Monster Page 11

I wake up the next morning to bright light streaming though several windows opposite the foot of the bed. This isn't my bedroom. The walls are exposed strips of wood where the wallpaper has been removed. In some places, there are scraps of the wallpaper's backing still stuck to the walls. I look to the left and see that the floor is bare, dull hardwood. It is a strangely comfortable, peaceful room. I stare up at the ceiling and run my hand across the short stubble on my face and then through my hair. My hair is now cut short, nearly a buzz-cut, and feels bristly to my fingertips. I had gone to bed with long, shaggy hair.

  I sit up quickly on the bed, "How the heck did my hair get cut during the night?"

  Sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed is Sarah. Almost. She looks like Sarah but not quite. She is noticeably thinner, skinny like a marathon runner, and has a shorter, different, pooffier haircut which frames her face in a soft, non-threatening manner. She is sitting cross-legged on the floor looking at something: a newspaper or magazine or photographs or whatever, I can't quite tell. She looks up at me and smiles.

  "Well, you're awake."

  I look on the pillow and see cut hair. I look back at Sarah.

  "How did my hair get cut?" I ask.

  She looks at me with a puzzled expression and squints for a moment. "It's been cut like that for a long time."

  I look back down on the pillow and the hair clippings have disappeared. I run my hand through my hair again and get out of bed. As I pull the sheets back, I notice dozens of Polaroid snapshots of Sarah all around me. I pick them up and look at them. They are photos of her as she looks now, only she's in different outfits and at different places.

  "How did these photos get in bed?" I ask.

  She smiles and laughs. "You were looking at them last night before going to bed and didn't feel like putting them away, so we just slept with them."

  She gets up and gives me a kiss as I sit on the corner of the bed. She is dressed in a reddish-orange sleeveless sweatshirt which is cut-off just below her breasts, and a pair of tight-fitting jeans.

  Where am I? Sarah looks like Sarah, but is not Sarah, even though she is Sarah. Different hair, a leaner, more athletic looking body, but the same mannerisms. All of this overnight?

  Then it dawns on me: This is two years ago. I've already lived through this moment, been in this bedroom. But it's an alternate two years ago. This reality never existed. Sarah never stripped the wallpaper from our first apartment's bedroom, she had just complained about it for an entire year. She turned down the opportunity to go to New York City for a week to meet with the modeling agency scout who met her and said she'd be a natural. She hadn't found the idea of being photographed for a living as very interesting, and had cut her hair as a way to reinforce her decision not to go. But not this haircut.

  "Sarah, this isn't really happening," I say.

  "What are you talking about?" she asks.

  "I don't know, I remember wondering what an alternate me would be doing, and sort of wishing to find out, and now I'm here, an alternate me, but this isn't what happened two years ago when we decided to live together," I say. "We moved to a new apartment, instead."

  She nods.

  "I'm not the me you were expecting to wake up. I don't know why I'm here, but I'm not your me."

  She understands but doesn't care. It's as if these are trifling details.

  "So, the other you will come back, eventually?"

  "I think so."

  She smiles and kisses me again.

  "So, I'm not cheating on you if I'm cheating on you with you, am I?" She smiles widely, lasciviously, and kisses me wetly.

  But all of this is too weird, so I pull away, reluctantly, and walk downstairs. There are no walls on the first floor, only a skeleton of two-by-fours and ceiling joists, and the areas which would be rooms are set with linen-covered tables. People are sitting at the different tables eating breakfasts of eggs, bacon and pancakes. They smile politely or say "good morning" as I walk by in my pajamas and out onto the front steps. The landscape of this world is the wrong tint. Everything is too pastel and the clouds floating by have too much mass, as if they are massive cotton balls suspended in the sky by unseen steel cables which are connected to satellites in geosynchronous orbit. The house sits in the middle of a series of rolling fields dotted with trees, and the dirt driveway leads away to a pitch-perfect black highway with neon yellow dividing lines. There is a pleasant, surreal, and scary feel to this world. It's so calm that it feels as if everything is about to change to anarchy, chaos and mayhem at any moment. This is the calm before the storm.

