950

November 3, 2019

2:49 AM

A simple, pulsing beat played over the radio. She leaned back against the seat, letting the music swallow her.

She loved this song. It reminded her of a dying memory from her childhood, a smudged array of distant technicolor. Tingles flickered under her fingernails, and she let the vintage phantom-feeling clutter her mind until she knew nothing but its ocean. She sank beneath the blooming and curling waves, their froth edged with neon blue.

Thunder crackled overhead, and rain splattered over her car. Her window, before she knew it, was covered in fat raindrops. They glowed in the dim streetlights, their glistening borders rimmed with cheerless yellow. When she opened her eyes, she leaned forward and stared at them. They reminded her of the waves that dragged her under and tried to take her away with them. Wherever they disappeared to.

She kept her eyes open until they began to burn and tears coated the purple bags underneath. She rubbed her eyes. “Shit,” she said.

She couldn’t see out of her window anymore, so she turned on her windshield wipers. The empty parking lot stretching out under the starless night sky greeted her, smeared with jaundiced rain. The same soft, pulsing beat still poured from the radio, and she glanced at the clock on her dashboard. How long had she been out of it? She had no clue.

That same failing memory from before suddenly came back in full force, knocking her over. She stared up at the orange sky, bright from the storm clouds and city lights. Her stomach clenched. Twisted. What the hell was wrong with her?

One arm pressed against her stomach as she closed her eyes again, and she peeked at the clock on her dashboard and memorized the numbers: 2:49.

The music changed. It blared through her speakers from her phone’s bluetooth, all angry guitars and gravelly vocals. She answered the phone call, breathing a sigh of relief when she heard Aria’s voice, “Where the fuck are you?”

“Somewhere deep in the ocean,” Henri answered.

“Speaking in riddles tonight, got it,” Aria said. “Whatever. I’m waiting for you, baby, c’mon.”

Aria’s voice sounded godlike, sweeping and golden even when she was annoyed.

“I know.”

“I don’t hear your engine. Shit, Henri, you’re just sitting in the dark again, aren’t you?”

“This time I’m parked outside a closed Target.”

There was a pause. When Aria spoke again, her voice was gentle, “Do you need me to come get you?”

“Ironic. No, I’m fine.”

“You said you were deep in the ocean when you picked up. What does that mean? I can’t even… Where do you go?”

“Well, at closed Targets in the rain I go deep in the ocean like I said. The waves look like a neon sign. Don’t know what that means. My therapist would have some made-up bullshit to say like, ‘That means you’re drowning in the light of your life.’ What the fuck does that mean? Yeah, let me just shut myself up in the dark like some old hermit with one sagging testicle and eight ten-toed cats.”

“Eight ten-toed cats?”

Henri chuckled, leaning back in her seat but not closing her eyes. Not again. She wouldn’t do that to Aria. “It’s a metaphor,” she said.

“What kind of metaphor has eight ten-toed cats in it? Your therapist fucked you up more than the…”

Aria stopped, and Henri could imagine her biting her lip, chewing it. Neither of them knew what to call what Henri did. Dissociating, the therapist had said. Henri has dissociative identity disorder.

And that was part of it, Henri understood that. But there was something else pricking at the back of her neck, tingling under her fingernails. Something sinister. Not her, not the disorder, but a memory buried so deep inside it struggled to resurface. Henri felt its presence sometimes: at night when she couldn’t sleep, at the gym in the middle of a workout, after she and Aria finished having sex. When it called her, she usually tried to resist. It was never the time or the place to accept that incessant thing trapped beneath her skin.

Henri took a deep breath, realizing she’d let the silence stretch on for too long. “Aria?” she said tentatively. “You still there?”

“Yeah, sorry,” muttered Aria. “Didn’t mean to… you know. Shit.”

“I got issues, I know that. Not your fault you don’t get it.”

It came out harsher than she meant it. She wasn’t blaming Aria, but the sharp edge to her voice hedged toward persecution.

“Thanks,” Aria snapped. “This is what I get for trying to help.”

“Aria, that’s not what I–”

“Yeah, but you said it, didn’t you? Fuck you. It’s 2:49 AM, and I’m on the phone with you. I offered to come get you for Chrissakes. What else do you want from me?”

“Jesus, Aria, I didn’t mean it that way!”

Henri slumped into her seat, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes. The waves that always tugged her under had calmed, their neon blue froth lapping at her toes. She could hear the rain pattering outside, steady, rhythmic. Everything she was not. But she was still here; she hadn’t disappeared.

She wanted to.

“I know you didn’t,” came Aria’s quiet voice. “It’s just… I’m tired.”

“Go to bed. It’s fine, really. You need sleep, and I need to get back home,” Henri said. Exhaustion crept through her bones. Her heart thumped harshly against her ribcage, the beat slow but obviously agitated. “Go to bed, Aria.”

“Tell me you love me,” Aria murmured. She sounded just as tired as Henri felt, that exhaustion tinged with sadness. Henri could hear the unspoken please, I need it ringing in the air.

“I love you,” Henri said. “So much more than you realize.”

“I love you too. Night, Henri.”

“Night.”

