The Very Last Days of Mr Grey (3 page)

Mason shook his head, inadvertently checking the time. He’d got some weird cover letters in the past, but this was tops. And Sera? What was with people and using misspelled names?

It had caught his attention though—and he supposed that was the point. He dug his fingers into the box and pulled the heavy stack of pages out.

He frowned at the empty title page. This girl—or guy pretending to be a girl—was weird.

He turned the page.

And effective.

He flipped through, allowing himself to hope that he may have inadvertently stumbled on the next
Pulp Fiction,
his mind running through interviews with someone important, them asking him how he discovered it, had the foresight to spot what a gem it was, him laughing modestly as he began to explain. But this dream came to an abrupt halt when he realized the pages he was flipping through were still empty.

He grabbed the stack by the edge and speed-flipped through it like a cartoon book.

All blank.

He stared at the last page. He at first thought it too was blank, but then saw the handwritten sentence in the bottom left corner:
PS, Sorry if I got your hopes up.

Mason pulled into the parking lot of All American Independent Coffee. Technically, it was actually a Walmart parking lot, but that was splitting hairs. Three twenty-three, his car radio told him. He’d made good time.

And why was he worried about being late anyway?

He felt like he should’ve brought pepper spray or something. What was he doing? This was nuts.

But he’d googled her name, and while IMDb had nothing on her, he had found her, or at least pictures.

And they were great pictures.

She was a little bit older then he might have expected, but still. Maybe he could get something out of this, scouting the next Scarlett Venu—at least a new secretary for Patricia, his ex-military-and-you’re-going-to-know-it boss, who had a thing for beautiful women in that age gap between young and old.

This didn’t make sense to Mason, since Patricia was married, but little that went on in Hollywood made sense, so he didn’t let it bother him.

He slammed his car door, and just stood there for a moment, staring into the coffee shop through its huge windows, trying to figure out which, if any, of the customers were the person he was looking for.

The idea that he’d be meeting a man, either the woman’s agent, or the man who was pretending to be the woman, evaporated when he saw that everyone in the shop was female. The customers at least. There was a guy he sorta almost recognized behind the counter, staring at an oven.

He rubbed at the contact in his right eye, which always seemed to bother him.

Maybe she wasn’t here, he thought.
And maybe assumptions make an ass out of U and ME
his mind taunted him. He needed to start meditating. Emily said it would help him with things like random thoughts, and also help him sleep.

But taking pills was so much easier. Or crumbly, tasteless, untested powder, as the case was.
Not untested. New to you.

He was blasted by lukewarm air as he opened the glass door and entered. No Starbucks, this. Barely audible Burning of Rome played from speakers mounted above the “kitchen”.

“So damn lazy / I can’t do anything at all / The cat is gone crazy / and she’s scratching up the walls /
[inaudible]
is all I have / Too late, too bad / I shouldn’t have let you go.”

There was a sad looking air conditioner, far too small, set high in one window. The thing tried mightily as it cranked and clattered against the overwhelming force of the thousand square foot coffee shop, hot milk machines, constantly brewing coffee, the single oven in which rather tasty pastries were cooked and which looked even worse than the AC—not to mention the space heaters at each table, that some persistent optimists referred to as people.
Each person is a hundred watt space heater
, another unbidden thought informed him. Mason wondered if hot coffee and caffeine increased that.

He felt like a fool as he glanced around the shop. Not because he was embarrassed to be standing there like an idiot as the customers and baristas looked at him oddly, but because he realized someone was probably going to scam or kill him. He certainly didn’t see the woman from the photo anywhere.

But before he could further berate himself or his mind further distract him with visions of gruesome outcomes, there was a tap on his shoulder. He turned.

“Mason Grey, I assume?”

All Mason could think to respond with was, “Yes?”

“Hello. Serafina.” She held out her hand.

Mason looked at it. That explained the weird spelling. Still— “Look, lady. If this is some kind of trick to get me to look at your script—”

“It worked?”

