She walked in while I was in the middle of frantically tearing the apartment apart.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. I paused in the middle of throwing everything out of the credenza drawer to see her glancing around at the mess I’d made.
“I have to find it!” I owed her an explanation, but I didn’t have any time to waste. I was on a mission!
“Find what?” Huge frustration came out in her voice. “And did you have to make such a mess?”
I still didn’t have time to explain, but I still owed it to her, so I made time, even though there really wasn’t any left. That reptilian alien left with other me just minutes ago, and there was no telling what it was going to do to me. And in the process, it left me with a revelation that I was still having trouble processing. But maybe she could help me process it?
“It’s all an experiment!” In hindsight, I wasn’t actually answering her question about making a mess, but I had to get right to the point. “An alien appeared right over there and admitted it, then took other me away!”
She stared at me like I had two heads, then took another look at the mess. “And that’s why you tore the place to shreds?”
She didn’t quite get it, but then, I didn’t exactly explain it very well, either. So, I tore myself away from the search and stood up to give her the attention she deserved.
“It’s an experiment, Hon!” I could barely organize my thoughts. So much was flying through my head that I didn’t know where to begin but starting with the biggest revelation felt like the best place to start. “My life, his life, maybe even yours and everyone that we know, it’s all some sort of alien experiment or something! Anyway, that’s what the alien said, so I got to thinking right after it left, what if it is an experiment, then where’s the device or devices that control it and how does it know if the experiment is working, so then I thought there must be a camera or something around here keeping track of it, so then I started searching for it but I couldn’t find it, and that got me more and more frustrated, and I guess I got a little out of hand, but you’re here now, and you can help… me… look…?”
She was following me with an utterly baffled look on her face, and that’s when I realized that I was frantically pacing around as I spoke, but my mind was racing too fast to notice. I halted immediately, of course, and stared anxiously at her. I hoped that she would understand and not just call someone to cart me away. The way she looked at me, I feared the latter. There was no reason for her to believe me anyway. She was a saint during our months of therapy together, but the duplicate me put a strain on even her credulity, then to come back home and see me trashing the place and then offering a crazy excuse like alien experimentation had to be the breaking point. It would have been for any ordinary person, anyway. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she turned around and walked right back out and never returned. I might have in her place. Instead, she looked around at the mess again and sighed.
“Okay.” Her voice was neutral, so I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but it made my anxiety spike. She let the word linger in the air for a while, making my anxiety spike even higher. She was tormenting me for messing up the place, leaving me on pins and needles until she finally added, “So, what can I do to help?”
I exhaled in relief, after holding my breath for so long, and she flatly added, “Without adding to this mess?”
“Oh.” I looked around and saw what I had done. I hadn’t even thought about it until just then, and I was absolutely baffled at how I’d managed to make such a huge mess in such a short time. It felt like it had only been minutes ago when I began the search, and it was going to take hours to straighten it all up again. And I had a hunch about who was going to be tasked with that little chore, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.
But that was for future me to worry about. Present me had other problems to deal with.
“We need to find the device that’s causing the… uh, the time… things.” I admit it. Very little of what the alien said actually stuck in my head, except for the important stuff. “I have to think that it’s somewhere in the apartment, in the middle of the experiment. And if we can’t find that, then maybe we can find the camera or whatever it is that the alien is using to watch us.”
She took a deep breath to process it all. “And if we don’t find anything like that?”
I blanked for a moment. Mainly because I hadn’t thought it through to that point. What if there was no device? Or camera? What if the alien was lying, or had some alien way of doing what it needed to do that didn’t have to be in the apartment at all? What if everything happening was just some gigantic delusion? Okay, I decided that that last one was ludicrous, considering that she had seen and interacted with my doppelganger as well, but everything was getting so topsy-turvy lately that it felt like I didn’t know anything anymore. But I had to tell her something, or she would just worry.
“I guess we go to Plan B, then.”
“Plan B?” She was skeptical. “What’s Plan B?”
“I don’t know yet.” I really didn’t. “But let me know if you think of something.”
She rolled her eyes, but she didn’t leave, so that was a good sign. “Okay, what’s this device look like?”
She stumped me again. “I don’t know.”
Then, an epiphany, and I added, “It might look like something ordinary, or something that we wouldn’t look twice at. That way, we wouldn’t get curious about it, or suspicious.
“Oh!” I had another epiphany. I really hope I’m using that word right. “And it has to be something recent. Something that appeared just before that morning when I woke up and everything got crazy.”
I looked around, but I couldn’t tell what fit that description. I’d gotten used to what the apartment looked like over the last few months, but before that strange morning when my life turned upside-down, it had looked entirely different. I didn’t know what was new or old, but she did.
