Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 27 - Raging Currents

Photo by Shane Smith on Unsplash

Other names and faces and memories flooded into Frankie’s mind during those first few days. At first, all his thoughts were like liquid that would suddenly fall into his consciousness before trickling away again. He started writing down everything that seemed important so he wouldn’t forget.

He was starting to remember first names. There was Tabitha the redhead and that skinny nerdy one, Sam.  

Sam. Like one of their Pomeranians. He still couldn’t believe he hadn’t made that connection before all this insanity occurred.

They’d both be helpful in finding Becca. But their last names were still indecipherable squiggles in his mind, like trying to read a billboard when driving at night without his glasses. He could see the shapes of the letters, but couldn’t make out the words they spelled.

There was another ENH co-worker with them when all this happened, too. What was his name?

Drake, or something like that. Wasn’t there a rapper or pop singer of some sort with that name? That didn’t matter.

But this one from ENH, this other Drake, he was a bitter bloke, suspicious in all the good ways, Frankie supposed. Frankie liked him, for some reason, but couldn’t remember why. Drake had known Becca was up to something dangerous, too, and he paid the price for it, for sure. He had been in the backseat with the other one, with Sam, who Frankie suspected had an almost Oedipal sort of fancy for Becca.

Frankie rubbed his jaw and it dawned on him for the first time that his teeth didn’t hurt. When he’d last seen Sam and Drake, it was right after the metal fillings had popped out of his mouth from whatever mess Becca had stirred up inside the ENH buildings.

But it was Tabitha he wanted to get ahold of the most, to enlist her help. If he could just remember her last name. Tabitha.

“Doctor,” Frankie said out loud. “Doctor. Tabitha. What the crap something or other.”

It had been several hours now, ten by Frankie’s count, since he’d suddenly found himself shirtless in their old apartment. In this apartment where he now stood.  He hadn’t heard from Becca, though every time there was a noise in the hall outside the apartment he ran to the door and looked outside the peephole in hopes it was his wife.

ENH had offices scattered through Chicago, but their main campus was due north. He’d tried to call both Becca’s direct number as well as ENH’s central line, but even after the one time he managed to get a dial tone, nobody answered. 

He thought about taking a taxi, but couldn’t remember the address. And given the view of the Chicago streets below his living room window, it looked like traffic was just an endless trail of tight unmoving gridlock and pandemonium anyway. The sidewalks, too, were crammed with an endless stream of people walking and rushing and stumbling into each other like ants who lost their way.

Frankie had no desire to toss himself into the fray but knew he couldn’t stay here much longer.

Where was Becca?  Why wouldn’t she call?

Because she knew what Frankie would say to her. She knew he’d blame her for all of this. And she’d be right.

But Frankie knew that his dear Dr. Becca Watts was notorious for never accepting accountability unless it came with a sizable portion of praise.

In their marriage, whenever they’d fall into fighting about something for which she was responsible, Becca’s modus operandi was to make herself scarce, to scuttle out with some excuse, some work that needed to be done.

On more than one of these occasions, Frankie looked up her location on his phone and see a Denny’s or IHOP pop up on the screen. He’d imagine she was sitting, withdrawn and hiding, avoiding the problems of their marriage from the safety of some dark back corner booth where she’d drink endless cups of coffee and pour over her journals, escaping into her thoughts and dreams the way she did, going to where their marriage wasn’t a problem, where she could go to that place of absolute certainty in her mind where she was always in the right, where her ideas were groundbreaking and brilliant.  Where she couldn’t possibly be at fault for anything. 

But again, was she even alive? She had to be, didn’t she? This wasn’t the first time the thought popped into Frankie’s mind, and it wouldn’t be the last. He had no way of knowing, of course, but once his overactive imagination kicked into gear, it was hard to taper it again. What if that black angry void he’d seen at ENH just hours before had swallowed her up forever?  The thought made the flesh on his arms prickle and brought a shudder to his shoulders. He went to the fridge and took out another beer. His last one. 

As he drank the beer, he reached behind and gently touched the Glock he’d tucked into the waist of his jeans. He certainly didn’t think it was safe out on the streets just then, but that was just a gut feeling. Nevertheless, he pushed his way through the crowded sidewalks to the grocers down the corner. The shelves had been picked clean. He returned to his apartment emptyhanded and settled in to wait out the storm of this uncertain situation.

Nights and days and mornings and evenings then started to blend into a muddled haze. He slept on the living room couch, falling asleep to the endless pontifications of television pundits and sudden experts spouting endless theories impossible to debunk.

