The Solution (15 page)

Stan tapped his fingers on the side of his leg, saying nothing. She had shown him so much, at one point, about her, and had taken him to the most classified areas of her memories, which were like hidden folders and files in the depths of herself. Stan had experienced Lisa when she was twelve, watching her father slowly dying on a hospital bed after an aneurysm; his body ate itself and starved and thirsted to death. Lisa was seven. Her
My Little Ponies
, how she organized them, pink, white, blue, on the carpeted floors for the March of the Fair Princess Lisa.

There were more secrets, of course, some horrible ones that had left Lisa bare and vulnerable in Stan’s eyes, and there were beautiful ones, too. He knew Lisa, her essence, literally knew her to the core.

Lisa’s hand was shaking. While Stan couldn’t see what was going on inside her, he could tell she was beginning to fall apart. He’d seen this many times, and it had become a sort of dance. She turned her back to him, and laid her head down.

He searched for something to say, dug in as deep as he could, but found nothing.

Stan went into his office and spent the remainder of the day there, reading about how the CC-8 is meant to genuinely reflect the darkness, light, depth, memory, future, fantasy. He found a passage pertaining to theory behind the cause of caterpillar headaches; that they were psychosomatic, squirming their way to reality, and blooming. Their proposed cause was that the CC-8 could not generate worlds or emotions in an extremely rare percentage of it users and there was confliction between body and mind. This was the theory, besides a malfunction in the CC-8 (which was even rarer). Stan put his hands to his head, knowing the pain was coming soon; it crawled.

He strained his mind until he fell within himself.

At first it appeared he was floating in a great, foggy hall that reached to what looked like infinity. Black static buzzed in his ears, and the sound echoed far, deep, and wide. Before he could comprehend, he was no longer floating but walking, and the air smelled dank and of the sea. The further Stan went down the corridor, the less he discovered.

He came to a point that, in the distance behind the fog, he caught a glimpse of the blackness. A terrible awe coursed through him. Then, as if a network of numerous mirrors had been angled to render a great illusion, Stan saw countless images of himself whirling and emerging from the fog. Each of the near countless images may have added up to be all the seconds of Stan’s life. There was nothing other than him, his images; some of them appeared to be from a different life, personifying what Stan would have been if he had made different decisions, taken other paths. His hair was longer on one image, and another wore a beard and dirt-smudged clothes.

The black static seethed, the sound of it wrapping around him as if it were a sentient being. Then the blackness expanded, eventually swallowing the fog until it consumed the mirror images of Stan. The body of blackness had taken hold of Stan and sucked him inward. Before Stan was lost, he saw a final image mouthing something that might have been of great importance, or it might have been a recipe for his late grandmother’s fruitcake. Stan could not understand it, and the liquid blackness ate him whole.

From the bed Lisa had heard him hollering and cursing and understood that another caterpillar headache had gotten him. She took him the oxygen tank and stayed by his side. When the pain released him, she hugged him, then, left the room.

By the time Stan had come out of the office, the molten gold color of dusk poured through the window in the kitchen. Lisa sat at the table, halfway in the gold and half in the darkness. She had taken her shower earlier, gotten dressed, and packed her bags. Lisa White had made a decision.

Her eyes appeared abyssal, and she said, “I think you’re scared to see anything else, Stan.”