“Do you remember getting anything new before that morning?” I asked her. “Maybe a week before, or that week? I can’t imagine the alien would wait too long before starting its experiment, so it must be something we got just before that morning.”
She scowled at me, silently asking if I was serious about going through with the farce, then gave in with a magnificent eye-roll and thought about it. “Well, there was that art fair we went to.”
“Art fair?” It was a long shot, but what if it came from there?
“Yeah,” she absently replied, deep in thought. She shrugged. “We only bought a few pieces, though.”
“When was that?” It mattered. A lot.
She went back into deep thought. “Umm… about eight, nine months ago?”
So, pre-wake-up-in-an-entirely-different-timeline era. “Around the time the weirdness started happening?”
She thought again, and her eyes widened. Astonished, she turned to me and gasped, “I think so!”
“We need to find those pieces!” I glanced around but had no idea what I was looking for. “Do you remember what they were?”
“Oh, yeah, sure!” But she didn’t look or sound that certain. She glanced around, an expression of deep concentration on her face, until her eyes alit on something and her brows went up. “That vase! I remember falling in love with it.”
I went to where she was pointing and without picking it up, checked out the vase. It was pretty, but ordinary. Glossy and brightly painted with a rainbow swirl on the outside but beige and coarse on the inside; it looked like any other vase, except that there was nothing in it. No flowers, real or fake, and no kind of decoration whatsoever.
“We didn’t use it?” That bothered me, although I wasn’t sure why.
“It was too pretty,” she explained in a tone that suggested it was the only explanation she needed to give. I left it alone, after peeking inside to make sure there was no weird mechanism inside.
“Anything else?” I looked around as I asked, but I still had no idea what I was looking for.
“Ummm…” She thought about it as she looked around. Then, she pointed. “That painting, there!”
I looked. Somehow it blended into the other artwork around it, but it was definitely different. A crude painting of a sailboat on scalloped blue water that looked like it was made by a six-year-old.
“Was the fair at the grade school?” As soon as I said it, I knew I was going to regret it.
“I thought it was cute!” She put just enough force behind the protest to let me know, in no uncertain terms, that she still thought it was cute and that I should appreciate it too. Or else. So, I swallowed crow and made no further comment on it.
“Uh, anything else?” I hoped getting her back on track would distract from thoughts of revenge and apparently, it did. She thought about it for a minute, then her eyes lit up again.
“Maybe it’s the Deely Bug!”
“The… Deely Bug?” I’d never heard of any such thing.
“That’s what you called it.” She pointed at it. “It’s right there, so you tell me.”
It was standing on the credenza the entire time, untouched. I could have sworn that I checked everything there; the rest of the knickknacks thre had already been tossed to the floor, but there it still was. An iridescent sphere roughly the size of a human head standing on three sticks in tripod formation, with smaller balls the same color as the main sphere serving as feet. Two more sticks with balls on the end, identical to its feet, jutted from the sphere roughly where shoulders might be, looking like arms thrust upward in a cheer, and nestled at the very top of the main body, right between them, was a slightly larger ball for a head, also the same color as the body. I could see why I called it a bug. But “Deely”? Where did that come from?
Now that I looked at it, it gave me a weird feeling, so I carefully approached it and looked it over. Other than being a weird sculpture, though, it didn’t look manacing.
“Is that it?” She wasn’t sure either, but at least she was taking me seriously now.
“I don’t know.” I peered at it closely. “Do you know what it’s made of?”
“Glass?” She was just spit balling. “I think?”
I took a deep breath and carefully touched it with one finger. It didn’t zap me, so I felt its surface. It wasn’t smooth like glass, nor did it feel like treated glass. It felt like metal, but it was textured and room temperature, not cold or even cool like I would expect metal to be. It didn’t strike me as an ordinary art piece, but I had to know for sure, so I carefully put both hands under it and lifted. It was heavy, much heavier than any glass figure its size should be. I didn’t bother to lift it more than an inch before I knew, or at least reasonably suspected, that I had found my culprit.
“Is that it?” She sounded as worried as I was. I carefully set the Deely Bug back on the credenza and backed away.
“I think so.” There was no use in even trying to keep the worry out of my voice. We’d already resolved never to keep anything from each other, even feelings that might disturb the other. “I don’t know what it is, but I think we found it.”
“So… what do we do with it?” I could tell that her mental gears weren’t turning anymore, but after everything that’s happened, it was perfectly understandable. I wanted to shut down, too, but after learning that I was part of some lizard’s experiment and seeing it kidnap other me for God only knew what reason, I couldn’t afford to give up that easily. Besides, she had already done so much of my thinking for me those past few months that I owed her big time.
“I think,” and my gears were grinding sparks as I thought it through, “I think we find a way to let the lizard know that we have it.”
