Not now. Not since she’d gotten clean. The recovering did not have those bullets in the chambers. Normally she’d try to smile her way out of it, do the kind of comical wasn’t-that-weird thing that begs for readmittance to the group. It never worked, and often felt as desperate as it probably looked.
Today, though, she didn’t try for anyone’s approval. She was too afraid.
Not of their rejection but of them being right. Maybe she was the Other for real. Weird, wrong, broken. Off.
Slipping.
Slipped.
When she reached her stop, she fled the train and hurried through the station and up the stairs. Not once did she pause to notice how thin the crowds were for a Friday. She was running a little late as it was, and the tax office was nine blocks away. The day was cold, but she was sweating. Not because of the train but because of everything else. The bathroom, the old lady, the kid, that scream. The glasses that now hung around her neck.
CHAPTER SIX
“I’m here to see Mr. Javers,” Rain told the woman at the front desk. “Lorraine Thomas, I have a job interview this morning.”
The woman—who was short, plump, and pretty—smiled up at her with all the warmth of a pit viper. “You’re late,” she said.
Rain glanced at the clock on the wall above the short woman’s desk.
“Um, I was told to be here at nine. It’s only eight fifty.”
The woman’s smile got wider and colder. “Yes.”
“So, I don’t—”
“Your appointment was for 9:00 a.m., Friday the tenth.”
“Yes, and—”
The woman cocked her head sideways and positively beamed at her. “Do you know what day it is today?”
“Of course I do,” said Rain, trying hard not get angry. “It’s Friday the tenth.”
Instead of replying, the woman took a Kitten-A-Day calendar, one of the kind that comes with its own plastic stand, turned it around, and nudged it an inch toward her. There was a cute little orange tabby kitten completely wrapped in loose pink yarn. Above the picture was the day and date.
Saturday, November 11
Rain stared at the date, then at the woman. “I … don’t understand…”
“You’re a little late, sweetie,” said the woman, her eyes twinkling. “Wouldn’t you say?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rain stuffed the folder in the first trash can she found on the street. She had one flicker of momentary regret at having tossed away a copy of her résumé printed on expensive cream-colored paper, but did not feel like fishing it out of the can. She was too pissed, too embarrassed, and way too confused.
She pulled out her cell phone and stared at the time-and-date display. Checking the time was something she did fifty times on the way here, but it never occurred to her to check the date.
How was it Saturday? Seriously, how?
And what had happened to Friday?
She started to walk but stumbled. The sheer weight of everything pushed her against a brick wall and held her pinned there, gasping and staring at a world that did not make sense. Last night was Thursday. No way she was wrong about that. She remembered sitting at her desk, studying for the interview. The TV had been on, and all the Thursday night shows were on. She and Joplin had watched Trevor Noah, and his show ran Monday through Thursday. She didn’t DVR it. Last night was, goddamn it, Thursday night, and today should have been, goddamn it, Friday.
Except it wasn’t.
Her phone clock said it was Saturday. Google said it was Saturday. The copies of the New York Post on the shelf at the kiosk outside the tax office said it was Saturday. The crowds on the train. There hadn’t been enough people. The street traffic was light. Busy, but Saturday busy, not Friday rush hour busy. Everything and everyone seemed to scream at her that this was real and the only wrong part of this was her.
Rain almost called Joplin to tell him about this and get him to confirm that he had been there last night. Thursday night. She went as far as going to her recent calls list, but she didn’t punch the button. What if he said that he’d been there Thursday night and not last night? How would he react if she told him that Friday was gone?
She knew exactly how he would react. He’d assume she was using and pull back. Joplin may have been a college party boy a few years ago, but he was a drinker. He never took drugs and didn’t even smoke weed because he said it screwed with the way he saw light and color. He didn’t even drink while he was working on a canvas, and on nights when she opened up and told him about her years getting high, he was always distant. That stuff shut him down. No. Calling him would be a mistake. He was the guy she slept with, but he wasn’t her boyfriend, and after six months of mutual booty calls, he didn’t seem to be interested in changing the arrangement.
Rain stayed there for a long time, leaning against the wall because she was too afraid to step away from anything as real and solid as those dirty bricks. The cars that moved past became blurs of color; so did the people. Outlines and details lost their specific shapes and instead became smears of noise and movement around her. It was like the way words smeared when she tried to read without glasses, except right now it was everything. Rain felt her eyes burn, but no tears fell; instead the burn turned to stinging pain as if the tears were crystallizing and all those sharp edges were cutting into her. She was outside, but there didn’t seem to be enough air to breathe, no matter how much she gasped. Her fingers and toes tingled and went cold.
Panic attack, panic attack, she thought, but even thinking the words made everything worse. Giving it all a name goaded it into taking hold of her.
Shutting her eyes didn’t help. Not much. Not enough. The afterimages spun past her on the movie screens of her memory. The smell of her own perfume was suddenly cheap and it nauseated her. Rain tried to swallow, but her throat worked and worked and accomplished nothing.
