A cab with the Off-Duty light illuminated.
I step out into the intersection and stand under the traffic light, waving my arms. The taxi slows down on approach and tries to swerve around me, but I sidestep, keeping its bumper on a collision course, forcing it to stop.
The driver lowers his window, angry.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I need a ride.”
The cabbie is Somali, his razor-thin face splotched with patches of a beard, and he’s staring at me through a pair of giant, thick-lensed glasses.
He says, “It’s two in the morning. I’m done tonight. No more work.”
“Please.”
“Can you read? Look at the sign.” He slaps the top of his car.
“I need to get home.”
The window begins to rise.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the plastic bag containing my personal effects, rip it open, show him the money clip.
“I can pay you more than—”
“Get out of the road.”
“I’ll double your rate.”
The window stops six inches from the top of the door.
“Cash.”
“Cash.”
I thumb quickly through the wad of bills. It’s probably a $75 fare to the North Side neighborhoods, and I’ve got to cover double that.
“Get in if we go!” he yells.
Some of the bar patrons have noticed the cab stopped in the intersection, and presumably needing rides, they are drifting over, shouting for me to hold the car.
I finish counting my funds—$332 and three expired credit cards.
I climb into the backseat and tell him I’m going to Logan Square.
“That’s twenty-five miles!”
“And I’m paying you double.”
He glares at me in the rearview mirror.
“Where’s the money?”
I peel off $100 and hand it into the front seat. “The rest when we get there.”
He snatches the money and accelerates through the intersection, past the drunks.
I examine the money clip. Under the cash and the credit cards, there’s an Illinois driver’s license with a headshot that’s me but that I’ve never seen, an ID for a gym I’ve never been to, and a health insurance card from a carrier I’ve never used.
The cabbie sneaks glances at me in the rearview mirror.
“You have bad night,” he says.
“Looks that way, huh?”
“I thought you are drunk, but no. Your clothes are torn. Face bloody.”
I probably wouldn’t have wanted to pick me up either, standing in the middle of an intersection at two in the morning, looking homeless and deranged.
“You’re in trouble,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not exactly sure.”
“I take you to hospital.”
“No. I want to go home.”
We cruise north toward the city on the vacant interstate, the skyline creeping closer and closer. With each passing mile, I feel some semblance of my sanity returning, if for no other reason than I’ll be home soon.
Daniela will help me make sense of whatever’s happening.
The cabbie parks across from my brownstone and I pay him the rest of his fare.
I hurry across the street and up the steps, pulling keys out of my pocket that aren’t my keys. As I try to find the one that fits the lock, I realize this isn’t my door. Well, it is my door. It’s my street. My number on the mailbox. But the handle isn’t right, the wood is too elegant, and the hinges are these iron, gothic-looking things more suited to a medieval tavern.
I turn the deadbolt.
The door swings inward.
Something is wrong.
Very, very wrong.
I step across the threshold, into the dining room.
This doesn’t smell like my house. Doesn’t smell like anything but the faintest odor of dust. Like no one has lived here in quite some time. The lights are out, and not just some of them. Every last one.
I close the door and fumble in the darkness until my hand grazes a dimmer switch. A chandelier made of antlers warms the room above a minimalist glass table that isn’t mine and chairs that aren’t mine.
I call out, “Hello?”
The house is so quiet.
Revoltingly quiet.
In my home on the mantel behind the dining-room table there’s a large, candid photograph of Daniela, Charlie, and me standing at Inspiration Point in Yellowstone National Park.
In this house, there’s a deep-contrast black-and-white photograph of the same canyon. More artfully done, but with no one in it.
I move on to the kitchen, and at my entrance, a sensor triggers the recessed lighting.
It’s gorgeous.
Expensive.
And lifeless.
In my house, there’s a Charlie first-grade creation (macaroni art) held by magnets to our white refrigerator. It makes me smile every time I see it. In this kitchen, there’s not even a blemish on the steel façade of the Gaggenau refrigerator.
“Daniela!”
Even the resonance of my voice is different here.
“Charlie!”
There’s less stuff, more echo.
As I walk through the living room, I spot my old turntable sitting next to a state-of-the-art sound system, my library of jazz vinyl lovingly stowed and alphabetized on custom, built-in shelves.
I head up the stairs to the second floor.
The hallway is dark and the light switch isn’t where it should be, but it doesn’t matter. Much of the lighting system runs on motion sensors, and more recessed bulbs wink on above me.
This isn’t my hardwood floor. It’s nicer, the planks wider, a little rougher.
Between the hall bath and the guest room, the triptych of my family at the Wisconsin Dells has been replaced with a sketch of Navy Pier. Charcoal on butcher paper. The artist’s signature in the bottom right-hand corner catches my eye—Daniela Vargas.
I step into the next room on the left.
My son’s room.
Except it’s not. There’s none of his surrealist artwork. No bed, no manga posters, no desk with homework strewn across it, no lava lamps, no backpack, no clothes scattered all over the floor.
Instead, just a monitor sitting on an expansive desk that’s covered in books and loose paper.
I walk in shock to the end of the hallway. Sliding a frosted pocket door into the wall, I enter a master bedroom that is luxurious, cold, and, like everything else in this brownstone, not mine.
The walls are adorned with more charcoal/butcher paper sketches in the style of the one in the hall, but the centerpiece of the room is a glass display case built into an acacia wood stand. Light from the base shines up dramatically to illuminate a certificate in a padded leather folder that leans against a plush velvet pillar. Hanging from a thin chain on the pillar is a gold coin with Julian Pavia’s likeness imprinted in the metal.
The certificate reads:
The Pavia Prize is awarded to
JASON ASHLEY DESSEN for outstanding achievement in advancing our knowledge and understanding of the origin, evolution and properties of the universe by placing a macroscopic object into a state of
quantum superposition.
I sit on the end of the bed.
I am not well.
I am so not well.
My home should be my haven, a place of safety and comfort, where I’m surrounded by family. But it’s not even mine.