his gaze with a blank, emotionless stare unlike anything Sam had ever seen. It contained no rage, no hate, no anger, no malicious satisfaction, no insane glee. Instead, it contained nothing at all.
Shawn Jaffe blinked. As he stuck the barrel of the pistol into his own mouth, his eyes finally came to life, widening in what Sam later swore was surprise.
He pulled the trigger, and the dance was over.
Part II
Three Years Later
Chapter Four
Ryan Marshall woke with a scream trapped in his throat and sat up in bed. “Don’t—”
But the dream flittered on the periphery of his consciousness before dissipating like a mist beneath the rising sun.
“Don’t.” He repeated his plea in a soft, desperate whisper, hoping to jar something loose, but only the rapid beat of his heart remained. He wiped at his eyes with the heels of his hands and glanced at the rumpled sheets and pillow next to his own. A faint perfume lingered in the air, and his hands fell into his lap as he stared at her side of the bed—which was unsettling, because he lived alone.
He’d met Victoria two months after his parents’ funeral. He’d been back at Ohio State, on his way to or from some class or other, backpack slung over one shoulder, battered Chuck Taylors scuffing along like a death row inmate walking the last mile. She sat on a black iron bench at the edge of Mirror Lake beneath a cloudless sky, elbows on her knees, face buried in her palms. Ryan had almost passed her by, but as he approached his crossroads of destiny, he instead chose the path where he unslung his backpack and dropped it between his knees as he sat beside her and offered a handkerchief. She wiped at her eyes and tucked her raven-black hair behind one ear. In spite of her sorrow, she was beautiful.
“Thanks,” she said, sniffling.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked.
“Not really.”
So they sat, listening to distant conversations carried on the wind as the reflection of the trees danced across the surface of Mirror Lake, their leaves shimmering like emeralds. The closeness of her thigh to his carried an electric charge that was impossible to ignore.
“My parents are dead,” she said. “Both of them.”
“Mine, too,” he said.
Victoria turned toward him, eyebrows drawn into a crease. She thought he was putting her on.
“Drunk driver.” He shrugged. “Happened a couple months ago. Still hoping it’s a bad dream, and I’ll wake up.”
Out of the corner of his eye, she studied him in profile. He twined his hands together while he waited for her to make up her mind about him. The sun warmed his cheeks.
At last she asked, “Watch the news lately? Hear about the suicide bomber in that mall in Cleveland last week?”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah.” She spit the word out like a bitter pill. “Son of a bitch had enough ONC strapped to his chest to—well, to level a mall.” She choked on something that came out half laugh and half sob. “And you wanna know the worst part? I asked my mom to pick me up some shampoo. Had to have this certain brand from this certain store. They were at the mall because I wanted some goddamn shampoo.”
Ryan studied the lines on his knuckles and the jagged ends of his fingernails bitten to the quick. “For me, the funeral was the worst part,” he said. “There was no family. No aunts or uncles or anything like that, just some people who knew my parents from work or were neighbors or whatever. I didn’t know them from Adam. We stood around the caskets while this preacher who must’ve been a hundred years old gave us the old ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ Everyone kept telling me how sorry they were and what great people my parents had been. Some guy actually told me to ‘hang in there.’ I wanted to slug him. Afterward, he and everyone else went back to their regularly scheduled lives. I went home to an empty house. In the fridge, there was this carton of milk, and I pictured my mom in the grocery store, comparing the expiration dates like always, not knowing she’d expire before it did.”
She stared at him and blinked. “Well then. Don’t we make quite the pair?” A corner of her mouth twitched upward.
Ryan laughed, not because it was funny, but because it wasn’t. Victoria caught his laughter as if it were contagious, and they devolved into hysterical fits that left them gasping for breath and wiping at their eyes.
They sat on the bench and talked for hours. He asked her out. She said yes. After graduation, they decided to start a new life together in a place untouched by the ghosts of their past and settled on Amarillo, Texas, where they bought a small horse ranch outside of town. A judge at the courthouse pronounced them man and wife and handed them a marriage certificate the color of parchment. He remembered all this.
But the thing was, he also remembered not being married.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and curled his toes into the plush, forest-green carpet that covered the floor of the bedroom like a blanket of moss. Above him, a ceiling fan stirred the air. The soft floral pattern of the wallpaper was both familiar and completely unfamiliar to him at the same time.
He shuffled into the bathroom, flicked the light switch, and stared at his face in a mirror that hung above a pair of sinks set into the marble countertop. His head spun, pulse pounding in his ears like a drumbeat as he leaned on the counter to steady himself. He reached for a bottle of Advil, shook five pills into his hand, and tossed them into his mouth. Then he bent to drink from the faucet and wash them down before staring into the mirror again. Disorientation washed over him like a black tide. His life had become a double exposure, one picture overlapping the other—the first clear and focused, the second the forgotten dream, the cry on his lips as he awoke.
“Don’t,” his reflection said.
