Infinite

by Brian Freeman

  “Sir?”

  The guard interrupted my thoughts. I watched a frown furrow his face.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but that office isn’t registered to Eve Brier.”

  I tried to focus on what he was telling me. “Who does have the space? Maybe she’s part of a larger practice.”

  “Actually, no one’s in that office right now,” he replied. “The suite is vacant.”

  “Do you know for how long?”

  “Almost a year.”

  “Was Eve Brier the previous tenant?” I asked. “Is it possible she moved?”

  “Not according to my records. I ran the name, and there’s no Eve Brier in any other space inside the building. It doesn’t look like there ever was. I’m sorry, sir. She’s not here.”

  I thanked him and walked away. Eve had no phone; she had no office in Hancock Center. I should have expected that her world had changed, just as everyone else’s had, but I was genuinely shocked to realize that she wasn’t here. Not just shocked—afraid. I was under the spell of her therapy, and she was gone.

  I sat down in one of the lobby chairs and used my phone to run searches for Eve Brier.

  For her psychiatric practice.

  For her medical school and degree.

  For her lectures.

  For her bestselling book about Many Worlds and Many Minds.

  For Eve Brier herself, with her swirls of highlighted brown hair and her distinctive, hypnotic eyes. If she wasn’t in Chicago, where was she? If she wasn’t living her life, what was she doing?

  She had to be out there somewhere, but I found nothing. There was no record of Eve Brier, doctor, psychiatrist, philosopher, author. There was no record of Eve Brier anywhere, no one who even looked like her. She’d left no footprints in this world.

  As far as I could tell, she didn’t exist.

  I got up from where I was sitting. As I stood in the lobby, the Lucent sculpture engulfed me again. I found myself lost in its thousands of lights and endless reflections, and then my eyes focused on a single star among the many. That was me, one insignificant point of light, lost somewhere in an infinite number of universes.

  Infinite.

  I heard the word in my head.

  All I had to do was say it. That was my way out. Roscoe had told me it would be better if I just went home, but I hadn’t finished what I’d come here to do. There was a Dylan Moran in this city who had already killed twice. Karly was alive and in his sights, and I had to save her.

  Eve Brier couldn’t help me.

  I was going to have to navigate this world on my own.

  CHAPTER 20

  From downtown, I drove back to Northwestern.

  I retraced my steps in the light of day to the residence hall where Karly lived, but like last night, I stopped before going inside. This wasn’t the way to approach a stranger. All I would do was alarm her. Instead, I needed a meeting with her that was innocent and accidental.

  I noticed a young man in shorts and sunglasses, reading an economics textbook on the building’s back porch. It wasn’t even eleven in the morning, but he already had an empty beer can tipped on its side and another one in his hand. Ah, college days.

  “Hey, do you know where I can find Karly Chance?” I called to him. “I need her signature to add a class in the fall.”

  He didn’t even look up from his book. “Try Norris. She hangs out there.”

  “Thanks.”

  Norris was the university’s student center and gathering place. It was only about a ten-minute walk from where I was, and the path took me past a quiet inner lake formed by fill land that blocked the waves of Lake Michigan. Sunshine beat down on my head, but the breeze off the water was cool. I entered Norris in the dining area and checked the tables to see if Karly was there. She wasn’t, but the building was a large space with several floors, and she could be anywhere. I strolled around the sprawling center, and everywhere I looked, I expected to see her. I tensed for that moment.

  What would I do? What would I say?

  When I passed the university bookstore, I glanced at the window display and saw at least three dozen books arranged under a sign for faculty titles. Among books on climate change, Sufi literature, and French cinema, my gaze landed on a slim paperback with a cover that showed the outline of a woman’s face as she held up a mirror, creating an endless series of reflections vanishing into the center of the photograph.

  The name of the book was Portal.

  The author was Karly Chance.

  I went into the bookstore and picked up a copy. The first thing I did was check the last page to see whether the publisher had included a photograph, but the only information was a brief biography. Karly Chance is a lecturer and poet-in-residence at Northwestern University. This is her first collection.

  That was all.

  I checked the listing of poems included in the book. The one-word titles unsettled me. One was called “Cut.” Another, “Plaything.” Another, “Jump.” Another, “Candy.” When I flipped through the pages, I was impressed but also horrified. Her poems used beautiful imagery to build a tableau of violent self-destruction, like Thomas Eakins painting the blood of a nineteenth-century surgical procedure in exquisite detail.

  It seemed impossible to me that the Karly I knew could have written these poems. I’d never seen a side like that in her personality. But then again, this was not the Karly I knew.

  I also thought about the word her faculty colleague had used in describing her background.

  Trauma.

  “You should read the book,” a voice next to me said.

  I looked around and saw a young woman no more than twenty, in a Northwestern T-shirt, with her brunette hair tied in a ponytail. Her name tag told me she was a bookstore employee. As I held the book in my hand, she tapped a purple-painted fingernail on the cover.

  “The poems are really deep. I mean, some of them will turn your stomach, but if you want to know what depression can do to someone’s head, it’s all in here.”

  My finger caressed Karly’s name on the cover. “Do you know her?”

