Have we made it back?

It was Saturday all right. The parking lot was packed, and afternoon sun glared off the windshields. Hot dusty air scrubbed his face and drew sweat down his neck. He smelled exhaust and oil and fast food scraps sweltering in some sun battered bag forgotten by the curb. The horizon hid behind mud colored apartment faces and a scraggly weed etched slope across the street, and the sky was like a great gradient glass, cloudless and clear. It was all there. Undeniable. Seeing something so real after finding the Otherworld was like coming to the end of an inverted dream.

Lucy seemed uninterested now. She followed him to his car, an old Camry with cloudbursts of faded paint, without looking around. He got in and started the car as she held her door open and kicked out trash. A bright clear morning had warmed the interior mercilessly and sweat fell in beads under his shirt.

“Where are we going?” He shouted over a squeal from the engine.

“To your job.”

“Are you going to watch me work?”

“What did I say about questions?”

“If you’re going to actually make me go to work, we might have to call it right here.”

Lucy surprised him by smiling.

“Just drive. You won’t be there long.”

Lucy rolled down her window and lit a cigarette as he drove out onto the street, letting in a rush of hot air. It was a hot day in a hot state and the asphalt shimmered. He cranked the AC. Lucy blew smoke down her chest at her crossed thighs and turned the vents away from her.

“You’re not hot?”

“Why would I be?”

“Oh yeah.” Gradie turned off the AC and reminded himself it was all in his mind, but sweat bloomed on his face.

The screeching of the serpentine belt quieted down when he picked up speed. Gravel hit the undercarriage and Lucy smoked silently. They passed the massive empty field he often wished would take over the whole world, and his office came up like it always did, flat two stories of brown and darker brown looking at him like it wanted an explanation. Why do we even exist? He had wondered a million times if living so close to his job, seen as such a good idea in his enthusiastic first year of work, was doing some kind of severe psychological damage.

“That’s your job?” Lucy’s voice melted out of the dry air.

“You know it is.” Hadn’t she teased everything out of his memory already?

He turned into the office parking lot, shared with an L shaped strip of for-lease retail space that had once held grocery stores, florists, barbers and other things from another age, but now served only a handful of shops so mundane he could never remember what they were. One made t-shirts or posters and two of the others had ‘solutions’ in their names. He took a right in front of his office, under the sign that said “Northwest Office Park”, all rectangles and hard lines like it was designed with crayon, and parked in a far spot close to the field.

“You want me to go inside?”

“Just think about it.”

“Going inside?”

“Everything. Just think about work.”

His mind responded despite his hesitance, as if her words had struck a tap in his memory. He saw himself in the break room, in a meeting, talking to people who had long since moved on to better things. All the nights he had worked overtime to pay for a new alternator. All the stolen looks at her. Every time he had been on the edge of walking out. Three years poured out like nothing, then ran dry in a breath.

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They sat there with the engine idling in a dusty parking lot where bright sunlight chased shadows to slivers and nothing unordinary could have ever happened to anyone. Lucy flicked the butt out the window.

“All right. I’m gonna drive now.”

She got out and walked around while Gradie sat there stunned, waiting for more of his mind to bleed out into the landscape. When she knocked on the window, he picked his legs up and hopped into the passenger seat, banging his hip against the gearshift on the way. She got in and adjusted the seats and mirrors, then started up the car and rolled down the rest of the windows.

“Hand me that.” She pointed to his cd case. He lifted it up off the floor-board and she set it in her lap.

“What kind of music do you listen to?”

His mind spilled out all the CDs he remembered from the case. She opened it and thumbed through it anyway.

“Which one did you get first?”

“Metal Church.” She raised an eyebrow at that.

“Which album?”

“Also Metal Church.”

She pulled it out and swapped it for the Nightwish cd in the player.

“I’m surprised you have CDs. A bit before your time.”

He couldn’t tell if it was more interrogation or just small talk.

“My aux port broke. I got most of those in high school.” He saw himself in the back of the mall, clearence sale at a closing Sam Goody, the cd sliding out of the sparse metal section. The memory floated in the air and dissolved, and he felt sure it was being kept somewhere known only to Lucy.

“Where else do you drive from here?”

The access road split up ahead of them like double vision. A hazy copy of himself drove down to the wal mart, the gas station, and the fast-food places and strip malls across from his work, all at the blistering speed of memory. The world expanded and contracted and they were alone again.

“What about the weekends?”

A phantom highway, this one in a world of evening, broke off and took another doppelganger to the liquor store, while others, debit cards flush with overtime pay, drove to an organic grocery or the Asian supermarket and disappeared.

“Where else?”

“That’s about it.”

They were on the highway now. The second riff of Beyond the Black chugged in the speakers and memories streamed out with the music. Laying in his bed in the middle of the night with his mp3 player on max volume. Playing the cd in his first car just after buying it, feeling a confidence he realized only now he had forgotten. Writing the first draft of his fantasy novel senior year, seeing the battle play out to the rhythm. The memories started repeating, and Lucy punched off the stereo.

“Where did you grow up?”

Her voice snaked through the hum of the highway. The first house he thought of was the second one he had lived in. They were parked in his childhood mini-van and the garage was just how he remembered. This time, the memories came without resistance, his spirit soaring through the rooms, falling through time.

“Fuck.” He was crying.

“Where are we?” Lucy’s voice was so gentle he didn’t recognize it at first. “How would you drive to your apartment from here?”

They sailed down the streets and highways in seconds the weight of years. Memories of everything along the way fluttered out like leaves kicked up by the tires.

“You go to school around here?” Her voice was ethereal, distant. His memories had exploded from him and the landscape was made of them. Memories of school he didn’t know he had played out in the halls, the classes. Some of them might have been half remembered dreams.

“Who was your first crush?”

He saw a smiling face under short hair and a winter cap.

“Fuck you!”

They were back in the car, parked in his work lot.

“I need to make sure your past isn’t fabricated. Before we—"

“I don’t give a fuck you robot bitch! You wanna watch me jack off for the first time too? If you can’t tell whether or not I’m a spy or whatever you think I am after seeing all this, then you’re shit at your job! I didn’t even want to join this fucking team! Michael talked me into it! I thought you were all in my head! I thought this was a dream!”

The words bounced around in the car. Gradie tried to focus on Lucy’s eyes instead of the fact that he had tried to wake up ten times since she had started driving.

“If you don’t want to join, then fuck off. This isn’t a dream. It’s dangerous. You have no idea how much we risk—”

“I don’t give a fuck. Take me back. I’m done.”

She stared at him a moment, then turned and walked through the door. He was standing in the bare room and hadn’t even noticed the change.

Back in the cosmic condo, Michael was looking out at a frosty forest and EP was lounging on a nebulae cushion talking to someone who wasn’t there. They stood up as Lucy entered.

“He’s cleared,” she said, before Michael could ask. Gradie locked eyes with EP and tried to hide his confusion. She looked away and studied Lucy walking across the room.

“Congratulations Gradie. Welcome to the team.” Michael held out his hand.

Gradie saw Michael and the woman walking towards him in the gas station, as if his memories were still liquid and free. He realized that everything he had said to Lucy at the end had been a lie. He would have shown her anything to get this. All his memories, his life, which he still felt spread out around him but invisible, seemed worthless beyond their ability to bring him here.

He shook Michael’s hand and followed him back to the front door.

“Thanks Lucy. Should have another job within the week.”

Lucy watched them leave. Gradie looked in her eyes for a message, but found nothing but neon.