pocket change, rearrange

The mollydoll is missing and I’ve had a blinding headache for five fucking days. Lucy’s dropped out — she never went to Vegas. I got a flash of her briefly, before the pain swept through like a canyon flood, and then she was gone. Now it’s just me and the bad wiring and the flickering lights, echoing footsteps down cold linoleum halls. Even the nurses have stopped talking to me. Something strange is going down.

...

When Aliss and I first met she knew things I never even thought about not knowing. Things it never occurred to me to know.

Over time she showed me how to find some of those things; where they lived and how to bring them home. I took lots of pictures at first, studying the landscapes and their objects. Deciding how I wanted to renovate and redecorate. If I wanted to.

But you never know if the couch is going to fit, etc.

If the curtains will argue with the rug.

And that’s fine, that’s fine. A lively debate never killed anyone.

But sometimes it makes it hard to sleep,

when the tension never slacks.

You live with it, but you can’t ever really concentrate.

That’s the trick, you know. Live in it, not with it.

That’s what Aliss would say.

It’s what she did say.

Aliss could integrate dichotomies – she was good at it. Very good. It’s the crazy people who can’t do it. You either live in one world or the other; they can’t both be true.

Because they’re not two worlds, Leo. It’s not a coin.

It’s a sphere it’s a sphere it’s a sphere.

I know, Aliss. But you were always better at it than me. You were a natural.

Why am I talking about you in the past tense, like you’re dead?

Because the mollydoll is gone. Fucking disparu.

...

Aliss never explicitly said, “Here, you hold this.” I just looked around one day and discovered it was there, in the corner of my mind. A satisfying heft; its smooth, waxy coils. Compact, but loose. Latent potential. Mysteries in plain sight, obscured only by the limitations of the beholder. The infinite fucking mollydoll.

I know that’s not its real name. Real Names have power. And I was too stuck to grok it, she said. It would have only made things worse.

I’ve never entirely agreed with her, but these things can’t be forced. They tend to only get more stuck.

So I held it, beheld it, grew to love and beloved by this neatly tangled presence in the back left corner of my brain. And now it’s gone, and I don’t know what that fucking means.

Aliss?

Lucy?

Fuck, it’s cold in here.