  “Sure. I’ve taken her class.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s amazing. So many of the profs around here are just talking heads, you know? But Karly lived it.”

  I smiled. “You’ve sold me.”

  I followed the young woman to the cash register. As she rang up the sale and took my money, I said, “You mentioned depression. Is that what the poems are about?”

  “Oh, yeah. She spent years in the cave.”

  “Did something happen to her?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, Karly was in a car accident right after college. She talks about it in class and doesn’t sugarcoat how bad it was. She had her mom in the car with her, and they were having some kind of big argument. The two of them didn’t get along, like really didn’t get along. Karly got distracted. She ran a red light, and they got T-boned. Her mom was killed.”

  I felt those words like a blow to my chest.

  “She spiraled after that,” the girl went on. “She spent a year in hell. Heavy into meth, abusive relationships, suicide attempts. The last time she almost succeeded.”

  I hesitated, but I needed to know. “What did she do?”

  “She drove her car right into the river.”

  I had trouble standing. Waves of violent memories rolled over me. My mother, dead on the floor. My father, with the gun in his mouth. Roscoe, dead in the seat next to me, his face shredded by broken glass. Dylan Moran on the riverbank, the rats eating his face.

  Karly and I, swirling and tumbling in the black water.

  Roscoe said: Fate has a way of making even the smallest details converge.

  “Shit,” I murmured.

  “Yeah. When they pulled her out, she was dead. No heartbeat. No oxygen for like four minutes. They put her in a coma to give her brain a chance to recover, but nobody figured she’d come o
ut of it. But she did. She says that was what finally turned her around.”

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

  “Anyway, enjoy the book,” the girl told me with a macabre smile.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  I left the store, still devastated by what I’d heard. I took the stairs up to the next level, and I used a coffee coupon on my receipt to buy myself an iced latte. When a table opened up, I sat down and began reading Karly’s book.

  Knowing it was her, knowing what she’d been through in this life, made the words almost unbearable to me. All this naked emotion roared off the page. Fury. Lust. Savagery. Ecstasy. Coldness. Guilt. Despair. “Plaything” was about bondage with a series of strangers. “Candy” was about her overdose of pills. “Jump” was about standing on an eighteenth-story Marina City balcony, naked and high as a kite, hallucinating that her mother was shouting from the ground below that she should climb over the railing.

  Jump, she said to me.

  Jump, she sang.

  I told myself that this was a different Karly, not my Karly, not the woman I knew, but I realized something as I read the book that made me impossibly sad.

  This was my Karly.

  I could hear her voice in the turn of a phrase. Little things she’d said when we were together, the words she’d made up about people, showed up here. The poems sounded exactly like her. All the pain, all the darkness, had been inside her when she and I were together. Same soul, same mind. Maybe it had taken a journey of shame to bring it to the page, but she’d had this identical wounded heart all along. I had never seen it, never asked her about it, never dived into the deep, deep pool of who she really was.

  I had loved this woman and not known her at all.

  How could I have missed it?

  I was in tears when I put the book down, for everything I’d lost, for everything I’d failed to appreciate while I had her. I hadn’t looked up from the pages for an hour. My vision was blurred, and I wiped my eyes. I hadn’t touched the coffee at all, and the ice had melted away, leaving a drink as muddy brown as the flooded river. Trying to regain some sense of where I was, my stare traveled from table to table, person to person, spying on the lives of others.

  Then my gaze froze.

  My heart stopped.

  Not even twenty feet away from me, a woman with jagged blond hair sat in profile, her graceful fingers tapping on the keyboard of a laptop. When she paused, which wasn’t often, she sipped tea from a paper cup. Her face was absorbed in her work, and she didn’t seem to notice the rest of the world.

  She had no idea that a stranger at another table had seen her. That I had to plant my feet on the floor with heavy chains to stop myself from getting up and sweeping her into my arms.

  That woman was Karly.

  Perfect. Gorgeous. Alive.

  That woman was my wife.

  Seeing her, I felt like a tongue-tied fool, with no idea what to do next. I could get up, go over there, introduce myself. But then what? Anything I would say to her felt completely insufficient to that moment. And yet if I offered even a glimmer of what was happening to me, she’d think I was crazy. I was the one whose world was turning upside down, not her.

  Needless to say, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. After a while, she felt it, the way you get that prick in your neck that someone is watching you. I saw her head turn, taking in the people around her, wondering where that odd feeling had come from. She stared at the others in the coffee shop one by one, and then, finally, she stared at me. Just for an instant, she looked right at me, before she moved on. I looked away, too, but the damage to my soul was already done.

  I was crushed.

  She didn’t know me. There wasn’t any recognition at all. Ten years ago, we’d had one date, and I’d come and gone from her life without making so much as a ripple. In my world, she’d found me bleeding in the car next to Roscoe, and we’d fallen in love with each other in the time it took for her to tell me that everything was going to be fine. But not now. Her gaze passed over me with no interest at all, no attraction, not even a physical curiosity. I felt nothing from her. Complete disinterest. That was worse than any other reaction she could have given.

  The despair I felt made the reality of my situation very clear. Roscoe was right. I didn’t belong in this world.

