Meanwhile, the person who’d taken my life for a day—they said they bounced from body to body, day after day. I didn’t know how to believe that. I had more questions.
But then that person was gone, too. And I was left with this blank space where a day of my life used to be.
But blank is never really blank. Take a blank sheet of paper. Yeah, there’s no writing on it. Nothing for you to read. But then hold it really close. Stare at it for a long time. You’ll start to see patterns there. You’ll start to see shapes and gradations and distortions. Hold it up to the light and you’ll see even more. You’ll see a whole topography within the blankness. And sometimes, if you look really carefully, you’ll start to see a word.
For me, that word was Rhiannon.
I had no idea what it meant. I had no idea why I was remembering it. But it was there in the depth of the blank space.
The next part was easy. There were only three Rhiannons within a fifty-mile radius. One of them was near my age. And she looked familiar, though I couldn’t have explained why.
The hard part was figuring out what to do with this information. I had no idea what I would say to her. I remember you but I don’t understand why. That sounded weird. And I was tired of having everyone look at me like I was weird.
But now here I am. I’ve come over to her house, because not going over to her house was killing me. I ring her doorbell. And from the minute she sees me, she knows exactly who I am.
I’m not prepared for that.
I’m also not prepared for everything she tells me, and how easily she says it. It’s almost like she’s grateful to tell me what she knows, like I’m the one doing her the favor. But I’m just as grateful. All along, we’ve been partners at the jigsaw, and it’s only now that we’re realizing how some of the pieces fit. She’s telling me the person who talked to me, the person who took that day from me and lived my life before leaving me at the side of the road, is named A. I tell her that, yeah, I met A two days in a row, when he/she was calling himself/herself Andrew and was in the bodies of two different girls, two days in a row. Rhiannon doesn’t seem surprised. But I’m damn surprised to be talking to someone who hears what I have to say and believes all of it. Rhiannon tells me A was really sorry about what happened with me—and from the way she apologizes on A’s behalf, I realize that, whoa, she is totally in love with this person who goes from body to body. The hole A’s left in her life is even bigger than the one in mine. I lost a day. She’s lost more than that.
“You must think I’m crazy,” she says to me when she’s done.
How can I convey to her that I’ve had the same thought about a million times over the past couple months? How can I get across that when weird things—when really weird things—happen to you, it suddenly opens you up into believing all these other really weird things could be true?
“I think what happened to us is crazy,” I tell her. “But that’s not us.”
I fill her in on the parts I know—about how Reverend Poole said I’d been possessed by the devil, and that there were other people who’d had the same thing happen to them all around the world. He told me I wasn’t alone, which was the thing I most wanted to hear. The whole time, though, he was using me—and when I finally figured that out, he turned on me. He said I had no idea what I was involved in. He told me I’d ruined my only chance of knowing what was wrong with me. I’d have no future, because part of me would always be stuck in the past.
I’m sixteen years old. Having an adult yell these things at me was hard, even as I also felt it was, you know, wrong. He was the only person who’d believed me, and because of that, I’d believed him in return. But now I couldn’t. Because what he was doing was cursing me.
I didn’t know what to say. I guess I thought I’d have another chance, that he’d come back and we’d talk it over. I thought he was getting something out of helping me. But as I said, he was just using me. Once he was gone, that was it.
I tell all this to Rhiannon as we sit at her kitchen table.
“You haven’t heard from him at all?” she asks.
I shake my head, then ask back, “And you haven’t heard from A?”
I can see how much it hurts her to say no. I’ll be honest—I’ve never had a girlfriend, and I’ve definitely never been in love. But I’ve been around enough people in love to know what one of them looks like. A’s disappeared, but her love hasn’t.
“A has to be out there somewhere,” I say.
“I’m sick of waiting,” she responds.
“Then let’s look,” I tell her.
There has to be a way.
X
To stay in a body, you must take that body over.
To take a body over, you must kill the person inside.
It is not an easy thing to do, to assert your own self over the self that exists in the body, to smother it until it is no longer there. But it can be done.
I stare down at the body in the bed. It is rare for me to have done so much damage, so I’m fascinated by the result. The regular response to a dead body is to close its eyes, but I prefer them open. That way I can study what’s missing.
Here is the face I have seen in the mirror for the past few months. Anderson Poole, age fifty-eight. When I look into his eyes, they are only eyes, no more expressive than his dead fingers or his dead nose. The first time this happened, I thought there would be an aftercurrent of life—some element to enable the feeble and the desperate to believe that the spirit that had once been inside was now somewhere else, instead of completely annihilated. But all I see is utter emptiness.
There is no reason for me to be here. At any moment, the hotel management will overrule the DO NOT DISTURB sign and come in to find the reverend in a state far beyond disturbance. He died of natural causes, the inquest will conclude. His mind failed. The rest of the body followed.
Nobody will know I was here. Nobody will know that the mind failed because I cut the wires.
It was time to move on. I was getting bored. Anderson Poole was no longer useful.
I am in a younger body now. A college student who will not be attending class much longer. I feel stronger in this body. More attractive. I like that. Nobody ever looked at Anderson Poole as he walked down the street. It was his position as a reverend that they revered. That was the reason they listened to him.
“You came so close,” I say to him, my new hand closing his left eye, then opening it again. “You almost had him. But you scared him away.”
Poole does not respond; I am not expecting him to.
The phone rings. No doubt the front desk, giving him one last chance.