The Lost and the Damned (23 page)

“At this point, I’m willing to believe anything,” she said, leaning back, her hands folded behind her head. “I don’t even know if this is happening. Is this a drug flashback? Hallucinations in my room at the hospital? Am I Alice in her own Wonderland? All I know is that whether fact or fantasy, something is going on. And even if it’s fantasy, I need to figure out how this fantasy works.”

“That’s a… surprisingly sane thing to say, in a sort of not-sane way.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, yawning, “After seeing those amputee monsters, I don’t want anymore bad trips. If I have any control over this, I’m going to take it. I haven’t had control for so long.  I need to have it now. I hate being helpless. I hate being weak.” She leaned forward to me. “You seem like a nice guy, and I like you, John. I know that I need you to get me out of here. But honestly, I hate fucking needing you.” She leaned back in her chair.

“I don’t know how to respond to that,” I said.

“There’s no real response to that. Really. I know it sounds completely bizarre, even weirder when you hear it in conversation. But I’m not like other people, so people are going to hear what I feel, whether they like it or not. It sounds like I hate you but I don’t. I really do like you. I think you’re a good guy. I just don’t like needing you. I can’t be weak, not anymore. Not ever. I’ve been burned on that so many times before. I need to be strong, I need to do it myself. Every time I need somebody, I’m weak. I want to need people, I want people to help, I want to be loved. But I can’t. I need to be strong. At least… at least until I find myself.”

“Is that really the best way? It just seems… I don’t know. Counterproductive?”

She leaned forward and touched my arm, but her mouth was tight lipped. “John, I like you and I know you mean well, so don’t take this the wrong way. Normally I’d bitch someone out for saying that, so understand I’m trying to be as nice as possible. But no. I’m tired of people telling me what to do, claiming that they know better. Everyone wants to judge me, everyone wants to say what’s best for me. Everyone wants to get in my business when I just want to live my life. And I have to do it my way. Even if it’s wrong, I have to do it my way.”

“But –“

“No, John, seriously, it has to be this way. Even if it’s wrong, even if what they’re telling me is what’s right, I have to live my life. Only by living my life my way and seeing what works am I going to figure it out. And right now, it’s to not be helpless. So I know I need you, I’m not stupid. But… I hate that I need you. I don’t want to need you, I wish I didn’t need your help. That’s why this is so hard for me.”

I opened my mouth to speak but then closed it, not knowing what to say. Her eyes glimmered with tears and she turned her head, looking around the room. I followed her lead and began looking around the room. There was a railing right next to us. Over it we had a clear view of the main circulation desk where a pretty young librarian with glasses was working. The circulation desk was pretty slow for the size of the library. Nobody was trying to check anything out. I wondered if it was day or night. There were no visible windows, just tall ceilings with hanging lamps.

I sat back in my chair. I decided to see what book I was sleeping in. I laughed. Katie looked at me strangely and I held up the book cover for her. “The Great Escape. What have you got?”

She flipped her magazine to the front page. “Yuck!” She lifted up the magazine from its corner with her fingertips, holding it as if it were toxic. “Better Homes and Gardens! I mean, eww! That’s just insulting!”

I smiled, but that smile quickly disappeared from my face. “What is it?” asked Katie.

“I recognize that voice!” I said, quickly turning to the railing and looking down. At the circulation desk was a familiar figure. The hair was different and he looked a number of years younger, but the features were the same. It was definitely him.

“Who is it?” asked Katie, craning her neck to try to see.

“Max,” I whispered, my eyes focused on him. It was definitely Max. A younger Max. Twenties, maybe? Definitely younger than the Max I met. At first I thought it could be a relative, but that thought disappeared. Once I heard him speak all doubt disappeared.

“Th-thanks, Helen. How are y-you today?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m fine, Max,” she said, stamping the book that Max had given her. “Just hanging in there really. It’s been a slow day, so I’ve been catching up on some reading while Richard does some stacking. Someone’s got to be at this desk,” she said with a smile.

“Th-that’s good. Sounds like a nuh-nuh-nice day.”

