“Chloe,” she said.
“You’re the one Alan Scarpio came to see,” he said as he turned back to face me. I noticed it wasn’t a question.
“How did you know that?”
“Wild guess,” he said, with a faint half smile.
“Did the Magician tell you that?”
He ignored my question and posed one of his own. “Have you heard from the Magician?”
“No,” Chloe said. “Have you?”
He shook his head. “You”—he pointed at Chloe—“asked me about something before.”
“Rabbits,” Chloe said.
He carefully set his crossbow down onto a side table, angled it away from us, and leaned forward in his chair. “What do you two know about the game?”
“We know you’re not supposed to talk about it, for one thing.” I said. I wasn’t sure if we should trust this guy. We had no idea who he was.
“For people concerned about not talking about something, you sure have a shitload of questions.” He stood up and walked over to a nearby table where he plugged in an electric kettle. “Tea?” he asked.
Chloe and I nodded.
As he boiled the water and prepared the tea, he told us that his real name was Neil. And then he just started talking. And talking. His initially cool and distant demeanor was quickly displaced by a torrent of words and fragmented sentences. I got the feeling Fatman Neil didn’t get a lot of visitors.
* * *
—
“Okay, so John Lennon from the Beatles, right?”
“Yeah?” I said, looking over at Chloe, who appeared just as confused as I was.
“He was supposed to be in the film WarGames, but he was assassinated before that could happen. And I don’t mean he was killed roughly around that time, I mean they took him out immediately before that shit was about to go down.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
“Everything has to do with everything,” he said. “That’s the thing you can never forget. That’s the thing behind the thing.”
Chloe looked over at me, and I could tell she was thinking this guy might just be a little bit out of his fucking mind.
“The last thing the Magician and I spoke about was you,” Neil said, finally, nodding in my direction.
“Me?”
“Yes. He said Alan Scarpio came to see you and told you something was wrong with the game, that something needed to be fixed before the next iteration began. Does that sound about right?”
I nodded.
“Did he say anything else?”
“Just that we’d be well and truly fucked if the next iteration began before the game was fixed.”
“Well,” Neil said, leaning forward in his chair, “that doesn’t sound good, does it.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
“Why do you think Scarpio came to see you that night?”
“That’s exactly what we’re trying to figure out.”
“Are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean: How hard have you been trying to figure out why Alan Scarpio asked you—and I mean you specifically—to help him?”
I blinked. “I don’t know. I mean, that part definitely doesn’t make any sense.”
“What if it did?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if Rabbits isn’t what you think? What if it isn’t just a game?”
“If it’s not a game, then what is it?” Chloe asked.
“Oh, it’s definitely a game,” Fatman Neil said. “But what if it was more than that?”
I looked at Chloe. She just shrugged, and Fatman continued.
“Would you notice thirty dollars less in your bank account? What if the bookmark you were using was suddenly stuck between different pages than it had been when you left for work that morning? What if you woke up one day and some of the pictures in an old family photo album were different than you remembered?”
Chloe shook her head. “What are you talking about?”
Chloe was clearly confused, but I knew exactly what Fatman Neil was talking about. He was describing pretty much everything I’d been experiencing （minus the gray feeling and the freaky swirling things hovering just outside the edges of reality）。
He ignored Chloe’s question, stood up, and grabbed his phone. “I think it’s time I introduced you to Mother.”
“You want to introduce us to…your mother?” I asked.