he secured his necessities, and the less-than-friendly clerk at the hotel’s front desk.
At least Keith never asked questions. In fact, he seemed entirely disinterested in Ronnie’s existence. Ronnie doubted Keith had even made enough eye contact with him to be able to describe him if anyone showed up looking.
Not that they ever would. He had used every drop of his social energy to keep his mother supplied with enough texts to keep her from worrying too much. He was getting good at making up the details of the life he had left behind. Insignificant little things like feigned irritation over an unjustified grade, or mundane interactions with his roommate. He was almost starting to believe the stories. They seemed more tangible than his ten-by-ten world of peeling wallpaper and dirty carpet.
He knew he couldn’t stay at the hotel forever. He would eventually run out of room on his cards, for one thing, and he knew if he didn’t get a change of scenery soon, he really was going to lose his mind. Or what was left of it.
Once Ronnie had made the decision to seek out a more long-term situation, it didn’t take long to find a shitty little apartment on the west side of the city. It was located above a corner market, and the landlord hadn’t even bothered to check his credit with his application. Ronnie had given him a check for three months’ rent, and that was good enough.
For all he knew, it wasn’t even a legally binding lease, but he didn’t care. It was a place to crash and lock himself away at night until he figured out what the hell to do with himself.
The future wasn’t something he could grasp anymore. Every day, every moment was just… nothing and everything at once. Time became an arbitrary concept he could peel off like an old jacket that no longer fit. He didn’t trust his judgment, or even his perception of reality.
Once he had moved his meager belongings from the hotel room to the tiny studio apartment, Ronnie decided it was time to go back to campus and collect the remainder of his things. Assuming Dave hadn’t either dumped them or just pawned them all for weed, at least. That was entirely possible.
He went back in the middle of the day, when he knew his former roommate would be in class. Dave’s schedule was one of those strange little details that remained fixed in his memory, while entire parts of his own life seemed like they belonged to someone else.
Sometimes he felt like he was possessed. Like with every night that passed, and with the reliving of each brutal murder of an entire family that bled into his conscience, he became less himself and more Vaughn.
In many ways, the life of a Plague Doctor was similar to the one he was living. One day became the next with little distinction between them. The years were marked only in the number of lives that no longer existed because of him. The guilt that had once plagued Vaughn became a numbness Ronnie recognized all too well. One that was now his own.
It was beginning not to matter that he wasn’t the one who had committed those murders. In fact, he was beginning to suspect many of his inherited memories belonged not to Vaughn, but to the others who had come before him.
Maybe that was what it was to be a Plague Doctor, or whatever he was now. To be hollowed out, filled only with a singular purpose. There was no room for anything else. No guilt, no compassion, no humanity. There was no room for a sense of self, either. They were merely vessels in a long line of succession with no more distinction between their lifetimes than there was between the days that passed so incessantly.
When he finally arrived, the campus was quiet, since most of the students were in class. Ronnie felt a strange wave of nostalgia as he reached the dorm, even though he didn’t exactly have any fond memories there. In fact, the entire time he’d been at Brown, he had been more focused on keeping to himself and staying distracted than actually living any semblance of a life.
Now that he was so far away from it, he realized just how much he had taken for granted. How, even though he had felt like an outsider back then, he had been closer to the normal world than he ever would be again. Closer than he