Awake Page 5

  According to my memory, I had stopped adding to the album following Melissa's death; the last item I remembered putting into it was the newspaper clipping of her accident.

  As I opened up the album and thumbed through it, everything appeared in order.

  Indeed, the newspaper clipping was still there (Late Night Collision Claims Three Lives), but there was more, beyond it, additional photographs that I of course had no memory of having taken.

  Some of these were even dated, as electronic cameras sometimes do, and the dates were all dates following Melissa's death.

  Most of the photographs seemed to be taken on vacation, as they were shots of us at various tourist destinations. Many of the places in the photographs I recognized; others, I did not. In some, I did recognize the locations but they weren't from my world, but from the world where Melissa and Lynne still lived.

  There were a good two dozen photographs in all, and as I was reaching the end of the album something caught my eye. It was a subconscious thing, and I nearly didn't return to the photograph.

  The photograph in question was a crowd shot; Melissa and I together in a crowd of other apparent tourists, smiling at the camera.

  Actually, there seemed to be two photographs in this series; there was the one of me and Melissa smiling at the camera from the crowd; the other seemed to be an alternate angle of that same shot, and in this photograph, Melissa and I could be seen, along with the person who had taken our picture in the first shot:

  The photographer was my favorite police investigator, Officer Thomas.

  I shook the album with trembling hands. As I did so Melissa came into the living room, rubbing her eyes and yawning. “Morning hon,” she said. “Is there any coffee?”

  “Hi Melissa,” I said, and I sounded pretty calm. “Sorry, I forgot to put it on. I'll do it in a sec.”

  “No worries,” she said. “I'll put it on.” She wandered into the kitchen.

  I put the album back into the shelf of drawers and headed into the kitchen.

  “How'd you sleep?” Melissa asked as she poured water into the coffee maker.

  “I guess pretty well,” I said. “Seems like I was asleep for hours. Plus, I fell asleep in one place and woke up in another.”

  She laughed. “You were so tired! We were visiting Lynne and you just fell asleep on her couch. You don't remember us coming back here?”

  “I don't, not really,” I said.

  “I woke you up and we headed back. Had a nice detour in the bedroom.”

  “Did we now?” I said. I wasn't sure how to approach this conversation. “Weird I can't remember it...am I taking sleep medication?” That shit didn't work on me, but who knew how things worked in this crazy opposite world I seemed to live in.

  “I think you did,” she answered. “Oh, those medications can cause a kind of amnesia, can't they?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said. “Hey, I want to get something to show you.”

  “Sure,” she said. The coffee had begun brewing. “I'm going into the living room.”

  “I'll follow you,” I said. She made her way to the couch; I pulled the photo album from the chest of drawers and turned to the last page. I showed it to her. “Do you know this guy?” I said, pointing to the photograph of Thomas taking our picture.

  She looked at it. “No, I don't think so,” she said. “Although he looks familiar to me...that's odd.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It's all very odd.” “He looks familiar to you?”

  Melissa frowned. “He does, but more in that 'haven't I seen you somewhere' kind of way, you know?”

  “This was a good trip,” I said.

  “Yes, it was,” she said with a smile. “I'm surprised we had the energy to go outside. That was a nice hotel room we had.”

  “Yeah it was,” I said absently. I sat down, and thumbed the album to the page with the newspaper clipping about Melissa's death.

  “Do you remember this?” I asked her.

  Melissa looked at it. “You kept the newspaper clipping about it? How could I forget the night Lynne was killed?”

  “That was really sad,” I said. Lynne? In my world, and to my memory, Lynne had died much younger and under very different circumstances. I quickly looked at the newspaper clipping. It was essentially the story as I remembered it, with the exception that Melissa's name had been replaced with Lynne's. “But we just saw her last night,” I said. “So this is kind of impossible.”

  Melissa closed the book. “It was sad in your world, yes,” she said. “I know it hit you almost as hard as my own death did.”

  “You say that so casually,” I said. “You know, from my standpoint, I seem to have gone crazy with all of this.”

  “There is an explanation,” Melissa said. “There is a reason this is happening. But does that really matter? We're together again.”

  “It's all a bit much to take,” I said. I stood up. “I'll be right back, I'm getting something to drink, do you want anything?”

  “Another cup of coffee would be great,” she said. I took her mug and headed into the kitchen. I grabbed a soda out of the refrigerator (a Crystal Pepsi, I was amused to see) and took her steaming mug back to the living room.

  She was gone.

  “Melissa?” I called out. “Where'd you go?”

  No response to that, either. I put her mug down on the coffee table (I would notice, later, that my Crystal Pepsi had become a Diet Cherry Pepsi) and headed into the bedroom.

  The bed was its typical mess of sheets and blankets, but she wasn't there, nor was she in the bathroom.

  There didn't seem to be any evidence that she had been here at all.

  This obviously sent my poor mind into a tail spin as it was already reeling from too much exposure to the crazy reality it had been exposed to.

  The photo album we had been looking at remained on the couch; I opened it up and wasn't all that surprised to find it had returned to “normal,” whatever that meant, with the proper newspaper clipping of Melissa's accident.

