Expiration Date

Erna Derace was sitting on the backs of her heels, the polka-dot dress fanned around her. The gun was a small, pearl-handled .38 revolver. I was fairly confident it was the same gun Dr. DeMeo held in his meaty paw and waved around my ghostly face a few days ago. Apparently, she’d taken it from his desk drawer. I could tell because the drawer was still open. And inside were papers and files, stuffed in horizontally.

She held the .38 casually, like it was a TV remote, and she’d become so absorbed in a show that she’d forgotten it was in her hand.

“Dammit…not again.”

She spoke softly, staring at the floor.

Was she about to kill herself? Or DeMeo? I tried to calm her down, even though I was invisible.

“I know you can’t hear or see me. But if there’s any way my words can find their way into your brain, please hear me now—I really think it would be a good idea to put down that gun.”

“I can hear you.”

I froze in place.

“What?”

She turned and locked eyes with me.

“I can see you, too. I can see all of you. I’ve been pretending I can’t because I know you’re probably just a figment of my imagination. I thought if I stopped paying attention maybe you’d go away. But you never go away. None of you do.”

“You saw me in the room that first night? When you were with DeMeo?”

“Yes. I was hoping you’d go away if I went down on him. You did.”

“What exactly do you think I am?”

“You’re a dead man.”

“But I’m not.”

“Right. Sure. You’re not dead. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe I’m a dead woman floating around a sea of living people, only I don’t know it yet. Maybe I’ve been dead since I was a kid.”

“I want to ask you about DeMeo.”

“He’s good to me.”

“What does he do up here? What kinds of experiments?”

“You mean you don’t know? I thought dead people knew everything. That’s why you come back. To taunt the living. To show us how smart you are, and how dumb the rest of us are.”

“Well, I don’t know. You can lord it over me.”

“I don’t know either. Mitchell says it’s top secret. All I know is that his patients arrive after dark, and they stay for sometimes an hour, sometimes all night. He says he works better in the dark, so he keeps the windows covered, and he unscrewed the lamps in the hallway. I’m allowed to have light in my apartment, but nowhere else. And he likes it quiet. It must be absolutely quiet at all times.”

I thought of Billy Derace, sitting in the one lit room in an otherwise dark apartment building. A twelve-year-old, being forced to stay inside and be quiet.

“I see your son sometimes, sitting outside of your apartment. Sometimes he’s crying. Sometimes he’s bleeding, Erna.”

“What are you saying?”

“You know what I’m saying.”

“You don’t understand what it’s like.”

“Try me.”

“No, I’d rather not. You’re going to disappear soon, too. Maybe you’ll leave me alone, maybe you’ll do something rude to me, but either way I’m never going to see you again. Just like the others. No guy wants a kid around that’s not his. Even Dr. DeMeo doesn’t like that he’s around. He always tells me to keep him quiet, he can’t concentrate on his work. And that little son of a bitch just doesn’t listen. He’s just like his father…”

“Your son needs you.”

More important, I need you to be there for your son.

She gestured at me with the gun as she spoke.

“No. It’s too late. There’s too much of Victor in him. He fights me on everything, no matter what I say. No matter how hard I work for him. You try talking to him. Easy for you to sit there and say your son needs you. You have no idea.”

“Who’s Victor?”

“My ex, Victor D’Arrazzio. The kid’s father. That why I pulled this out. I thought I saw him yesterday.”

“What, so you want to shoot him? You should put that back in the drawer. Take a deep breath. Go downstairs and lay down.”

“No, I don’t think I will. I’m either going to put a bullet in my head or I’m going to go out drinking. It’s the only thing that keeps the likes of you away. All of you dead people. So I’ll either ignore you or join you.”

“What dead people? I’m not dead, Erna. It’s complicated, but I assure you, I’m not dead.”

“Prove it.”

She leaned in closer. I could smell her perfume, sweet and pungent. Her lips opened slightly. She moved closer still.

“What are you doing?”

Before she could answer our lips collided. I felt her hand touching mine, our fingers interlocking. She squeezed mine.

Soon nothing made physical sense. We were in the room, we were all over the room, we were inside each other’s skin. I had no sense of where my lips or my fingers ended. No sense of where I stopped and this woman began.

