Down the Rabbit Hole

He looked back at her seat, half expecting her to still be there because the other scenario was too weird, but the chair canted outward exactly as if somebody had abruptly stood and ended a relationship.

She’d finished her omelet, he noted blankly. In record time. His was still half-eaten on his plate. And moments before, he’d been laughing at some joke she’d made.

Although in retrospect, maybe it wasn’t a joke.

The most damning part was that he’d thought things were going well—really well. Well to the point of thinking, Holy shit, maybe this is IT.

No so for Macy, whose thoughts apparently ran more to the Exit, stage left end of the spectrum.

He’d have said he couldn’t have been more shocked, but that was before the next thing happened.

He kept an eye on her auburn head as it moved through the crowd, and he tried to stand to go after her. Because it was ridiculous—you don’t just end a nearly seven-month relationship with an I’m outta here over brunch. Where was the explanation, the It’s not you it’s me, at least a freaking apology for potentially, maybe, possibly hurting his feelings?

But he couldn’t. Couldn’t go after her, couldn’t get out of the chair, couldn’t, in fact, do anything except grab hold of the table while the most unbelievable feeling of suction rose through his legs to his torso and up across his chest like a flood tide.

Could he be having a heart attack? He was only thirty-four! Headlines and Facebook links and Sponsor My Walkathon email pleas flooded his mind with details about unexpected deaths, early-onset illnesses, it-could-happen-to-you disasters.

He looked at the people around him, obliviously chatting and eating and sipping coffee. He glanced at the breakfast congealing on his plate, the fork quivering beside it, his coffee jumping in the cup as if electrified.

His fingers ached as they clutched the edge of the table. His body compressed in on itself—collarbone into ribs, ribs into waist, waist into hips—like a giant wave pressing down on his shoulders, squishing him into a smaller and smaller square, like the paper-covered blocks his parents used to get out of their trash compactor.

Except he got smaller still, down to a shoe box, then a milk carton, until finally . . . finally . . .

He was inhaled by his smartphone. Into his smartphone.

It was like getting flushed down a toilet, or being sucked out an airplane window at thirty-five thousand feet.

He could only tell what was happening because, while everything else shrank, the cell phone got bigger and bigger, eventually looming like a skyscraper in front of him, until finally he was drawn into its center, tumbling down a darkened hallway until he ended up where he was now: an enormous cubicle-filled room.

The carpet beneath his feet was of the gray industrial type, the exact shade and texture of the cubicle walls, which were fabric with thick plastic supports. They were just like the cube he’d had in his first job out of college as a copyeditor. He tipped his head to look into the one directly in front of him. Just like those at his first job, a desktop wrapped the inside of three of the walls, a rolling chair in front of it. There appeared to be nothing else there, no computer, no printer, no in-or outbox, no paper, pen, nothing. It was a brand-new cube waiting for a brand-new employee.

It was so far from the sunny café patio, from the clatter of plates and the honking of horns, the slamming of car doors and the passing of pedestrians, the exodus of Macy . . . that he thought he must have passed out and be dreaming.

Except it didn’t feel like a dream.

For a moment the floor seemed to dip beneath his feet. Then he remembered to breathe, and shoved aside the ache in the center of his chest brought on by the thought of Macy. His hand reached for the phone holster at his belt and found it empty.