Reminder (2)

He went back on Thursday.

Not the next Thursday. The Thursday after that. Eleven days in which the taste of the champagne resurfaced three times — once while brushing his teeth on Saturday morning, the toothpaste turning sweet and flat underneath the mint, once while drinking coffee at his desk on Monday, the coffee acquiring a carbonation it did not have, and once while eating the turkey sandwich on Tuesday, the bread soft and warm in a way that bread from a plastic bag is not warm, as though someone had toasted it, as though someone had handed it to him. Each time the taste lasted between ten and forty minutes. He timed it. He timed it because timing was what he did — the duration of a claim, the interval between submission and review, the exact number of minutes a policyholder had been on hold before Stuart picked up the phone. He timed the taste because timing it made it a thing that could be measured and a thing that could be measured was a thing that could be explained and a thing that could be explained was not the other thing, the thing where a man's mouth remembers a wedding he did not attend.

He timed it and he went back.

The parking lot. The directory in the lobby. The elevator. Suite 204. The door with its brass plate. He opened it.

The waiting room was the same — four chairs, the magazines, the fountain running its water over its stones. The receptionist slid the glass open. The same cardigan. The same expression.

"Mr. Kemp," she said. "You're early again."

He sat in the chair. The chair fit him. He did not adjust. The fountain ran and the air in the room had the weighted quiet and he sat inside it and the quiet held him.

The inner door. Dr. Pell. The reading glasses on the chain. The smile.

"Stuart," she said. "Come in."

He went in. He sat. The chair fit. Dr. Pell sat across from him and opened the file and the file was thicker. Not four inches now. Five, maybe more. The pages on top were new — the ink fresh, the paper unworn.

"You've been here," Stuart said. "Between my visits. You've been adding to the file."

Dr. Pell looked at him over the glasses. "You were here Tuesday."

"I was not here Tuesday. I was at my desk. I adjusted eleven claims and I ate a turkey sandwich and I went home."

"You were here Tuesday at 2:15. We discussed the overlap. Carol had called to reschedule Graham's appointment — he's been having the headaches again. You were concerned."

Stuart looked at the file. The top page was dated Tuesday. Two days ago. The handwriting was Dr. Pell's — he recognized it from the earlier visit, the cursive that tilted slightly right, the way she crossed her t's with a stroke that extended past the letter. The notes described a session. The session described a man named Stuart Kemp who had come in at 2:15 on a Tuesday to discuss his son's headaches and the increasing frequency of what the notes called episodes and the effectiveness of the current protocol.

"That's not me," he said.

"Tell me about Tuesday."

"I adjusted eleven claims. The Hendricks file took the longest — water damage, disputed square footage. I ate the sandwich at my desk. I drove home on Route 8. I watched television. I went to bed."

Dr. Pell wrote. The pen moved and the gold caught the light and she wrote what Stuart was telling her on a page that would go into the file next to the page that described the Stuart who had been here on Tuesday, and both pages would sit in the same file, and the file would hold both Stuarts with the same manila indifference.

"The convergence is accelerating," she said. She said this with the tone of a person reading a blood pressure — clinical, unsurprised. A measurement, not a verdict.

"What convergence?"

"The overlap." She set the pen down. She folded her hands on the file. "The episodes you're describing — the taste, the dreams, the sense of recognition in unfamiliar settings — this is what we've been tracking. The treatments slow it. They don't stop it."

"I don't have episodes. I have a postcard from a doctor I've never met and a file I've never contributed to and a receptionist who knows my name."

"What do you think the taste is?"

He stopped. The question sat between them the way the name Carol had sat between them the week before — with weight, with the quality of something that has been asked before and answered before and the answer has never been sufficient.

"Champagne," he said. "Flat champagne. From a reception."

"From your reception. The champagne that sat on the table for four hours because you and Carol were dancing and you forgot it and you drank it later and it was warm and flat and sweet and you said it was the best glass of champagne you'd ever had because the best glass of anything is the glass you drink when the night is almost over and the person you married is standing next to you taking off her shoes."

Stuart's hands were on his knees. His hands were gripping his knees. The grip was the grip of a man who is sitting in a chair that fits him in an office that smells like paper and flowers and the woman across from him has described a taste that is in his mouth right now — the flat champagne rising through the water he'd drunk from the fountain on the way in, the sweetness spreading across his tongue. His mouth was full of it — the table where the glass had sat for four hours, the moment a hand with his knuckles picked it up, the woman beside him taking off her shoes, and the shoes were silver, and the night was almost over.

"The treatments," he said. "What are the treatments?"

"We'll continue on Thursday. Same protocol."

"What protocol?"

Dr. Pell opened a drawer. She took out a small glass bottle — brown glass, the kind pharmacies use, with a white label that Stuart could not read from his chair. She uncapped it and poured a measured amount into a paper cup, the same cone cup from the fountain. The liquid was clear. It could have been water. It caught the light from the south window the way water catches light, but the refraction was slightly off — the light bending at an angle that water doesn't bend.

"Drink this," Dr. Pell said.

He drank it. The liquid tasted like the fountain water — like the champagne underneath the water, like the reception underneath the champagne, like a life underneath a life. It was cool and it went down and it sat in his stomach with a warmth that was not temperature.

