The door swung open and I stuffed the newspaper under my pillow.
Henry came in, looking surprised to see me. He gave me a terse nod and sat down at his desk with a thick Chemistry book. I pictured myself hoisting him out of his chair and lurching over to the window, our shared momentum carrying us through the glass and down to the paved courtyard below. He stiffened, as if receiving the image through an invisible cable.
To counteract the horrors going on in my head, I asked him the first thing that came to me. “Are you religious, Henry?”
It seemed like a reasonable question. We’d been roommates for two years and I hardly knew a thing about him. He remained quiet for a long moment before answering. “I’m sorry?” he said, still frowning at his book.
“I was just wondering if you’re religious.”
“No.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Why?”
I shrugged. “No reason.”
“Well, my mother is Buddhist,” he said, carefully. “And my father is Catholic.”
“So you’re…”
“A little of both, I guess.”
“I see.” I smiled what I hoped looked like an innocent smile, the image of us going out the window together lingering. It made no sense. I had no reason to want to hurt him. “So…” I cleared my throat. “What are you doing this weekend?” He returned his eyes to his schoolwork. “Studying.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I watched him vacantly for a while, as if he were a television screen, my consciousness and body peeling apart like two segments of an orange. Henry shut his book with a sigh and got up, saying he’d forgotten something in the computer lab. When he was gone, I looked at my hands, thinking about the tiny digits hidden in birds’ wings. Phalanges. I closed and opened my fists. The usual sounds of the dormitory—a racquetball smacking a wall, an out-of-tune guitar, a peal of female laughter—were overlaid by a steady throbbing in my right ear. I rubbed at the ear, and the whole of my childhood rushed through my head, as if spun through an impossibly fast projector. The experience was over in seconds, accompanied by an odd suction and a swell of emotion so intense I could hardly bear it. Everything was there. Every sensory detail. Every lucid moment. I cried out briefly, as though in sexual pleasure, then lowered my hand from my ear, stunned not so much by the realization that my memories had been so meticulously archived, but that the archives were accessible. If I could find a way to tap into that frequency and slow down the film, I could relive my life, moment by moment. The notion should have been reassuring. But as I took the newspaper out again and looked at Chad Temple’s smiling face, it brought me no comfort at all.
I returned to consciousness reluctantly, trying to swim back into a dream in which I’d been wandering through an enormous glass-walled hotel in search of my missing head. Sunlight pushed at my eyelids. I gave up and rolled out of bed. Kim was out in the sitting room, pumping her arms as she walked in place with headphones on. I sat down on the couch and stared at her until she took the hint and turned off her MP3 player. “What’s up?” she asked.
I felt like I hadn’t slept in months. One of my hands quavered uncontrollably, as if I’d had a stroke. “I think…” I said. “I’m losing my mind.”
“Oh?” She started to walk again, leaving the sound off.
I told her everything, about the blackouts, the leaps in time, the jarring returns to the present.
Kim frowned, as if to say, I’m listening, but her gaze kept wandering off to a spot just over my shoulder. I was struggling to convey just how real the visions felt when she interrupted with an impatient flick of the hand.
“That happens to me all the time.”
“What? No, I don’t think you understand how vivid—”
“No, I get it.”
“It’s a sensory experience. I smell things. Feel things.”
“Right.” She looked at me like I was a naïve child, describing the most common phenomenon in the world.
“That happens to you all the time.”
“Absolutely.”
“But—”
She walked faster, her hand edging towards the MP3 player hooked over her waistband.
I shook my head. “Forget it.”
The walls were slightly off-kilter, as if the apartment had been dismantled and hastily reassembled while I slept. I heard the faint rhythm of Kim’s workout music start up again. There would never be a better time to end things. One simple, unambiguous statement and it would be over. But before I could say a word, a hard jolt brought me into a new space, a smaller, dimmer space lit by strings of Christmas lights. A naked, middle-aged woman sat beside me on a futon, smoking a joint and studying me with detached interest, as if she intended to paint me. Feeling simultaneously heavy and weightless, I tried to sit up. I’d never smoked pot before and was fascinated by the way one green light on the wall flickered whenever I asked it to. How the rhythmic song on the stereo had been skipping for the last ten minutes. Even in the dim light, even drunk and high, I could see that my companion wasn’t beautiful. Her teeth were blocky and yellow, her stomach rolled with fat and sagging with age. But her pale green eyes had a trace of kindness in them, a glimmer of a real person, a person I might have been able to love.
“It’s okay,” she said.
A meaningless noise left my mouth and dissolved in the air.
“Don’t fight it.” She rested a hand on my arm. “Let it take you where you need to go.”
We were both naked, but I couldn’t remember having sex. I looked around for my clothes as the skipping song came to an end and another one started, a tinny synthesized melody against a slow driving beat. I tried not to panic about my complete loss of coordination, or the fact that someone else was crouched in a corner of the room. A boy. Arms wrapped around his knees.
“What is it?” the woman asked.
“He’s watching us,” I whispered.
“Is he?”
“Do you see him there? In the corner?”
She took one last hit on the joint and set it in a little ceramic ashtray, then wrapped a silk robe around herself and went over to the stove on the other side of the room. The burner clicked and she put a kettle on. “Tea?”
I shook my head, still watching the corner. All this felt familiar, like it had happened many times before. Chad Temple’s face appeared over the small body.
“Do you know him?” the woman asked.
I nodded.
“Is that a good yes or a bad yes?”
“A bad yes,” I whispered.
“Would you like me to make him go away?”
I nodded again, then flinched as she flipped a switch. Light flooded the room, thrown from a bulb on a wire. The dingy room had little in it besides the futon. In the corner, Chad had transformed into a step stool draped with a peach-coloured bra.
“Okay?” she said. The harsh light revealed the woman’s thick makeup, her scarred hands, the stubble on her calves. But her movements were graceful, and she didn’t seem the least bit self-conscious.
I wrapped a blanket around myself. “Okay.”
The woman shut the light and came back to the futon. “How old are you, sweetie?”
“Twenty-four,” I said, still watching the corner.
“Do you want to tell me your name?”
“I… No, I don’t think so.”
She shrugged. “Okay. Sometimes it’s better that way.”
Chad had reappeared, his adult head on the body of a child. “I’m still seeing him,” I said. “Is that normal?”