The other side of now, p.8
The Other Side of Now, page 8
Maureen has found a stuffed toy and is now milling in circles with it, hoping to be noticed and appreciated.
“Don’t talk to me ’til I’ve had my coffee, am I right?” says Kiera, holding up the towel and then tossing it into a rattan basket with other dishrags. “Anyway, how you getting on?”
Even less helpful.
She sits down on the couch by the fireplace and waits on the update.
“Did you have a fire last night?” she asks, gesturing at the hearth. “Did Cillian come over?”
“No, I was cold,” I say, though a dreamy, romantic image has come to mind of that gorgeous bartender here stoking my fire. Not a euphemism. Although—
“And you didn’t turn on the heater?” she asks, gesturing at a metal object I can now see is very obviously a space heater. “You never use the fireplace.”
I shrug, a gesture that feels wildly blasé for how strange everything is right now. “Thought the fire would be nice.”
She gives me a look of confusion and says, “Who are you and what’ve you done with my best friend?”
Welp, I’m not gonna get an opening better than that.
I bite my bottom lip and then decide I can’t do this completely blind. I need some answers. I need an ally.
I sit down on the couch across from her and lean forward, elbows on my knees. “Kiera, we’re close, right?”
“Obviously.”
“K, well, I’m about to say something, and I know it’s going to sound absolutely insane. I want you to have an open mind, if you can. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, but—”
She gives me a look. “I hardly think you’ll shock me.”
“Ha,” I laugh. “We’ll see.”
“What is it?”
Maureen gives up on being the center of attention and curls into a ball on the floor.
I get up the nerve to say it.
“I don’t know who you are.”
“Jesus, Nial’s not that bad. What are you on about?”
“No, no, I mean, I don’t know who you are at all. I don’t know who that bartender was last night, though I understand his name is Cillian. I kind of don’t know who … who I am, right now. I mean, I do, but—yeah. I don’t live here. I’m from California.”
“I thought you were from the one with all the alligators and crime. What’s it—Florida?”
She’s rightfully confused, and I know I’m being confusing, but I can’t help it. I’m also confused.
“I am originally, yes. Okay. Look. I know this sounds like some weird joke or lie or, I don’t know, a crazy delusion. And honestly, maybe it is. But the thing is, I live in Los Angeles. I’m an actress.”
“What the hell are you— Are you Truman Show–ing me?”
“I had my thirtieth birthday party, all these people were over, Barry Keoghan was there.”
“Did I tell you my cousin Marnie went to primary school with him? O’Connell in Dublin. She said he was a twat. But Marnie’s a bit of a twat.” She looks at me. “Sorry, go on, you had a party, ol’ Barry was there. Where was I when you were having this party?”
“I don’t know, I was in LA. Right, okay, so that night, I booked this cottage on Airbnb and a flight all on a whim. I flew here, I got out of the taxi, I walked inside, dropped my suitcase, and then I went to the pub to get food, as all I’d eaten all day was a pretzel from the airport. As far as I know, before last night, I’ve never spoken to you or to Cillian or—anyone here before.”
“Oh, wait, is this a dream you had? You’re supposed to start that kind of thing with, I had a dream where this batshit thing happened.”
“No, I’m telling you the truth. That’s my real life.”
“Are you concussed?”
“No! I don’t think so. I know how this sounds.”
“We should go to hospital.” She stands up and makes her way to the door.
“No, no, I’m fine, really! It’s—”
“If you don’t recognize your friends, and you think you live in a place you never lived, then I think that’s a cause for emergency. So come on, off we go.”
I consider the number of tests I’d be likely to undergo—if a person comes in and thinks they have another life or that they’ve time traveled or they’re from another planet, no one would ever believe them. I’d end up on some medication, maybe locked in a psych ward somewhere. I’m becoming increasingly unsure why I even expected Kiera to believe me. Of course she thinks I should go to the hospital, that’s what I’d say if someone told me this.
She gives me a serious look. “If you really believe what you’re saying—” When I appear, I guess, horror-struck at the idea, she says, “Well, we must at least go see Jim.”
“Jim?”
She looks really troubled now.
I try to seem mentally stable. “Can I tell you what I think is happening?”
She hesitates. “You’ve got five minutes, and then we’re leaving.” She goes back to her chair.
“Okay, thank you.”
I’m really going to have to make a good case for myself here.
“I got into Avalon School of the Arts when I was eighteen years old. I applied with my best friend—”
“Aimee, yeah, I know that.”
It’s thrilling and a little dizzying to hear this stranger refer to her.
I go on to tell her my version of what happened. The wait-list, the college dorms in Florida, everything. Everything but the big, important part, about how Aimee is dead.
She narrows her eyes. “This is mad, what you’re doing. It’s very unlike you to do an elaborate joke like this to make a fool of me.”
“Yeah, I’m not doing that. I hate that kind of thing actually.”
“That’s true, you do.” She cocks her head at me, suspicious. “Oh, feck, this isn’t some weird method acting thing or something? You used to do this kind of thing in school, but—”
“No, it’s not.”