A voice spoke to her. It said, “Él le habla a su mamá.”
Rain’s eyes snapped open, knowing the voice. The old lady from the train. She looked, turned, scanned the street.
But of course the old lady was not there.
Rain touched the glasses that hung around her neck. She fumbled with them, put them on, hoping to find clarity that would make some sense of the moment. The hairline crack flashed with reflected sunlight as she put them on. The cars in the street still moved with sickening relentless constancy, but they were in sharp focus now. That made no sense, because she was farsighted, not nearsighted. Nothing else made sense, though, so Rain accepted it for what it was. She looked down at her hands, saw that her skin was fish pale. Her purse was on the sidewalk between her feet, and she didn’t remember dropping it. People walked past, and a few of them cut her looks. The Other, they seemed to snarl. It was as if she were becoming the parasite that lived in her mind.
There was the blare of a horn, sharp and close, and Rain turned to see a little boy go running into traffic not twenty feet from her. Running fast, heedless of the danger. Running with blind panic. Running away from …
From what?
What did it matter?
It was him. The same little boy. Same clothes, same face. Only …
Was he the same? She wasn’t sure. On the train, the boy looked to be nine or ten, but here he was smaller. The face was the same, even the clothes, but this kid couldn’t have been more than five. Younger brother? If so, what the hell was going on?
The kid jagged left as if avoiding someone and cut right across the street.
“No!” cried Rain, breaking into a run.
Cars rushed toward the boy. Cars slammed on their brakes, tires screeched, horns howled, and Rain screamed as she ran out to catch the boy. A UPS truck shot past her, and Rain had to jump backward to keep from being crushed. A heartbeat later she lurched forward again.
The boy was gone.
Cars were stopped all around her.
Her. Not the kid. She stood in the center of the street, and everyone was focused on her. Honking, yelling
, cursing at her. There was no boy anywhere in sight.
A man leaned out of his car window and yelled, “The shit’s wrong with you, you crazy bitch?”
“Did you see the kid?” she demanded, pointing. “The little boy?”
“There’s no boy, dumb-ass,” said the driver. “You high or something?”
Rain flinched back from those words. If she had a knife, she’d have cut the man. Or herself. Or everyone.
The cars kept honking, even the ones where the drivers could have driven around her. She was the Other, and they were all mad at her.
“Get out of the freaking way!”
Ten voices seemed to yell that all at once. Rain felt pummeled by the sounds, the voices, the everything. She took a step toward the opposite side of the street—where the little boy should be, but wasn’t. Then she stopped and backed up, retreating as if shoved away. She bumped into someone and whirled around to see a tall man standing right behind her. He was scarecrow thin, and he was smiling at her in ways that didn’t fit the day or the moment.
“You look lost,” said the man. “Let me help.” He reached out to touch her. To take her arm. His fingers were long and pale and he had very thick, dark nails. His black suit was immaculate, but his tie … there was something wrong with it. The silk hung limp and red and wrong somehow. It glistened wetly, but almost looked like a tongue, like a piece of meat.
No, she told herself. It’s not skin. Don’t be an idiot. It’s a tie, and you’re having a goddamn panic attack. Get out of the street. Move, move, move, move …
“Let me help you,” said the man in a voice that was soft and unctuous and yet familiar. Did she know him?
It’s him, whispered a warning from deep in her mind, and Rain could not tell if it was her own thoughts or the parasite trying to confuse her. It’s Doctor Nine. Run. Get away from him.
“Take my hand,” said the tall man. He had very red lips that framed small, white teeth, but he wore sunglasses that hid his eyes. In all her dreams, Doctor Nine’s eyes were hidden, and she was terrified to know what he hid behind those opaque lenses.
No, don’t touch him. Move, move, move … get away. Run before it’s too late.
Rain recoiled from the man, cast a wild look at the cars, and then broke into a run. She was wearing the wrong shoes for it, and from the first step, she felt needles of pain in her arches and ankles and insteps. She dodged around the tall man, reached the sidewalk, caught a sign pole like a drowning person grabbing at a scrap of driftwood. Held on. The metal was cold and hard and real. Cars still honked at her, but the traffic began moving again. Slowly, reluctantly, resentfully, but steadily.
When she turned to see if the tall man had followed, he was nowhere in sight. Like the little boy and the old lady, he had faded away. Or stepped through a crack in her broken mind. She had no idea where he went. Maybe he went back to Friday.
The thought was so ridiculous that she snorted out a laugh.
Which became a sob. Rain put her forehead against the cold metal pole and held on for dear life as everything she understood about today upended and sank slowly beneath the waves.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As she walked, Rain tried to make sense of a day that did not want to be made sense of.
She stopped in a Starbucks for coffee, found a seat in a corner, and sat staring into her cup for a long time. The train, the boy, the old lady, the job interview, the lost day…? It was like tuning in to a movie halfway through. Or joining a conversation that had been under way so long it was hard to pick up the thread of what everyone was saying.
