Supermarket - Bobby Hall Page 0,51

Rachel said, speaking up. “Did our time together mean nothing to you?”

“I fucking knew it!” yelled Mia, storming off.

“You’re sick in the head, man,” said Kurtis, before chasing after Mia.

And right then, what started out as a cocky realization ended in another realization: I had been arguing with a man who didn’t exist in the middle of the supermarket.

This meant I did cheat on Mia. Those nights I sat writing on my typewriter about what Frank and Rachel had been doing . . . I was actually living those moments myself and writing about them later. How much had I tricked my brain? How much had my brain tricked me?

I looked to my side. Frank began to fizzle, looking staticky, like bad reception on an old-school television. My chest grew insanely tight. I felt like I couldn’t remember where I was, or who I was. Time seemed to slow down. Then speed up. It felt like I was in a waking dream.

And in a matter of seconds, everything came back to me. Every moment I blocked out of my mind. Every time I lied to myself for the sake of completing my book suddenly revealed itself. I felt piercingly lucid.

It all started with Bennett.

I pulled out the photo of me and my dog. There was no dog in the photo. Bennett didn’t exist. I went to the shelter, imagined a dog in an empty cage, bought him food, a red collar, and a blue leash. I asked a guy to take a picture of my dog and me, and he freaked out because there was no animal by my side. He must have thought I was a crazy person!

Oh, my God, I thought in this instant of realization. Have I been a crazy person? Oh no . . .

All those walks after work with Bennett, I had just been dragging around a leash. Posting photos of a lost dog with no dog in it! Asking people if they had seen him, showing them nothing. No wonder that guy asked if I was “fucking kidding.”

And then the repressed memories started to pour out, unlocking all at once.

Frank never said anything to Mia on the phone that night. He didn’t tell her I was fucking Rachel. He told her nothing. There was no Frank to say anything. When I claimed the phone was ringing and Frank was on the line, she knew something was wrong. Because not only did the phone never ring . . . not only was there no one on the other line . . . the phone wasn’t even plugged into the wall.

Oh my God, it was all so twisted to realize. This meant when Rachel walked down the aisle toward us, winked, and said hello to “Frank,” she actually meant me. Because . . .

I had been Frank all along.

Of course. When I received Rachel’s number, I put it in my right pocket—but retrieved it from my left pocket when giving it to him. I had only done it for the action of doing so inside the delusion. There’d been no reason to hand it over to Frank, because . . .

I was Frank.

Frank was me.

I made Frank up and made him real in my own head. He was a complete illusion, a hallucination, an apparition.

It went all the way back to that first day at Muldoon’s, when he thanked me for being the only person who acknowledges my existence in this place . . .

In midpanic, I fell to my knees, scared to death. I tried to run but was disoriented, and every time I tried again I fell over from a spell of vertigo. It felt like slamming into the cashiers’ conveyer belt.

Then I noticed all the shelves from aisles six through twelve were on the ground, essentially destroyed. The sight of this only confused me more. As I struggled to get up on my feet, something stopped me.

Someone.

I was being held by my neck by a large man in a dark room, looking into a bright screen.

I heard the word why over and over.

“Why, Flynn?” The voice became clearer. “Why would you do this, Flynn?”

It was Ted Daniels. I rubbed my eyes, making out the image on the monitor. The video on the screen was grainy footage of someone in a black ski mask flipping off the camera. The man was me.

A police officer put my hands behind my back, locking handcuffs tightly around my wrists.

“Flynnagin E. Montgomery, you are being arrested for felony