“The problem here is, you’re a good actress.”
I have the compulsion to google myself again, to use the internet to prove it. It’s what you do if you’re a hundred percent sure Harry Styles has four nipples, and you desperately need to prove it to someone.
But since the internet seems to be in on whatever charade this is, I can’t simply look it up.
“Kiera, I swear on everything. I swear on my dog—I mean my dog back home. Dido. I met this dog last night.”
We both look at the retriever.
“You’re telling me you don’t know Maureen.”
“I can’t even fathom why I or anyone else would name a dog Maureen.”
“He named her after the actress didn’t he? Maureen O’Hara? The Parent Trap? I thought it was your idea.”
“He?”
She squints. “Cillian.”
“Ah, right. He wants me to bring her back apparently.”
She shakes her head. “You’re telling me you don’t know the dog that you’ve literally kidnapped every other night since she was a puppy?”
I look at Maureen, who is now using her toy as a pillow.
“She seems very sweet, but I don’t know her,” I say.
“Was it the breakup? Did it cause you to go daft? I mean, you two have broken up a hundred times, and you’ve never forgotten your entire life. Something did seem different about this one, though. I feel like you aren’t telling me something about it.”
A plunge of reasonless guilt goes through me and I shake my head. “I don’t know. Cillian seems nice too.”
She gives me a challenging look. “Cillian seems nice? I’m starting to feel a bit gaslit.”
“Wait—breakup? Are you telling me I was with that guy?”
She looks puzzled. “You don’t remember being with Cillian? For years on end? Off and on, over and over?”
I shake my head slowly. “No.”
“You don’t remember breaking up with him yesterday?”
“Yesterday? Oh my God, no wonder he seemed so annoyed with me being there.”
The pieces of this new image start to fall into place. I was with Cillian. Or … some version of me was.
“To be fair, he’s always a bit like that.” She laughs, but then remembers what I’m telling her and looks seriously at me. “You’re telling me you really don’t remember any of this? You really believe you have a different life?”
“I swear on everything. You don’t have to believe me. I mean, I wouldn’t believe myself right now, if I hadn’t looked in the mirror and seen”—I gesture at my face—“all this.”
“What about”—she gestures at my face too—“all this?”
“In my life, my real life, I weigh like twenty pounds less and I’ve had some work done. Not a lot. But enough that I can say with one hundred percent certainty that this is not the face I had when I woke up yesterday.”
She laughs. “In my real life, I too am about twenty pounds thinner.” She then shakes her fists at the heavens. “God, won’t you wake me up from this nightmare?”
“I—ugh. I need to prove this to you.” I rack my brain. “Okay, okay, um … okay! I can tell you everything on the menu of this amazing Thai place in Silver Lake. There are actually several locations, but—okay, this restaurant called Night + Market. Google it.”
She furrows her brows at me and then raises them and pulls out her phone. “Okay, I’ll play your little game.”
“Type in ‘Night + Market Silver Lake.’ It’s the Song location. On Sunset.”
She gives me a look, types it in, and then says, “Got it.”
“Okay, find the menu. They’ve got something called Startled Pig, though they don’t always have it. They have this um … oh, larb, they’ve got like two or three kinds of larb. They have a crispy rice salad—”
“I’m not sure what this is supposed to be proving, except that your obsession with food has started to stretch globally.”
I let out a growl of impatience.
“I need something better. Oh!” I clap my hands together and point at her. “You know Grayson Gamble?”
“The one from that Marvel movie? So fit.”
“Yeah, that’s him!”
“I know you hate that guy.”
“Do I?” I ask, feeling practically airborne with my eagerness to prove myself. Partially because I want someone else in on this with me, but also because if she believes me, she can help me to believe myself.
“You said he looks like a Disney prince that cries after sex.”
This catches me off guard and I say, “Actually, he turned down an Enchanted spin-off and one time he cried during sex, so that was an excellent read.”
“You said he looks like he sits sidesaddle on the loo.”
I laugh at this. “That’s very funny. I can’t confirm it, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Because you’re so close, the two of you.”
“I can tell you where he lives. You can zoom in on his house on Google Maps. I can tell you exactly what the house looks like. I actually live there with him. It doesn’t really feel like my house. But that’s its own thing.”
“I’m not saying you would do this, you’d have to be barmy … although, at this point … but, Meg, you could have looked all this stuff up. Memorized some mansion in Beverly Hills, or—”
“Silver Lake.”
“Whatever that is. Or looked up some random menu for a restaurant and memorized it. I don’t know why you’d do that. But you could have.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” I pat my lips with my fingers, thinking. “We could call Grayson.”
“We could call Grayson Gamble?”
“Yes!”
“Even that, while insane, still wouldn’t prove you’re…” She shakes her head and widens her eyes. “Are we really having this conversation, Meggie?”
“Actually, I wouldn’t know his number by heart.” I struggle to think. “Oh, God, I know—when he was thirteen, he burned his house down.”
“Jesus!”
“Everyone was fine, but his parents were obviously miserable about it, and he never told anyone it was his fault.”
