An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(41)
I watched as Andrea Vander, with great care, counted out the exact change of her delivery order, leaving zero cents extra for a tip.
“That looks good,” I said to Ms. Vander after the delivery driver had gone. “How often do you order from there?”
“Every day,” she said.
The next day, I ordered some food from that restaurant. The same delivery driver showed up at my house, and I made her a deal. I wouldn’t say or do anything at all if Bitters showed up at my front door in the next twenty-four hours. If that didn’t happen, she could expect to see me asking questions around her neighborhood very soon.
“She’s just so awful!” the woman whined.
“Shhhh . . . ,” I advised her.
Now, look, I know this doesn’t sound very high-stakes, but Bitters was home, I got my $200, and everyone was happy.
I tell you this story because, by the age of sixteen, I considered myself something of a talented detective. And at twenty-three, I figured I must be even better. I had solved and implemented the Freddie Mercury Sequence before anyone else even knew it existed. Of course, I did that with help, but that’s part of what a good detective does. I was feeling pretty proud of myself.
So when I finally got my ass to sleep after an hour of tossing and turning, I was ready to take the Dream on headfirst. I started out by wandering through the parts of the office building I could explore, avoiding only the receptionist, who seemed to be good at waking you up.
The door to the puzzle room was one way out of the reception area, but there was maybe another: An elevator stood on the opposite wall. I hadn’t considered it at first, but if I could go into the office, why not try that?
I pushed the down button and the elevator door opened immediately. It was a normal elevator, nothing special except the number of buttons. They climbed up both sides of the door, higher than I could reach. I thought about going up, but I’d already pushed down, so instead I punched the button for the ground floor. I had already looked out the window of the building onto the peculiar city; I wanted to see if maybe I could get into it.
The elevator opened into the cavernous lobby of a fancy office building. They all look different, but they all look the same. The floor was marble; the ceiling was thirty feet up. There were tables with flower arrangements, a big desk where security and checkin would go, art on the walls, and, in the center of the room, blown up double-sized, towering over the whole thing, was Carl.
Well, that was one mystery solved. Any chance that this was a somehow-unrelated impossible mystery was gone now.
What was conspicuously absent from the whole thing was people. Office building lobbies are central stations of human activity and movement. This place looked like it had been sucked out of reality and put into some kind of museum exhibit: “Here is an example of early twenty-first-century high-rise lobby design and decor. You can see the emphasis on stonework contrasted with meticulously maintained flower arrangements. The hard and the soft, the permanent and the ephemeral, but both costly, giving those who occupied the space a sense of high-class luxury.”
In fact, I would later note that the Dream’s entire landscape looked like some kind of diorama, constructed as a place to observe, not as one to occupy.
Anyhow, I overcame the desire to explore and instead moved through the giant room and then through the door. Outside was, again, a tremendous stillness, but an assault of conflicting styles. Directly across the street was an Arby’s, but not, like, a city Arby’s smashed into a row of retail storefronts. A free-standing normal-America Arby’s surrounded by its parking lot. Next door to the Arby’s, surrounded by a swath of knee-high grass, was a wooden church-looking building. No cross capped its steeple, but the slatted wood and the double doors centered on the front of the building made the sense that it was a house of worship clear.
None of these buildings alone looked weird; they were just dramatically out of each other’s context, especially considering the massive marble lobby I had just walked out of. I turned around to look at the building. After a few years living in New York City, you look up less, but now I craned my neck up and found that as high as I could see, there was no end to the height of the building I had just exited. I kept leaning back to try to see farther. Suddenly I stumbled, and then lurched to the side, and then was awake.
My phone was ringing. It was Andy.
“Why did you wake me up, dick! I was out of the building. There’s a whole city. There’s an Arby’s!”
“Yeah, I know. Look, it’s not just us, and it’s spreading. It’s spreading fast.”
CHAPTER TEN
The sequence you solved . . . they’re calling them sequences . . . the one on the floor with the receptionist, that one’s already been solved, but it’s pretty cool that you did it on your own.”
“What? Goddamn it, Andy, you have to explain things before talking.” I was still groggy.
“The Dream, it’s full of these weird riddles and puzzles and clues. Somehow we missed it, but there are dozens of communities online talking about it already. The one you solved was the first one that got solved—no one’s sure who solved it first. It’s weird because it’s a dream and it took a while for people to realize they weren’t the only one. But now people are out in the city solving these puzzles. There’s already a wiki and a subreddit and a bunch of semiprivate chat rooms.”