Without warning, she broke our embrace, looked up at me. I pushed away.

“You think I’m dead, and you kiss me?”

“I wanted to know what death tastes like. It tastes good.”

Outside the El train cars rumbled down their tracks, vibrating the floorboards beneath our feet.

“Please put the gun away.”

“Why? What do you have to be nervous about? You’re already dead. Even if I aimed this gun straight at your head and pulled the trigger the bullet would sail right through you.”

I had nothing to say to that, mostly because I worried she was going to swing the revolver over at me and squeeze the trigger, just to test her theory. I had no idea if the bullets would sail through my head or not. I didn’t want to find out.

And then the pill wore off.

When I woke up in the present Meghan was sitting on the floor, pen in her hand and legal pad on her lap. She wasn’t writing anything. She hadn’t written anything.

She didn’t say anything.

I sat up, rubbed my eyes.

“You’re not going to believe what just happened.”

She stood up and walked across the room. She turned and half-sat on the cherrywood desk, then finally looked at me.

“Meghan?”

“I can’t believe you actually kissed that woman.”

“Oh. I’m guessing you heard all of that.”

“Your end of the conversation. But don’t change the subject, Mickey. You were making out with the mother of the guy who killed your father.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“What?”

“I was unconscious and nearly four decades in the past. It just kind of happened.”

“So what—were you hoping to heal your girlfriend Erna there with the magical power of your lips? Do you realize, Mickey, that if that woman’s still alive, she’s like sixty or seventy by now?”

“She said she saw other dead people. What does that mean? That other people like me are traveling back in time?”

She looked at me, again at a loss for words. This wasn’t like Meghan at all. She was the perfect friend because she had this warm, relaxed way of filling the uncomfortable spaces. Usually, I loved to listen to her talk. But not now.

“What, Meghan, what? What’s wrong?”

“There’s something else.”

“What.”

“While you were…under, asleep, whatever…you uh…”

“Spit it out.”

“You ejaculated.”

“I what? Are you sure?”

“I’m a big girl, Mickey. I’ve seen it happen from time to time. But not like it happened with you. You looked like you were either having a seizure or an orgasm.”

“Oh God.”

“You didn’t try to swallow your tongue, so my guess was orgasm.”

“Oh God.”

Meghan looked at me, uneasy smile on her face. “Quit it with the Oh Gods, or I’ll think you’re doing it again.”

“I’m sorry. Oh God.”

“So let me ask you again: What were you doing with the mother of your father’s killer?”

This was too much. She’d kissed me, she’d merged with me—or whatever the hell had happened. I didn’t remember it being necessarily sexual. I remember it being extremely disorienting.

Finally I stood up and went to the bathroom and cleaned myself up with the three fingers I had left. Meghan hadn’t been lying.

When I returned to the main room we seemed to have this unspoken agreement not to speak about whatever had just happened. Maybe it was a side effect of the pill. Hell, maybe they weren’t time-traveling pills after all. Maybe Grandpop Henry had a secret stash of Cialis in that Tylenol bottle and I was a sick bastard imagining this whole thing.

But I knew that wasn’t the case. Meghan knew it, too.

“So to recap, we’re out of witnesses. Your mother doesn’t know anything. Your grandmother gave us a little. And Erna can do wonders with her lips.”

Meghan was wrong. We had another witness.

“There’s someone else.”

“Who?”

“Billy Derace.”

Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up. I listened to Meghan’s breathing for a while, then realized she was awake, too. I reached out and touched her hand lightly.

“You awake?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

We lay there in the dark together. I was genuinely surprised when she suggested crashing again. She told me it was late, she didn’t feel like making the drive back downtown this time of night—making it not a big deal. But still: she stayed. She didn’t have to. Even my pill-popping wet dream hadn’t scared her away. Even me, making out with a woman who was probably seventy years old by now. It made me wonder. Finally, I asked her.

“Why are you doing all of this?”

“All of what?”

“You know. Everything. Helping me trying to figure this out. Hanging out so much. Not calling the lunatic asylum to have me carted away.”

She was silent for a moment.