  It was as if all of these realities were colliding together, fragments of these parallel worlds pushing themselves into my own world – or into my mind.

  For the moment, I had to wonder if things had returned to normal – or as normal as they could be.

  I went around the house again, looking at photographs and through my yearbook to see what was represented there; everything seemed fine, in the sense that there were no weird pictures from situations I had no recollection participating in.

  I headed back into the living room and turned on the television; my channel line-up was back to normal as well, with the usual nonsense I was expecting.

  * * *

  For the next several days, life seemed to have returned to normal, and I was convinced that everything had been an incredibly vivid dream, borne out of prolonged sleep deprivation; each day I checked the photo albums, thumbed through the yearbook and turned on the television to verify that my world was back in order, and that dead loved ones were not making a return appearance in my life.

  Grieving is a deeply personal thing, and each of us do it differently; I had thought I had done all of my grieving, for both the end of my marriage and for Melissa's unexpected death.

  Perhaps I hadn't finished after all; the dreams certainly seemed to indicate that I was still dealing with issues of loss and my apparent need to have Melissa back – or someone else in my life, although I knew no one could ever replace her.

  I had even tried imagining one of those portals into existence, and to my deep relief nothing came of it. Although it did seem that during one attempt I thought I heard that breakfast cereal crinkling sound, but when I opened my eyes there was no accompanying shimmering of light as the fabric of reality was bent and reshaped into something else.

  So, in those days of seeming normality, I resumed my usual routine, and was spending a lot of time in the garden due to the unexpected appearance of actual sunshine that lasted for several days.

/>   In life, of course, things rarely go as we expect them to.

  One minute you can be in the garden, watering the plants, and in the next minute, being hauled away to face punishment for a crime you had no memory of committing.

  CHAPTER SIX

  As was becoming habit, I blasted music through my iPod as I gardened, and because of this I didn't hear the sirens.

  With my peripheral vision I did see the flashing lights.

  I had been weeding a particularly difficult patch of grass when I noticed the lights; I turned off the iPod and turned towards the front of the house; I could see three police cars pulling up, and behind the squad cars, a Humvee.

  Uniformed officers poured from the cars; from the Humvee emerged several men in suits, the off-the-rack kind you see and immediately forget.

  One of the men was dressed in a nice suit, and it definitely was not an off-the-rack model.

  That man was Officer Thomas.

  He approached me and motioned with his hand for the uniformed to stop. “Are you Charles Matheson?” he asked.

  “Hello, Officer Thomas,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

  At that Thomas looked at me and appeared as if he was about to speak. Instead he showed me a badge. It had his picture and identified him as J. THOMAS, SPECIAL INVESTIGATOR, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. “I'm with the Department of Defense. Are you the Charles Matheson that served in the Air Force, 1987 - 1981? Enlisted grade of E-5?”

  “I'm not,” I said, and wondering why Thomas was acting so odd. “What's this all about?”

  “Sir, we received an anonymous tip that the man the Department of Defense had a record of going absent without leave in 1991 is in fact you.”

  “Your informant was mistaken, apparently,” I said.

  Thomas motioned for one of the uniformed officers, who approached holding a file folder. He handed it to Thomas. Thomas produced from it photographs. He handed me one. “That isn't you?”

  I looked at the photograph. It was indeed a photograph of me, in Air Force dress blues.

  “That's me,” I said. “But I never served in the military.” I handed him back the photograph.

  Thomas looked at the photo, and then at the others, and then back at me. “You're in all of these photographs,” he said.

  “That may be true, and I'm sure you know just how easy it is to create photographic fakes.”

  “Is this your Social Security number?” he asked, stating the digits.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Born in Cleveland, Ohio?”

  “Yes again,” I said.

  “I'm going to need to take you in for questioning,” Thomas said, almost apologetically. “We can get this cleared up quickly.”

  “What if I refuse to go?” I said. “And I'd need to have my attorney present.”

  Thomas said. “Mr. Matheson, you're not being arrested. Those photographs could possibly be fakes, although I pulled them from your microfiche, so it seems unlikely. Let's just get to the bottom of this, and if it's a scam, we'll let you go and go after whoever it was that did this. Okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Let's go. Where are we going?”

  “I have a temporary office at the federal building downtown,” Thomas said. “We can talk there.”

  “What's with all of these officers?” I asked.

  “Our informant had said you might be dangerous and carrying a weapon,” Thomas replied. “Follow me.”

  I did. We headed to the Humvee, surrounded by several of the uniformed officers.

  Thomas held open the back door; I climbed into the vehicle. He shut it and sat in the front passenger seat. We sped off.

  * * *

  Traffic was heavy and it took almost an hour to reach downtown and the federal building. During the drive Thomas said nothing; he had asked if I wanted to hear anything on the radio, and when I said yes, he put it onto a classical music station.

  During the ride my mind was trying to understand, without much success, exactly what was happening, and why it was my apparent nemesis was being so nice.

  He acted as if we had never met before; if he was bullshitting he was doing a great job of being convincing.

