Page 59 of Middlegame

“They changed the title to The Village of the Damned when they made the movie,” says Dodger. “Anyway, those kids weren’t good planners. We would be the end of days.”

“Probably less oddly sexist, though.”

“Ever notice how our last names make the word ‘Midwich’ if you cut them in half?” asks Dodger. “Middleton gives us ‘mid,’ and Cheswich gives us ‘wich.’ Midwich. It’s like a lousy word puzzle.”

Roger straightens, looking down the length of his nose at her. “Did you seriously just ask me whether I had noticed a word puzzle? Even a bad one?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been inhaling marker fumes again?”

“Yes.” Dodger widens her eyes, giving him her best sappy smile. “They make my head all bubbly.”

Roger picks up a pillow, weighs it carefully in his hands, and flings it at her. She dodges, laughing, and for a moment he can almost forget the crushing sense of déjà vu hanging over the room. We’re diverging from the original script, he thinks, and that makes no sense, but it soothes his nerves all the same. Divergence is good. We got it wrong, he thinks, and that makes even less sense, and does nothing for his nerves. If anything, it sets them back on edge.

“Well?” says Dodger. He looks back to her. She’s put the cap on her marker and is looking at him expectantly, clearly waiting for something.

Roger hastily reviews their conversation, backtracking to the point where everything went strange. His answer should be easy. It’s not. “I don’t think I’m going to go,” he says, and the feeling of disoriented doom recedes. He can breathe again. “It’s not a good time to fly to Boston. The tickets are refundable, I can say I have to stay on campus for some reason . . . Could I come to Thanksgiving dinner at your place? It’s cool if I can’t, I’m happy to roast a chicken and lecture it for not being a turkey.”

“Charming as I find the image of you yelling at your dinner, of course you can come home with me,” says Dodger, expectant look melting into a frown. She drops her marker on the floor. That’s standard behavior: she leaves them scattered around the room like breadcrumbs, waiting for her to pick them up and begin another mathematical journey into mystery. She walks over to the bed, perches, birdlike, on the edge, looking at him gravely. “What’s wrong? You were so excited about seeing your parents.”

“I just don’t think this is a good time.” He can see how things will play out, like watching a flickering home movie projected on a makeshift screen. Each piece leads inevitably to the next, from his mother’s cornbread to the footsteps on the stairs. The images are already starting to fray around the edges, and he’s glad of that, in a way: these aren’t thoughts he wants to have about his parents. These aren’t memories he wants to keep.

He’s also terrified. How many times? The question echoes. It has no good answer.

Dodger frowns. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“My family’s a little much sometimes.”

“I could do with a little much.” He manages to smile. He does it for her, and is rewarded when some of the tension leaves her shoulders. She trusts him not to lie to her. She’s the better liar of the two of them, and sometimes she forgets that doesn’t make him incapable of deception: he’s good too, in his own way. “Hey, speaking of family, have you thought more about getting our blood tested?”

She blinks before her whole face lights up. “I have!” she says. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, actually. I think we should do it. I want to know whether the quantum entanglement has a basis in biology, or whether we were just in the wrong place at the right time and somehow blundered into a cosmic anomaly—”

She keeps talking, and he keeps listening, clinging as he does to the thin line that reminds him, over and over, how something has gone wrong; how something is out of true. He responds when necessary, letting her carry the bulk of the conversation. We got it wrong, he thinks, and he doesn’t know what “it” is, and the not knowing is like a splinter in his mind. He wants to talk to her about it. He doesn’t know how.

By the end of the evening, he’s confirmed for Thanksgiving in Palo Alto, and they’ve agreed to talk to Smita about performing a blood test after the holiday. She’ll probably consider it beneath her, but at least they both know her, and they trust her to jab them with a needle. He leaves promptly at eleven. It’s a school night, after all.

Dodger walks him to the door, all smiles, and shuts it firmly behind him. Only then does she let her knees buckle, sinking to the hallway floor. Candace is already in bed and she hasn’t seen Erin in days; she’s not concerned about her roommates walking in on her, thank God. Everything is spinning, everything has been spinning since she asked Roger when he was leaving. It’s like the world has transformed into a carnival ride, constantly in motion, never growing still. She’s experienced this before, but it’s never been this bad. When Roger was talking, it was all she could do to keep smiling, to keep from running out of the room to vomit.

He’d think there was something wrong with her if he knew. He’d think she was broken, or that their quantum entanglement was overloading her synapses. To be honest, she’s not sure that’s not what’s happening. There was a click earlier in the evening, like a metal rod being shoved into a battery pack, and everything went white for a heartbeat. It’s happened before. Not often, of course, but often enough that the sensation was familiar. She almost welcomes those electric-shock moments when they come, because those memories will always remain sharp and crisp and easy to revisit, preserved in time like amber.

(The day she opened her wrists in the gully is one of those frozen moments. It’s not a pleasant memory, not by a long shot. She’s still grateful to have it trapped in her mind the way it is. Every time she starts to feel like the world is getting narrow, like she needs to open herself to let the blackness out, she goes to that memory. She remembers the way it felt: that it wasn’t better, it wasn’t an answer, it solved nothing, but it nearly took everything away. Sometimes perfect recall is a blessing that can be used to counterbalance all the curses in the world.)

Not here; not now. She starts to cry, big, wracking sobs that shake her entire body and make her eyes burn. She’s getting snot down her front—she’s probably getting snot in her hair—and that doesn’t matter, because the world is still spinning, the worst carousel the world has ever known, bobbing and weaving around her. She doesn’t know how to make it stop. She doesn’t know how to make it stop. There is no exit from this funhouse.

Eventually, the tears run out. She curls herself into a tight ball on the hallway floor and waits in silence for the world to stop spinning.

Roger knows none of this, because she doesn’t call for him, because he doesn’t like to walk with his eyes closed. He’s halfway home when he hears the footsteps. This time, he knows who they belong to. He stops walking and turns, waiting for Erin to catch up. She looks . . . satisfied, somehow, like things are going according to some complicated plan that she hasn’t felt the need to share with anyone else. He hates her for having that smug look on her face. He hates himself for putting it there.

“What did you do to me?” he demands.

Erin’s smile doesn’t falter. “I have no idea,” she says. “I’m not you, Jackdaw. When I see the Impossible City, I forget it afterward, unless you order otherwise. I guess this time you didn’t care to retain the information.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“No, I’m not,” she says. “That’s the fun part. Because see, come morning, all this is going to seem like a funky dream—even this conversation, which wouldn’t have happened if not for the things that came before it. Your mind is going to edit out the pieces that don’t make sense. It’s going to lie to you, and you’re going to let it. The world’s more comfortable that way. The world hangs together better that way. And you need a lot more foundation stones before you can start building this tower.”