In some ways this was familiar to her. She often felt like she was observing her life rather than actually living it. It was a side effect of having deliberately become a passenger rather than the pilot during all those years being bullied by her mother, being a slave to crack and DMT, drifting along with the orchestrated routines of rehab, and participating in the predictable structure of Narcotics Anonymous. All of that had collectively prepped her for observer status. Even when she dreamed, there was a part of her that was aware she was dreaming and sat on the sidelines to watch, like a fifth-string player at a school lacrosse match. Dreams were usually more real to her than her actual life. In dreams, everything and anything was possible. In life … not so much.
So, was this all a dream?
She closed her eyes and tried to determine if she were actually asleep.
The dream from last night was still there, hovering right below the surface. Rain kept her eyes closed and tried to move toward that dream, pulled by an instinct that the dream and what was happening today were connected. What, then, was the dream? The details were so hard to lure to the surface. There was something about …
Fire?
Was that right? No, it wasn’t like something was on fire in the dream; not like a building burning down. No, it was something else. A place? Maybe. Probably. A fire something. Burning with beautiful light. There was more to it. She was positive. Only a few seconds ago, she knew something. She was in the fire. Not burning. Walking. Dancing? In the fire? In fire? It didn’t make sense.
I was there all night, she thought. Thinking that flipped a switch on and off very fast. It was like peering into a darkened room and then there’s a microsecond of light and afterward you try to remember the things in there. Rain had only glimpses of it, like the afterimage of the sun when you looked at it and looked away. Burned onto her eyes, but fading.
A nighttime street, glistening as if after a summer rain. Buildings rising on either side and stretching away up a long hill. Neon and LED lights burning, swirling, changing shape as if they were alive. Brighter the higher up on the hill. She wasn’t on the hill, though. She stood at the very bottom. Down on the boundary. No. On Boundary Street. An actual street with that name. She stood among the shadows there. Not alone, but she couldn’t see who else was there. Sometimes she could see them. Some of them made her cry. Some made her sick. One of them made her scream, but she hadn’t dreamed of him last night. Or at least she didn’t think so.
She looked up the hill to where all the beautiful lights glowed with strange promise. They were magical to see. Or maybe it was that they were actual magic. It was a dream, so that could go either way. People danced up there. And laughed. And sang along with the music that spilled out from the open doors of nightclubs.
She saw all of that in a glimpse. Saw it and understood it, knew it. Felt it. Maybe she caught so much of it because it wasn’t the first time she dreamed about that place. Though when she was awake it was so hard to hold on to any specific memories. Sometimes when she was on the train, the rocking motion would coax her to the edge of a doze and she’d hear the music and smell the perfumes and colognes and cooking smells and incense and …
And see the faces.
People she didn’t know. People she did know. Some dead people. People Rain was absolutely sure she needed to know. A few who scared her in very good ways. A few who scared her in really bad ways. Their faces swirled around her like the crystal patterns in a kaleidoscope. Many of them danced, and it made Rain want to dance, too. She used to dance, back when she was little and the world was still painted with fresh colors. She’d been good at it, too. Almost a prodigy. Good enough to go pro when she grew up. She’d danced and danced, and that was her cure-all. When young Rain was dancing, it was like everything made sense, or maybe it was that nothing else mattered. When she was younger, she could dance her way out of any bad mood. When her best friend’s family moved to L.A., Rain danced it all out. Her hurt, the loss, and the grief, too. All of that became part of the dance.
Somewhere along the way, she stopped dancing. The music became muted and off-key, and the colors of the world faded and peeled, revealing uglier colors beneath. It was like what happened with her mother—she used to dance, too. And stopped. Forever stopped.
Rain wanted so badly to dance again. She knew that it would cure her, fix her, repair the broken parts inside. However, she was positive that danc
e was a gift, and she had squandered it, ignored it, let it wither and die. She could read the disappointment of that in the faces she saw. They knew.
He knew, too.
He. Him.
He hated her and hated that she used to dance. That thought came into her head, and not for the first time, though she did not understand what it meant. Not on a conscious level, though she knew with certainty that it was true. He was like that.
The man of my dreams, she thought with more intense bitterness than she felt for anything in her world.
Rain never had an imaginary friend when she was a little girl. No, what she had was an imaginary enemy. He came to her in dreams and, sometimes, she thought he came to her while she was awake. Came and whispered things. Bad things that, at first, she’d been too young to understand. As she got older and wiser and saw the world as it was, Rain understood.
The enemy never once spoke his own name, but once, during a session, a therapist had asked about the phantasm. It had been during a session in one of the rehab centers her mother had sent her to—was it the fourth one? The sixth? Not the last one, that was sure, because Rain had checked herself into that one and Mom never even came to visit. Maybe it was the fourth one. The therapist had been walking her through the minefield of her childhood, and Rain told her about the man who came and whispered to her and sometimes climbed into her bed and lay next to her, cold as a corpse, damp and smelling of rot.