Uncanny Magazine Issue 32

by Lynne M. Thomas

  She is thrashing underneath me, but I know from the future that she’s faking it.

  I faked it too, sometimes. I grip her skin and remember why I loved her. But also why I stopped. Even this first time, there is a lie beneath the surface. So many lies. So much work to pry them apart. An onion that’s rotting underneath.

  Afterward we lay in one another’s arms and giggle and kiss all the empty spaces.

  “It won’t always be like this,” I say.

  We fall asleep, young and exhausted and covered in a smell I’m smelling for the first time. I think, this is enough. And it is, enough. No more, no less. Nice to be loved again. But not the reason I’m here.

  The doctor told me how to jump. I could stay for the whole of a relationship, reliving each and every memory, until my time with that person was finished, until our body-to-body contact had been extinguished. Until the day and hour and minute of our last time. Then, I would no longer have a choice. I would be moved to the next whether I wanted it or not. It is possible, she said, to get lost somewhere you did not intend to stay. Be wary where you linger. The memory is a clever trap.

  I jump from Anne to #2, that sharp pain between my legs. I lean my head back against my pillow, arch my back, do everything I’m supposed to do. I don’t feel the explosive tremor through my body. I don’t fake it, not yet jaded enough to pretend at satisfaction.

  “Look, we’re fucking,” Mario says, enamored and amazed.

  “No shit,” I say.

  Then I’m onto #3 with his clumsy drunk fingers. It’s nice to see Daniel half-sane again. It’s also painful, to see a ghost I finished mourning over two decades ago.

  It’s disorienting, jumping from place to place like this.

  I land at #4. But this time it’s different. I’m in a dark room in a foreign house, a place I long ago blocked out of my memory. I’m standing at the foot of a bed while another version of me pushes at the body in bed with her.

  “I’m so tired,” she says to the half-stranger, the man I have tried to forget.

  I intended to jump immediately on from this one, to leave this room so quickly my eyes wouldn’t even have time to adjust. But this isn’t what the others have been like. I’m frozen by the sight of this other me.

  I don’t think about the fact that these are just memories, that the me in the bed is in no danger because it isn’t real. I scramble up onto the bed and push the guy out of the way, pull my own body out of the blankets and then out of the room, down the hallway, onto his freshly manicured lawn.

  He doesn’t follow us. He’s too drunk, almost as bad off as we are. It’s no excuse, but it’s the truth.

  “Who are you?” the other me slurs.

  “I’m here to help you. You have to get the fuck away from that guy.”

  “He wouldn’t listen to me,” she says.

  “You should leave,” I say.

  “I’m too drunk to drive. My keys are in the house still.” The other me rummages through her pockets and comes up empty-handed. I look for my car until I find it in the driveway, my old black sports car, beautiful and sleek and a piece of shit even then.

  “Wait here,” I say.

  I sneak inside, back into his room. The asshole’s passed out, mouth open, splayed across the bed. I grab my keys off the floor. I grab my favorite necklace from where it was slung across the room. I draw a cock on the back of his neck where he might not notice it for a good long while. It’s the best quick revenge I can think of.

  “I’ll drive you,” I say to myself. Already I feel myself slipping, feel the ground falling out from underneath me. When we get to the car, the ground is translucent underneath me. “Fuck,” I say. I reach out and grab hold of myself. “Don’t let go,” I say.

  And as fast as a sunrise when you’re not expecting it, we’re at #5, both versions of me, entwined with Natalie in a mess of limbs and tongues.

  “You’re so hot,” Natalie moans. “You’re both so fucking hot.”

  I untangle myself and struggle from the bed. The other me moves to-and-fro, too drunk to realize her deer-in-headlights expression is still pasted over her face. Natalie kisses her across her shoulders, across her neck, across the bridge of her nose and cheeks.

  Natalie laughs, then falls away. “I needed that,” she says. “I really did. You Pisces sure know how to make a girl come.” She closes her eyes. “I’m glad you came over,” she whispers as she drifts off to sleep.