  Sarah comes out and sits down on the steps next to me and doesn't seem perturbed I'm not the same man she's used to. I feel like I should kiss her, so I do.

  "Do you like it here?" she asks as she puts her hand on my thigh.

  I shrug. "I don't know, I've only just gotten here. I'm not sure how I should act."

  She smiles the same wicked smile I'm used to my Sarah smiling when she wants to have sex in a public place where the odds of getting caught are steep. She moves her hand up my thigh and slips it underneath the waistband of my pajama pants and begins to stroke me slowly. I look over my shoulder and see that inside, nobody is paying us any attention. They are eating breakfast and talking and ignoring us. Sarah leans close to me and kisses me on the cheek and trails her tongue down the side of my face and across my lips.

  "Where are you supposed to be right now?" she asks as she puts her other hand on my thigh.

  "To be?"

  She laughs and pulls the waistband of my pajamas away from my stomach and looks down. "I think we've got something I can take care of, if you want me to."

  Nick shook quickly, a hypnic jerk that felt like he had jumped inches into the air, and opened his eyes. Several inches in front of his face was the bottom of the refrigerator; beneath him, he could feel the hardness of the vinyl floor. He blinked and stared at the refrigerator door, rolled over and looked up at Sarah, who was crouched down a few inches away. Her hair was tucked behind her ears and Nick wasn't sure what to make of her expression, which was a cross between confusion, dismay and nausea. He sat up and looked down at the pillow upon which his head had been resting and then back at Sarah, who was now biting her lower lip. Nick smiled weakly.

  "Now, I know for a fact you were in bed last night, because you were passed out when I got home," Sarah said. "But why you came in here in the middle of the night beats me."

  "What time is it?" Nick asked, pulling the blanket off his legs and standing up.

  "Just after eight."

  "Wow. What time did you go to bed last night?" Nick asked.

  "About one."

  Nick shook his head and walked into the living room. Sarah trailed behind him and tossed the pillow onto the couch. "So I got up sometime after one, got a blanket and pillow, and decided to sleep on the kitchen floor?"

  Sarah just looked at him.

  "Weird," Nick whispered.

  "Maybe you were hungry," Sarah said and smiled.

  Nick ran his fingers through his hair. "That's twice in just a couple of weeks."

  "Well, I know you were in bed," Sarah said.

  "It feels like it was a good sleep, though."

  Sarah scrunched up her nose. "And it couldn't have been me, I didn't even get to talk to you last night. You weren't having nightmares, were you?"

  Nick shook his head. "No, just your normal dreams, I guess. I can't remember."

  "Rob said you and Dave were pretty drunk by the time you left last night," Sarah said.

  "When did you show up?"

  "About eleven-thirty. I guess you had left just a little bit before, so I just stayed with Tess who, by the way, was supposed to meet Dave."

  "She was?" Nick asked, thinking about Sarah's short, Italian co-worker who had a notorious habit of being unable to keep a boyfriend longer than a couple of dates. It wasn't that she was unattractive, just a bore who talked incessantly about the banal aspects of her life and even more about what
she had seen on television.

  "Well, Dave didn't know about it," Sarah said, getting up and walking into the kitchen.

  Nick turned on the television and lit a cigarette while Sarah banged around the kitchen and returned, a half-dozen minutes later, with two cups of coffee. She put one down on the table in front of Nick while he worked his way through the cable system trying to track down Bugs Bunny. She pulled a cigarette from the pack, lit it and sat back into the cushions on the other end of the couch.

  "As I see it," she said amid a stream of smoke signals, "you've only got two choices."

  Nick turned away from Wile E. Coyote's perusing of an Acme catalog and looked at her.

  "Prozac or me."

  "Prozac?" Nick asked.

  "Well, that's what they'll put you on after you go to see a doctor about your sudden sleep problems," Sarah said.

  "And the 'or you?'"

  Sarah stuck out her left hand and splayed the fingers wide apart, the cigarette supported in a wide smile and smoke curling up past her right eye and pooling on the ceiling.

  TWELVE