Nick had spent the afternoon wandering down his neighborhood's streets trying to process why he was even allowing himself to consider Mordechai’s version of how life on planet earth really worked. He had sat silently for over an hour in the cemetery several blocks from his apartment, staring at the rows of acid-rain stained tombstones jutting out of the grass. Had anybody beneath the ground ever faced a dilemma similar to his? The silence of the graves only allowed him to think more about his problems, both real and imagined.
After Mordechai had left him in the bookstore, Nick had flipped through the dream book and found nothing on the topics of underground mausoleums, duplicate realities or, on a whim, symbionts. There had been a reference to monsters, though. To be chased by a monster meant bad luck in the future; to kill a monster meant just the opposite. There was nothing on being eternally stalked.
There in the afternoon sunlight, sitting on a bench in the middle of a sea of gravestones, his problems were neither more solvable nor less threatening. He had tried to bring tears to his eyes in the hope that a good cry in such a forlorn location would cleanse his spirit, but the most he could bring up was a plaintive sigh which made him feel pathetic. He smoked another cigarette and walked back to his apartment.
He walked in the front door with the mail and stopped short when he saw Sarah sitting on the couch reading a magazine. He looked down at his watch, she was home almost two hours early, and dropped the mail on the coffee table. She closed her magazine, lit a cigarette and licked her lips. Nick smiled weakly and sat down on the chair opposite the couch.
"So, do you want to tell me what's been going on the last two months?" Sarah asked, her voice calm and firm with no hesitation between the words.
"What do you mean? Nothing's going on."
Sarah tried not to scowl. "You were certainly going to tell Dave something. He left three messages on the machine today asking for you to call him so you could meet when he gets off work. What can you tell him that you can't tell me?" Sarah asked, taking a quick drag on her cigarette and blowing the smoke out quickly. "Are you having an affair?"
"No," Nick said quickly, instinctively, and then wondered if he had answered too quickly. He drew in a breath. "No. It's nothing like that."
Sarah let out a little of the tension that had been bunched up in her shoulders. She ran a hand through her hair and pulled it behind her head. "Then what is it like, Nick? All of the sudden you're having nightmares; you're drinking all the time. For Christ's sake, last night I come home and find you passed out, an empty glass on the floor and an almost empty bottle of whiskey sitting on the kitchen counter. That's not who you are, Nick, so something must be going on."
Nick stared at her and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, wondering why Dave hadn’t called it. It was off. He shook his head a millimeter to either side and turned his cellular phone on, and set it on the table. Sarah had come home early for this conversation and he owed her some sort of an explanation. Just which one, he wasn't sure.
"It's not going to make any sense."
"Try me," Sarah said softly.
He stared out the window behind her and at the branches on the tree, wondering how to string some sort of sense into a stream of stories that intersected crazily and in ways he wasn't sure he believed connected. There was no way he could make sense to her of how his nightmares were rooted in a parasitic life form living inside him and trying to gain a presence in his consciousness. And then try to connect that with an underground art counterfeiting ring he was investigating and had become unwittingly connected to by having sex with one of the suspects. Well...
"I guess it just has to do with, well, you, us, my job, our life, I don't know," Nick said, the words jumbled as they came out. "This is hard to explain."
Sarah leaned forward on the edge of the couch. "I'm listening."
So Nick concocted a story so close to real he could almost believe it. He was nearly thirty, living with Sarah, afraid for some unknown reason to get married -- "And I do want that, Sarah, I do" -- just as he was working on what could be the biggest story of his career. And then he explained the art theft ring and how he had stumbled onto an investigation and gained the confidence of the lead investigator but that he couldn't print anything, yet. He told her that added extra pressure because he wasn't sure what the competition was up to and, stringing his fantasies closer to reality, what it would mean to them if he broke this story and was able to get a much better job somewhere else only to find out that she wouldn't want to move with him. So his future possible success came backward in time to disrupt his relationship now, making him a little bit more afraid than normal to go the next step because he wasn't sure what it would do to the relationship in the future. After all, he said, she had the job she always wanted and he was only working at one of the lower rungs on his career ladder.
"So I guess that's just causing all these weird nightmares because I haven't been able to talk about it because I've been, I don't know, too unsure how I could talk about it and make sense of it. I still don't think I have," Nick said, pausing, wondering if this moment also gave him an introduction he had been seeking, "and then..."
Sarah tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. "And then, what?"
Nick shook his head slightly.
"What?" she said softly.
"And then, well, I saw," Nick pursed his lips. "Well, I wonder, been wondering, what that artist Sammers gave you that night. I mean, he seemed so interested in you and it seemed like, I don't know, like you were flirting with each other and he gave you his number or something and I thought, maybe, I don't, well..."
Sarah smiled and let out a small, barely audible laugh. "What? You thought I was going to have an affair with Josh Sammers?" she asked, obviously amused.
Nick shrugged.
She smiled wider. "You are nuts. The last type of guy I'd even date, let alone cheat on you with, would be some semi-talented, over-confident artist who is well known for his sex addiction to blondes. Really."
"So, what did he give you?"
"His number, but only because I told him my boss was interested in buying one of his pieces for the office."
"Oh," Nick said plaintively.
Sarah walked over to Nick and knelt on the floor before him. She reached out and took his hands in hers and stared up at him. "You don't have to be afraid of what I'm going to do. I'm going to be here. I love you," she said and smiled.
Nick smiled and stared back down into her eyes. Somewhere he couldn't pinpoint on his lower right side, a small tingling burn fanned out across his hip and, for a moment, he thought he heard someone deep in his brain calling him a liar.
"Listen, I've got to go meet Cap for a couple of beers," he said, standing up and walking back to the bedroom. He returned a moment later and looked around the room.
"Have you seen my wallet?"
"No?" Sarah said and shook her head.
"Shit. I wonder if I left it on the table at the bookstore," Nick said as he spun a slow turn in the middle of the living room and scanning the flat surfaces.
"Was there any money in it?" Sarah asked.
"No," Nick said flatly. "Do you have any cash? I'll use my passport if I need an ID."
"Your passport? I didn’t know you had a passport," Sarah said.
"I went to Spain five years ago," Nick said abruptly. "I showed you the pictures, remember?"
"Oh, yeah, you getting laid in Barcelona," Sarah said. "I remember the pictures: You and some girl with dark hair. I forgot you had a life before me." Sarah reached for her purse and pulled out a twenty. "You're not going to get drunk, tonight, are you?"
Nick smiled. "Not on twenty dollars."
And then he sat on a barstool and told Cap the same altered story he had told Sarah, once again he was unsure why he had omitted the entire portion with Mordechai and intra-body alien life forms. He knew why he had omitted Sophia , but he thought he should have spun a humorous story out of the meetings with Mordechai. Yet, he told no one. Now, after four
beers, he found himself sniffing contemptuously at the notion he would sleep with a woman other than Sarah, feigning indignation that his fidelity could ever be called into question. He didn't, though, go so far as to denounce of the possibility for fear that a too strenuous denial would somehow strengthen the case against him.
"Well, I don't know what to tell you, but just hang in there. It sounds like you've got a good story -- and I won't tell anybody about it, so don't worry -- and who cares about this thirty bullshit?" Cap said and tipped the last of his glass of beer into his mouth. "You'll figure all this out, it doesn't sound like all that much; you're just exorcising some sort of last-minute demon is all."
Nick took a final drag on his cigarette and stared into his friend's eyes for a moment, half-wondering if Cap had somehow inferred something about his dreams and hip pains, and then crushed his cigarette into an ashtray.
TWENTY