“You want the truth?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t get me wrong—you’re a great guy, and I cherish our friendship.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I was really concerned when I thought you were slipping into some kind of Trainspotting-style drug oblivion—I mean, I couldn’t just stand on the sidelines and do nothing, you know? But now I know there’s something else going on, and the more I hear, the more I’m curious, and…well, I don’t mean to sound cold or anything, but I really just want to know how it all turns out.”

Somehow it was honest and warm and heartbreaking at the same time.

We slept most of the next day away. The rain was pelting down when we pulled up to the Adams Institute in the early evening. There was a frightening rumble in the distance. It was one of those good down-and-dirty early summer storms you get every so often in Philadelphia.

“And here we are, sneaking into a mental hospital,” Meghan said.

“We’re not sneaking in. We’re just going to walk.”

“Easy for you to say. You must have done this all the time at the City Press. Smooth-talking your way past security, slipping through unlocked doors…”

“Uh, not exactly.”

“You didn’t sneak into government buildings? Secretly tape meetings? Spend endless nights taping together shredded documents?”

“There were reporters who loved that kind of thing. But I wasn’t one of those reporters. I preferred the phone—or even better, an e-mail exchange. To tell you the truth, I even hated that—it always felt like I was bothering people.”

“You’re a regular Bob Woodward.”

“I’m not even a Carl Bernstein. Lock me in a room with piles of documents and I’m a happy man.”

“You live in a room with piles of documents, and you’re miserable.”

“Oh shut up.”

All I wanted was thirty seconds with Billy Derace. That’s all. If he recognized me, then it was proof that all of this was real, that I was speaking to him in the past. That I was the kindly ghost from upstairs who tried to stop his mother from beating him. Of course, I was also the kindly ghost who’d kissed his mother. But I wouldn’t bring that up.

The front gate was just off Roosevelt Boulevard. Even the tall, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding the neatly manicured estate seemed to hold up a hand and say and just where do you think you’re going.

The plan was this: Meghan would pretend to be a lawyer from a nonexistent firm (she’d even printed up fake letterhead) with documents for an inmate (William Allen Derace) about an estate matter. Meghan was attractive, confident and knew how to lay down some lawyerspeak after years of watching her father.

The front receptionist desk shot her down completely. Meghan was told that the lead attorney would have to call to make an appointment.

She came back out to the car, sat down in the driver’s seat, dripping wet. She fumed so hard, I swear I saw raindrops on her forehead sizzle and evaporate into steam. Meghan was not used to being shut out of anything.

I had no choice but to say:

“Okay, let me try.”

She looked at me.

“I thought you didn’t do this kind of thing.”

“I’m thinking it’ll look good on my résumé.”

I was wearing my one jacket and a pair of ill-fitting trousers from my grandfather’s closet, as well as one of his dress shirts. We had been roughly the same size at some point, but the man had shrunk in his old age, leaving everything a little tight. If only I had a skinny tie, I could join a new wave power pop boy band.

“Let me borrow your clipboard.”

“Why?” Meghan asked.

“If you wear the right suit and carry a clipboard, you can pretty much walk into any building and nobody will bother you.”

“Is that the right suit?”

“I’ll walk fast so they don’t notice.”

I reached over with my three good fingers and started to pull on the door handle.

“Wish me luck.”

“Good luck. By the way, if you’re caught by the guards, wet your pants and start barking like a dog.”

“You think this is a riot, don’t you.”

“No, I’m serious. That’s the one thing that can get you out of pretty much any situation. Or at least, give you a chance to make a break for it.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The front lawn of the Adams Institute was manicured to within an inch of its life, and glistening with the humid rain. I strode forward purposefully, unapologetically. I was faking it like you wouldn’t believe.

Inside the main hall there was a reception desk. I blew right past it and continued down a marble-floored hallway. Someone said “hey!” but I turned a corner, looking for a wall-mounted directory. There was a door to my right, then another set of stairs, then another door…which took me outside again, into the rain. Crap.

Not knowing exactly where to go, I darted down the side of the building, feeling the water creep down my collar, until I found a path that led into a group of trees. There were more buildings, two and four stories each, dotting the grounds. Derace could be in any one of them. Or not here at all.

