Alicia hugged me when she saw me. She looked normal; she looked the same. When she took me back to her office, she asked me how I was, and I told her very honestly that I didn’t know.
“Alicia, this is an odd question, but when did you last see me?”
She gave me a quizzical stare. “What?”
“I’m having some short-term memory issues. When did we last talk?”
“You came in for an appointment a few days after Karly’s funeral.”
“Was anything wrong with me?”
“Only the things I’d expect. Depression, anxiety, sleeplessness. Your blood sugar was elevated, which can happen as a result of stress, and so was your heart rate. You were grieving, and that takes a physical toll as well as an emotional and psychological one. Now, tell me about these memory issues.”
“I will, but first things first. When I saw you, did I say anything about... seeing things?”
“Seeing things? Like what?”
“Like my identical twin. A doppelgänger. Someone who looked exactly like me.”
Her brow wrinkled in surprise. “No, you didn’t say anything like that. Why, are you having hallucinations?”
I ignored her question. “Did I mention a psychiatrist named Eve Brier?”
Alicia frowned. “Yes. You told me you’d heard her speak at the hotel, and you’d read her book. You were planning to see her for therapy. I told you I wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do. Not therapy itself — I strongly suggested you talk to someone. But I looked up this Dr. Brier, and based on what I found, I had concerns about the kind of treatment she offered. Something tells me you went to see her anyway.”
“I think I did.”
“You think?” Alicia asked. “What does that mean?”
I ran my hands through my hair in frustration. Then I told her everything. The whole story. What I remembered and didn’t remember. What I’d experienced in the other worlds. What Eve had told me when I’d awakened in her office. Alicia took it all in and didn’t say anything for a while.
“You saw Roscoe?” she asked finally.
“Yes. In one world, he was a priest, but in another, he was a doctor, practicing here with you.”
Alicia glanced at the pictures of her son. “Well, I can see the appeal of what Dr. Brier is offering her patients. I can also understand your being reluctant to leave those worlds behind, if you were able to be with Roscoe and Karly again.”
“That’s the thing. I’m not sure I have left them behind.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those worlds felt every bit as real to me as this one does. How do I know this isn’t just another part of the illusion? I don’t trust what I see, Alicia. I look around, and everything in my life looks and feels right. But then again, it doesn’t.”
“Well, I remember your whole life, Dylan. If you’re asking me, this is the real world, but I don’t know if that helps you. I probably would have told you the same thing in those worlds, right?”
“No, it does help. I appreciate it. Eve says the procedure can be disorienting, and that’s probably what’s happening to me. Somehow I have to turn off that experience and turn this world on again.”
Alicia got up from her chair. She came around and sat on the front of the desk. “If these worlds were as vivid as you say, that will take time.”
“I know. I just don’t understand how I could lose three weeks of my life. If Eve’s right, I’ve been getting up, going to work, living my life this whole time, right up until I went to her office this morning. Now it’s like those past few weeks have been erased and replaced by the worlds she sent me to. How can that happen?”
“I can’t tell you that without knowing more about her therapy. But I think there’s more going on here than just Eve Brier.”
“What do you mean?”
“Trauma can affect memory, too, Dylan. You’ve been through a singularly traumatic event.”
“Karly.”
“That’s right.” Alicia put a hand on my shoulder. “Let me ask you something. Forget about today. Forget about the past few weeks. What’s the last thing you do remember?”
I closed my eyes and rewound the clock in my head until the seconds started ticking forward again.
“I remember being in the river,” I told her. “I was under the water. That was when everything stopped.”
Finally, I went home.
In the foyer of our apartment building, I could hear the buzz of Edgar’s game show on the television upstairs. I thought about going to see him, but he was probably asleep. Tomorrow was Thursday, and I’d see him at the Art Institute.
Inside my apartment, I saw the things I’d expect to find for a man who’d just lost his wife. Flower arrangements were beginning to wilt. Dozens of sympathy cards lay on the table, some opened, some still sealed. Laundry was piled in baskets, and dishes that needed to be done were stacked in the sink. This was the apartment of someone who’d been in a kind of Alaska for weeks, frozen in place, unable to move on. Seeing it all triggered fresh memories, too. The last three weeks didn’t come back, but everything that had happened before Karly and I left on our weekend trip was still here in the apartment, waiting for me.
We’d argued in the living room that night. She’d lost an earring as she tore at her hair in guilt over the affair. There, on the floor near the fireplace, I saw the glittering diamond stud where it had fallen.
I’d packed carelessly for our trip, letting a pile of winter sweaters tumble from the upper shelf in our closet. I’d kicked them angrily across the floor. All the sweaters were still there, exactly where I’d left them. Obviously, in the time since then, I hadn’t bothered to pick them up.
Karly had been playing Ellie Goulding songs before I got home late that night. She’d stopped the music in midsong when she saw me. I remembered what she’d been listening to, a song called “Figure 8.” I started the music again, and the same song took up right where she’d paused the disc.
There was no way around the truth.
This was my apartment. This was my world. No other Dylan Moran lived here, just me.
I went to the kitchen to pour myself a drink. When the lowball glass was full, I stared at the ice rattling around in the vodka like diamonds and then drained it all out into the sink. I did the same with the rest of the bottle. We had an unopened bottle of Absolut in one of the cabinets, and I got rid of that one the same way. I kept going until all the alcohol we had in the apartment was gone.
Dylan Moran no longer drank.
While I was in the kitchen, I heard the front doorbell. I had no idea who would be coming to see me, but I went through the apartment and pulled open the door. Detective Harvey Bushing stood on my front step. He was as emaciated as he’d been in the other worlds, and his eyes had the same wily intelligence. In my own life, I didn’t remember him at all.
Even so, he knew me.
“Mr. Moran? Detective Harvey Bushing. We met a couple of weeks ago. You called 911 after finding the body of a young woman near the riverbank.”
“What can I do for you, Detective?” I replied, although two weeks ago was inside the fog that I couldn’t remember. I had no memory of finding a body or calling 911.
“Well, I wanted to give you the news personally that we’ve arrested the man who murdered Betsy Kern. It was an ex-boyfriend of hers who’d been stalking her for some time. He confessed.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“I just wanted to apologize to you. I was a little harsh when I first interviewed you in the park. The fact is, it’s not uncommon for the person who reports a crime like this to be the actual perpetrator.”