Asking Cosmo to come over now was out of the question. Micah couldn’t risk failing to let him inside.That sounded nice, actually. Micah would put his arm around Cosmo in the dark theater as some special effectstravaganza flashed on the screen. He’d press his nose to Cosmo’s hair and whisper that he wasn’t going anywhere.
Cosmo’s reply appeared:
No. Micah felt himself shaking his head. He squeezed the phone. No, no, no. They liked each other. It couldn’t end like this.
Micah waited for a response. Every second that went by constricted his throat even more. He wrote,
He struggled to swallow, his hand clenching around the phone. He whispered, “Cosmo. Please.”
The phone screen blurred in his vision, and eventually the screen went to sleep. He hurled it at the wall. It dented the drywall, then clattered across the floor. He yanked at his hair. This wasn’t fair! He was so close to letting someone in, in more than one way. So close.
Something dark and consuming reared inside him. He’d been working on pushing it down for nine months. Working on pulling himselfup. Keeping his head above water, treading until he was strong enough to reach the shore. But the tide was dragging him back, tugging him under, and it was so much easier to just give up and let it take him.
He took off his glasses, crawled into bed, and pulled the sheets over his head.
The phone rang sometime that evening, but it wasn’t Cosmo, so he dropped it back to its spot on the floor. When it rang the next day, it still wasn’t Cosmo. And the more time that passed, the more Micah stopped checking, and the less he got out ofbed, resigned to let the dark sea of depression fill his lungs, swallow him, until he was completely numb.
Days blurred together and time seemed irrelevant. Ah, the irony in that.
His only comfort was the white cat, which he kept thinking of as “Phantom.” She’d jump into bed and stare at him with her mismatched shooter marble eyes. If he ignored her, she’d butt her head against his face and mew loudly until he finally got up. He wasn’t sure if she needed anything aside from attention, considering that she’d vanish back to her own timeline after a bit, but it had motivated him enough to throw on some sweats and go to the corner store for cat food. That had been at least a week ago, and he hadn’t done anything since then except water his plants.
The plastic factory odor still emanated faintly from the couch. Some kind of chemical they used in the dye. Mostly, Micah could only smell himself. He lay with his nose pressed against the cushion, floating in and out of an annoying half-awareness. He needed to sink deeper to forget he existed, but he had to pee, and the sensation wouldn’t leave him alone.
Throwing off the blanket, he staggered past a bag of mail Ximena had brought him, and a Tupperware dish full of something he hadn’t eaten. It was bad by now. He couldn’t remember what day she’d stopped by.
Avoiding his reflection as he passed the bathroom mirror, he relieved himself, then dropped back onto the couch. Something thumped, or rattled, or maybe it was the phone ringing again. Either way, he was too tired to go investigate.
As he slipped back into a half-sleep, he imagined Cosmo padding across the carpet, the couch creaking as he sat down. His teeth floating in the dark like the Cheshire cat.
A hand shook his shoulder. He gasped and sat up. Words clogged in his throat so hard he couldn’t swallow. The pulse in his neck jittered. His eyes prickled and watered, but he was afraid to blink.
Stooped before him… was himself. The doppelganger stared at Micah, lines bookending his mouth and glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose.
“Hey. You should get up,” Other Micah said.
Was that what his voice really sounded like? It seemed less reedy in his head. And his face was so asymmetrical. God, he’d hoped the thick black frames on that pair of glasses helped disguise his scars better than his other pair, but he was fooling himself. At least the reflection on the lenses helped obscure the fact that his pupil–
“Micah.” Other Micah patted his cheek. “Wake up. Hey, c’mon. It’s going to get better.”
The hair on the back of Micah’s neck stood up. “I’ve done this before.”
“No, you– Well, I suppose that’s sort of right becauseI’mdoing it, and I’m you.”
Micah threw off the blanket, his mind insisting that this had already happened. He scrubbed his stubbly face. He should be freaking out, right? That was surely the natural response to meeting a version of yourself from another time. But his initial shock was already being swallowed by the numbing tide. At least the fabric of the universe wasn’t being rent apart. Or maybe it was. It was hard to care.
Other Micah sat next to him. “I stood over you for like five minutes, wondering if the fabric of the universe was about to be rent apart.”
“I don’t understand how you’re here. I thought the disturbances I’ve noticed were from the tenant before me, the cat–”
“Ah. Phantom is mine. Ours.” Other Micah shrugged. “She just showed up one day. I asked around, but nobody claimed her, and it seemed like she needed someone. I guess we needed her too.”
Micah scrubbed his forehead. His cat all along. No wonder she was so friendly during his first encounter with her.