I kept strolling, not too fast to be obvious. By the time I reached the tree line I could see another building off to the left—a 1950s-style, no-nonsense two-story deal. Which one of these things is not like the other? If I were going to run government drug experiments, would I do it in one of the storied old buildings that had been around since the Civil War, or would I use federal money to slap up something new? The name on the building said: the papiro center.

And that was as far as I got before I felt a hand on my good arm.

I half-expected a guard, but instead it was a man in a white robe and slippers. Late fifties, with brown hair combed straight back. His eyes were the most intense I’d ever seen. They practically glowed.

“I remember you,” he said. “I met you when you were a kid. On that boat. Do you remember?”

I had no idea who he was, or what boat he was talking about.

“You and your sister. You were lost. On that boat.”

See, right there were strikes one and two. I was an only child, and I grew up a landlubber. Mom didn’t bring us on any yachts or cruise ships. She didn’t even bring us to the Good Ship Lollypop down at Penn’s Landing, like every other kid I knew.

“Sorry,” I told the guy. “I don’t remember.”

He leaned forward and winked at me.

“My name is Dean. But that’s just an alias.”

Dean looked around to see if anyone else was listening. I looked around, too, to see if any armed guards were running toward us. But we were alone. Unfortunately.

Sometimes, though, a reporter can’t be picky about his sources. It was a long shot, but I looked at Dean.

“Do you know a man here named William Derace? Billy Allen Derace?”

Dean’s eyes widened.

“Of course I know that bastard. You should stay away from him—he’s incredibly dangerous. I’ve been trying to collect him for years, but they keep him locked up all the time. Oh, the murders I could solve with that son of a bitch locked in my skull.”

Okay, this guy was probably loony tunes, but it was also possible that he conflated actual reality with his fantasy life. Maybe he really did know Derace.

“Where do they keep him locked up?”

“No,” Dean said. “Can’t tell you that. Too dangerous. You don’t want anything to do with Billy Derace. They keep that menace on sedatives twenty-four/seven. Weird shit happens when he wakes up.”

“Come on, Dean. For old time’s sake.”

“You trying to con an old con? Nothing doing.”

But Dean’s eyes gave it away anyway. They flicked over to his right. Toward that 1950s building I’d spotted. The Papiro Center.

Dean tried cover it up by changing the topic.

“So how’s your sister?”

“I don’t have a sister. I’m an only child.”

“Sure you do—the two of you were together on the Moshulu, when you got lost at the Bicentennial. You know, the little blond-haired girl eating the popcorn with you.”

That stopped me cold. Suddenly I knew who he was talking about, but it wasn’t my sister. It had been my mom’s youngest sister, who was only nine months older than me.

We had been down at Penn’s Landing because my father had been hired to play with a band called The Shuttlebums in front of Winston’s Restaurant. And across a pedestrian bridge was a huge clipper ship, since converted to a restaurant, called the Moshulu. During the summer of 1976 my dad was working maintenance on that boat.

Mid-gig, I somehow conned my aunt, who was all of five years old, into walking over the bridge and checking out the boat. My parents went insane with worry, but luckily we were picked up by an off-duty cop, who thought it was a little suspicious that two little kids sat themselves down at a small table meant for two—meaning, no room for parents.

“You’re the guy who found us?” I asked. “How is that possible? How do you even recognize me?”

“It’s not your face,” he said. “It’s your soul.”

Okay then. I thanked him and then excused myself. Leave it to me to get lost as a kid, only to be found by a raving lunatic who could see other people’s souls.

The lights were mostly out in the Papiro Center. The back doors were locked. The front door was locked and controlled by a keypad. Why did I think it would be open? This was a mental hospital.

I stood there, looking up at the building. I’d already trespassed; I’d feel like a moron just leaving without trying something.

Screw it.

I shouted.

“BILLY DERACE!”

This would either work right away, or not. If I saw a light on the ground floor, I’d bolt.

“BILLY! DERACE!”

Come on you nutcase. Get up out of bed, come to your window, look down. I’ll know in a second if you recognize me. Which of these windows is yours?

Then, on the left side—movement. No light, just a shadow on shadows. Dark gray on black. A male figure? It was too hard to see.

Behind me I heard a cough. My head whipped around; nobody. I looked back up at the window.