"Same time next week," she said. "Thursday. 2:15."

"What happens if I don't come back?"

She looked at him. The look was the steadiest look anyone had given him since the divorce — steady and warm and without the complexity that human looks carry, the layered thing where a person is looking at you and also looking at themselves looking at you and also deciding what the looking means. Dr. Pell's look had one layer. She was looking at Stuart. The looking was care or the performance of care and the distinction between those two things was the width of the file on her desk.

"You always come back," she said.

---

He sat in his car in the parking lot. He sat there for twenty minutes. The engine was off. The parking lot was a parking lot — cars in spaces, lines on asphalt, the medical complex with its dentists and podiatrists and the particular quiet of Suite 204 up there on the second floor behind the wood-grain laminate door.

He took out his phone. He typed Gateway Wellness Associates into the search bar. The results loaded. A website — simple, institutional, the same serif font from the postcard. A list of services that did not list convergence. A list of providers that listed Dr. R. Pell, PhD. No specialty. A photograph of the waiting room — the four chairs, the fountain, the magazines. The photograph could have been taken that morning or fifteen years ago. The waiting room had not changed.

He typed his own name. Stuart Kemp. The results were the results of a man who exists on the internet the way most people exist on the internet — a LinkedIn profile, a White Pages listing, a ten-year-old race result from a 5K he'd done with the office. He scrolled past these. He was looking for the other Stuart. The Stuart who had a wife named Carol and a son named Graham and a file four inches thick at Gateway Wellness Associates. The Stuart who had been here on Tuesday while the real Stuart was adjusting the Hendricks claim.

The LinkedIn profile was his. His photograph — the headshot the company had taken two years ago, the blue background, the smile that was the smile of a man who is smiling because someone has told him to smile. He was about to scroll past it when he stopped.

The photograph was different.

Not a different photograph. The same photograph — same background, same angle, same shirt collar visible at the bottom of the frame. But the face in the photograph was rested. The lines between the eyes were shallower. The jaw was the same jaw but the jaw was held differently — not clenched, not carrying the particular tension of a man who grinds his teeth at night and has the mouthguard on the nightstand to prove it. The face in the photograph was Stuart's face the way the chair in the waiting room was Stuart's chair — the same, but the same in a version that had been sitting in comfort for fifteen years instead of alone for three.

Under the photograph: Stuart J. Kemp, VP of Operations, Hargrove & Associates. Not claims adjuster. VP. Under that: University of Virginia, MBA. Stuart had a bachelor's from State.

He scrolled down. Under People also viewed, a woman. Carol Kemp. Dark hair, early forties, a photograph taken outdoors with the particular light of a morning that is going well. She was smiling. The smile was the smile of a person who smiles because smiling is what happens when the photograph is being taken by someone she likes.

He looked at her face. He did not know her. He did not know her the way he had not known her name when Dr. Pell said it — completely, with the full weight of never-having-known, except that the weight was lighter now. The weight had a door in it. The door was not open, but the door was there.

His thumb moved to save the page. The screen refreshed on its own, the way screens do, and the profile came back: Stuart J. Kemp, Claims Adjuster, Bellmont Casualty. State. The photograph with the lines between the eyes and the jaw that carried the tension. He pulled down to load it again. The same. He typed the name a third time and got the White Pages listing and the ten-year-old race result and nothing else.

He put the phone in his pocket. He sat there with his hands on the wheel and could not have said, under oath, what he had seen. He started the car. The engine turned over. He pulled out of the parking lot.

He drove home. Route 8. The strip malls. The light failing. His apartment. The counter. The laptop. The claims.

He went to the bathroom. He turned on the faucet and let the water run. He cupped his hands under the stream and brought the water to his face and the water was water and the water was cold. He straightened. He looked in the mirror. His face. The lines between the eyes. The jaw that carried the tension. The mouthguard on the nightstand.

His hand was on the faucet handle. His hand was turning the faucet off. His hand turned the faucet off at a specific angle — not the angle he usually used, not the wrist rotation he'd performed ten thousand times in this bathroom with this faucet. A different angle.

He looked at his hand. He looked at the faucet. He dried his face.

He went to bed. He lay on the left side. His hand found the spare pillow. He spread his fingers on the cotton. The cotton was cool and smooth. He closed his eyes.

Behind his eyes: the same kitchen. The fruit. The coffee maker. But closer now. Not a room seen from a doorway. A room seen from inside — the counter where his hip rests when he's reading the paper, the drawer where the good knives live, the window and the specific quality of light that means this window and this morning and this house. A woman's voice. Not words. The voice. The particular frequency of a woman saying something from another room that is not urgent and not important and is the sound of a person who is in a house with another person and the house contains them both and the containing is ordinary.

Stuart lay in the dark. His hand was on the pillow. His fingers were spread in the shape of a hand that is used to a head being there. The head was not there. The hand did not know what to do with itself.

Outside, in the parking lot of his apartment building, every car had two shadows. One from the security light on the east side of the building. And one from something else — a light source that did not exist, that cast the second shadow at an angle that didn't correspond to any fixture or streetlamp or window. The second shadows were fainter. They fell in the wrong direction. Stuart did not see them. He was asleep. They would be there in the morning.

 

Next Part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/reminder-3