Mason opened his mouth, but failed to think of a response in time to avoid looking like a fish.

The woman smiled. “This is so much more than that. It’s about your dreams. It’s about Eila.”

Mason’s heart sped, someone had just injected him with adrenaline—or blew cocaine in his face.

Be calm, he thought, before responding. He tried to ignore the sweat he felt forming on his forehead. “Are you—were you a friend of hers?”

The woman put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, that’s right. No, Mason, I don’t mean your Isla.” She cocked her head. “Not exactly anyway.”

Mason scowled. “What does that mean?”

She put a hand on his shoulder, jerked her head toward a table. “Come, sit. Have some tea. I’ll explain everything.”

And so, for reasons he later would never be able to explain, even to himself, he followed the odd woman back to her table, where she was drinking tea from china that this coffee shop had never once used. Not in this world.

Serafina caught the man before his head hit the table, looked around to make sure no one was paying attention, and hoped no one would find him too soon.

Then she quickly, but without seeming to rush, exited the coffee shop, got in her car¸ put the roof up, and drove away.

When he woke, it was not in All American Independent Coffee. His first thought, perhaps oddly, was, where was his car? His second was, where was he?

He sat up, and only then realized he had been lying down. He was on a couch, which he was sunk deeply into. The room was a blur of reds and golds, some old world rug shop, except there weren’t enough rugs for that. A lot, but not quite so many as that.

There were a lot though, he realized as he took in the room.
You already thought that
, a voice taunted.

He’d always been here, since time before time. But in the same way he knew this, he knew that he’d arrived here via stairs, and that this was important somehow. That on those stairs, the newel post capper was of a man holding a globe—Atlas.

Mason knew it was Atlas, but for some reason wanted to call it Stephano instead. When he thought the word Atlas, he heard Stephano.

It wasn’t a bedroom exactly, and the decor there did nothing to differentiate what kind of room it might be.

He went to the large wooden door, a deep oak stain with brass handles, twisted the knob knowing it would be locked.

It wasn’t.

Except, it was, but his twisting of it, his expectation, had opened it, unlocked it.

Into a void he stared. He squinted into the dark, trying to see. After a moment, he was blasted by a gentle breeze of humid air. It felt more like steam than air. It smelled like Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

Mason whirled, the door somehow slamming shut.

Before him stood a man in a suit, an old suit, the kind with coattails. He had his hands up, as if to ease Mason, as if Mason were a wild animal. “Never know what you might let out.”

Mason was suddenly overcome with the strange sense of… Something.

Something was off about this situation. There were no other doors, but that didn’t bother him. But he knew, he
knew
, there was supposed to be another one, right there behind— “Who are you? Where— What’s going on?”

“I needed to find you first. To see if it would work. This was the only way we could think of. The only way to be sure. I was beginning to think I’d never find someone who…” He sighed. “Well, I needed to find you. As for this”—he gestured at the room—“this is a place you’ve been before.” The man wore a slight smile, a sad smile.

Mason took in the room again. Was that what it was, déjà vu?

No, that wasn’t it. That particular college psychology class, an indelible presence, his constant companion since that fall quarter, proved its usefulness once again by offering up a memory of an exercise they’d done: writing their names over and over and over, watching them become meaningless—jamais vu. That’s what he felt. “I don’t remember being here before. Why am I? How did I get here?”

The room seemed to shake.

“You were…” The man’s eyes drifted to the closed door behind Mason. Mason could tell the man yearned to go through it.
Or come through it.
“Brought here. This is where you need to go. That is the door you need to pass. Beyond is the thing you need to seek.”

“But I’m here, and the door is open.”

The man’s gaze was on Mason now, and his head, large and covered in dark hair and a hat, lilted to the side, a vaguely curious dog, an indifferent cat. And though his expression didn’t change, his face seemed sad. This change was not physical, yet Mason saw it just the same. The same way he saw the man’s clothes now shimmer from a fine suit of deepest blue, to something off-white with buckles and too-long sleeves fastened behind him, and then back again.