Nothing.

Just the rain, smacking into the grass, the blacktop path leading back to the main building.

Suddenly security lights flickered to life all around me. Crap. The main office knew I was here. I ran back the way I came, figuring that I could slow down my hurried jog at the last minute and just stroll on out of there, clipboard in hand.

But the door I’d used to get out was locked, trapping me outside.

Trapping me on the grounds of a three-hundred-year-old insane asylum.

Okay, so I freaked out a little. I ran in the opposite direction, toward the fence near Adams Avenue, where we’d parked. At the very least, I thought I could yell to Meghan and let her know what happened before they tackled me to the wet grass and wrestled me into a straitjacket. Meghan’s dad was a powerful lawyer. I’m sure he could get me out of this place. Eventually.

There were voices behind me. I ran faster. You never realize how much you depend on your arms for balance until you lose feeling in one of them. I felt like I was going to tip over at any minute. Which would make it much easier to wrestle me into a straitjacket.

As I approached the gate, I saw that Meghan was out of the car, waiting for me. Her hair was dripping wet, and she urged me forward with her hands.

“Hurry!”

I skidded to a halt and almost slammed into the gate.

“They’ve got me surrounded. Look, go call your dad and tell him you have a dumbass for a friend who thought it would be funny if he—”

“Give me your foot.”

I looked down. Meghan was reaching through the bars, fingers intertwined, making a little step for me.

“No way. I’m too heavy. And I’ve only got one functioning arm.”

“Will you just give me your foot? I’ll push you over the fence.”

I didn’t have the chance to have a talk with my father about women; he died before I’d reached puberty. But even I knew that when a beautiful woman is standing in the pouring rain, offering to help lift you over the black metal fence outside an insane asylum, you take her up on the offer.

I stepped into Meghan’s hands, then reached up for the top of the fence. I could tell immediately that she’d grossly underestimated my weight. Her hands felt like they were attached to rubber cables, ready to snap at any moment. I wanted to stop and apologize—sorry I’m so heavy, Meghan. It’s all of the beer I’ve been drinking. But there wasn’t time. Meghan summoned some kind of inner Incredible Hulk–style gamma ray strength and pulled her arms up, lifting me to where I could just grab the top of the gate with the three good fingers on my left hand.

I held on as tightly as I could, then swung my left foot up to the top of the fence. The rubber soles of my shoes clung to the metal for a fraction of a second, and it was enough time for Meghan to give me another superhuman push, and for me to pull myself up and over.

I was over the fence.

And then I was falling.

The good news was that I’d managed to not land on top of Meghan—she’d scurried out of the way the moment my foot left her hands. But as I landed, my right foot twisted. I had a fleeting moment of wow, I actually managed to land on my feet before I completely went down.

Meghan helped me up, asked if I could put any weight on it. I tried. I told her no. She told me to stop being a pansy, and then helped me limp back to her passenger seat. The water ran down through my hair and onto my face. I eased back into the seat, used my good hand to pull my bad leg into the car, then we took off, rocketing down Adams Avenue.

“Thank God you were by that fence.”

I looked over at Meghan. Her hands were gripping the steering wheel tightly, and her arms were shaking. Probably from the exertion, the worry, the adrenaline.

She looked at me.

“I presume that was you, shouting the name ‘Billy Derace’?”

“The doors were locked. What else could I do?”

She didn’t respond. By the time we’d cleared about three blocks, there were no sirens, no pursing vehicles, no spotlights. We’d gotten away clean.

Which is what probably emboldened me to suggest something really stupid.

“Slow down and go back around.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Go back and park on the other side of the grounds. I’ve got an idea.”

“You can barely walk.”

“I don’t plan on walking.”

I reached into my overcoat pocket and pulled out a single white pill. I’d tucked one in there, just in case.

Meghan got it right away—there are no dull forks in her silverware drawer. Still, she thought it was a really stupid idea.

“What good is it for you to sneak into that place back in 1972? Billy Derace’s only twelve years old, and he’s living at home. He’s not going to be placed here until years later.”

“The Papiro Center is the place listed on DeMeo’s letterhead. His office might be on Frankford Avenue, but he works out of this building, too. Maybe we couldn’t find any notes about his experiments because he kept them all here.”

