Am I on the right street?
I cast a glance back to my corner bar.
VILLAGE TAP should be blinking neon in the front window, but instead there’s a heavy wooden panel with brass lettering attached to a pole that’s swinging over the entrance, creaking in the wind.
I continue walking, faster now, the rain driving into my eyes.
Past—
Rowdy taverns.
Restaurants poised to receive the dinner rush—sparkling wineglasses and silverware quickly arranged on white linen tablecloths as servers memorize the specials.
A coffee shop I don’t recognize bursting with the jangle of an espresso machine grinding fresh beans.
Daniela’s and my favorite Italian place looking exactly as it should, and reminding me that I haven’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours.
But I keep walking.
Until I’m wet through to my socks.
Until I’m shivering uncontrollably.
Until night has dropped and I’m standing outside a three-story hotel with bars on the windows and an obnoxiously large sign above the entrance:
HOTEL ROYALE
I step inside, dripping a puddle on the cracked checkerboard floor.
It isn’t what I expected. Not seedy or dirty in the lurid sense of the word. Just forgotten. Past prime. The way I remember my great-grandparents’ living room in their teetering Iowa farmhouse. As if the worn furniture has been here for a thousand years, frozen in time while the rest of the world marched on. The air carries the scent of must, and big-band music plays quietly through a hidden sound system. Something from the 1940s.
At the front desk, the old, tuxedoed clerk doesn’t bat an eye at my sodden state. Just takes $95 in damp cash and hands me a key to a room on the third floor.
The elevator car is cramped, and I stare at my distorted features in the bronze doors as the car labors, noisily and with all the grace of a fat man climbing stairs, to the third floor.
Halfway down a dim corridor, scarcely wide enough for two people to walk abreast, I locate my room number and wrestle the old-school lock open with the key.
It isn’t much.
A single bed with a flimsy metal frame and a lumpy mattress.
A bathroom the size of a closet.
A dresser.
A cathode-ray television.
And a chair next to a window, where something glows on the other side of the glass.
Stepping around the foot of the bed, I sweep the curtain back and peer outside, finding myself at eye level with the top of the hotel sign and close enough to see the rain falling through the green neon light.
Down on the sidewalk below, I glimpse a man leaning against a streetlamp post, smoke curling up into the rain, the ash of his cigarette glowing and fading in the darkness under his hat.
Is he waiting there for me?
Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I go to the door and check the deadbolt and hook the chain.
Then I kick off my shoes, strip down, and dry myself off with the bathroom’s only towel.
The best thing about the room is the ancient cast-iron radiator that stands under the window. I crank it up to high and hold my hands in the jetties of heat.
I drape my wet clothes across the back of the chair and push it close to the radiator.
In the bedside table drawer, I find a Gideon Bible and a sprawling Chicago Metro phone book.
Stretching out across the creaky bed, I thumb to the D’s and begin searching for my last name.
I quickly locate my listing.
Jason A. Dessen.
Correct address.
Correct number.
I lift the phone receiver off the bedside table and call my landline.
It rings four times, and then I hear my voice: “Hi, you’ve reached Jason, well, except not really, because I’m not actually here to take your call. This is a recording. You know what to do.”
I hang up before the beep.
That isn’t our home voicemail message.
I feel insanity stalking me again, threatening to curl me up fetal and shatter me into a million pieces.
But I shut it down, returning to my new mantra.
I am not allowed to think I’m crazy.
I am only allowed to solve this problem.
Experimental physics—hell, all of science—is about solving problems. However, you can’t solve them all at once. There’s always a larger, overarching question—the big target. But if you obsess on the sheer enormity of it, you lose focus.
The key is to start small. Focus on solving problems you can answer. Build some dry ground to stand on. And after you’ve put in the work, and if you’re lucky, the mystery of the overarching question becomes knowable. Like stepping slowly back from a photomontage to witness the ultimate image revealing itself.
I have to separate myself from the fear, the paranoia, the terror, and simply attack this problem as if I were in a lab—one small question at a time.
Build some dry ground to stand on.
The overarching question that plagues me in this moment: What has happened to me? There’s no way to answer that. Not yet. I have vague suspicions of course, but suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesn’t lead to truth.
Why weren’t Daniela and Charlie at our house last night? Why did it seem as though I live alone?
No, that’s still too big, too complex. Narrow the field of data.
Where are Daniela and Charlie?
Better but reduce it further. Daniela will know where my son is.
So this is where I’ll start: Where is Daniela?
The sketches I saw last night on the walls of the house that isn’t my house—they were created by Daniela Vargas. She had signed them using her maiden name. Why?
I hold my ring finger up to the neon light coming in through the window.
The mark of my wedding band is gone.
Was it ever there?
I tear off a piece of loose thread from the curtain and tie it around my ring finger as a physical link to the world and the life I know.
Then I return to the phone book and thumb through to the V’s, stopping at the only entry for Daniela Vargas. I rip out the entire page and dial her number.
The familiarity of her voice on the recording moves me, even while the message itself leaves me deeply unsettled.
“You’ve reached Daniela. I’m away painting. Leave a message. Ciao.”
—
Within an hour, my clothes are warm and nearly dry. I wash up, get dressed, and take the stairwell down to the lobby.
Out on the street, the wind is blowing, but the rain has relented.
The smoking man by the streetlamp is gone.
I’m light-headed with hunger.
I pass a half-dozen restaurants before I find one that won’t clean out my funds—a bright, grimy pizza joint that sells enormous, deep-dish slices. There’s nowhere to sit inside, so I stand on the sidewalk, stuffing my face and wondering if this pizza is as life-changing as I think it is, or if I’m too ravenous to be discerning.
Daniela’s address is in Bucktown. I’m down to $75 and change, so I could hail a cab, but I feel like walking.
The pedestrian and traffic levels point toward Friday night, and the air carries a commensurate energy.
I head east to find my wife.
—
Daniela’s building is yellow-brick with a façade covered in climbing ivy that’s turning russet with the recent cold. The buzzer system is an old-fashioned brass panel, and I find her maiden name second up from the bottom of the first column.
I press the buzzer three times, but she doesn’t answer.