Pieces of a strange conversation with a man wearing a geisha mask.
A room filled with old generators and moonlight.
And while the thought of last night carries the emotional weight of a real memory, it has the fantasy lining of a dream, or a nightmare.
What was done to me inside that old building?
Springer pulls a chair over and takes a seat beside my bed. In proximity, I can see freckles covering her face like a sprinkling of pale sand.
“Let’s talk about what you said to Dr. Randolph. He wrote down…” She sighs. “Apologies, his handwriting is atrocious. ‘Patient reports: It was my house but it wasn’t my house.’ You also said that you got the cuts and bruises on your face because people were chasing you, but when asked why they were chasing you, you couldn’t provide an answer.” She looks up from the screen. “You’re a professor?”
“Correct.”
“At…”
“Lakemont College.”
“Here’s the thing, Jason. While you were sleeping, and after we couldn’t find any trace of your wife—”
“What do you mean you couldn’t find any trace of her?”
“Her name is Daniela Dessen, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Thirty-nine years old?”
“Yeah.”
“We couldn’t find anyone with that name and age in all of Chicago.”
That levels me. I look away from Springer, back out the window. It’s so gray that even the time of day is masked. Morning, noon, evening—it’s impossible to determine. Fine droplets of rain cling to the other side of the glass.
At this point, I’m not even sure what to be afraid of—this reality that might actually be true, or the possibility that everything is going to pieces inside my head. I liked it much better when I thought everything was being caused by a brain tumor. That, at least, was an explanation.
“Jason, we took the liberty of looking you up. Your name. Profession. Everything we could find. I want you to answer me very carefully. Do you really believe you’re a physics professor at Lakemont College?”
“I don’t believe it. It’s what I am.”
“We trolled the faculty webpages for science departments in every university and college in Chicago. Including Lakemont. You weren’t listed as a professor on any of them.”
“That’s impossible. I’ve been teaching there since—”
“Let me finish, because we did find some information about you.” She types something on her tablet. “Jason Ashley Dessen, born 1973 in Denison, Iowa, to Randall and Ellie Dessen. Says here that your mother passed when you were eight. How? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“She had an underlying heart condition, caught a bad strain of the flu, which turned into pneumonia.”
“Sorry to hear that.” She continues reading. “Bachelor’s degree from University of Chicago, 1995. PhD from same university, 2002. So far so good?”
I nod.
“Awarded the Pavia Prize in 2004, and the same year, Science magazine honored your work with a cover story, calling it the ‘breakthrough of the year.’ Guest lecturer at Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley.” She looks up, meets my bewildered gaze, and then turns the tablet around so I can see that she’s reading from the Wikipedia page of Jason A. Dessen.
My sinus rhythm on the heart monitor I’m attached to has become noticeably faster.
Springer says, “You haven’t published any new papers or accepted any teaching positions since 2005, when you took on the role of chief science officer with Velocity Laboratories, a jet propulsion lab. It says finally that a missing-persons report was filed on your behalf eight months ago by your brother, and that you haven’t been seen publicly in over a year.”
This rocks me so deeply I can barely draw breath.
My blood pressure triggers some kind of alarm on the heart monitor, which begins to emit a grating beep.
A heavyset nurse appears in the doorway.
“We’re fine,” Springer says. “Could you shut that thing up?”
The nurse walks to the monitor, silences the alarm.
When he’s gone, the doctor reaches over the railing and touches my hand.
“I want to help you, Jason. I can see that you’re terrified. I don’t know what’s happened to you, and I get the feeling you don’t know either.”
The wind coming in off the lake is strong enough to blow the rain sideways. I watch as the droplets streak across the glass and blur the world beyond into an impressionistic cityscape of gray, punctuated by the glow of distant taillights, distant headlights.
Springer says, “I’ve called the police. They’re sending a detective over to take a statement from you and begin trying to get to the bottom of what happened last night. That’s the first thing we’re doing. Now, I’ve struck out trying to get in touch with Daniela, but I have been able to locate contact information for your brother, Michael, in Iowa City. I’d like to have your permission to call him and let him know that you’re here, and to discuss your condition with him.”