“So you’re just going to pass out on the front seat on my car. What am I supposed to say to the cops when they pull over to check out what I’m doing here? And you know they’re going to pull over and check it out.”

“Keep driving, then. Just don’t go too far.”

We used her car key to cut the pill in half. I figured that dosage should give me enough time to slip through the gates, through the front door and into that building.

At first I wasn’t even sure it worked—the place looked exactly the same now as it did back in 1972. This was a well-maintained loony bin, and always had been. But then I realized I was sitting in the middle of the street on a cold dark night, and the cars around me were all vintage models. Meghan’s Prius was nowhere to be seen.

I slipped right through the asylum gates—which weren’t locked now. Guess security wasn’t a big concern back in 1972.

There were sodium lights dotting the grounds, casting wide ovals of yellow light on the lawn. I stuck to the dark patches.

When I reached the front door I grit my teeth and closed my eyes and just went for it.

Then I was inside.

Past the reception area, the doctors’ offices and up a narrow row of concrete stairs and into the main quarters…

Which were empty.

Nothing. Just gurneys, completely stripped of everything except their thin mattresses.

Wasn’t this where the experiments were supposed to be happening right about now? Did I miss them? Did I have the wrong building, after all?

I spent time back downstairs in the offices, rooting through filing cabinets, but they were empty, too.

By the time I thought to slip across the grounds and try another building, I could feel the dizziness starting again, and my grip on everything slipping away.

I woke up groggy. Throbbing. Taste of sour metal in my mouth. Sweat all over my face, and nostrils full of a gamey scent that I quickly realized was me.

Meghan was next to me, driving.

“Did you find anything?”

“No.”

I insisted on parking at the hospital garage again, even though it meant a five-block walk for me on a bad ankle. Climbing up to the third floor wasn’t fun either. Meghan tried to hide it, but she couldn’t keep the smile off her face as we slowly made our way up.

“I still can’t believe you just shouted his name.”

“Fine. Next time we break into a mental hospital, you go over the fence.”

And then we reached my apartment door.

But it was already open.

We could see the torn-up wood where the burglar had used the crowbar. Probably took him less than five seconds—jam the steel into the wedge between door and frame, pull once, maybe twice, and presto, you’re breaking and entering.

We immediately tried to figure out what was missing, but the place was so cluttered with boxes, it was difficult. I had no TV to steal, no fancy DVD players or jewelry.

Meghan walked over to the desk.

“Your laptop’s still here.”

“It’s too ancient to pawn.”

My father’s albums were still stacked up against the Technics turntable, which was also a relief. The peanut butter and apples were still on the kitchenette counter. My books were still stacked up on the cherrywood desk.

“Wow. I think someone busted into your place, saw that you had jack shit, then turned around and left.”

“I’m glad you think this is funny.”

“I don’t. Not really.”

“I don’t know whether I should be relieved or depressed.”

I limped into the bathroom to wash my face, then used a hand towel to dry my hair a little, which was dripping from the storm. Since the medicine cabinet mirror was still smashed, I had no idea how I looked. When my hair’s wet a certain way, you can see the top of my head where I’m starting to go bald. I usually try to comb it to cover it up. Now I knew why men preferred fedoras back in the day.

Hanging the towel up I could feel my ankle really starting to throb. An aspirin would probably help, but then I remembered that I didn’t have any real aspirin; just the transport-you-back-in-time variety. Tylenol A.D. Take two and call me thirty years ago.

Wait.

“Meghan!”

“What?”

“Did you move the bottle of pills?”

She appeared in the doorway.

“The pills?”

“Yes. The pills.”

I could see the brown ring of rust where the Tylenol bottle used to sit, but the bottle itself was gone.

That was the only thing the burglar had taken, it seemed.

But how did this guy know about the pills? Why had he taken them now?

“You should go. I’ll walk you to your car.”

“And leave you wet, limping and burglarized? What kind of a friend would I be?”

She guided me to the houndstooth couch. We sat there listening to the rain snick-snack against the front windows. The El rumbled into its station, which sounded like thunder at first.

“I’m going to stay here tonight.”