“Yeah, it’s not bad,” she said, sliding his book back to him. “So this is due back in twenty days, on the nineteenth.”

“Th-thanks,” he said, half turning as if to leave, then pausing in his spot. Then he seemed to decide. “L-listen, Helen. W-w-would you l-like to g-g-o to dinner t-tonight?”

I saw Helen pause for a minute before replying, trying to wash her face of any inappropriate emotion. “Oh, that’s sweet, Max. But I’m sorry, I already have plans. I have a date with Brad tonight.”

“Oh,” said Max. Even at this distance, he looked crestfallen. Poor guy probably got his heart broken. Helen saw it too.

“It’s okay, Max,” she said, trying to catch his eye as he stared at the floor. “I’m sure there’s some girl out there that would love to go out with you!”

“Y-yeah,” he said, not convinced. “I have to g-go.”

“Oh, alright, Max,” Helen said, realizing she hadn’t gotten through to him. “Well, take care of yourself, Max. Things will get better.”

“Y-yeah,” he said before turning and moping away. He kept that mope up the entire course of the library. He had some skills at being depressed. Eeyore had nothing on this guy.

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“No, it’s not. Good for her,” said Katie.

“What do you mean?”

“A guy like that, you need to cut them off immediately,” she said. “If she gave in to his puppy dog eyes and said, ‘well, maybe,’ she’d never be rid of him. She’d either be suckered into spending an agonizing date with him and then going through this exact same situation to cut him off or he’d end up stalking her for years. Maybe he’d try being her ‘good friend’ and confidante, but all the time he’d be in love with her, wanting to get into her pants, and giving her bad advice whenever any guy not like him wanted to date her. Then if she got into a relationship, he’d pick out every fault with the guy, press on her the first sign things went wrong, just to have a chance to put himself forward as an alternative.”

“That’s a somewhat cynical view of things,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s true. I’ve been there. I don’t trust a guy who gets refused by a girl and then hangs around, trying to be her good friend.”

“What if they just work well together as friends?”

“I don’t buy it,” she said. “The attraction has been established by him making a play for her. It’s the elephant in the room and it won’t go away. If he still wants to be friends, he’s waiting in the wings for his chance. If she still wants to hangout, she wants to use his attraction for her to have a friendship where she wields more power.”

“I change my mind, that’s an
extremely
cynical view of things.”

“I just call them how I see them,” she said, matter of factly.

“But what if their interaction was based on something other than ulterior motives? What if they don’t have agendas?”

“They may not consciously, but they’re there.”

“How can you make so broad a generalization?” I said. “I think we’ve all known friends who once dated but are great friends years late.”

“Ah, but that’s the mystery ingredient. Years later. If they take a break and meet again or start again, they can be friends. But not directly after one says they want the other and are refused.”

I rubbed my forehead. “You seem to have a lot of rules for things.”

“It’s necessity,” she said. “Dating is dangerous. Everyone thinks it’s all simple, people coming together when they like each other and everything naturally goes well. That’s wrong. There are some fucked up people out there, and they’re just waiting to fuck over people. And then those people who got fucked over are now all wrong, so they unknowingly fuck over other people. It’s the great wheel of fuckover.”

“I can’t say that I’ve been really successful with relationships, but I just feel that’s wrong,” I said.

“See, you’ve been fucked over and don’t even know it. It’s that ignorance of your condition which will make you fuck over someone else without ever knowing it. You’re damaged goods. That sucks, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, so you say,” I said, growing annoyed. “Let’s get back to talking about Max instead.”

“He’s damaged goods too.”

“I’m not talking about his love life!” I said, immediately shocked at myself for raising my voice. I lowered it immediately. “I think all this weirdness we’re going through involves Max.”

“Yeah? Explain.”

“Think about it, we keep seeing Max everywhere we go.”

“I know we saw him at the Well and now," she said. "I didn’t see him in those tunnels, the ones with the monsters. Unless he was one of the monsters. Does he seem the monster type? He looks like he has all his limbs.”