Frankie quickly grew numb to the impossible reality that people long dead and buried were alive again, many slipping right back into the places of power they’d held often long before they’d died. As if his memory had never collapsed into dementia, Ronald Reagan seemed to be on nearly every channel. The first time Frankie saw him addressing the nation, he naturally assumed he was watching old footage until he realized what the former president was saying.

“We don’t believe this was a terrorist attack, but something that has impacted the entire world,” President Reagan said with his raspy staccato.  “Unfortunately, there is very little information known at this time, but be assured that my thoughts and prayers are with us all.”

As he addressed the world from the safety of the Oval Office, a hodgepodge of familiar faces flanked him including Vice President Bush who stood at his side, visibly weeping. The lower third whizzed past at the bottom of the screen with the words, “President Reagan Addresses the Country. Electronic Anamoly Being Investigated. Presidents Barrack Obama and George W. Bush Allegedly Assassinated.”

Frankie felt like he was floating in an alternate reality.

After the President’s address, he flipped through the other channels. On one of the metro Chicago stations, a young blonde reporter held a microphone out to local boys Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.  Frankie remembered watching a documentary about Roger after he died in 2013 from head and neck cancer. In the documentary, Roger’s face had been completely changed physically, nearly unrecognizable from cancer and surgeries before his entire body expired.  He couldn’t remember how Siskel died but knew he was dead, too. Or should have been.

Yet here they were on TV again, Roger portly and smiling as he always was and Gene with that pompous and derisive look that was perpetually pasted upon his face. They were both whole once more, well and healthy, as these two cinematic adversaries sat there as usual, espousing theories about what may have caused the event that apparently raised them both from the dead as if what happened was nothing more than the complicated plot of a summer blockbuster.

Did they even realize they were both corpses?  Surely they had to.

Were they aware that years had swept into history, moving past their existence, after their deaths?

Yet now they were back on television, reclaiming their spotlight. Frankie shook his head and turned off the television.   

People who were once dead were now alive.  But what about the people who were alive when all this happened? If Becca had been inside ENH when that massive black pulsing ball of energy swallowed up the building and everything around it, was Becca dead? Was he now a widower?

But he was alive, and didn’t he get swallowed up by that same black hole — or whatever it was? So if he survived, surely Becca did, too. Right?

Would it matter, though?  Was this a second chance, the thing that would fix everything as Becca was prone to repeating, or just an elongation of the torment that was their quickly failing — failed — marriage?

For Frankie, who always saw things plain and simple, trying to grasp the abstract complexities of this new world was all too much. He always focused on what was real and calculable, on acute angles and measurable distances which couldn’t be doubted. They were provable. Clapboards, chamfers, and casements.  These were things oozing with tangibility, certainty, and controllability.  Like physics, they just were. They were understandable and applicable.  There was no guessing when calculating the angle of a parapet.

There was comfort in the security of provability.

But like the mysterious black hole that had supposedly launched the whole world back in time, with Becca everything was second thoughts and reconsiderations, overanalyzation of every blessed word that spouted from his mouth.  Over the years, Frankie’s confidence was often shaken and he started to just keep his yap shut out of worry that she’d misinterpret what he saw as plain, misunderstand his meaning, or twist it completely around. 

He often felt Becca heard him speak, but rarely heard what he was saying. 

Yet it was these very discussions, the moments when he did manage to break through a stalemated and heated disagreement, that he’d often find a deeper affection and appreciation for Becca that he didn’t even know was possible. He was constantly surprised by how oftentimes fighting through the raging current of emotional upheaval and anger within their arguments often made them stronger on the other side. They’d often find themselves, then, coasting on smoother waters once the rapids subsided. There were times when after a stormy season their love deepened like a soothing balm, a healing comfort that almost on its own would somehow propel them onto a new plane of their relationship. 

Eventually, though, the balm would wear thin. Over time it seemed like all their conversations were arguments, and it got harder and harder to fight through them each day. Old wounds would expose themselves anew, raw and red and infected, and Frankie and Becca would topple through another wave of angry emotion and Frankie would doubt they would ever be blessed again to find themselves deeper in one of those periods of love after yet another tumultuous experience.  They’d perhaps banked on that possibility one too many times and, eventually, wouldn’t their account be overdrawn?

And now here was the most utterly preposterous obstacle hovering over them like an unscalable mountain: the entire world had been irrevocably shifted, lives were wiped from existence as if they’d never even been, and Becca was the cause of it all.

There was no escaping her fault this time.  What would the world do if they knew his wife was behind all of this? What would they do to her? To him?

He was suddenly furious again, and yet Frankie could not deny the utter aching desire in his heart to embrace his wife at this moment, to see if smooth waters were possible again.

Photo by Lisa Forkner on Unsplash