Part 2: Next Level / Chapter 17
___
“Can you take me home?” Darla asked.
“Why?”
“I need to see the rest.”
“The rest of what?”
“The rest of the code. Maybe more has been translated while I‘ve been here. Could give us some answers.”
I hadn’t had a plan for where to go next, but her suggestion sounded pretty good. Whatever was going on with her had something to do with what was going on with me. And what was going on with her was apparently slowly but surely being revealed by her fortune-telling computer. Granted, she’d said that the computer’s feed was heavy on not-very-helpful world news and business headlines, but there were bound to be some useful updates sooner or later.
“Your place it is,” I said, as we reached my car and we both climbed in. Then, starting the engine and pulling out of the lot, I realized I didn’t know where I was going.
“Where exactly is your place?”
“San Jose.”
“What?”
“San Jose.”
None of our discussions thus far had included the location of her uncle’s mansion, though now that I thought about it, it made sense that a Silicon Valley big shot would live in Silicon Valley. But . . .
“You biked 60 miles?” I asked, confused.
“Biked to the train, took the train to a bus, biked to GetGet.”
“Aren’t you a millionaire?”
“Billionaire.”
“Right. And . . . no car?”
“Got my license suspended.”
“How?”
“I . . . ran over a giant cheeseburger.”
“What?”
She sighed, and I got the sense that this wasn’t something she talked about with many people.
“You know that fast food place, Chuck’s Chuck?”
“Uh huh.”
“You know the six-foot fiber glass cheeseburger they have at the drive-thru that you talk to, to place your order?”
“Uh huh.”
“I ran that over.”
“So, you had an accident,” I said. “Happens all the time. Why would they suspend your license for that?”
“Wasn’t an accident,” she said. “I asked if they had any vegetarian options and the order-taker guy laughed at me.”
“Oh.”
“Apparently, the owner of the chain is on some kind of meat crusade.”
“I’ve seen the ads. Don’t they have a burger with five patties?”
“Yup. So I guess the order-taker guy thought I should know better, and . . . ”
“He laughed at you.”
“And called me crazy, which is kind of a trigger for me.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, I ran over the cheeseburger.”
“Got it.”
“And a little bit of the restroom.”
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“Oh.”
“And some of the kitchen.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” she said, shrugging self-consciously. “And there was some other stuff from before, so . . . they took my license.”
“What other stuff?”
She shrugged again and mumbled, “Mental hospital.”
“What?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Well, I’m not sure what I think.”
“I checked myself in after my second year in college.”
“You checked yourself into a mental hospital?”
“I thought I might have schizophrenia.”
“Oh,” I said, taking a beat to take that in.
Her crazy seemed to predate the last few days. But I found myself resisting the conclusion that she was genuinely nuts.
“So, did they do some treatment or . . . ?” I asked.
“They locked me in a room and took my shoe laces.”
“And then?”
“They asked me a bunch of questions.”
“And then?”
“They gave me back my shoe laces and sent me packing.”
“So, no schizophrenia?”
“They said I just had ‘existential angst’. But the fact that I’d admitted myself didn’t look great when the burger thing happened.”
I pulled onto highway 101, which paralleled the hospital campus. San Jose was about an hour and a half away. It was almost 4 a.m. and I should have been worried about the drive. But for whatever reason, the exhaustion hadn’t hit me yet.
Darla fell quiet for a while. I thought maybe she was regretting opening up. But then she surprised me by pushing ahead.
“I don’t think it’s just existential angst. I think there’s something going on with me. I think there’s always been something going on with me. I think that’s why I kind of related to my uncle. I never really knew him, but even from a distance I felt like there was a . . . connection.”
“Wait, you never really knew him? And he left you everything?”
“Yeah, at first it seemed weird to me too. But the thing I thought was wrong with me—it’s getting worse. And I think maybe . . . ”
Based on what she’d told me of her uncle, I put two and two together.
“You think you’ve got whatever he had.”
She gave me an almost imperceptible nod. She really didn’t want what was wrong with her uncle to be wrong with her. And she’d been not wanting that for a long time. Now I fully understood her relief when we’d met. My wacky story normalized the wackiness she’d experienced recently, and maybe, just maybe, the foreboding sense of psychosis she’d been feeling for years before that. I found myself buying into the notion without much thought.
“Well, remember, whatever’s wrong with you isn’t any wronger than what’s wrong with me,” I said. “As far as I can tell, I spent the day murdering droves of bloodthirsty Cutie Pants dolls.”
A day ago, her cuckoo cheeseburger assault might have scared me off. But after what I’d seen, I really meant what I said. And she could tell. She gave me a hint of a smile and there was that grateful glint in her eyes again.
“I don’t talk to anybody about this stuff,” she said.
“Well, we’re in this together.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Life partners.”
“What?”
“I said we’re . . . like partners.”
“You said ‘life partners’.”
“Did I? That’s weird,” she said, sweeping the strange remark under the rug. I might have given it more thought, but she rolled right into a non sequitur.
“Do you get any warning?”
“Huh?”
“Before bizarre things happen. Do you get any warning?”
“Oh. No. One minute I’m doing regular everyday stuff, the next minute the dolls or ferrets show up and it’s on.”
“You’d think there’d be some kind of schedule.”
“That’d be nice. But whoever or whatever is in charge has been pretty glitchy with stuff happening out of order and what have you.”
“Out of order!” Darla exclaimed.
“Huh?”
“The numbers on your arm!” she said, pointing to the Quest Summary. “There was a pattern. Sort of. It’s been rattling around in my head. Lemme see.”
I reached over as best I could to let her examine the log printed on my forearm.
“See!” she said. “The order changes, but there’s a lot of the same numbers. “52280730, 22580900, 58180022 . . . The five always comes before the eight and the two twos are always together.”
“Neat,” I said, cluelessly.
“Hello? Five, eight, twenty-two?”
It started to sink in for me.
“That’s . . . ”
“Yesterday’s date! And these other numbers . . . 0730, 0900, 1800 . . . that’s military time!”
“The dolls showed up at 7:30!” I said, matching her excitement now. “Then the car guy when I got to the office which was around nine, and the ferrets when I got to the hospital which was around six!”
I looked over at her, a little suspicious.
“Are you, like, a code breaker for the NSA?”
She shrugged bashfully. “I’ve always been good at puzzles. I can kind of . . . see through them? But whatever.”
Was it a coincidence that she’d just put all this together? Or was there stuff she wasn’t telling me? My suspicions flared up again, but I doused them with a splash of reason. Even if there was something she wasn’t telling me, the discovery was very helpful. So far, I was glad I’d taken a chance on her.
She went on, “So up next is . . . well, who knows what, but it’s happening at . . . ”
She traced her finger down my forearm and stopped on the next number: 52206309. “6:30 a.m. today!”
“So we’ve got some time.”
“We’ve got some time.”