Infinite

by Brian Freeman

  “I didn’t react at all, because it meant nothing to me.”

  “Yes, that’s interesting. I’m not sure what to make of that.”

  I shook my head. “How does this treatment work?”

  Eve glanced at the sidewalk near the water. We were still alone, but she obviously didn’t want anyone to hear us. “Have you ever heard of a San Francisco psychiatrist named Francesca Stein? She was in the news a few years ago when she was found to be altering the memories of her patients using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis.”

  “If you say so. I don’t know the name.”

  “Frankie and I are friends. We were in school together. We’ve talked a lot about the therapeutic possibilities behind the Many Worlds theory. She believed it might be possible to use a technique similar to what she used in altering memories to get people to ‘experience’ their other lives. I’ve been exploring the idea ever since.”

  “Jumping between worlds?” I asked cynically.

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you saying you did this to me?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I would never have agreed to that.”

  “In fact, you volunteered. You pushed me to try it. You said you wanted to know the truth about yourself. So we agreed that you would be my guinea pig.”

  I felt as if all I could do was sputter out my protests. “Experimenting with psychotropic drugs? Is that even legal? Because it sure as hell doesn’t sound ethical.”

  “You’re right. I push the boundaries. Actually, you said that was something you liked about me, that we had things in common. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I was a drug addict for a while back in medical school and nearly got kicked out. If people found out what we did, I’d probably lose my license. That’s why I was so cautious with you tonight. Yes, I gave you hallucinogenic drugs to alter reality for you, but believe me, it was with your full consent.”

  I shook my head. “Impossible. You’re making a mistake. I don’t know you.”

  Eve sighed at my denials. “You’re Dylan Moran. Events manager at the LaSalle Plaza Hotel. Your father killed your mother and then killed himself right in front of you. You moved in with your grandfather, Edgar, after their deaths. You still go to the Art Institute with him every week. Your favorite painting is Hopper’s Nighthawks. Edgar likes to say that if he hadn’t accidentally bumped into the museum director when he was a boy and saved him from getting killed on State Street, that painting would be hanging in a totally different place.”

  My breath left my chest. I grabbed her shoulders and hissed in her face, “How do you know all that?”

  “How do you think? You told me.”

  I stared at her face in the starlight and tried to make sense of this woman. She was a doctor and a psychiatrist, but she was something more, too. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but she had an enigmatic quality about her, as if she could seduce people with her mind. I felt the spell she cast pulling me into her orbit. She was beautiful, sensual, unforgettable. A magician. I could picture being with her in her office. I could hear my own voice telling her secrets about myself.

  But it had never happened.

  “This therapy,” I went on. “What did I experience?”

  “You told me you saw other Dylans from other worlds. You interacted with them. You went into their lives.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “You believed it.”

  “What did I see?”

  “If you want to know that, you should go back inside your head. Try it and see for yourself.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Are you sure? You told me after one session that you wished you could stay in the world you found. You were tempted to take over that other Dylan’s life.”

  “None of that is real,” I said.

  “How do you know? Frankly, I wasn’t sure before we began, but your experience made me a believer. The Many Worlds theory is true. We really do take every road that’s open to us. In some other world, you and I never met. We’re passing each other by the lake right now like strangers. In another world, we’re having sex. In another, you’re holding me under the water and drowning me.”

  I flinched at the violent image. “Drowning you? Why on earth would you say something like that?”

  “Because that’s why you came to me, Dylan,” Eve said. “You said you were having visions of killing people, and yet these people were still alive. But you could give me details, dates, descriptions, methods of how you’d murdered them. You wanted my help. You were afraid you were on the verge of becoming a serial killer.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror—I mean, really looked at yourself—and wondered who you were?

  What kind of person lives behind your eyes?

  That was how I felt at that moment. I no longer had any idea what to believe about Dylan Moran. Eve had told me things about myself that seemed impossible, and yet they also made sense in a crazy way. If my personality had split apart, if another side of me was living a different life that I knew nothing about, then maybe my mind was projecting that second Dylan Moran into my hallucinations.

  I was seeing myself. Talking to the other version of myself. Somehow, my brain was bringing my second personality to life, and what I knew about that personality scared me. When I was him, I didn’t know what I was capable of doing.

  Why are you here?

  To kill.

  I needed something I could hold on to, some kind of driftwood in the sea that would keep me afloat. I needed Karly, or at least a reminder of her. So I took a cab north along the lakeshore toward the house where Karly’s parents lived. There were faster ways out of the city, but I asked the driver to take the slow route along Sheridan Road, and I told him I’d make it up to him in the tip. Karly and I had taken this road many times when we were visiting her parents. She liked to see the neighborhoods change, from the green fields of Lincoln Park to the academic neighborhoods of Loyola and Northwestern, and then to the lakeside mansions of Evanston, Kenilworth, and Winnetka.

  Personally, I just thought she wasn’t in a hurry to see her mother.