“Mason.”

Everything shifted. Mason was aware of two realities. And then of more. And then of two. This, this was—

The man was sad. The man was not there. No, Mason was not there, Mason was fading, shimmering, the man was remaining.

His arm was shaking. His arm was being shook. “Mason! Wake up.”

Mason peeled his head from the coffee table. He looked up into the woman’s face. Tried to remember her name. Sara.

No, S A R A, that was wrong. There was an H, for hell.

No, it was an E, for enigma
.

He scanned the table for the woman’s script. He looked at her. “Where is it?”

“Mason, you okay?”

Mason scowled. “Pe— Emily.”

“You’re really out of it.” She laughed. “That’s ironic.” She gestured at the shop around them.

Mason shook his head. “I had tea.”

“That explains it.” She made her voice gruff, pumped her arm as if punching a gremlin off of her left bicep, “You come here for a real man’s drink?”

“I had tea here.”

“In your dreams.” She put her hands on her hips. “All American Independent Coffee; we don’t need no stinkin’ tea.”

“You don’t serve tea. You don’t have glasses.”

Emily touched her face. “Contacts.” She tilted her head at him, a concerned dog… An indifferent— “You okay? You’ve been asleep for hours. They almost kicked you out before I came in.”

“They didn’t recognize me.”

Emily pressed her lips together. “Okay, up! Come up. There you go. You’re going to wait while I finish closing up, then we’re going to your place and you can make us margaritas.”

“I’m not old enough to drink,” Mason said as she pulled him toward what, as much as anything, could be called the “kitchen”.

Emily just laughed, and Mason looked around the shop, wondering where they kept the pastries, where they kept the rugs. He saw they were the only two people here.

He watched Emily go back to work. He rubbed his eyes several times while waiting for her to close, and had to blink several times for his contacts to slide back into place over his dry eyeballs. He felt like he’d run a marathon.

He was going back to that doctor. He knew he should have waited it out for the hot doctor.
You signed the waiver
, a voice whispered.

It was that crumbly crap—had to be. Everything else he’d heard of. Hadn’t LSD once been legal? Been proscribed?

‘Desoxyn’ popped into his head. He’d known someone in high school, a blonde with translucent skin he used to stare at during PE, stare at the pale legs exposed by the short shorts she wore, who’d had ADHD. She’d taken that. A doctor had prescribed it to her, prescribed methamphetamine to a fifteen-year-old girl.

Mason frowned. He’d been prescribed other things, true. But had he taken anything else? He didn’t think so. Why was it so hard to remember?
Because dreams have a way of displacing thought
.

Emily finally finished almost an hour later.

Mason had stared outside and hadn’t moved the entire time. Had just stared through the window, and into the dark.

“Coffee?”

Mason shook his head. The night seemed too clear.

“Dickface.”

He looked at her. “What?”

“Talking to my reflection? And not even deign to talk!”

“Oh.” He shook his head. “Just tired.”

“Duh. That’s why I asked.”

“I’m fine.”

“Suit yourself.”

“What were you planning on doing if I hadn’t been here to take you home?”

“Calling you.”

In his car, Emily messed with the radio, while the steaming, scaldingly hot cup of designer coffee sat between her thighs, waiting to be consumed once the proper atmosphere was set.

Mason was especially weary that it did not even have a lid, lest the mound of artistically dispensed whipped cream be disturbed. “That’s not safe.”

She looked up at him. “What?”

He nodded at her lap. “Soon we will be in motion. Hot liquid plus motion plus skin equals … ?”

“Okay Mom. Where should I put it?”

“Try the cup holder shitface.”

She stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth at him and scrunched her face in a snarl.

He laughed. “What was that?”

She ignored him, finished choosing her station, then stowed her cup. She put a finger up as if to stop him from saying anything—he hadn’t been about to—then put on her seatbelt. “I’m ready Mommy!”