  I got up from the table, took Karly’s book with me, and left. I didn’t even turn around for another glimpse of her. The risk of her looking back with those blank eyes was too painful. I went downstairs, anxious to get back outside. I knew what I should do. Go back to the lake, find a quiet place where no one could see me, and say the escape word simply and clearly. Say it out loud and hope that it would send me home.

  But fate got in my way and reminded me why I was here.

  As I walked back into the sunshine, I met a man coming the other way. He was old and slightly stooped, with salt-and-pepper hair. We were on a collision course, and I side-stepped to give him space. Instead, he blocked my path.

  His weathered face studied me curiously. “Oh, hello again. Did you find her?”

  “What?”

  “Did you find the woman you were looking for? Karly Chance?”

  I was about to say yes—but then I realized that I had no idea who this man was. We’d never met. I’d never seen him before. And yet he knew me.

  “Why did you think I was looking for Karly Chance?” I asked, but the twisting sensation in my gut told me why.

  His face screwed up with confusion. He squinted, looking at me again. “Didn’t we meet last night? I could swear you were the man who asked me about Karly Chance. Sorry, it must have been someone who looked like you. These old eyes of mine aren’t what they used to be. My mistake.”

  “No problem,” I said, walking away.

  I wanted to tell him his eyes were fine. He hadn’t made a mistake.

  My doppelgänger was still here. Still hunting. I couldn’t leave this world until I’d found him.

  CHAPTER 21

  I spent the day consumed by thoughts of Karly. I didn’t go to work, because the job at the hotel wasn’t really my job. I didn’t go home, because Tai wasn’t really my wife.

  But Karly? I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  I went to the Bohemian National Cemetery, which is a couple of miles west of our apartment. That’s where I go when I need to think. I usually visit one particular sculpture. Its true name is The Pilgrim, but people call it by other names. Death. Walking Death. The Grim Reaper. It shows an old woman covered by a cloak, walking with a staff toward a nearby mausoleum. Unless you get up close and look under the cloak, her face is invisible, just black shadow. However, the legend says that if you look at her face, you’ll see a vision of how you’re going to die. I’d never looked. It never seemed worth the risk. That day I was tempted enough that I stole a peek, but all I saw was the pilgrim mother’s serene expression as she stared at the ground. She didn’t give me any clues about what was coming next.

  I spent the afternoon there, lingering even after the cemetery gates closed. I sat on the steps of the mausoleum, and I reread Karly’s book of poems over and over. It wasn’t just that I wanted to know the woman she was now, in this world. I wanted to know who she’d been. The wife I’d lost. The more I read, the more I fell in love with her all over again, as if I’d discovered an entirely new person. It killed me that we couldn’t be together.

  Eventually, the cemetery caretaker kicked me out. I had nowhere else to go, so the only thing I could do was head home to the apartment. When I got there, things got even worse.

  Detective Bushing was waiting for me. He sat in the wicker chair where he’d been the day before, his face like a dry desert except for those sharp eyes. Tai sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap. She wouldn’t even look at me.

  “Mr. Moran,” the detective croaked. “Welcome home.”

  I took a seat on the opposite end of the sofa from Tai. Her coolness gave a chill to the apartment.

  �
�What do you want, Detective?” I asked.

  Bushing pulled his briefcase into his lap and drew out a yellow pad, along with a stubby pencil in need of sharpening. “It’s been a whole day since you got back. I was hoping you’ve started to remember things from when you were gone. Like what you did in the park that night when you went for a walk.”

  “I still don’t remember anything.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “It is what it is, Detective. I can’t help you.”

  Bushing nodded, seemingly unconcerned. “What about last night? You remember that, right? Where did you go last night?”

  I saw the twitch of a smile on his lips. He knew something. I glanced at Tai, who was uncomfortably quiet.

  “I went to visit a friend on the South Side. Roscoe Tate.”

  “Yes, your wife told me. She also said she called to check on you and found out that you left the parish where your friend works midevening. You didn’t come home for several hours after that. Where did you go?”

  “What business is it of yours, Detective? Why do you care?”

  “I’m investigating a homicide, Mr. Moran. I care about everything.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with my whereabouts last night.”

  Bushing played with the pencil between his fingers. “Then let me explain it to you. The fact is, in this city, some murders are more equal than others. Ten black kids get shot on a holiday weekend, nobody seems to blink. But a pretty white girl gets stabbed in a park? People notice that. They see it in the paper; they remember it. It tends to generate a lot of tips. Most of them go nowhere, but every now and then, you find a needle in a haystack.”

  “You’ve lost me,” I said.

  “Well, see, a tip came in late last night. Someone in campus security at Northwestern called us. Seems a grad student reported a strange man stalking her near one of the residence halls. She gave a pretty good description of him, too. That kind of thing wouldn’t typically make it onto our radar, but the security guy remembered the photo of Betsy Kern from the newspaper. He said the two women looked a lot alike.”

  Bushing removed two photographs from his briefcase. One was of Betsy Kern, the same photo I’d seen in the newspaper. The other was the young woman who’d confronted me near Goodrich Hall the previous night. The woman I’d thought was Karly.