  Susannah Chance lived in a stone mansion that dated to the 1930s. It looked like a Tudor castle, with bay windows, tall austere chimneys, and sharp gables. Yes, Karly’s father lived here, too, but this was the House That Susannah Built. Karly’s father, Tom, was a published poet and high school English teacher who would have been just as happy living in a one-bedroom apartment near Wrigley Field. Susannah, however, was the force of nature behind Chance Properties, and her Wilmette estate was the ostentatious symbol of her success.

  I had the cab let me off on Sheridan Road, and I walked the last hundred yards under the old-growth trees. I was white and wearing nice clothes, which probably protected me from someone calling the cops. The people in this neighborhood had itchy 911 fingers. When I got to the Chance house, the lights were off, which wasn’t surprising given the late hour. I didn’t want to talk to Susannah or Tom. Instead, I let myself into the fenced backyard and made my way through the gardens to Karly’s dollhouse.

  You can call it a dollhouse, but at more than a thousand square feet, it was bigger than our Lincoln Square apartment. That tells you how far down in the world Karly came to live with me. When she turned twenty-two, she moved out of the main estate and into the dollhouse, which was all the independence that her mother would allow her. She was still living there when we met, so I’d spent a lot of time in this strange fairy-tale world. I’d had a key for years, and I knew the security code.

  When I went inside, Karly may as well have been a ghost rattling chains at me, because her presence was so strong. Her school pictures were on the walls and her dance trophies and poetry books on the shelves. She hadn’t lived here in three years, but her mother still kept it like a shrine, decorated with furniture she’d picked out for Karly at age sixteen. Susannah probably hoped that her daughter would eventually come
to her senses, dump me, and move back home where she belonged.

  I sat down in a beat-up leather chair that overlooked the garden. The chair came from Karly’s father, and I think he gave it to Karly for the dollhouse rather than let his wife take it away to Goodwill. It was a man’s chair, ugly and incredibly comfortable, and it looked out of place amid pink wallpaper and sunflower quilts. I’d spent weeks in this chair after Roscoe was killed. With my arm and leg in casts, I was essentially immobile, and Karly did everything for me. We barely knew each other, but she was my caregiver. And soon after that, my lover.

  The last time I’d been here was six months ago, in January. She’d called me from the office on a Tuesday morning and said she needed to get away, and could I meet her in the dollhouse? I said yes, but I got there late. I was always late. Work always came first. As I came in from outside, I brought cold wind and snow flurries with me. Karly had made a winter picnic for us, spreading out a blanket on the floor and opening wine and laying out a Mediterranean lunch of hummus, grape leaves, and pita.

  She stood on the other side of the dollhouse, where a fire in the fireplace warmed her bare legs. The chill had pinked up her face. Her breasts swelled with each calm breath. She stared at me with a kind of forever seriousness, just the barest smile on her lips. I swear, she was like a painting that way, frozen in her beauty. A Manet. A Vermeer.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I love you, that’s all.”

  “I love you, too.”

  It was hard to imagine a more perfect moment, but looking back, I knew that very day was when things had begun to fall apart for us. I could draw a line from our lunch in the dollhouse to her foolish affair with Scotty Ryan to the last speech she’d given me that weekend in the country.

  If I’d been paying attention, I would have noticed that Karly was unusually quiet. She was off somewhere in her own world, and she never took time off in the middle of the day unless something was wrong. I should have looked behind her peaceful smile, but instead, I was blind. I poured wine, and we sat across from each other on the blanket, with the fire crackling beside us.

  “Susannah talked to me,” Karly said, when we’d enjoyed our lunch quietly for a few minutes. She said it casually. No big deal.

  “Oh?”

  “She’s giving me the Vernon Hotel account.”

  I put down my wine and realized this was a celebration. Except it didn’t feel like a celebration. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s like the biggest account in the firm.”

  “Yeah. It is. She says I’m ready.”

  “Well, of course you are.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This is huge,” I said, trying to fill this moment with excitement, because the excitement in her face was strangely missing.

  “Yeah. Pretty huge. It’s way more money. That’s good, huh? But a lot more time. Long hours.”

  “So neither one of us will ever be home,” I joked, but Karly didn’t laugh.

  “Susannah thinks we should move. We should be up here in Highland Park or something. She says we need a place where we can entertain.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The same flat monotone all the way through. So unlike her. So not Karly. Why didn’t I see it?

  “Well, congratulations,” I said, leaning over to kiss her. “You’re a star. I mean it.”

  Karly smiled at me, but her smile was hollow, like one of her dolls on the shelves. Then, just like that, she changed the subject.

  “I bumped into a friend at Starbucks this morning,” she went on. “A girl I knew in college. Sarah. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned her.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She’s got four kids now. They were all with her. Her youngest is almost two. A Down syndrome girl. So, so sweet. While Sarah was chasing the others, her little girl sat in my lap. I fell in love.”

  “Of course you did.”

  Karly delicately brushed something from the corner of her eye, and then she closed her eyes altogether. “Anyway . . . ,” she murmured.