He wondered if he was going crazy.
One way to find out. He left the bathroom and went to the closet, pulled on a pair of blue jeans, boots, and a flannel shirt, grabbed his smartphone, and made his way downstairs.
The third stair from the top creaked like ancient bones beneath his weight, loud and sharp and something he’d have expected if he’d set foot on them before. Yet he hadn’t known it would creak, and the sound caught him off guard. But how was that possible, if this was his home and he walked up and down these stairs every day?
He placed his palms against the walls on either side of him, steadying himself like a man on a ship at the mercy of a violent tempest.
From below, Victoria called out. “Ryan, is that you? Breakfast is ready.”
Ryan descended the stairs. The aroma of pancakes and sausages greeted him as he rounded the corner and entered the kitchen, his boots clicking on the tile floor. He stopped in the entryway and stared at his wife.
Victoria had her back to him as she shoveled a heaping stack of pancakes onto a pair of plates and drowned them in maple syrup. She wore a pair of tight blue jeans and a white tank top that accentuated her slim frame. Holding a plate in each hand, she turned to face him. Her green eyes sparkled, and her face broke into a crooked grin. She was his wife. She was a stranger.
“Morning, sleepyhead,” she said and stepped forward, rising on the tips of her toes to plant a kiss on his cheek.
“Hi.” He ran a hand through his unkempt hair.
She spun away and set the plates on opposite ends of the kitchen table nestled against a bay window that beheld a vista colored in shades of brown and yellow. The sky was a light blue, the sun a white ball of fire rising in the east.
“Are you gonna eat something?”
A three-board fence surrounded the property, the slats weathered and uneven. A dilapidated barn leaned on the far side. A section of its roof had collapsed, and jagged ends of timber hung over the gaping maw like rows of savage teeth. His old Ford pickup rusted in the gravel drive next to the house with lazy indifference, and a pair of palominos roamed the yard with muzzles lowered to a tangle of knee-high yellowed grass and weeds. Everything was as it should be, yet beneath the veneer of normalcy lurked something strange and disconcerting, like debauchery hidden behind a white collar and a cross.
“Honey?”
“Hm?”
“Are you gonna eat something?”
Ryan turned from the window and forced a smile. “Of course.”
They sat and ate together in a thick fog of silence. He sawed off a bite of pancakes, shoveled it into his mouth, and placed his forearms on the table. Then he set his knife and fork on his napkin, moved them to the edge of his plate, and returned his forearms to the table before lowering his hands to his lap. He glanced at Victoria. She smiled.
He swallowed and looked out the window, down at his plate, then back to Victoria. “Have we ever lived in New York City?” he asked.
Victoria’s fork slipped through her fingers, clattered on her plate, and fell to the floor. She stared at him for a heartbeat and bent to retrieve it. “Of course not,” she said with an incredulous laugh. “You know that.”
He did. He also knew nothing of the sort.
Victoria wiped the fork with her napkin and returned to her pancakes and the silence, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be sitting across from him. But the table stretched between them like a blank page that suggested otherwise.
“I think I was an investment broker.”
She knitted her brow. “Okay, now you’re starting to scare me.”
Ryan shook his head. “I had this dream.”
“Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts about moving here.”
“It’s like I woke up, but at the same time, I didn’t wake up.”
“It was a dream. That’s all.”
“Dreams fade. This is right there, below the surface, like a word on the tip of my tongue. I lived in New York City and worked for this investment firm.”
“But honey,” she said, “we’ve never been to New York City.”
“And something about a debate.” He frowned. “I don’t remember.”
She reached across the table and placed a hand over his. He started to pull away but stopped himself. “Maybe you should go lie down again.”
He sighed. “I guess.”
“Wait here a second.” Victoria’s chair groaned against the tiles as she pushed it backward. She padded to the cupboards, opened one, and reached for a white plastic bottle. She turned to him and shook a small blue pill into the palm of her hand. “Take this.”
“What is it?”
“It’ll help you sleep.”
He took it from her hand. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
She was his wife. But she also wasn’t.
Instead of swallowing the pill, he palmed it beneath his thumb and pretended to wash it down with orange juice.
Her gaze remained intent upon his face.
“What?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’ll be over soon.”
His blood ran cold. He held out his hand and uncurled it without saying a word. The blue pill fell onto the table and lay there like a guilty conscience.
“Fuck,” she said.
He remembered walking to class, his arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist. The fresh scent of summer bloom or the biting caress of winter, it hadn’t mattered. He’d been unconcerned with the seasons, the passing of time, the crush of student bodies as it parted and flowed around them. She was all that mattered. They shared stories about their professors and classmates and threw their heads back and laughed.
“Abort,” Victoria said. She stood, and her chair skidded backward with a squeal as she turned away from him. He sat slumped, numb and unable to move, like an empty sock puppet.
