CHAPTER 28
Back alone in my room with the doors shut and locked, I took Dr. Ahuja’s sleeping pills when I felt like I needed a break — they were like pushing a button — and I would wake into new light, my phone on my chest.
I turned my head on the pillow and watched the betta fish and wondered if he was somehow changing colors. Now he looked a plasmotronic blue as if he’d changed color for a different segment of life, and he went up and down in the corner of his tank, fighting his reflection. A jet’s thrust reversers rattled the balcony doors, the sounds of the womb to me, and another gray day trying to leak through the shears, and I thought, Is the day ending or beginning? I’d become jetlagged inside a hotel room.
I was thinking “jetlag” when something on the other bed moved, a lump of a human beneath the covers, and somehow my mind already knew it was Ursula. She was on her side facing the wall, the shimmering light from the aquarium undulating on the comforter over her body, and I had some vague recollection of the happiness of seeing her last night. Ursula is here.
On the bedside table were a martini glass with two dead cranberries and my bottle of sleeping pills.
I whispered, “Ursula?” and wondered why I was whispering if I wanted to wake her. “Ur!”
She rolled, squinted at me, and immediately squeezed the button on her watch to stop it. “What?” she said, eyes swollen from sleep.
“What are you doing here?”
“Sleeping, dumbass.” She rolled back toward the wall, and I heard the watch beep again.
“Are you really here?”
“Are you really here?” She didn’t turn over to see me, only took a deep breath, and her voice reflected off the wall. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”
Her watch beeped again, and she rolled over to see me, then checked the time.
“A little bit.”
“I found you downstairs,” she said.
“You’re lying.”
“You were at the bar. I’m extremely pissed at you, by the way.”
“At the bar?” I pulled up memories that were like dreams. “Elizabeth doesn’t know about this, does she?” I asked. “Did she see me?”
“No, but you were quite the hit there in your pajamas. It’s freezing in here.” She pulled the cover tighter over her head. “Why did you invite me here?” she said. “Do you even want me here?”
“Yes, of course I want you here.” I had a dull alcohol headache.
She rolled her eyes and pulled the covers over her mouth; she was only eyes and a nose. The empty martini glass sat on the bedside table, sugar around the rim reminding me of the night with Franni from Mount Unpleasant.
“There’s a front coming, an ugly storm,” she said, words veiled, her lips beneath the fabric. She reached a hand out and picked the brown pill bottle and shook. “Look, don’t take this shit.”
“I know,” I said. “I just—”
“No, you don’t know,” she said. “I mean, it knocks you out, and, you know, erases your memory. You don’t want to be that deep asleep. Ever.”
She got out of the covers, slammed the bottle down and it bounced on the floor. She said, “Too many people take these. You don’t want to be that out.”
“Aliens aren’t coming to take me.”
She had on that worn-out fake jersey with the peeling “20.” She put her feet on the floor so she was facing me, had on gray cutoff sweatpants. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. “You believe what you believe. In a weird way, I can completely understand why you do this. It makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”
“Feel good? To live in constant fear it’s going to happen tonight?” she said. She got back under the comforter.
“If someone could snap their fingers,” I said, “and make it never happen to you again, would you do it?”
She thought about it. “No.”
“But you’re scared all the time.”
“Like a cat on a windy day,” she said.
“Ur, just don’t get hypnotized. Okay?” Almost all the abductees she read about got hypnosis to supposedly regain memories. They only engrained false memories. She had read this too, but I still wanted to make sure.
“Did I say I was fucking getting hypnotized?”
“Stop cussing so much. It just means you don’t know how to express yourself.”
“Jesus, I’m freezing,” she said.
Her fingers were holding the covers beneath her chin as she ceiling-stared, and she said, “I wish you would just open your mind for once. I have several floating experiences I remember, I mean when I was a kid. I remember flying over the woods, seeing the highway. I literally have seen the V wake of snakes swimming in the river at night, moonlight reflecting on the water. They aren’t dreams.”
“Ur, we literally grew up thinking there was a spaceship crashed in the swamp, or wanting to believe it. We were kids. I think we liked to believe. We liked to watch the movie and believe an alien was in the swamp. I think you’re just doing that now.”
“The Creature,” she corrected me.
She waited until everything was completely quiet and still in the room and she said, “They took my eggs.”
“Stop it.”
“They did.”
“No, Ur, you’re just trying to find a reason for why you are the way you are, you know. . ”
“Barren, you mean?” she said.
“That was because of the cyst, or related to it,” I said and watched her shift beneath the covers. “I’m speaking honestly, okay. We all remember when you had that problem.” Ursula, since she was fourteen and had the cyst removed and the doctor told her that she’d probably never have children, always openly declared herself barren. She had always said it as if she just wanted to get over it.
“But why did I have a cyst?” she asked.
“Look, forget that for a second. I really think Triple Zero affected you. I know nothing happened on that flight, and when nothing happened, that triggered something in your mind. You wanted something to happen.”
She got up and went over and grabbed a new Adidas jacket from the chair and put it on. The tag stuck out of the collar, and she walked around and sat on the bed across from me. Her eyes moved back and forth from my right eye to my left, inspecting me, and there was a part of me that wanted to put my hands on the side of her face and pull her and kiss her. I had promised myself to do this.
“Are you lucid?” she asked. This close, I could smell her, and I had a flash of the house in Sopchoppy, the taste of fresh river water and then the salt of the gulf.
“You think I’m crazy?” she said. “You’re the one who thinks God is sending you text messages.”
“What?”
She nodded.
“What else did I tell you?”
“You said it was a hacker too and it’s all related to Charles’s discovery.”
“I told you about Charles?”
“Yes,” she said. She paced and pulled the elastic band out of her hair and casually said, “And conveniently can’t you show me this conversation?”
“Whoever it is makes the texts disappear.”
“What a fine predicament,” she said. “You think I’m crazy, and I think you’re crazy for believing anything Van Raye says. He’s got that Southern mouth of a liar, you know.” She spread her mouth thin with her fingers. “You know, Southern liars all got a thinness, a shape.”