The Plan
admin — Fri, 08/21/2009 - 21:35
April 25th:
Lucy is pregnant. It’s what we wanted, to start a family right after getting married. It isn’t like we’re getting any younger—and I think she saw what happened with Jessica and Alex and thought it would be best to get started ASAP on bringing new life into the equation. Except, of course, she probably doesn’t really think about or remember that part of it at all.
When I floated the name Alex to her if it is a boy she smiled this silly smile and said it would be an OK name. And when I suggested Jessica she nodded and said she thought she remembered a friend from elementary school with that name. Just like it was some old childhood friendship of the sort that fades away, all of its impossible importance evaporating.
I didn’t bother trying Misty’s name.
I should leave everything be. Mom and Lucy just don’t remember anything. His apartment is the sort of haunted place that kids will dare each other to go into, until the whole damn building is torn down or there is serious modeling or something. I’m sure of it. That’s how these things go.
Why should I keep poking around, keep looking at this journal that vanished word by vanished word, vanished letter by vanished letter, vanished stroke by vanished stroke, is transforming into something else. There is a page that isn’t turning into new text, but in to a jumble of symbols. Ones that match other entries, that were like that intentionally. He was guessing at them, at least in this journal—he mentions a Rosetta Stone, or did before that section started to dissolve into something else.
I have to read the journal at night, while Lucy sleeps, exhausted from the pregnancy. When she saw me reading it she would ask about it, and I made the mistake of saying what it was. The look on her face terrified me. It wasn’t angry or confused or even just blank. For a moment, I saw that it was just a mask and that beneath, the truth lived. Beneath there were muscles we had no names for and viscera that if you could dissect would show the true nature of good and evil. And that Lucy, that secret body, knew exactly what I was talking about, but hell if I knew what it thought.