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We hop in Ann’s car, and I grab her cell phone out of her pocket, which was a bit of a challenge, since her pants were form fitting, and she was sitting down. I make a call and say: “Tammy, hey.”

“Sam. Are you OK?”

“I’m OK. I want to go see Mom . . . well, you know . . . Mom’s grave.”

“That’s a good start.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s at the back of that church near Dad’s place?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, why?”

Click

It was just too much to explain. I give Ann directions while slipping the phone back into her, not so roomy, pocket. She gives me a sweet little smile.

We pull into the back of the church parking lot, and go to my Mom’s gravestone where Ann says: “Mom’s are very important.”

She rubs my shoulders and back, and she looks a bit sad for me. I think about what my Mom means to me. I think about all the times she was there for me, after my Dad called me stupid, after he hit me. I love both of my parents, but my Mom truly deserved my love. She was a good parent, a real parent. It hurts when the one parent you can count on dies, especially when the other parent is a bad person. I take quick breaths; my crying is stopping me from being able to breathe. Ann just holds me; she’s there for me.

The little girl. She’s back. She runs through the parking lot, with my gym bag, which appears to be empty. I point to her, and whisper: “Ann, is she real?”

“Yeah . . . she’s real.”

“Hmm.”

I start piecing everything together in my head. Wiping the tears away from my face then grabbing Ann’s hand, I say: “let’s go home. I need to sleep.”

We hop in Ann’s car and drive off. I look back through the rear window to see the church on fire, slowly growing higher and higher with flames. It felt a bit like a movie. In the perfect movie, the two pivotal characters, one male and one female, crazy in love, would ride off into the sunset. That’s how you know it’s over, except we were riding off away from a church fire.

I close my eyes and start to fall asleep.

Ring . . . ring . . . ring.

Ann’s cell phone goes off, prompting me to ask: “who is it?”

She looks back at me and says: “who cares?”

She shuts the phone off, and asks: “where do you want to go?”

I just smile, close my eyes and fall asleep.

My Dad’s gone back to bed. I have nothing but a bag full of old flyers and newspapers. Why did I grab these? I’m starting to remember everything, but I can’t figure out why I grabbed the flyers. I leave, with my bag intact, flyers and all. I pass by the church again, stopping for a moment. I drop the bag, run towards the church, and grab the handle of the door to pull it open, as though this could be my defining moment. It’s locked. This is definitely a sign from god. I’m not quite sure how to decipher the sign though. Either god is telling me: I don’t exist, go away or like everyone else, I too have hours of operation. I think I’ll stay an indifferent non-believer for now.

I start to walk away from the church, heading home, but out of nowhere, a little girl runs up to me, hugs me and says: “thank you Sam.”

“You’re welcome?”

It was the same little girl as before. I can’t remember her, except in my imagination. I must have had a genuine interaction with her at some point.

I walk back home to see Ann, crossing my fingers on the way. I hope she’s real. I open my front door, hoping she’s real. I walk into the bedroom, hoping she’s real. My eyes are closed, and I take a deep breath. I open my eyes, whispering: “be real, be real, be real.”

There’s nobody here.

“Ann,” I yell.

I feel arms wrap around the back of my waist, and I jump, my whole body tenses. I turn around quickly. It’s Ann. She laughs, like a crazy person and says: “you shot up six feet in the air. That’s hilarious. Why are you so jumpy?”

Still a bit shaken up, I say, in a grumpy sort of way, “Uh . . . maybe cause I haven’t slept in a month.”

“Right, OK. So . . . how are you feeling? You look different. You look really tired?”

“I didn’t before?”

“No. You look like a different person.”

“Ann, I am a different person now.”

“Where did you go? What changed?”

I kinda smiled at Ann and said: “that little boy I told you about . . .”

“Matt, right?”

“I killed him.”

She looked shocked. She looked frightened and asked: “what?”

“He wasn’t real. He was a manifestation of my childhood, and his father was actually my Dad.”

“So . . . you’re OK now?”

“To be honest, I was worried that you weren’t real.”

“You’re not worried that Maria’s not real?”

“Maria was my mind’s way of making things easy for me. She didn’t challenge me in anyway; she was just there, just available. She wasn’t a puzzle or a riddle. It doesn’t matter that she’s real. It only matters that you are.”

“So you don’t want me to tell you if she’s real or not.”

“No.”

Ann smiled at me. This made her happy, a bit excited. I know Maria’s real. If Ann is, Maria is, but I really don’t care. I just want Ann. I grab Ann’s hand and say: “let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“The cemetery.”

“You really know how to show a girl a good time. I suppose you wanna walk there?”

“Hell, no. You can drive.”

