It felt like a controlled descent at first, but the elevator began gathering more and more speed, finally accelerating into a terrifying, high-powered thrust toward oblivion. I was slammed into the ceiling, a sharp pain radiating from my neck and back, and still the elevator’s speed continued to increase.
Looking down at the smooth black floor as I sped toward extinction, I thought about my parents in that capsized ferry.
I always imagined them together at the end, holding hands, floating in the ferry’s dining area, breathing their last breaths from that final inch of air along what would have been the floor of the boat. I pictured them staring up at the tiles of that floor, at the scuff marks made by hundreds of people’s shoes as those people had waited impatiently in line to get food or maybe buy a magazine. What would my parents have given in that moment to have been stuck in traffic, or in a long supermarket line behind some asshole trying to use expired coupons again?
Then suddenly I was sitting with Annie and Emily Connors, back in that truck on that lonely country road, the fuzzy static of the radio the only sound.
I opened my mouth to warn Emily about what was going to happen, but before I could speak, the world ended in an explosion of wild light, heat, and rumble.
* * *
—
I woke up covered in sweat, with no air in my lungs.
I’d forgotten how to breathe.
It was like that feeling you get when your mind tricks you into believing you’ve momentarily forgotten how to swallow.
I jumped up and smashed my knee against the glass corner of my coffee table as I rushed through my living room. The sharp sudden pain in my knee forced an involuntary scream from my lips, and my lungs were suddenly working again.
I yanked open the sliding door and stepped out onto the balcony, filling my chest with crisp rainy air in enormous panicked gulps.
The cool bracing wind and wet concrete beneath my feet slowly brought me back to reality.
Of course it had been a dream—a recurring dream I’d been having, off and on, for as long as I could remember.
Aside from the beginning of the dream, which was always slightly different, once the world lost all gravity and I began to float it was the same: outer space, the black monolith, the elevator, everything.
I looked into the kitchen at the clock on my microwave. It read 4:44 a.m.
There’s a theory among those of us interested in （read: obsessed with） the game of Rabbits—something we call fours.
The theory goes like this: Rabbits players, and perhaps also would-be Rabbits players, notice one specific time on the clock, 4:44 （afternoon and/or morning）， more often than people not connected to or interested in the game. This has to be complete nonsense, of course—an example of nothing more than confirmation bias—but I do notice that specific time constantly, and can’t help but think of Rabbits whenever it happens.
* * *
—
The first thing I did after I noticed the time was compose a text to Baron. Whenever one of us sees that specific time on a clock, we text each other: 444.
Once the fog left my brain, and I remembered that Baron was gone, I deleted the text message and crawled back under the covers.
I missed my friend.
After a few minutes of tossing and turning, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, so I got up to make coffee, and then started looking into Minister Jesselman’s suicide.
* * *
—
The incident had taken place on the Cardiff University campus in Wales. Nobody interviewed could agree about what Jesselman had meant by “the door is open”—although most people believed it was related either to his open-border immigration policy （his campaign had used the phrase in their election materials a couple of years back） or to a personal scandal he’d been involved in featuring some kind of English sex cult.
Outside of The Phrase, there was nothing that appeared to connect the incident to Rabbits—but it had to be connected. There was no way our discovering that video was a coincidence.
I closed my laptop and started digging around to see what I might make for breakfast. I had my choice of expired watery yogurt, questionable homemade granola with way too many raisins, or bananas, some too green, the others too black. While I was trying to decide, Chloe called and told me to meet her at a restaurant downtown for brunch. I told her I’d be right there.
* * *
—
“I found something this morning,” Chloe said in between bites of overcooked home fries and undercooked pancakes.
The restaurant was an old pub that served greasy spoon–style food during the day. Chloe and I had been there a few times before. The dark wooden walls and sticky floors always made me nostalgic for college. Outside of the eggs Benedict, the food was uniformly terrible. I always had one of their Benedicts, but Chloe clung to the futile hope that she’d eventually find something else on the menu that might pass as edible.