She crosses her arms. “How’d he do that?”
“He”—I laugh, thinking of the story—“it’s awful, I shouldn’t laugh. He was pretending with his stuffed rabbit, Flip Flop, trying to cook with him, but it was a gas stove, and Flip Flop caught on fire and then Grayson knocked over the box of pasta and then tried to put it out with oil—”
“Terrible.”
“He only told me because we were together. I mean, and he was also on peyote at the time.”
“When he was thirteen?”
“When he told me.”
“Ah. So you reckon,” she says, “I should call up famous movie star Grayson Gamble out of the blue and suggest that when he was a little too old to be playing with dolls, he might have burned down his family home.”
“Maybe that’s too mean.”
“There must be a way you can prove”—she puts air quotes around the word prove—“this, without retraumatizing a man.”
“You’re right.” I breathe in deeply. “You must be right.”
“As usual,” she says quietly, fidgeting with her nails.
Then I think of it.
“I know what I can do!”
“Go ahead then.” She takes a sip of coffee.
“There’s this show called Brilliance.”
“Duh. Love it.”
“You’ve seen it?” So it does air here. Good to know.
“Have I seen it? I watched the first season twice. I thought you hated that show.”
“Do I?”
The Me-Who-Lives-in-Avalon seems to hate all the things that make up my entire life back in California.
“You do. Anyway, carry on.”
“The finale hasn’t aired yet. It airs…” I glance at my watch. “Tonight, right?”
One of the soapiest aspects of our show is that we broke modern tradition and have almost thirty episodes a season, and when we shoot it, we air it almost immediately, like traditional soaps. It’s one of the things that got people’s attention. I know the inside scoop, which is that the writers wanted to be able to change the show if something was or wasn’t working. Which has been hell for line memorization, but worked well for keeping the attention of our fans.
“Yes, it airs tonight.”
“I know exactly what happens. I know every line. Well, all of my lines.”
“Your … lines?”
“Right! You don’t know. I play Daphne.”
“Kim Wong plays Daphne.”
“Yes, but in my world, Kim plays Velma.”
“Jordan Levinson plays Velma.”
“She does? The weird girl from those banned tampon commercials?”
“The what?”
“Never mind, it doesn’t matter—this is the perfect thing. I can tell you my entire monologue at the end when—”
She plugs her ears. “Ah! Ah! No spoilers!”
“I’m sorry,” I say. Then, “So you are starting to believe me.”
She exhales, furrowing her brow at the ground. “Am I?”
Hope lifts within me.
“Look, I can’t say this will work. I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if the monologue will be the same. Maybe without me, it’s different.” In fact, it probably will be. The writers change everything based on audience response. “But this is a good place to start. I won’t spoil it for you. I’ll write it down and give it to you and you can open it after you watch the episode.”
“Shouldn’t there be some wizard guiding you through this or something? Or like, Father Christmas?”
“I know, right? That would be nice.”
She considers. “All right, fine. We’ll do the finale thing. But will you do me a favor in the meantime?”
“Anything!”
“Let’s get your head checked. I mean, you seem normal enough. You seem calm, sort of, and you don’t seem like you’ve had a catastrophic cranial injury, but obviously everything you’ve said since I arrived is absolutely mad, so I think it’s best we get you checked out.”
“I really don’t like hospitals.”
“We’ll just go see Jim.”
Jim again.
“Okay,” I say.
“Great, good, grand, okay.” She starts to make moves.
I remember Aimee. Not that I’d forgotten, but the idea is so massive it’s hard to hold it in my mind while I think, speak, or do anything else.
“And … you know Aimee?” I ask.
“Of course I do.”
“Is she … is she here?”
“What, in the room with us?” She makes a face.
I breathe deeply. “No, I mean … I—does she live in Avalon?” I stumble a bit on the word live.
The moment between my question and her response is one of the longest of my life. Is she here? Is Aimee here? Is Aimee somewhere at all?
“Yes…”
Holy shit. Oh my God, oh my God.
“Can we go see Aimee? Now?”
I stand.
My heart skips a few beats as I stare up at the photo of Aimee, Kiera, and me.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Meg. You two haven’t spoken lately.”
“What?” Bile rises in my throat. “Why?”
She stands too. “Meg, this is really worrying. You really don’t remember anything that’s happened?”
I let out a deep sigh. If I were her, I would have already called the men in white coats to take me away.
Part of me wants to tell her why it’s so important and staggering that she’s saying Aimee is here. But I can’t do it.
“I don’t know,” I say, rubbing my eyes in frustration. “Maybe my plane crashed and this is my version of Lost. Maybe we’ll all find out I’m dead in the finale.”
Her eyebrows drop to a heavy line and she lifts her chin at me. “You know damn well I’m only on season three.”
“Shit. See, I don’t know that. And also, I’m sorry. And also, it’s still worth watching, people give it a bad rap, but the ending is actually not what that show is all about. It actually aged into something more interesting.”
“That is exactly what you said to me last month when I was looking for something to watch.”
We’re silent for a moment. I drink my chai, she drinks her coffee.
