“Jerk.”
“Ow,” I say, laughing, rubbing at the spot. She’s a lot stronger than she looks.
The house is a total throwback. There is no wireless. On the rare occasions I come up here, I use my phone as a hot spot to get online. But even that’s wonky because cell service is spotty. There’s a television, an ancient box of a thing, connected to a VCR, no cable. But there’s a vast library of modern classics—Scarface, The Godfather, the Star Wars trilogy, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club. And books—books in every room, on every shelf and surface—all genres, from Stephen King to Jane Austen.
It smells a little. The musty scent of old, little-used places.
There’s a transistor radio in the kitchen. It picks up AM and FM stations. And yes, of course, there is a landline with an answering machine. The nineties came here and stayed.
We keep the place stocked—in case. There are good bottles of red and white in the pantry, canned goods—soups, beans, spaghetti and ravioli, nuts, chips in tubes. When I do come up, I normally stay the night, feast on junk food, go home sick.
“This place is amazing,” Emily says, walking around, running a careful finger across surfaces, objects. “Time has stopped.”
We make a perfunctory attempt to get online, to look through Anisa’s feed for more clues, to come up with next steps, but we can’t get her page to load. Finally, exhausted, we just give up.
I open a bottle of wine. Build a fire. We make popcorn on the stove. I find The Matrix and pop it in the VCR. Rewind. Wait and listen to it whir. Time settles when there’s nothing to do but wait. Our phones, Emily’s laptop, are all useless and lie dark in the other room. She puts her notebook and a slim pen on the coffee table, in case inspiration strikes, I guess.
We curl up on the couch. The lights are out, the room lit only by the screen. The popcorn is buttery and salty.
Keanu Reeves is smooth faced and svelte, caught in a web of digital deceit. Morpheus tells Neo how the Matrix is all around him. How it’s the world that’s been pulled over his eyes to blind him to the truth. How he is a slave born into bondage, in a prison he can’t touch.
When Emily’s hand finds mine, I turn to her.
Her lips are sweet, her skin silk under my hands. My need for her is sudden—urgent and real. Not a reaction formation. She sighs as I pull her to me. She yields, her arms wrapping around me, her passion a taste on my tongue. I am awake and alive, truly present for the first time since I watched my blood spill on the bathroom floor.
We tear at each other’s clothes, tumble from the couch. Skin on skin; I am alive for the first time since Anisa. I shiver with pleasure. Emily’s skin glows in the firelight, her eyes shining.
When she pulls at my shirt, I’m embarrassed, try to keep it on.
“Let me see all of you,” she whispers beneath me.
The keloid scars are dark on my arms, two long lines. I show them to her.
She puts her lips to them, and my whole body shudders with the relief of being seen, my whole truth, no matter how flawed and ugly.
We make love, ravenous for each other. It’s raw and desperate. I make sounds I don’t even recognize as we roam each other’s imperfect flesh. Emily cries, tears streaming down her face as she moans with pleasure. It’s nothing like it was with Anisa. Emily abandons herself to the moment. Anisa always seemed to observe it. I am lost and found.
By the time we’re drifting off, the television is emitting white noise and the sun is rising outside.
“Oh, Will,” she whispers. “I’ve wanted this for so long.”
“Me too,” I say. It’s true, and it’s not true.
We just stare at each other in wonder until we fall asleep in each other’s arms.
When I awake, I lie by the fire, which I guess Emily has kept going. The blanket from the couch covers my body.
For a moment, I think she’s left. Or that maybe she was never here. This was a dream. A hallucination. Chasing Anisa’s digital presence, I’ve walked right off the edge of reality.
But then I smell something. The unmistakable aroma of Campbell’s chicken soup—that chemical facsimile of food that is somehow so much more than the real thing. I get up and retrieve my clothes from the floor.
In the light of day, everything looks as shabby as it is—the carpet is stained, the couch pilled, the blanket frayed. In the kitchen, Emily is the only thing of beauty. The linoleum floor peels, the Formica countertop is rife with burns, scratches. The wallpaper is yellowed.
“I love it here,” Emily says. Her notebook is on the table. I can see that she’s been writing, the pen tucked into the pages.
I sit. The wine we drank last night, the heavy meal, makes my head ache, my stomach complain. I am not a morning person. I remember that we came up here looking for Anisa and didn’t find her. Emily seems to have forgotten that. But maybe, I’m realizing, that’s not why she wanted to come up here at all. She turns to me with a bright smile, but whatever she sees on my face causes it to fade.
Silent, she pours the soup into two bowls, carries them to the table. There’s tea too. With honey. We eat and drink. It’s good. The food helps my darkening mood. But I realize I’ve missed a dose of my medication. We should get back.
Emily has gone still, internal. She feels the shift of my energy.
“You’re never going to stop looking for her, are you?” she says finally.
The light of day has cast all of this differently.
I am slipping back into old behaviors. Paranoid. Delusional and compulsive. Maybe it’s more than one dose I’ve missed. Dr. Black would not approve of this errand.
“It’s really about Claire, right?” she says. “How you couldn’t hold on to either of them?”
I shake my head, not wanting to hear the truth of it.
That dark place, it starts to open in me. I try to breathe it away.
“And Anisa. Even when she was with you, in love with you, you were chasing her. You held on so tight that you strangled the love between you.”
When it starts, it’s a rumble, an engine gunning deep within. I hear it coming like a semi in the distance.
“You drove her away. When all you had to do was let her be.”
“Stop,” I say.
“Look,” Emily says, putting down her spoon. She looks up at the ceiling, then back at me. “She’s gone, okay? Here’s the truth, Will. That tiny house? It’s far from here—in Portland, Oregon. Anisa and Parker? It’s real. They’re happy.”
I grapple with her words. “What are you saying?”
“I’ve helped them with social media,” she says, hanging her head. “I did some work for both of them, in the beginning. Still do occasionally.”
“No,” I say. But the look on her face—pale, mouth turned down. Shame.
“She doesn’t want anyone to know where she is. Especially you, Will. You hurt her, frightened her. That night you got arrested—you pushed her against the wall. You tried to strangle her. If it wasn’t for her neighbor breaking down the door, she said you might have killed her.”
I hear Anisa’s voice: Stop it, Will. You’re hurting me. I see the fear on her face. I was only the chaos of my rage; I couldn’t stop.
“Will,” Emily goes on. “She says it’s hard enough to be stable herself without your instability.”