  I remember: we could never stay awake when we were together. Even the other me is falling into her own sleep, as unworried about her new location as I ever was in that time. I pull her from the bed and shake her awake.

  “You have to stick with it,” I say, leading her through the bedroom door into Natalie’s living room, the floor strewn with astrology books and tarot cards. She had read my cards before we went to the bed; they were full of swords and cups, difficulties and loves.

  “Where are we?” the other me says.

  “We’re safe here. She’s wild but kind.” I eye my camera sitting on her coffee table. I think about picking it up but I’m already fucking with the memory enough so I leave it be, knowing I’ll never see it again. “Just maybe don’t leave your stuff here.”

  “I’m so tired.” The other me clings to my shirt. “I can barely stand up. Can we go to sleep, please?”

  I’m tired, too, so tired I can’t make sense of the situation. I know I need to figure out what to do with the other me: what happens if I leave her in this memory? What happens if I keep taking her with me? Already, like faded scars, what remains of that night with #4 is falling away. The doctor did warn me, though I was too desperate to listen, that moving through memories might change them irrevocably. But what really occurred, in your past, she said, that stays the same.

  This place is safer than most. Natalie won’t mind if we sleep over. She won’t wake in the night and demand anything of us. In the morning we’ll go out for crepes.

  “You can sleep in there if you like,” I say. “The bed is nice and comfortable. I’ll take the couch.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.”

  She shuts the door behind her. I make sure the front is locked. I pick up some of Natalie’s things and stretch across the couch as best as I’m able. She has no extra blankets, so I pull a discarded coat over my body. So I don’t forget, I repeat the violinist’s name again and again: Dover, Dover, Dover, until the lullaby of it pulls me under.

  I returned to my memories because I cannot live in my realities. People give many different reasons for going through with the procedure—to cure PTSD, to see a dead loved one a final time, because they think they can change things even though the doctors tell them they cannot—but they all boil down the same, don’t they? They cannot live in their reality.

  I at least was honest about this. The doctor appreciated my honesty, I think. She didn’t ask for much more than I put down on her paper. She didn’t try to talk me out of it, which I’d heard of some doctors doing for patients without referrals.

  I’m going to ride this all the way to the end. I am going to be in Dover’s arms again. Because there was something in me then that she loved more than anything in the world. I need that back if I’m ever going to get her to talk to me again.

  It’s been three months since she last answered my calls. Three months is a long time to be without someone. Three months is too long to cling to old love.

  Logically, I know this. But I dreamt about her every night. I remembered her every day.

  To be bound to nostalgia, that’s an illness deserving of a name, in need of a cure.

  In the morning, my other self shakes me awake. I stare into her face, at her smooth skin free from sun spots, her unstained teeth. She doesn’t look like she had a rough night. Sure, I had saved her from the worst of it, but shouldn’t the very closeness to tragedy induce a fear of the world? Like the times I nearly but didn’t wreck my car?

  But yes, the time I did wreck it proved more difficult t
o forget.

  “Morning, chip off the chipper block,” I say. My back screams as I sit up. “Where’s our lady friend?”

  “She went to get pancakes,” she says. “I like her a lot.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “We did think we might be able to love her for a time, didn’t we?”

  “Can I ask you something?” she says, sitting at the foot of the couch only inches from my feet. “What are we doing here? What is this?” She runs her hands up and down her bare legs. “I don’t feel right here. But also I love it here.”

  I fold myself into the couch. “I do, too,” I say. “Which means I should go. I need to go.”

  “So soon?” she says. “We just got here.”

  “We have somewhere else to be.”

  “Can we eat first?” She clutches her stomach. “I’m starving.”

  “You’re not coming with me.” I untuck myself and slip on my shoes.

  “Of course I am! Where else would I go?”

  “Stay here.” My leather jacket, the one the memory me left on Natalie’s floor, makes my skin itch beneath it. “You’ll be happy here, for a while. Then you’ll move along. And along again. And again and again.” I grab up my old phone and check through the contacts, looking for the next in line. He isn’t there yet. No matter. I don’t need to call before moving to the first time we fucked; I’ll already be there. I grin. He was good in bed, the redhead.

