Chapter 4
Being dead hadn't been particularly
difficult, but John found slipping back into his old life to be almost too
easy. After a week spent cooped up in
his new apartment, catching up with society and trying to ignore the specter of
his forgotten fiancé, he returned to work.
Thirteen years ago he had earned a
position with Cohen and Associates, Philadelphia's premier architecture
firm. Now, thanks to their long and
fruitful working relationship with the U.S. military, C&A was welcoming
John back with open arms.
He took a cab on his first day
back, and spent some time on the sidewalk staring up at the façade of the Cohen
& Associates office. It seemed to be
made of one mass polished mirror, just like SkyCrest. At each floor was a ledge studded with modern
art, all wrought in what appeared to be glass.
Cetacean forms leapt and writhed from the wall, warping the light that
passed through them into an infinite array of hues that lit up the
sidewalk. Old memories inundated John,
years spent coming to this building, hopes for a future coming together. But now he saw the dark spots, the little
bits the memories seemed to leave out.
As he looked at the incomplete picture of his life, he realized this
must be where Lucy dwelt, the unknown shadow now haunting his past.
He hurried inside.
There was a meet-and-greet, the
president of the firm showing off his prodigal architect to the current
employees. Most, John didn't
recognize. A few he remembered, and
spent several minutes catching up with, finding out how things had changed.
One surprised him: a short woman
with an auburn bob-cut.
“Alice!” John embraced her when she introduced
herself. “I haven’t seen you since
college! How long have you been
here."
She smiled sheepishly. “I sorta got your job after you left everyone
hanging.”
They caught up while everyone else
drifted away and got back to work. John
tried to find out something about Lucy, but Alice knew little beyond her name
and general appearance.
Their conversation was winding down
when Alice said, "If you don't mind me asking... what happened? I now there was a car accident, but the
higher-ups are keeping everything quiet."
John swallowed. He didn't like talking about the accident,
but the sooner he could get it behind him, the better.
“I was in a--my brother's term
here--permanent vegetative state. Beyond
that, my ID got switched with the Army colonel who rammed me going the wrong
way on the freeway. When he died, they
put John Donalson on the death certificate.”
"Wow."
"And after I came out of it a
few months ago, I let them know who I was.
Since then they've been bending over backwards to ensure I don't
sue."
Alice smiled. "Well, that's one win for our litigious
society!"
They both got to work after
that. John learned is way around the new
modeling software, experimenting on a digital copy of SkyCrest Tower: changing
its height, manipulating its structure, playing with its composition. He got a feel for it, but kept the file
around as a personal project, his own private SkyCrest to remake in his image.
After work he went home, had dinner
with Reggie and Rachel, then spent the rest of the evening online, looking for
Lucy. Right away he found an old photo
gallery, thousands of pictures of a young woman: pale, dark haired, her face
dominated by a large, hooked nose. In
most of the pictures, kissing the woman, hugging her, just being happy with her…
was John.
Night after night John stared at
the pictures, wondered at the phantom woman and the phantom life they might
have had. At first it was just morbid
curiosity: who was she? Then it was an
existential search: why didn't he remember her?
In the end it was an obsession.
She had no place in his mind, caused no feelings of fondness, but now he
could see where she had been, could sense her absence in his memories. Like an itch he couldn't scratch, she
tormented him.
Once, he almost made contact with
her. Shortly after discovering the photo
gallery he had found a public
profile. There was a more recent photo
of an older woman, still recognizable as Lucy, still a stranger. Below her image was a phone number.
Just one call and John felt he
could make peace with her, could let her go.
He was ready to make the call.
He dialed, the phone rang, and he
hung up. Whoever Lucy was, she had loved
him, had grieved for him. Tearing open
old wounds for his peace of mind would be cruel.
"No, you should call her,"
Reggie opined. "You'll feel better
once you make peace with this element of your past. At least that's what my patients always tell
me."
But John couldn't make the
call. He would hold out, and hope she'd
fade away.
Weeks passed.
Rachel moved to California for the
summer.
John was brought on board a team
project at work, designing a bunker pulling double duty as a presidential bomb
shelter and medical research. After a
month of working on it, he and the team were flown out to a developing suburb
in Oklahoma to consult on the construction.
