The Intrusion

Thirty-Nine

[?]

I feel strange, and not just because I am in a body that is not mine.The whole room moves around me. Something crawls up my spine—a headache like a snake slithering to the base of my skull and finally settling into my brain.

I sit up in bed, and for a second my vision goes completely black. I groan and clasp my head in my hands as it pulses and pounds. It feels swollen.

Why do I feel this way?

The surge of pain ends, and I push myself to my feet. I stumble on legs that are not mine to the door and flip the switch. The light flicks on like fire and my eyes snap shut, burning. Slowly, I blink them open. It hurts my head, but somehow I find it funny. It's not really my head that's hurting.

Or maybe it is.

I make my way over to the closet. Jordan's room is a mess. Clothes cover the floor. I kick a pair of ripped jeans out of my way with my foot before deciding "fuck it."

I plop down on the ground and pull them on.

I take a thirty second break and then push myself back up. Once I make it the rest of the way to the closet, I grasp onto the door frame, hugging it for support. I feel like I'm on a ship. I hold on for balance, waiting for the vessel to stop pitching and rolling and surging and swaying and yawing and heaving. And heaving...

And heaving.

Oh fuck.

I rush across the bedroom, nearly slipping on a discarded T-shirt, and manage to make it to the other side of the hall and into the bathroom just in time to release a spew of bitter vomit into the toilet. Panting with nausea, I flush the liquid down. My head pulses as needles prick at the sides of my skull. My throat contracts again and another surge of bile powers up my esophagus, spewing out of my mouth and into the swirling water in the base of the bowl.

I catch my breath as the pressure in my head finally subsides. I flush the toilet one more time, and then I get to my feet and make my way to the sink. I splash my face with cold water and brush my teeth.

Once I determine that I look as close as I'm going to get to presentable, I head back into the bedroom and dress in the first shirt I see.

I think about what I need to bring. Nothing much, really. Jordan's phone is useless out of the apartment, but I guess I'll bring it anyway.

I grab the phone off the bedside table where she keeps it. She forgot to plug it in to charge tonight, but there is still 42% battery. I attempt to shove the phone into my pocket for fifteen seconds before remembering that it doesn't fit.

Instead, phone in hand, I make my way into Jordan's living room and find her purse right in its place—the center of the glass dining table. I drop the phone in the bag and look around the room.

The TV is on. Animal Planet plays on mute. A half empty bottle of vodka sits open on the coffee table next to a glass of melting ice. A ring of condensation spreads out around it like blood at a crime scene.

I pick up the bottle of vodka. Just the smell of it makes my stomach turn. I gag, but there is nothing left in me to vomit up. I screw the cap back on the bottle and put it away in a cabinet in the kitchen. Then, I clean up the glass and the water on the table. Finally, I click the TV off.

Even though it was muted, when the screen goes blank, for some reason everything feels even quieter than it already was. It's like I've had this ringing in my ears, in the back of my head for my entire life that I wasn't aware of, and suddenly it's stopped. Like when you are sitting in a room and the AC goes off, and it's at that point that you realize for the first time that it was even on in the first place. Even though it's loud, the background noise is so constant that you can't hear it at all.

That is... until it's gone.

I shudder as I look around the room one more time. My eyes stop at the mirror. I gaze into the glass, but I don't know what I see. A girl stares back at me from the other side. She isn't me, but at the same time, I know that she is.

I don't know what to think about anything anymore.

I head out the door and into the hall, locking the apartment behind me. I walk towards the elevator and click the little call button. After a wait that feels way too long, my feet telling me the entire time to turn around and go back to sleep and let everything go back to normal, the doors slide open.

Mirrors surround me like a cage closing in as I ride it down. Everywhere I look, my face reflects back, staring at me from all directions.

When I reach the lobby, the man sitting behind the desk doesn't even look up as I pass, as though I'm invisible. A ghost.

Outside, wind rushes down the street like I'm in a tunnel, and I shiver, realizing I've forgotten to bring my jacket. I cross my arms in front of my chest. It's too late to go back though, and it's not like I have far to go anyway.

I walk to the corner and cross, subconsciously making sure that my feet land on the white of the crosswalk. I've always gotten this weird feeling that, if for some reason I were to step in the black, the street might somehow open up and swallow me whole, and I'd be gone. Buried beneath the ground, beneath the street, beneath the concrete. All my thoughts, all my memories, all my dreams, gone. Nothing. Like I'd never existed at all in the first place.

I hop safely onto the last bar of white, feeling like I'm performing a balancing act on a ledge two hundred feet off the ground, and then I step onto the curb. I enter the towering skyscraper that stands there waiting.

I pass through the lobby and ride the elevator up to the 23rd floor. I get out and walk down the hall until I reach a door.

I turn the knob, and it creaks open.

It isn't locked.

But I knew that it wouldn't be locked.

I didn't lock it before I went to sleep.