Even though she was joking, I had an involuntary shiver thinking of those things. “No, we didn’t see him there, but that was the only place. We saw him here, at the Well, and the hospital before I found you. There was a kid in the hospital in 1985 and I think it was Max.”

“Are you still going with that claim that we were in 1985?”

“Yes! I don’t know how it happened, but it happened.”

“But 1985? I could think of much cooler years if you were going to make shit up.”

“I didn’t make it up!” I said. “You may not believe me, but it happened. I don’t know how we got there, but we did. I don’t know why you have such a hard time even just entertaining the idea! We traveled through whiteness, found a door which led us to a monster feeding pit. Does that make any more sense than time travel?”

“Whoa, calm down there!” she said, putting her hands in the air in front of her. “Alright, alright. Let’s entertain this idea. So we were in an old version of the hospital, sometime in the past.”

“1985,” I interjected.

“Right, the hospital in 1985. And you think you saw Max?”

“They called him Schraeder, and I’m almost positive they called him Max at some point. He was like thirteen or something.”

“Tell me more,” she said. “I wasn’t awake for all this. Mighta looked like me, but it was all autopilot.”

So I told her. I included every detail, from the diabolical nurses to the shock treatment, from the mutilation to the monster. I watched her face. It ranged from the incredulous to the fearful, from impassive to shocks of recognition when things became all too familiar. When that was all over, I decided to go for an encore, telling her everything had happened from when I met Max the first time, through meeting her, and ending at waking up in the old hospital. It was backwards, but things made a strange sort of sense knowing where we ended up.

“Wow,” she said, sitting back. “That’s crazy.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty unhappy about it.”

“So you had seen that huge monster before. That’s why you ran.”

“Wouldn’t you?” I said. “It just seemed to have ‘trouble’ written all over it.”

“True,” she said. “And it also said ‘Max.’ That points more towards your theory.”

“These places we’ve been all have something to do with Max.”

“Except the steam tunnels and monster feeder,” she pointed out.

“Well, yeah. We can’t prove that had anything to do with him. But the others do.”

“So what if they all do?” she asked. “Where does this get us? What else do we know?”

“I had been thinking about it and I have a radical theory.”

“More radical than 1985?”

“Ha ha,” I said sarcastically. “It involves it, at least. I believe that all these places we’ve gone to have been in the past.”

“The past? Of course they’re in the past, we’re not there now, therefore we were there in the past.”

“No, I mean farther in the past. Prior to the current year.”

“You lost me,” she said.

“Well, look.” I ripped a page out of The Great Escape, looking around to see if the book police had noticed me. It was the title page, so it had a fair amount of white space. “Let’s assume that the hospital, Bellingham, is the present. Or the present we know. I’m making this assumption because things went all super weird after I found you and went into that red energy.” I drew a long line and drew a notch on it. I circled that notch and labeled it Present. “You with me there?”

“I’ll accept it, at least.”

“Good enough. So the first place we went was the old hospital. I saw a young Max and it was 1985.” I drew a notch on the line far to the left of Present and labeled it 1985.

“I still don’t believe it.”

“Look, you weren’t there. The hospital was broken down, there was a mint newspaper from 1985, plus tons of anachronisms. There’s no way it could have been present day. Not unless it was some freak’s retro paradise.”

“What’s an anachronism?” she asked.

“It’s something that doesn’t fit historically. Like if I went to your home and saw a 1960s black and white TV or if you saw a movie about King Arthur where they wore sneakers.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie like that,” she said.

“The example is unimportant, but you get the idea, right? It was 1985, just accept that I know that.”

“Fine,” she said reluctantly.

“So the next place we saw Max was at the Well. You saw him, he looked pretty close to what he looked like at the hospital in the Present.”

“I don’t know what he looked like in the hospital.”

“Well, he looked the same. Better hair at the Well, but otherwise the same. He looked way older. Forties? Late thirties? Something like that. So I think that was more recent. Past year or two.” I drew a notch on the line to the left of but very close to Present. I labeled this one The Well. “Still with me?”

“Yes,” she said in a pained way. Her brow was furrowed and her hands on her temples. I know she felt like she was in school and I bet she didn’t do well there.