around, thinking very quickly. “Then it’s true, I suppose. You know what this is, of course?”
Mona shrugs.
“You don’t? Why, this is bruising, my girl. Just like we always discussed! I expect it can’t be affecting a particularly wide area—not if you vanished only a few yards away. It must not extend that far past the lens. But I cannot imagine it’d be anything else. You and I would be quite pleased, my dear, if it hadn’t had such awful consequences, wouldn’t we?”
“Huh?” says Mona out loud.
“I wish I knew what I looked like right now. An image projected across realities… though it is projected poorly, if your suggestions are correct. I don’t know why, but I can see you plain as day, though you are a bit colorless… I guess the bruising must be more severe on your end. Have you witnessed any other effects? Any other symptoms?”
“What?” asks Mona.
Coburn looks at her, perturbed. “Why do you look so confused? Laura, have you been injured? Is something wrong with you?”
Mona decides the jig is up, and writes: “not laura.”
This just pisses him off. “What do you mean, you’re not Laura? That’s not… you look exactly like her. If you’re not Laura, then who the hell are you?”
Mona glances at him warily, and writes: “her daughter.”
When Coburn reads this it’s as if all the air gets knocked out of him. He staggers back a little, then sits down on the ground. “What?” he says softly. “Her daughter?”
Mona nods.
“You’re telling me the truth?”
Mona nods again. She sits down on the floor opposite him.
“You look a little different, I suppose… but I thought you’d—she—had changed. She vanished before it all happened, but… I thought she’d come back to help me. What happened to her?”
Mona wonders how to put this. Her own experiences with death have blunted any sensitivity to grief, so she mentally rummages through some greeting card expressions before giving up. She pulls a face, sighs, writes, “died,” and shows it to him.
Coburn slumps forward in shock. “She died? In the storm?”
Mona shakes her head.
“Then… she died of natural causes, I hope.” Mona diplomatically chooses not to correct him on this point. “But if you’re her daughter, how… how are you so old? How old are you?”
Mona winces. This, she knows, is going to be a nasty surprise for this guy, who seems to have had quite a lot of those in the past couple of years, or months, or however time works for him. But she guesses these things have to be done like Band-Aid removal, quickly and ruthlessly.
She writes down her age and shows it to him.
He sits up, and his hands fly to his forehead. “What? You are thirty-seven?” There are pops of white at the edge of his image, and he briefly grows translucent. When he comes back, he is saying, “—irty-seven years old?”
Mona nods.
“But then… then how long ago was the storm? What year is it over there?”
She sighs, writes down the answer, and shows it to him.
He stares at it. His hands slowly drop. “No.”
Mona nods.
“No. No, it’s not possible.”
She nods again, then shrugs with her palms up—My sympathies, but what can I do?
“No. It can’t be, it just can’t. I can’t have been stuck over here for… for over thirty years! I just can’t! I remember everything like it was yesterday!”
Mona watches him helplessly.
“Is everyone else dead, too? Did we lose everyone, everything?”
She shrugs.
“You mean you don’t know?”
She writes, “dont know a damn thing sorry”
“But surely some of them have to be around, if you’re at the lab?”
She writes: “abandoned”
“The lab? The lab is abandoned?”
She nods.
“Oh, my Lord,” says Coburn. He slouches forward, face in his hands. “Then I’ll… I’ll never get back. How could this have happened? How could things have possibly gotten worse for me?”
To her discomfort, he begins sobbing. Mona is sure he’s in some pretty trying circumstances, since apparently he’s actually trapped somewhere horrific, but it still feels weird to see him, this shabby old man sitting on the floor, sobbing his eyes out. She wonders what to say, and decides grief counseling is not something that can be done via pen, paper, and a vocabulary that’s been adversely affected by texting and the internet. So she just sits, and waits.
When his tears taper off, she writes: “what happened to u”
It takes him a while longer to gather himself. He stares into his lap, hollow-eyed, and says, “There was a… storm. A storm during one of our tests. I am not