  “I don’t want that,” she says. “I’m too tired for that. Can I come with you instead?”

  Well, fuck. I can’t leave myself where she doesn’t want to be. She’ll like the redhead. I’m sure she’ll want to stay with him the way I always wanted to stay with him. After he stopped talking to me, I was sure my heart was broken, sure I’d had my first brush with near-loving a man.

  “Come on then,” I say. “Grab a snack bar from the kitchen.” I watch the door. “If she comes back, we’re never getting out of here alive.”

  Natalie was always aggressive with her goodbyes: those hard, knee-numbing kisses against the cold wall a memory I used to call up when fucking long-term partners, remembering the excitement of being wanted with such authority.

  We disappear as the door’s handle rattles. The noise becomes the knock of my head against the wood of a dresser, Christopher pushing into me from above. I grip his pink skin and moan. He doesn’t notice that my head’s hitting his dresser, softly but audibly, and this, too, is a turn-on: sex so rough it hurts. I’ll walk the next morning on throbbing legs.

  The other me, this time, is sitting at Christopher’s computer desk. She’s clicking through his music. My timelines, somehow, are crossing; this is what I would do after sex sometimes. The redhead introduced me to Bob Dylan, to the Band, to a hundred other all-male bands. He was never concerned with feminism; his house was woman-free except for me. I got a pass because I talked about women with the worst of them. Because I won games of beer pong too. Because I didn’t ask to change the channel from football. (Though I should have; I hated football even then.)

  “I’ve never heard of any of this music,” she says. I think she’s talking to me, but I can’t be bothered about music right now.

  “Hush,” I say from beneath him. “You have no idea how much I missed this.”

  After he’s come, he holds me and tickles me and kisses my neck until my skin is so sensitive I beg him to stop.

  “You’ve never heard of Bob Dylan?” he says to the me at the computer. “What have you been doing with your life?”

  He puts on an album: The Freewheelin’.

  “Play ‘Don’t Think Twice,’” I say with a hint of malice, though in all seriousness it’s the only one of Dylan’s songs that ever meant something deeper to me. I remember the redhead burning the CD for me, putting it on as I drove away from his house one morning. How beautiful was Dylan’s pain! Then, later, it became the album I put on to commune with the ghost of Christopher’s lost affection. I took a Bob Dylan class my second semester at college. Turns out he was a terrible sexist.

  “This is beautiful,” she says to Christopher. He beams and kisses the top of her head, like she’s his fucking sister.

  “This is Dylan!” Such excitement. I forgot how much of a fan he was, how much he loved the things he loved, how far I always was from being one of those things.

  But when he crawls back in bed with me, I stick my hand in his red curls and smell the sweet toxic weed smell of his oversized sweater.

  “He’s cute,” she says. “What happens with him?”

  “We both want the same thing,” I say, “But he talks me into wanting something more. And then decides against it.”

  He nuzzles his head in my lap. “Who are you talking to?” he says. “You’re missing the best parts of the album.”

  “I’m talking to myself,” I say, and both versions of myself laugh at the terrible joke.

  We stick around with the redhead for another fuck. After that we drive back to my dorm room. When I pulled her out of her timeline, she had just moved in, and I wanted her to see the mess living alone became in a brief time. I’d written the address to a party on the wall in red paint. I’d been painting cartoons on canvas, love stories I was trying to make sense of: me as a mermaid, Pisces in literalization, with the Virgo sunlight-first-love pulling me from the water, saving me from drowning. A giant Alice holding on to the stem of a mushroom with a candy cane.

  “Drugs?” she says. “We promised we would never do drugs.”

  “Weed is a drug, believe it or not,” I say. “If you remember correctly, we also said we would never do dudes.”

  “That’s fair.” She picks up my copy of Moby Dick. “You’re still not done with this?”