I say nothing. I just whimper. I cry, but no tears come out, no sound is made. He’s in complete control of my body. He’s in control of everything. He stabs the boy’s leg and twists the knife around then pulls it out. The boy wakes, screaming, a loud high pitched scream, a scream that I’ve only heard from a dying animal.

I try desperately to stop this. I lie: “I remember. I remember being here before.”

“And?”

“And what? And what? I remember, OK? Let’s get him to a hospital, put the knife away.”

He stabs Matt in the eye, and I hear the knife moving around in the ocular cavity, scraping against bone. I can’t live with this. I can’t go on. Once I get control back, I’m going to end my life, horrible, horrible, horrible.

He takes blood that’s pooling on Matt’s leg and rubs it all over our hands, as if he’s washing in blood. He uses our blood soaked hands to write the word remember on the wall. He takes more blood and washes it over our face. He holds the knife in two hands above Matt’s chest, whispering the words: “remember, remember, remember.”

I feel sick, so sick. The knife plunges down into Matt’s heart, as Matt is screaming, flailing, and crying. I look around to see blood everywhere. It drips off my hands; it drips off my face; it drips off the walls, and it soaks into the bed.

I hear someone coming. It’s too late. The door knob turns, as though it’s turning in slow motion. My alter ego drops the knife and kicks it under the bed, as if the dead bloody boy isn’t going to be a give-away of what happened here.

The boy’s father comes in carrying a rifle, aimed right at me. He turns the light on, illuminating the room, showing the terror even more clearly to me. Matt’s father lowers the gun, pointing it at the floor, and says: “thank God. It’s only you. I thought someone had broken in.”

My alter ego reaches in our pocket, pulls out a key and says: “no, I used the spare key you gave me.”

“Well, thank God. I thought I was in for a real fight, but what the hell are you doing here in the middle of the night?”

“I couldn’t sleep. There’s a woman at my place.”

“Well, that bed’s yours to sleep in, if you want it, but at some point we’re going to have to talk about why you didn’t show up to your own Mother’s funeral.”

“I wanted to Dad, but it was just too difficult. I was going through too much.”

Did he just call Matt’s father dad? Why would he do that? I start to regain control over my hands. I look at them, there’s no blood on them. I wipe my face, no blood. There’s no body on the bed. There is no Matt. There is no blood, anywhere. It’s my Dad who is alive. It’s my Mom who is dead.

I hear a faint voice, almost in the distance. “You got it now.”

I have complete control of me back, no more voices. I am no longer fantasy. I am reality.

There’s no fence stopping us from going into Matt’s backyard, so it’s fairly easy to get back there. While in the backyard, my alter ego tries to open the back door. It’s locked.

I have to break my silence to say: “who’s stupid now?”

I probably shouldn’t have said anything. This is only going to spark a whole long dialogue from my alter ego. Here it comes: “you are.”

We go over to the window and try to open it. It’s locked. Even if it were unlocked, it would be very difficult to try to fit through. We go to the door again. I can see he is going from easiest to hardest. It’s actually fairly intelligent. The backdoor has a typical looking deadbolt on it.

Again, I pipe up. I just can’t resist when I say: “we can’t pick a lock, so who’s stupid now?”

The alter ego laughs at me and says: “still you.”

He closes our eyes, I can’t see anything. I feel something. Is he picking the lock? The door opens, and we walk in. I speak again.

“Look, I understand that I’ve gone crazy, but we need to leave now. Breaking into a troubled boy’s house is not going to solve anything.”

He makes a breathy noise like he’s annoyed with me and says: “after this, there won’t be blackouts. There won’t be a you. Just a me. You’ll see something so horrible that your whole world will come crashing down. You will crumble, and I will once again be strong. I will be forced to live with the harsh reality, the truth.”

He starts walking us towards a room, directly towards a room, like he knows where we’re going. A door is slightly open, so he slides us through, gym bag and all, closing the door behind. I see Matt lying peacefully in his bed, and I have to try again: “please stop. Please stop. I don’t care who is fantasy and who is reality. Whatever you have planned, please stop. I’ll let you have control of everything if you just leave the boy alone.”

“It doesn’t work like that dummy. I need to wake you up. This will do it.” He slowly and quietly opens the bag and pulls out a large knife.

“Please whatever you want. Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it. Just don’t hurt the boy.”

“Fine, brain dead idiot. I’ll give you one last chance. Do you recognize this house?”

“What? No. Have we been here before?”

It must have been during one of the blackouts. He wants me to remember the blackouts. What horrors has he committed during these blackouts? I have to remember this. No matter what he does, I have to remember this. I have to turn myself into the police, have myself committed. There is something seriously wrong with me, seriously. I want to close my eyes, but he has control over them. He gently puts the knife to the kid’s throat and says: “last chance.”