As John stood atop a pile of red dirt, looking down into the abyss that
he had had a hand in making, he felt content.
He was finally where he belonged, seeing the labor of his mind becoming
reality.
He could almost be happy...
Except for Lucy.
Two months after learning of her
existence, he still spent his evenings sitting on the couch, transfixed by
Lucy's phone number glowing on the television screen. If he didn't get this over with, she'd always
haunt him... always be a missing memory scratching at his mind.
He gestured at the screen and a low
intermittent buzzing started up. There
was just enough time for him to realize that technically, he was
haunting her, when the buzzing stopped and a high voice said, “Hello?”
John swallowed. “Uh, yes, uh... Could I speak to Lucille Dawkins, please?”
“Speaking.”
“Ahhh...” He wasn't ready for this. “This is John.”
“John who?” She sounded distracted.
“Okay, please don't hang up, I know
this is going to sound weird—”
“Saying that guarantees I'm going
to hang up.”
There was no time to turn
back. “This is John Donalson.”
There was a long moment of
silence. “Yeah, I'm going to hang up
now.”
She's giving me a way out, John
thought. Take it, take it. “I'm not dead.”
There was another long
silence. “You might think this is funny,
but I don’t. If you don't hang up right now, I'm going to go
in the other room and let you speak to my boyfriend; he's a cop.” Her voice was strong, but there were enough
little hitches in it that John knew she still had feelings for him.
He should have stayed dead for
her.
“I'm really not dead. I just—I just needed to tell you that, to try
to move on—”
“You have video?”
The abrupt change caught John
off-guard for a moment. She wanted to
see him—she believed him.
“Yeah, let me just—”
“If you're doing something weird, I
swear I'm—”
John activated video, and a small
mirror image of himself appeared in the lower corner of the screen.
A low gasp echoed through the
room. “Shit!”
John swallowed again.
“How did you—You can't—they said
that you were—”
“I was mislabeled in the ER.”
Lucy didn't respond for a
moment. Then the screen changed, a face
blinking into existence: black curls framing a pointed face with a thick nose
and wide eyes, just like in the photos.
“Oh, my God, John, I...” Her
voice remained calm but her eyelids began to twitch with emotion. “How long?
Why didn't you call? I would've
come to see you...” She was beginning to
sound hurt.
John chewed his lip and stared at
Lucy, at this woman who was supposedly such a big part of his life. And... he felt nothing. She was a stranger. “I didn't remember you.” As soon as the words were out, he felt a huge
rush of relief. He had done his duty to
her, told her he was alive and that there was nothing between them.
She shook her head, not
understanding.
“I was brain-dead for ten
years. I guess things... things didn't
stay right in there.”
“Why'd you call then?” Definitely hurt.
“Reggie mentioned you. I just...
I needed to give you a goodbye.”
She closed her eyes and
nodded. “Thank you, I... thanks.” She looked away, then back at whatever screen
she was talking to. “I'm, uh, I'm
getting married. In about a year. I hope you don't mind.”
John opened his mouth, tried to
find words, shrugged. “Yeah, I'm... I'm
good.”
Lucy sniffed and smiled. “I still don't believe you, you know, but...
but this felt right. So... Thanks, I
guess.”
“Yeah.”
They held eye contact for ten more
seconds, then both hung up.
John relaxed into the couch and
sighed. The scratching was gone...
The phone blared, jerking John out
of the sofa, blinking wildly. Lucy's
number was on the screen. John connected
the call, still as video.
“Lucy?”
“Shut the fuck up and listen.” It wasn't Lucy. A young man stared out of the screen, tan,
with close cropped brown hair poking up from a gaunt face, the skull bulging
against the confines of the skin. “I
don't know who the hell you are, and I don't care, but if you call again I will
find you and I will fucking kill you.”
The call ended.
John blinked and stared at the
blank screen, unsure of what had just happened.
He assumed this man was Lucy's boyfriend. A mysterious call, an emotional fiancé;
surely giving some kind of protective threat made sense. John didn't begrudge him that.
What didn't make sense, though, was
that while John had no memory of Lucy, he felt sure he knew this man.
So now Lucy was no longer an
enigma, and she left John's mind... Only to be replaced by this strange man.
