her fingertips. I was angry, but part of me softened at her touch.
“Okay, Mickey. Maybe you just need some rest.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
She stood up and started looking through her purse for her keys. As much as I wanted her to stay, I also wanted time to sort through what I’d just dreamed about. All of it was so damn real, so detailed.
“Let me walk you.”
“I’m fine—I’m parked right downstairs. You act like this is Beirut or something.”
“Yeah, I know it’s not Beirut. Beirut has more buildings left standing.”
Meghan leaned down and brushed her lips against my forehead. I reached up and touched her arm, as if my touch could make her linger. But she pulled away quickly and walked to the door. She smiled, told me she’d check on me later.
I pushed myself up off the floor and went to the bathroom for more Tylenol. The two I’d taken before hadn’t done a damn thing—
Wait a minute.
V
The Clockwise Witness
Using a butter knife, I chopped a single pill into quarters, doing the math in my head. Last night, I’d popped four pills, 250 milligrams each. I had weird-ass dreams about cars and women in polka-dot dresses and fat, sweaty doctors that lasted pretty much all night long.
This evening I’d taken two pills, and the weird-ass dream thing lasted three, maybe four hours.
So a quarter of a single pill would be what…a half hour?
Okay, worst case, I’d swallow it and it wouldn’t do a thing. Then I’d know it was something else making me dream about February 1972. But if it had been the pills, it would start to explain a lot. Namely, that all of these crazy dreams weren’t coming out of nowhere.
I opened a grape Vitamin Water that Meghan had brought and swallowed the quarter pill. Then I laid back down on the floor, next to the couch, and closed my eyes.
There was no warning, no herald. The pill worked that fast.
Within seconds I was on the floor of the dark, empty office. Two fingers, still missing. El rumbling outside.
This time, however, I stayed put in the office that would someday become my Grandpop’s apartment. As Blaise Pascal once wrote: “All of man’s trouble stems from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Instead, I peeled back some of the cardboard, looked out of the front windows and watched the soft rain land on the early 1970s cars moving down Frankford Avenue. I listened to wet tires against asphalt, a soothing sound broken up every few minutes by the thunder of the arriving El that always, without fail, jolted me, whipping shadows across my face.
There were also murmured voices somewhere in the apartment building. A woman’s. Then an angry kid, saying he didn’t understand, he was being quiet. And then the woman’s voice again, saying something about being done, that’s it, she couldn’t take it anymore. Ah, another quiet night in Frankford circa 1972.
Right? This was 1972?
But I didn’t want to go outside and check. I just wanted to sit on that weird stiff psychiatrist’s sofa and take everything in. Convince myself that I was actually sitting here in the past.
Everything felt real. I could smell the burning dust in the air, baked by the steam radiator in the corner. I could hear the rumble of the El outside. The squeal of the brakes. The thump of the doors opening, then closing. I could feel the fibers of the cushion beneath me, the smooth polished wood of the sofa’s frame. I could blink and breathe. I was able to run my tongue around inside my mouth.
But this couldn’t really be my physical body, could it? Meghan said she’d watched my body in the present—mumbling, convulsing and otherwise seeming to have a perfectly good time by itself.
So what part of me was sitting here right now? My soul? Spirit? Life force? Ghost? Whatever it was, this other me was able to walk downstairs and open doors and pick up newspapers. In fact, except for being invisible to most people and that pesky
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