  We arrived downtown and pulled into a parking garage. Within a few moments we parked. If the other vehicles had followed us, they hadn't gone as far as this parking structure. It was just me, Thomas, and the driver; as we headed into the building, I could see that both Thomas and the driver were armed.

  Inside we passed through a security checkpoint, including metal detector (Thomas and the driver were just waved through). We eventually entered into a small office which screamed GOVERNMENT. A man at the front desk wearing a headset, answering calls; a couple of other individuals at desks looking busy with paperwork.

  Thomas led me towards the back of the office and to a door with a sign that read simply J. THOMAS. He opened the door to a small office which consisted mainly of a large desk and a couple of chairs. The walls were bare aside from one box which contained a folded U.S. Flag and several ribbons and medals. Thomas saw I was looking at it and said, “My shadow box. When I retired from the Air Force.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “Do you want something to drink? The coffee is hot but not very good. There's a soda machine down the hall.”

  “Whatever you're having,” I said cautiously.

  “Couple of Cokes then,” he said. “I'll be right back.” And with that he left the office.

  Obviously, things had reached a crescendo of bizarre.

  There wasn't much to look at in the office other than the shadow box. There was a small computer monitor on the desk, with keyboard and mouse, and a desktop computer next to the desk.

  Actually, there was something else on the desk, a photograph in a frame. I glanced at it. It was a younger Thomas in military uniform, along with a group of about 10 other men. As I was straining to get a closer look the door opened.

  I glanced over and Thomas had returned, although inexplicably he had changed his suit. No, upon closer inspection it seemed to be the same suit, but the tie was a different color. He also seemed to have lost 10 pounds in the past two minutes.

  “Our missing airman,” he said with a smile. “And here you didn't think I had any jurisdiction in your world.”

  To that I had no response, although the look on my face must have been hilarious as Thomas began to laugh. “Nice to see you too, Matheson. To coin a shitty pun, there are parallels between your world and mine, and one of those is that people on your world exist in mine. So, impersonating your world's version of me was pretty damn easy.”

  All I could manage was, “But...”

  “Don't worry about the J. Thomas of your world. I've put him somewhere...safe, for the time being. And if you cooperate, I'll see that he's returned to here unharmed, and none the wiser for what happened.”

  “What do you want,” I sighed.

  “What do I want?” Thomas said. “Why, to make sure that you die. What else?”

  “Whatever happened to your family, however much you might think I'm responsible, I'm not, and I think deep down you know it. It was an accident, a freak of nature.”

  “You can think that all you want,” Thomas said, “and maybe you're right. Maybe you're not. I'm still going to see that you fry. In my world you went AWOL during a military conflict, and in my world the penalty for that is execution. We don't take kindly to war deserters.”

  “I think you know that wasn't me, either.”

  Thomas laughed. “You know, that identi-chip in your head isn't just proof of your citizenship, all of your military records are stored in it. Those chips are unique, like a fingerprint. How would you explain to anyone how it came to be implanted into your skull? And even if someone believed you, the chips also include a DNA marker, which means a quick blood test would be enough to show that it's the real thing. The chips can't be counterfeited.”

  “So what are you going to do, Thomas? Just kill me?”
/>
  “I'm going to turn you over to the military police. They'll be the ones doing the killing. And in my world they're not much into a quick and painless death. We have no provisions against cruel and unusual punishment. It'll be death by firing squad.”

  At this point I felt resigned to whatever fate awaited me. “Fine, let's do this. And how do you propose to get me to your world?”

  “I can get us there without introducing the element of chaos you jumpers cause,” he said. “You may think this is all bullshit, but in my world our scientists have studied this extensively and they know what happens when people just casually rip open the fabric of time and space.” He had pulled out a device which resembled a key fob you'd use to electronically open the door to a car. He waved it in the air. “Doesn't look like much, does it? This little wonder can generate portals. It's experimental, but I know some people and they've been giving me the prototypes to use. Let's go.”

  I stood up. “And what are you going to do about this world's Thomas?”

  “When we go through, I have it programmed to send him back here. He's not going to have any memory of the last several hours.”

  “That's very convenient,” I said.

  “It's not convenient,” Thomas sneered. “It's fucking incredible. Your world is so behind the times. We're ahead of you in technology by at least 50 years. There's no famine in my world, there's plenty of water, and people live long healthy lives.”

  “While a friendly government keeps watch over them.”

  “There's pros and cons to everything. Enough talking.” He pushed a button on his device and immediately a portal was brought into existence.

  Actually, there were two portals, and through one I could see this world's J. Thomas. The other one had a view of some kind of government building – or maybe a military installation.”

  “How's he going to know to come back here?” I said, looking over at the portal where J. Thomas was being kept.

  “I have a guy there who's going to shove him through,” Thomas said. “Come on. Step through.”

  I did, and the man who wanted to see me dead followed. We stepped through to what was indeed a military facility – at least the people here were all dressed in military uniforms. As we emerged Thomas brought his hand up to his mouth and said, “This is agent Thomas. I have Matheson.”