Rabbits(87)

“What do you mean?”

“I have a theory,” I said as I sent the pages to my printer.

“You wanna share?”

I rushed across the room and waited for the printer to finish.

“What are you doing?”

I pulled the two pages out of the printer, pressed them together, and held them up to my dining room chandelier.

“This,” I said, and motioned Chloe over.

“Holy shit,” she said.

Set amidst the random numbers and letters that ran along the bottom of the page was one section of comprehensible text. A URL: gatewickinstitute.com “What the hell is the Gatewick Insitute?” I asked.

The two of us sat down to try to figure that out.

“Gatewick is linked to a number of obscure experimental medical research studies that took place in the seventies and eighties,” Chloe said as she scrolled through what she’d been able to dig up.

I couldn’t find anything, so I closed my computer and moved over to sit beside Chloe on the couch.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“A little.”

The last physical address Chloe had been able to find was a cluster of buildings in San Francisco, but that was way back in 1987. There was nothing current.

It looked like the Gatewick Institute had sold itself as some kind of medical research facility–slash–self-help spa retreat, promising peace of mind and body for a very reasonable price.

Along with the cluster of buildings in San Francisco, Chloe managed to uncover a handful of newspaper and magazine ads from around that time that shared a now-defunct telephone number with the Gatewick Institute. The ads were mysterious and vague. They were looking for research subjects for some kind of medical study that appeared to straddle the line between pharmaceutical well-being and new-age enlightenment.

The handful of people Chloe had been able to find connected to the institute were either dead, completely detached from the world of social media, or both.

We were just about to take a break and get something to eat when Chloe showed me a photo on her phone—a picture of a narrow red-brick-and-glass building with long uniform rows of birch trees running along concrete pathways on either side of it.

“Where is this?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry, my breathing slightly shallow and labored.

“San Francisco. One of a small cluster of buildings that belonged to the Gatewick Institute in 1982.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Darknet forum.”

“Is there any other information?” I tried to focus on the moment, to anchor myself next to Chloe on the couch, but I could feel my heart beginning to race in my chest. I took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds before exhaling.

“You recognize this place,” she said.

Forty-thirty.

“Maybe,” I lied. “I’m not sure.” I was having trouble keeping my voice level.

“Are you okay?”

Deuce.

“I’m fine.”

But my stomach felt light and empty. A few glittering stars danced around the edges of my eyes as my peripheral vision threatened to tunnel.

Advantage, McEnroe.

I looked at Chloe and followed her eyes. She was staring down at my legs where I’d been tapping out the 1992 U.S. Open fourth-round match between John McEnroe and Jim Courier.

“K, you need to tell me what the hell is going on.”

I tried to force a smile, act like everything was fine. I took four or five slow deep breaths, then got up and walked over to the closet. I reached up and removed a black-and-brown banker’s box from the top shelf.

“I’ve seen that building before,” I said as I sat back down on the couch beside Chloe and opened the box.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s everything I have left of my parents.”



* * *



—

Chloe and I had spoken about our families countless times over the years. She was aware of the ferry accident that had killed my parents, and I knew about her experiences with an alcoholic mother and a sister who was constantly on the verge of being institutionalized for an extreme personality disorder. But I’d never taken Chloe through the contents of the box. It was one thing to talk about this stuff; it was quite another to see it staring back at you in full color.

Although I hadn’t opened the box in years, my mind had cataloged everything in significant detail.

Chloe’s eyes scanned each item as I pulled it out and set it down on the coffee table. There were a number of worn, old file folders filled with papers—including birth, marriage, and death certificates—a couple of baseball and hockey trophies, Ruby’s leash and collar, a large stack of old photographs, and a bunch of other distant memories in physical form.

“Oh my god. You dress exactly the same.” She held up a picture of me in jeans and a David Bowie T-shirt.

“Settle down,” I said. I was starting to feel a bit better. Having Chloe with me as I went through this stuff helped a lot.

I opened one of the folders and flipped through a bunch of pages until I found what I was looking for. It was a picture that had been paper-clipped to a photocopy of the deed to our old house in Olympia.

“Holy shit,” Chloe said.

“Yeah. I don’t know what’s happening.”