When I turned the final corner and saw the stairs leading up to the fifth floor, I tumbled forward, convinced they were going to disappear any second.
But they didn’t.
I took those stairs two at a time, and when I finally burst into my therapist’s office and had a seat in one of the small leather chairs in her waiting room, I was breathing like I’d been chased for miles by a chain saw maniac in a horror movie.
Everything appeared to be the same—the magazines on the table, the art on the walls, the view out the window.
Slowly, I began to relax.
I flipped through a couple of the magazines, but nothing held my interest.
I looked over at the high-rise office tower directly across the street.
The building I was sitting in was perfectly reflected in the mirrorlike glass of the office tower, and I began thinking about the way the old brick appeared reflected in the modern glass. I found the dichotomy between the old and the new comforting, and it momentarily made me feel like I was glimpsing something profound—some kind of deep insight into the connectedness and impermanence of all things. And yet, something wasn’t right. I felt a nagging tug on a thread somewhere deep in the back of my mind.
Then I saw it—and everything changed.
The old brick building reflected in that office tower across the street—the building I was currently sitting in, waiting for my therapist to see me—had only four floors.
I was completely frozen in place, unable to move.
At that moment, the dark gray shadows poured into the room from beneath the door and oozed into my mind from the screaming black cracks of another world, and tiny wiggling things crept up from my stomach and took over my body.
And everything went black.
* * *
—
I woke up in the hospital with two sprained wrists and several bruised ribs. Chloe was there. Apparently I’d called her at some point after I’d been arrested. She told me I’d been accosting people on the street, wild-eyed and manic, demanding they count the floors of the building and tell me how many there were.
I couldn’t remember anything after I’d seen the reflection of the building with four floors.
The doctors explained that I’d experienced a complete mental break. Chloe helped me hire a lawyer, and he managed to persuade an overworked judge to release me under my own recognizance.
Chloe made me promise to stop playing the game immediately, and I reluctantly agreed.
I made it almost three months.
* * *
—
What if Chloe was right? What if it was happening again?
I knew that The Kingfish Cafe had closed six years earlier, but when I grabbed my phone and looked it up, I couldn’t find any of the articles I’d read back then that detailed the closure. All I could find were glowing Yelp reviews—most of them written by people who’d visited the restaurant at some point during the past six years.
That night, Chloe stayed at my place until two in the morning. She told me it was because she’d had a bit too much to drink, but I know Chloe, and two glasses of wine definitely didn’t qualify as too much of anything. She was clearly worried that I was headed for some kind of mental break. And, if I’m being honest, I was worried right along with her.
11
HANG IN THERE, TIGER
“Something big is going on over at WorGames,” Baron said, waggling his spoon in my direction like an orchestra conductor setting the tempo of an extremely odd time signature.
He’d shown up at my place around eight thirty in the morning. I’d done my best to ignore the buzzer, but Baron was persistent. He burst into my kitchen carrying a bag of groceries that contained a bowl of chia pudding, six Gala apples, a tub of vanilla ice cream, beef jerky, and a Diet Coke. He was either stoned out of his mind or completely sober; it was impossible to tell with him.
“What do you mean?” I asked, unable to stifle a yawn. I’d barely managed two hours of sleep the night before.
“I was talking to my friend Valentine. She’s a project manager over there.”
“And?”
“And last year they brought in Sidney Farrow.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “For real?”
“For realz, but nobody could talk about it.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Val told me they made everyone sign an NDA as thick as a New York City phone book from 1986.”
“That’s very specific.”
“You know what this means?”
“No idea.”
“I’m going to be working with Sidney Farrow.”
“How? What the fuck are you talking about?”