When I reached the bottom of the stairs I heard a loud click—my neighbor had checked to make sure that the door was locked. To him I was the suspicious one.
I sank again into the couch my ex-wife hadn’t wanted in the divorce, my heart overworking itself. Funny how labor brings us into this world and rest is what we get when we leave it. Trying not to disappear would be the end of me—maybe that’s what happened to the other Matt. I pushed the empty box in front of my door and slid the safety lock. Two could play at this shame.
In my office I tried to write three thousand more words of the new novel. My protagonist lay on his couch trying to feel the world spinning. In the apartment above him someone screamed. It was a scream on the edge of what was and what wasn’t real. To him the scream sounded like his own voice. He climbed the stairs and peeked under the upstairs door. Inside, roped to a dining chair, sat an upright cat. In my protagonist’s voice it pleaded for its life. The upstairs neighbors held the cat at gunspoint. When my protagonist gasped the man rushed to the door and cracked it. “Nothing to see here,” he said through the opening. “You better go. I’ve got a phone call with my mom.” Not knowing what else to do my protagonist descended as he was told.
At my desk I tried to turn my protagonist around, send him to rescue his cat-self, but for some reason I couldn’t make myself believe in his delusion. The writing felt false, ridiculous, like the ending of a film in which a character awakes from his dream—except in reverse. His reality awoke to my imagination.
I reclimbed my own staircase instead. As if my novel had gotten out of the computer, a sheet of white printer paper hung on my neighbors’ door. Scrawled across it was DO NOT DISTURB. Was a sign enough to protect their lives from disturbance? I knocked for six minutes and thirty-two seconds, then pounded with the flats of my hands. No one came. They had noise-canceling headphones or something. They had developed the power to ignore. I wrung my hands out, palms stinging. If no one heard my anger, did it even exist? If I didn’t see my doppelgänger, how could I be sure I wasn’t him? I knocked again.
At last something made a sound. But it was only whining and pawing. I listened to the ghost of my cat and imagined its purring warmth in my arms. It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the woman’s Volkswagen for a long time, just the man’s. Was my imagination so poor that it had replaced her presence with that of my cat? Why her and not him? My adoptive parents had often accused me of hearing only what I wished to hear. For a while I stood there wondering whether I was the one who was disappearing people. Maybe I was the villain of my story.
THE CRACK
I woke in the middle of the night, back sore, fogged with sleep. I was on the floor. It took a second to figure out why I was there. I had passed out drunk. I tried to remember the dream I’d emerged from: I was standing in line with my daughter for a pony ride (she was six or seven) and other kids kept cutting in front of us. I said nothing, I watched a girl pull her hood over her head, and when I turned back Charlotte was twelve and I was in the butcher shop again. “Choose,” she whispered as she passed me in line. “Your beef shank or mine?”
But in my dream my daughter wasn’t in a camo T-shirt and leggings and purple lipstick with spiky hair. We were wearing matching tracksuits.
I rolled over and my shoulder bumped something. It was the empty box with which I had blocked the door. I was in the living room then. I was still groggy, the toys were still gone. I was still a dull version of me who nevertheless was still here.
When I sat up the first thing I saw was the photo of my ex-family. It lay beside my hand. I must have passed out holding it. My phone was nowhere in sight. I wiped the thumbprints off the photo. I missed my family so much I still rolled the toilet paper over, not under, in case they were on their way somewhere and suddenly needed to pee. I had the bidet set to “woman,” and I kept the bowl sparkling clean.
Blood ran hot in my cheeks. Bile soured the back of my tongue. My head hurt. In this condition standing was out of the question. I crawled. I pictured that poster of apes evolving into humans: In hundreds of thousands of years I would evolve into Matt. Pain shimmered around my head like a bald man’s sunburn. My eyes kept trying to shut. I had the feeling that something or someone was yanking me back into dream.
I counted to five, slowly, as I had seen white heroes do on TV to let their terror take five seconds of their life and no more. But I was still afraid. I counted to ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred. I opened my eyes anyway.
Something new was on the floor. Beneath me stretched a long yellow yarn I was fairly certain hadn’t been there before. It seemed to generate its own faint light. It was the same yellow yarn I had seen outside The Cave.
What was going on? “Try making sense this time,” my neighbor had said. How to explain.
The yarn trailed from, or actually through, the spot where I had slept, under my body, and on toward the kitchen. I didn’t want to touch it—it looked solid, but for some reason I felt sure that it wasn’t, that I saw only an image. Maybe that image of yarn was what my cat had followed when it slammed its head into the wall . . . I had to get it together. I clenched the photo of my ex-family between my teeth and crawled along the yellow yarn into the kitchen, where I found a half-empty glass of wine (I drank it), then back into the hallway, then into the bathroom and out again, then into my office where I had written the first six thousand words or so of a new novel. For the second time in twenty-four hours I placed the photo back on my desk. All around me the air pulsed with a kind of womb-like pressure. I felt sure something had started here. I was returning, like in the Minotaur story, having unspooled yarn to mark my way back.
I flipped on the lights and leaned on the doorframe while my eyes adjusted to the brightness. The other me was not lying in wait. I had half expected to come to blows with myself. Nausea choked me, but I held it down. The yarn continued to unspool across the floor. It looped around the desk, to the opposite wall, and there . . . it went straight inside. Somehow the yarn went into the wall.
I sat on the chair, which as usual dug into my back. That was real. As usual I saw the note to buy a new chair. I had written it. The fluorescent lights washed the wall a bright purple. I had painted them. The yarn was as real as that note and the paint. It wasn’t like my cat—I knew it wasn’t ghostly or imaginary. Even though I couldn’t touch it, it was made of the same reality as the wall it went into. I rubbed my temples, and searched for the exact point on the wall at which the yarn entered. Had it found a hole? A defect in the construction? Once I had discovered a line of ants squeezing through a gap in the molding to get to a single drop of honey on the pantry floor. I had ignored them until they finished the honey, but when they moved into the rest of the kitchen I couldn’t let them take my place.
Because you can always get a closer look I lay flat on my stomach. The hardwood was cool and solid. The yarn was insubstantial, yet “there.” I tried to see along its route into the wall, I tried to tell whether it was like wool yarn, woven from strands, and what those strands were, I tried to tell myself I was just losing my mind. I moved my face as close as it could get, and the yarn never became any clearer or more physically defined. It didn’t become any less believable either, not like the hostage cat in my novel. I wanted to disregard my beliefs—this was typical. I moved my face closer until my nose touched the floor—only the floor—I raised my face, I lowered my face—I moved up and down with no difference. The distance between the yarn and my skin wasn’t material.