“There’s no lock on the door. You can stay here. Anybody can stay here, help themselves to anything in the apartment. What does it matter?”

Her finger touched my chin, turned my face.

“Nobody else is welcome.”

She kissed me.

We pushed the door shut to make sure it would at least stay closed, if not locked. We pulled out the houndstooth couch, made up the bed. We crawled in together and held each other, kissed each other, listened to the rain and the rumble of the El and kissed each other some more. We kissed until we faded into each other and it was hard to tell where I stopped and where she began and vice versa.

It was everything I’d wanted, but assumed I would never get.

At some point we fell asleep and then I woke up and gently touched the side of her face, just to feel her skin beneath my three good fingertips.

And then a harsh voice said:

“Hello, Mickey.”

I could see nothing in the room. Just the streetlights, filtered through the front windows. Who was speaking?

Then, by my right ear: “Sorry I didn’t come to the window. But I was sleeping. They make me sleep so much. But I woke up when I heard your voice. I’ve been waiting years to hear your voice.”

I jolted and sat up in bed, looked around. And then I felt hands grab the sides of my head and pull me out of bed.

I’ll admit it: I screamed.

Meghan woke up a nanosecond later, pushing herself up from the mattress. But something pushed her back down, violently. The springs of the couch strained beneath her.

“Stay out of this. This is family business, whore.”

Then I saw him. He was a complete stranger, but I recognized the voice. It was older. It had deepened. But it was still the same voice.

Billy Allen Derace.

“Can you see me, Mickey?”

Yeah, I could see him.

But not quickly enough.

His fist smashed into my face quickly followed by his knee to my balls, which I swear came heaving out of nowhere. The lower half of my body exploded in white hot pain. My legs trembled for a second before giving out on me, and my knees slammed into the hardwood floor. Gravity wasn’t working like it should. My internal compass was off—way, way off.

I crawled forward a few feet, the tips of my three good fingers clutching at the uneven spaces between the floorboards. My lip was throbbing and my balls felt like they were the size of cantaloupes. I crawled on a single elbow and both knees toward the bathroom. Anywhere.

Derace laughed at me. Walked toward me, ready to drag me back into the living room for more fun and games.

“Where you going, Mickey?”

Away from you.

“Would you rather me spend time with your girlfriend here? I like playing with the girls. Wig wam bam, gonna make you understand…”

Meghan screamed. I turned to see her lash out at the air. Her eyes popped open as something grabbed her throat. No.

“STAY AWAY FROM HER!”

I spun myself around and crawled back toward the couch.

“Wig wam bam, gonna getchoo if I can…”

Meghan cried out again but her voice was a weak rasp.

“But I think I’ll save her for later. After I deal with you.”

Something hard slammed into the side of my head. I think by chance I’d moved at the right moment, otherwise I would have been kicked in the face. I saw a white flash and collapsed to the ground, rolled over onto my back. I reached out with my three good fingers and tried to find the bathroom doorway so I could pull myself up.

Fingers tore at the back of my neck, then found the back of my head. There was a tug at the back of my waist…and then I was vertical again.

And then I was hurtling into the cherrywood desk. My face slammed against the back panel. My useless hand fumbled for the edge of the desk to anchor myself, but Derace was right behind me.

The next thing I knew the side of my face and my dead right shoulder slammed against the desk again, tilting onto two legs. Drawers opened, files gushed out.

Then he lifted me up and spun me around.

There was Billy Allen Derace. Nearly fifty years old. Wild red hair shaved down to nothing. Eyes sallow. Teary. Breath hot and stinking. I could feel him. I could smell him. He was standing behind me. This was no hallucination.

“Such a handsome face. That’s not how I remember you. You had some scars. Nasty red-looking things. Maybe I’m supposed to give them to you.”

“What do you want?”

“I was young when I killed your father. I was just starting out with the pills, figuring it all out. I thought the old man up here had some money I could steal, buy my own pills. But then I saw he had his own stash. And it was goooooooood shit he had. Shit nobody else had. Shit that made me a superhero.”

“You asshole—you killed my father.”

“I was confused back then, you see. I thought he was you. I killed him because I thought he was you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Now I get what I want. Finally.”

Then the hands released me.

