“Alice, I have been your best friend for a very long time, so I know the chances of you listening to me right now are basically a negative percentage, but are you sure you want to do this?”
“I have to, Soph. Petermann is hiding something, and I’ve got to figure out what. Especially now that I know Max remembers, too.” I can just make out the CDD building squatting in the distance, all dark except for blinking red alarm lights along its circular perimeter. It looks like an alien spacecraft, if the aliens had been turn-of-the-century architects. Or a giant statue of R2D2, the robot from Star Wars. I zip up my hoodie a little tighter.
“I still can’t believe he’s not coming with you,” Sophie says. “Also that he’s . . . you know. Real. Still pretty weirded out by that fact, if that’s okay.”
“He didn’t say he wasn’t coming,” I reply defensively. “He just didn’t say he was. Anyway, he’s not totally like the guy in my dreams. Although lately the guy in my dreams isn’t totally like the guy in my dreams either . . .” I think about Max’s color-changing eyes. His face separated from mine by the glass of an iPad.
“You’re giving me a headache,” Sophie says. “Sometimes when I get off the phone with you, I realize I’ve lost all sense of reality.”
“Try being me,” I tell her. I arrive at the front double doors of CDD and pull out Lillian’s ID, swiping it through a box to the right of the door handle. This is too easy. I feel like a Bond girl.
Except nothing happens.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say.
“What’s happening?” Sophie asks.
“I stole an ID from the girl at the front desk when I was here on Monday, but it isn’t scanning. She must have deactivated it already.” I continue running the ID over and over again. Nothing nothing nothing.
“Try flipping it over,” another voice suggests, and I turn to see Max standing behind me. “You’re scanning the wrong side.”
“Call you later, Soph,” I say, and hang up.
“Tell me what we’re looking for exactly?” Max asks. We’ve ascended the double staircase behind the front desk and are searching the research office, having risked turning one desk lamp on. I’m rifling through some drawers in the hopes of discovering a Post-it with a computer login, and Max is sorting through a giant wall of green metal filing cabinets.
“Us,” I say. “We are looking for us.”
“But we’re right here,” Max says with a quizzical frown, and I chuckle. He’s so literal. We are right here. And he showed up tonight. And it all feels sort of surreal.
“You know what I mean,” I say. “Our files. Names, dates we attended CDD, that sort of thing.”
Max opens a cabinet and a bunch of papers go flying to the ground. “Not the most organized institution,” he observes critically, picking up the papers and giving them a quick once-over before filing them again.
“Which makes me all the more certain Petermann was lying before about the computer updates. Why invest in something like that when you can’t be bothered to file anything in the first place?” I look to Max for his response and notice he is doing more shuffling of papers than he is reading.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Refiling,” Max says, frowning as he pulls files out and rearranges them on top of the cabinet. “These folders are all messed up. I can’t put the F back in its proper place if the E and G aren’t even where they are supposed to be.”
“Yes you can,” I warn. “And you have to, or Petermann will know we were here.”
Max looks over at me and sighs. “Fine,” he says, shoving the files back in the drawer sheepishly and opening another. Papers come flying out again, but strangely this time they don’t fall right away. They actually seem to fly up toward the ceiling, like doves that have just been let loose from a cage, before eventually floating to the ground.
Max nearly jumps. “Did you just see that?” he asks.
“Um, yes . . .” I manage, my throat a little dry. Max glances warily at the cabinets, then opens another drawer and it happens again. Like an invisible person is tossing the paper out from inside the cabinet. I watch Max peer inside and know he must be thinking the same thing. He tries a third door, but this time, nothing happens. No whirlwind of falling sheets. Just another poorly organized drawer.
“I don’t get it,” Max says.
I shiver a little. “Me either.”
“No, Alice,” Max says again, as though I haven’t understood him. “I don’t get it. Papers just flew upward toward the ceiling, and I want to know why.”
I shrug. “This place is nuts.”
But Max just stands there, his look of disbelief forming into an incredulous grin.
“What?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s this place, I think it’s you,” he says.