Passenger(41)

I open my mouth to say that’s not necessary but what comes out is, “Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

For the first time she smiles.

There, says a small voice at the back of my head. You wanted to know what pretty looks like and now you do.





SIXTEEN





I am dreaming of an endless winding highway. I am a shadow, a faceless figure, shambling down the center of the roadway. A cool breeze overtakes me. There stirs an itching at the base of my skull, where my neck meets my cranium. My fingers rub at it, soft at first, then with mounting vigor. Soon, I am clawing at the scar at the back of my head with both hands. I pull my hands away only after I feel a wetness seep down the back of my neck, dampening the collar of my shirt. My hands are red with blood and there are bits of flesh and hair beneath my fingernails. But this does not stop me from my task, and I am quickly digging at the hole opening at the back of my head once again, furious now, blood spilling down my back and pooling on the blacktop at my feet. I dig at the scar until it splits open like a mouth; I grab the lips and part it, hearing it tear like brittle cloth, and peel and peel and peel the skin away from a skull of fused metal and titanium screws, of gears and cogs and the motorized whir of some invisible machine.

I wake, startled. It takes a moment for me to assemble the events of that day. Just as I see the haunting silhouette of a petite young woman standing over me, I remember where I am. Still, my breath catches in my throat. I sit up from the sofa, my neck stiff.

“Hey,” I croak, my voice rusty with sleep.

“I’ve been thinking,” Nicole whispers. In a knee-length white gown, she looks like a specter, a phantom. Maybe I’m still dreaming…

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been thinking,” Nicole whispers, “about the notebook.”

My brain still cloudy with sleep, I say, “The notebook? What about it?”

“We should stop writing in it. We should get rid of it, even. Destroy it.”

“Why?”

“Because if you were meant to write all this stuff down, you’d already have notebooks. You know—from the other times you’ve started to remember.”

“Nicole, I don’t understand…”

“What if you’re not supposed to write this stuff down? What if you’re not supposed to remember the stuff all at once?”

“That’s ridiculous…”

“Then why haven’t you left notebooks for yourself in the past?”

“Maybe I just didn’t think of it.”

“You thought of it tonight.”

“I thought of it after talking to you. Which I haven’t done before. So I think everything’s fine. It’s okay.”

“No,” she insists. “I think we should get rid of the notebook. Just in case.”

I ease back down on the sofa and drape an arm over my eyes. “Whatever you think is best.”

In the morning, Nicole is showered and dressed and waiting for me to get up from the sofa. She sits across the room in a chair with a plate of sliced fruit on her lap. She is in her post office uniform.

“Hey,” I say. “Been staring at me long?”

“Do you—remember?”

“Nothing has changed. I made it through the night.”

“Good.” She sets the plate of fruit on the chest and rises, grabbing a coat from a peg on the wall. “There’s coffee and some fruit in the fridge.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have to go to work.”

“Where’s the notebook?”

She looks instantly sad standing with her hand on the doorknob. “It’s on the counter by the coffee. I didn’t throw it out. Although I think you should consider it. There’s a reason you never wrote to yourself before, uh…uh…”

“What is it?”

Half her mouth curls up in a grin. “Nothing. Just sounds like a name should go there.”

She leaves.

“You are a peculiar young lady,” I say to the empty apartment.





*





It is midday by the time I step out of Nicole’s building. The sun is overly bright, brutalizing my eyes. My first destination is the library once again. This time, at a computer terminal, I type in the exact headline from Nicole’s article, baltimore man struck by city bus, and search through countless online newspaper databases. When I locate the article—and it is the exact article—I find the date of the accident was August 31 of last year.

August 31.

Struck by city bus.

Somehow knowing the exact day is disturbing. I sit for a long time, staring with a blank expression at the computer monitor, not moving. Kids with knapsacks strapped to their shoulders filter in through the front doors of the library, noisy in their quietness.

I search other local papers on that same date and read the varying accounts of my accident. All write-ups are brief, cursory, as unimportant as one man in a large American city can be, but there is one quote that disturbs me. Some elderly man, some unnamed eyewitness on the scene, says, “He just walked out into the street like it was on purpose.”

Like it was on purpose, I think. Like I saw the bus and walked out into the street on purpose.