He remembered weekends at the movie theater, sitting in the back row in the dark with a tub of popcorn tucked between their seats and surrounded by silhouettes playing bit parts in the story of their lives. They reached into the tub for a handful of popcorn at the same time, and their hands brushed. She giggled and slapped at him as she whispered, “Mine.” He hung his head in mock dejection, and she rolled her eyes and threw a popped kernel at him. He turned and tried to catch it in his mouth, but it bounced off his nose instead. She giggled and leaned into him, kissing him hard.
“You hear me? Abort!” Two long strides carried her to the refrigerator. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back like a waterfall at midnight beneath a moonless sky.
He remembered their vacation to Lake Erie, where they’d stayed in a timeworn cabin built around the turn of the century. She’d bounced from room to room, marveling at its antiquities. “It still has light bulbs and manual locks. And look, a microwave!” He’d placed the odds of the cabin collapsing in upon itself and crushing them while they slept at fifty-fifty. After slathering themselves with sunscreen, they’d spent the rest of the day at the beach. The following morning, they’d rented a speedboat and skipped across the waves, racing toward the horizon until the coastline vanished and they were the last two people in the world, surrounded by an endless, blue plain.
She reached behind the refrigerator, groping with blind fingers. The sound of duct tape tearing free was unmistakable. It was the sound of betrayal.
He remembered the drive to Amarillo, a turn of the page as they began the next chapter of their lives. Rolling hills gave way to Midwestern plains, and after they crossed into Oklahoma and neared Texas, she’d tuned the radio to a country music channel. “To put us in a country state of mind,” she’d said, and threw back her head and belted out the lyrics, out of tune but not caring, and he’d loved her for it and joined in.
He remembered all of this. And he also didn’t.
She turned toward him, holding what she’d drawn from behind the refrigerator. A pistol. Duct tape still hung from it in tattered strips like confetti streamers. She planted her feet, raised the gun, and pointed it at him in one fluid motion, the barrel a lifeless eye with a cold hard stare.
The moment stretched toward eternity as the aperture of time constricted. Yet for him, its tempo remained constant, the world around him moving in slow motion, as if it were a river and he’d stepped out of its flow and onto the shore. A sense of déjà vu gripped him, and in his mind’s eye the image of a butterfly fluttered in the wind against a chrome grill.
The tendons in Victoria’s arm tensed as her forefinger pressed against the trigger. Ryan placed his palms under the edge of the kitchen table, bent his knees, and exploded upward, tipping it toward her. At the same time, a tiny pinpoint of light ruptured the wood to the left of his head, and something screamed past his ear. A gunshot boomed. He lowered his shoulder and stumbled forward. Silverware and dishes slid off the table and crashed and shattered on the tile floor. He drove the table forward like a battering ram, and it slammed into Victoria, throwing her into the refrigerator with a heavy thud. She grunted, and the pistol clattered across the floor. She fell to her hands and knees behind the table, her hair a black curtain around her face.
He staggered back on his heels and gasped for breath. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of movement through the bay window. Two men sprinted out of the barn and across the yard toward the house. They pointed guns, steel glinting in the sunlight.
The window shattered as they ope
ned fire, and thunder filled the room. Ryan threw himself backward and twisted around so he hit the tile on his stomach. Using his legs and forearms, he dragged himself out of the kitchen.
The two men continued to fire, and a rain of lead ripped the room asunder like a violent tempest. Ryan made it to the doorway to the living room when the gunfire ceased, and he rose into a crouch and glanced over his shoulder. Victoria scrambled toward her pistol. Through the front door, footsteps pounded across the porch.
He turned his back on her and fled.
In the living room, a drab brown sofa and a pair of matching recliners sat behind an electronic glass-top coffee table. A holo-screen curled against the opposite wall, as blank and silent as a coma. On the far side of the room, the door to the front porch loomed. The gunmen’s shadows darkened its curtained window. They’d burst inside any second now and trap him between themselves and Victoria. His only option was the stairs he’d descended before breakfast. He sprinted toward them as the front door flew open, and the two men spilled into the room.
“There!”
Ryan took the stairs three at a time in great, leaping strides. Halfway to the top, gunfire roared, and a slug slammed into the wall in front of his face and sent a spray of plaster and dust pluming outward, temporarily blinding him. He stumbled and grabbed for the railing. If he fell now, he was a dead man. But he fell anyway and threw himself forward with a final, reckless leap.
His shin collided with the edge of the top step in a white flare of agony, sending him sprawling into the hallway at the top of the stairs. He skidded and rolled and came to a violent stop when his left shoulder slammed into the wall.
With a grunt, he struggled to his feet. The pain in his shin and shoulder throbbed as he hobbled along the hallway, balancing himself against one wall with his uninjured arm.
Footsteps on the stairs. They were coming.
The doorway to the bedroom might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. He didn’t think there was any way to reach it before they gunned him down. He waited for the hard shove of a bullet in his back, but as the men reached the top of the stairs, he staggered into the bedroom, slammed the door shut, and lurched across the room.