Unexpected
admin — Tue, 08/18/2009 - 04:47
April 17th:
I couldn’t understand when no one showed up for Misty. Not just her funeral, but to inquire about her at all. It seemed like she mentioned her past, her friends outside of our circle, as much as anyone else. Yet, after she died they seemed wholly uninterested.
Stranger, even Lucy and the rest of the girls seem to be forgetting her. Not just in a coping way. When I brought Misty up, Lucy looked confused, and only sort of went along with it when I mentioned her and my brother being dead. She said the funeral was lovely and went back to her spreadsheets, but it occurred to me that I couldn’t quite remember how they died.
Which is, of course why I poked around in Alex’s apartment so much. The place seemed entirely forgotten. No one had come in to do anything about it, leaving a snapshot of his life—complete with rumpled sheets slowly losing the smell of sex.
Everything seemed fairly normal until I looked around the library. It was a nice place, though I never had any idea how he afforded it. Among the eclectic set of books, non-fiction and small press novels and poetry collections, I found what looked like journals—not his but not all of them old. They blended your typical litany of mundane pointless shit with cryptic allusions and codes. In the midst of them I found a thin piece of stone etched with numbers and strange squiggles, and behind that I found a switch.
It opened up a passage in the wall, reminding me of that NYC apartment that the designer encoded a game into. Except that the passage ended at a giant mirrored room, like the inside of a disco ball. I looked at myself from every angle and wondered what the hell my brother had been up to.