  I thought she was just basking in the warmth of the fire and in the glow of her success. She’d worked hard for it. I had no idea, no idea at all, that she was watching two trails diverge in the woods and thinking that she was on the wrong one.

  “I’m really proud of you,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  You were running so fast in your life that you never saw that Karly wanted to slow things down.

  Scotty was right. Karly had told me how she was feeling that day in everything but words. I never heard her.

  “I wondered who was out here,” Susannah Chance said from the doorway of the dollhouse. “I thought it might be you.”

  Karly’s mother wore a satin robe tied at the waist over her nightgown, and I could have sworn she’d put on makeup to go check on an intruder. She came inside the cottage and went and made herself a cup of coffee at the Keurig machine on the counter. When that was done, she took the mug into her hands and sat down on the sofa across from me.

  Physically, she looked the way Karly would have looked in another twenty-five years, although Susannah was still trying hard to look like Karly’s older sister. She’d groomed her only child to be a carbon copy of herself, with the same ambition, same charm, same need for success. Karly had spent her twenties following that blueprint under Susannah’s watchful eye.

  “How are you, Dylan?” she asked.

  “I’m lost.”

  “Yes, of course. Tom and I are devastated. I wake up each day, and I can’t believe it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Susannah sipped her coffee. The steam rose in front of her face. She’d said she was devastated at the loss of her daughter, and I’m sure she was, but Susannah Chance didn’t show emotions easily. Her husband was the poet, the one who wore his heart on his sleeve.

  “You can stay here tonight if you like,” she added.

  “Thanks. That’s nice of you. But I just needed to feel her again. That’s why I came.”

  Susannah looked around at the dollhouse and gave me a numb smile. Maybe loss always brings self-reflection. “I don’t know if this is the right place to do that. I think Karly felt like a doll herself when she was here. Artificial. Unreal. A plaything. That’s my fault. The truth is, she was never really happy until she met you, Dylan. And if you sometimes felt that I didn’t like you, maybe that was the reason.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing at all.

  “She told me what happened between her and Scotty Ryan,” Karly’s mother went on. “She was inconsolable over what she’d done. It was a stupid, drunken, onetime mistake and had nothing to do with how she felt about you. I hope you know that.”

  “I do now.”

  “Did you forgive her?”

  “I never got the chance.”

  “Oh, Dylan.” Susannah drank her coffee and looked away, with a teary shine in her eyes. She got up and went to the sink in the kitchen, where she washed the mug carefully and dried it with a towel. Susannah was always neat and precise. She put it away in a cabinet and then tugged her robe tighter around her body. She went to the door and opened it as if she were going to leave without saying anything more, but with the night air coming in, she hesitated. “I should tell you something. I know what you did. I understand it, even if I can’t condone it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you confronted Scotty about the affair.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Dylan, why? Why couldn’t you let it go?”

  I shrugged, because I had no excuse for the assault. “I didn’t plan to see him. It was chance. He was there, I was there. I should have walked away, but I gave in to my temper. I blamed him when I should have been blaming myself. That doesn’t change what he did, though.”

  “Well, the police know,” Susannah said. />
  “The police?”

  “Yes, they called me. The house was one of our listings, so they called to see if I knew anything about it. They had a description of you, Dylan. They had a witness who saw you leaving the house. They knew about the fight. I’m sorry, I couldn’t lie to them. I told them about the affair with Karly. I’m afraid it gives you a motive on top of everything else.”

  “Susannah, what are you talking about?”

  “They know you killed Scotty,” she replied. “They told me you stabbed him in the heart. He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 9

  I expected to find the police waiting to arrest me when I got back to the hotel. Instead, at five in the morning, the lobby was quiet and empty. Apparently they didn’t know I was sleeping here. I was relieved, because I needed time to think, to figure out what to do and where to go. Scotty Ryan was dead. The man who’d had an affair with my wife had been murdered. I’d killed him.

  Except I hadn’t.

  I’d hit him in the face and left him alone, bleeding but very much alive. Yes, a part of me wanted to kill him. That was true, and I couldn’t deny it. When I walked into that house, I’d been consumed with rage and out for revenge. But if I’d taken a knife and plunged it into Scotty’s chest, I’d remember doing it.

  Wouldn’t I?

  Or had a different personality taken control of my mind? A personality that was here to kill. Just like my delusion had promised.

  I took the elevator upstairs and let myself into my hotel room. I was exhausted. When the door closed behind me, I leaned back against it and measured out my breathing, trying to relax. Trying to think. To grasp at some kind of explanation for what was going on. Except I noticed almost immediately that something was wrong. There was a foreign smell around me, a sharp, sweet fragrance that lingered in my nose. I took stock of the room, suddenly awakened by a rush of adrenaline.

  The bed was undone. The blanket lay on the floor, the sheets tangled. That wasn’t how I’d left it. The maid had done the room long ago, and I hadn’t slept since then. When I’d left to see Eve Brier, I was certain that the blanket had been folded into crisp corners.