Henri ended the phone call, watching her dashboard flash off of the call screen and go back to the radio. The song still hadn’t changed, and nausea crept into Henri’s stomach. The waves that had, for just a moment, caressed the beach now roared to life, spitting and hissing. Henri didn’t close her eyes. She watched the lightning that forked across the sky, turning the whole mess of clouds overhead white-hot for a second before they faded back to burnt orange. The rain came down harder, blasting at her car like bullets. Would it start hailing soon? Was it cold enough for that?

Tears streaked over her skin, and she wiped at them. Blinked. Blinked again.

The rain had stopped.

The music had stopped.

Everything had just stopped.

An ambulance siren wailed in the distance, but that was the only thing Henri could hear beyond her own breathing. She reached into her pocket, her spine prickling. The music had just been on; it’d been repeating for an hour now.

3:49.

Henri glanced at the clock. Yes, it was 3:49 AM, and she was still sitting in an empty Target parking lot. But something had changed.

No more rain. No more music.

She closed her eyes and searched for the waves. They sounded off in the distance, crashing against a foggy shore. They had retreated far back into her mind. She opened her eyes again and stared at her phone.

Aria’s call wasn’t on her call log anymore.

She checked her contacts. Aria, Aria, Aria… Yes, there she was. With a smiley face on the end of her name. Henri had never put that on there.

And then the memory that had been eating her insides up resurfaced.

She was ten years old, riding in the front seat of an old pickup truck down a country road bathed in the golden glow of sunset. Wheat waved on either side of the truck, and she reached a hand out the window as if to touch the shining stalks. She couldn’t reach them; her hand was too short. Her father laughed in the front seat. “Yer little arm’s too short there, Henri,” he’d said in his thick, Texas accent. “Don’t worry, you’ll grow into it. It’ll become all long an’ stringy like Papa’s.”

“Yeah?” she’d asked. “How?”

“Don’t know much about that.”

“Well, what do you know about it? Gotta know somethin’.”

“Nope, not anythin’.”

They lapsed into silence.

The sunset spoke for them, the bleeding colors gleaming like a thousand words. There was a thick warmth in her belly like when she’d eaten just more than enough at dinner. She smiled so much her cheeks hurt, and she turned back to her dad. “You wanna know something?” she said.

“What’s that?” he asked her.

She heard it then, the crashing waves. They echoed in her head like the beginnings of a migraine, and she glanced out the window, bewildered. Nothing but grain and sun and golden sky. She looked over her shoulder, and there again was nothing but grain and sun and golden sky. Her father was nowhere to be seen. His seat was empty, the seatbelt swinging as she and the truck drove carelessly into the field of wheat, crushing the plants under slowing tires. Aria couldn’t move. She stared through the windshield, and when the car finally stopped, she sat there. And sat there and sat there as indigo swallowed the eastern horizon.

She faded back into herself, staring out the window at that Target parking lot. She could hear her phone ringing distantly. The rain had stopped, and dewy morning sunshine cast the gravel, the store, the car in a gentle glow. Her heart was a cinderblock in her chest, weighing on her lungs. She couldn’t breathe; ragged gasps shook her, an anxious earthquake consuming the fibers of her very being.

She clutched the wheel. Tucked her head against the rim and tried to breathe. The waves were so loud, crashing against her skull. Her father had disappeared off the face of the earth. She wondered if perhaps it was her brain offering her a less traumatic solution to a suicide, but all of that had felt so real. So did that song looping over the radio and Aria’s phone contact name without the smiley face, she thought. What the absolute fuck is going on?

The sun poured through her window, warming her cheek. She blinked. Looked at the clock.

Oh shit.

7:05.

“Oh. Shit,” Henri hissed. She grabbed her phone and sucked in a tight, rib-clenching breath when she saw twelve missed calls from Aria and one voicemail. Frost thick as stone crept along her veins, and every part of her body plunged to her toes, slaves to gravity’s cruel fate.

She clicked on it and put the receiver to her ear.

There was a deep, shaking breath on the end of the line. “I’m done, Henrietta,” said Aria coolly. “I’ve called you twelve times. I’m not coming to get you. I’m done, Henri, I can’t do this anymore though I tried to. Guess maybe we would’ve been better for each other in another life, don’tcha think? Hope you get this all sorted out. Um, so this is it. Bye, Henri. Bye.”

Henri had lost sensation in her feet, and it swept up her legs like a tsunami consuming everything in its path. She was aware of putting her phone down beside her as she leaned back and closed her eyes, letting the sunshine spread buttery rays over her tear-streaked face. She couldn’t feel those either, the tears. She couldn’t move her fingers anymore nor open her eyes. The last thing she remembered was the sunshine.

November 3, 2019

2:49 AM

Version 950

A simple, pulsing beat played over the radio. She opened her eyes, remembering with an ancient longing sunshine playing over her face.

Somewhere, outside the realm of the Target parking lot, something dialed the number of the girl in the car. When she picked up, they said, “Baby, where are you?”

The girl replied, “Oh, Aria, uh…”

The thing on the phone scratched a tick next to the numbers 25, 630, 635, 783, and 901. What version was this? Ah yes, 950. They were almost at a thousand, and then they could finally take a break.