  “I’m done,” I say. “I’m twenty years older than you. If I can say I accomplished anything in life, it’s that I read Moby Dick.”

  The other me slides into my desk chair. “Twenty years?”

  “Resist the temptation to ask me questions,” I say.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asks. “Are you going to leave me behind eventually?”

  I kneel at her feet. “I’ll pick a good one for you,” I say. “But Dover is mine. I want her to myself. You’ll understand once you get to her. It’s better than first love. Better than flimsy fucks. Better than the guy in the fancy ass private dorm.”

  “Private dorm?” She wrinkles her nose.

  “Remember that. Treasure him. Oh, and Meredith. Treasure both of them. You’ll remember them vividly for the rest of your life.”

  She plugs her ears with her fingers. “No more,” she says. “I trust you. If you have to leave me, leave me with private dorm dude or Meredith. But no spoilers!”

  “No spoilers, no questions,” I say. We shake on it.

  When we arrive at #7, the other me bursts out laughing.

  “What is this room?” she says. On one wall he’s hung a giant poster of a woman straddling a massive nugget of weed. “Fucking stoner dudes.”

  “It’s good for a guy, isn’t it?” Simon says, that infamous line.

  The other me rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. “Now this is a poor decision. That other stuff? Small potatoes.”

  “Shut up,” I say, pushing him away and moving from bed.

  “You made fun of me,” she says. “It’s only fair.”

  “I made fun of both of us. This is every bit your decision as it is mine.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t think so. The others I got. This one? We’re not even attracted to him. This one is a sad fuck plain and simple. I don’t like sad fucks.”

  “You think I do?”

  “I think you can’t help it. It’s not always about joy for you.”

  “Jesus,” I say. “When did you become so insightful?”

  “I have the added advantage,” she says, “of meeting the me I don’t want to be.”

  Simon massages my shoulders with clammy hands. “I can’t believe I fucked a gay chick,” he said.

  “An entry for your jou
rnal,” I say.

  “Don’t talk like that to him,” she says, sliding down beside him. “He likes you, and that’s the only thing he’s guilty of.”

  I turn and kiss him, to be nice. “You were good,” I say, “for a guy.”

  “At least you were truthful with him,” she says of #8, Oliver the poet. “That’s the best I can say about that shit show. I’ve never met a needier guy.”

  “They’re needier than we thought they’d be, men,” I say. “It takes some getting used to.”

  At #9, Xander, myself and I forget him and dance until we’re so sweaty we look like sea monsters freshly risen from the ocean. We stand in the bathroom mirror and watch the sweat drip to the floor.

  Though I let her have Xander when the night is through.

  “This one is fun,” I said. “No muss, no fuss.”

  She spots his blue hair in the crowd. “That’s him?” She laughs. “Is he wearing makeup?”

  “He always saves the last dance for you. Every club night. Go get it.”

  I wait in his living room with the rolling kids, their pupils black saucers swallowing the skies of their eyes. They pass me a tab. I pop it and lean back into the couch. Might as well go with the times. We pass a joint as the lights go blurry, and they talk about the blue-haired boy.

  “He saved my life,” says a teenage girl. I remember this happening; I was there, with her in the kitchen. She thought she’d had too many pills. He gave her water and food and calmed her down. I like helping people, he said when she was better again, the revelation lighting him up like a fucking Christmas tree of cliché.

  But damn was he hot with his plastic bracelets up and down his arms. I liked to imagine him in class, raising his hand, the bracelets falling together down his arm.

  When she comes out of the room, she’s white as a Mud Flap. And I remember.

  “Oh, shit,” I say.

  She goes red in the face. “That’s the worst possible thing you could have said right now.”

  I laugh, because I can’t help it. Other me isn’t me, exactly; somehow, pulling her away from #2 in his seedy bedroom with his seedy insistent hands changed her. I don’t know if I like her more or less than me; she’s not as bold but she laughs easier, as though she’s merely revealing what was always there. When I laughed, at this point in my life—which I did so often I was known for it in my circle of friends—it was to let the mania hide the depression.