“Hey. No. No no no no no no not yet…”

Billy was gone.

But I still heard his voice.

“DON’T YOU BASTARDS STICK THAT IN ME I’LL COME FOR ALL OF YOU IN YOUR SLEEP AND CUT YOU AND YOUR PRETTY LITTLE CHILDREN TO DEATH…”

My eyes may have been playing tricks. But for a flicker of a moment I saw the shape of Derace above me, and it was like he was wrestling with unseen forces, trying to lift his curled fists up, but he couldn’t, because the man had invisible restraints around his wrists…

And then he vanished.

In the mid-1960s a professor at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments on an advertising executive named Robert Monroe who claimed to have experienced numerous “out of body” (OBE) experiences. Monroe agreed to eight sessions in which he was placed in a locked room and asked to project himself. In two of those sessions Monroe was able to accurately describe the contents of another room in the facility in vivid detail.

In the late 1960s the Pentagon began a series of experiments aimed to control “remote viewing”—essentially, using psychics as spies to peer behind the Iron Curtain. Reportedly, the other side was engaged in similar experiments, resulting in a top secret, low-key “brain race” similar to the arms race and the moon race.

And in 1971, Dr. Mitchell DeMeo was given a government grant to find a way to induce an out-of-body experience using pharmaceuticals, which he’d developed over a period of twenty years.

DeMeo was affiliated with the prestigious Adams Institute. But he ran his experiments offsite; the board of directors at the Adams Institute thought it would be better that way. He used the address of the Papiro Center, at the time an empty building on the hospital’s grounds that was sometimes used by the government, sometimes not. When it was not, unruly patients and “special cases” were housed in the center.

But DeMeo had actually set up shop in an abandoned apartment building on Frankford Avenue. They advertised in local papers for volunteers.

They accepted my father.

Dr. DeMeo hired a cleaning woman named Erna Derace to tidy up his office as well as the other apartments in the building. Payment was very modest, but in exchange, Erna was allowed to keep an apartment downstairs.

She had a boy named Billy. And he was instructed to be quiet at all times. In fact, their stay in the apartment was contingent on Billy “behaving.”

No one cared about the experiments now, because the experiments were seen as a failure.

And the story had gone untold.

The story was all here in the papers, which had been buried in drawers of the cherrywood desk. Meghan had found the motherlode when she righted the desk after Billy Derace had tried to smash my head through it. Everything was in there. Grandpop Henry had clearly been through it all, and kept the relevant stuff neatly organized in the desk drawers. The boxes and crates were essentially leftovers. Trash he hadn’t gotten around to bringing outside. We’d been looking in the wrong place this whole time.

Meghan flipped through DeMeo’s experiment notes, all of which were neatly typewritten and separated into three categories: positive, negative and “questionable.” The negative files were thick, and had taken up most of the drawer. The questionables were comparatively slim. And the positives were thinner still.

We more or less read in silence, as if we were both engrossed in the same 500,000-page novel that had gushed itself out of the desk. Only, we were on wildly different chapters, trying to piece together the story out of order. At one point Meghan looked up at me.

“Okay, so Dr. DeMeo was researching out-of-body experiences. As far as we know, Billy Derace is still locked up, under heavy sedation at the Adams Institute. So this means the Derace we saw last night was what…an astral projection?”

“Which will make it very interesting to explain to the police.”

“True.”

Then I thought this through a bit more.

“Wait wait wait—that doesn’t make sense. Say he has the same pills I do. And let’s say he can do the same things I can do. Does this mean he’s come back from some future year just to mess with me now?”

“Maybe the whole going back in time thing is specific to you. According to these papers here, it was all about astral projection. Harnessing it. Making it predictable. Finding people who were predisposed to it. Maybe you, and maybe your father, could only project into the past.”

“What makes you say that?”

Meghan held up the positive folder.

“Because in this folder is Dr. DeMeo’s one proven success. And his name is Billy Allen Derace.”

“You’re kidding. He ran drug experiments on a twelve-year-old boy? The son of the woman he was banging?”

Meghan opened the folder, handed it to me.

“I don’t think he was twelve. These notes are dated from early 1980. That would make Derace, what, eighteen years old then?”

I skimmed the notes. Meghan was right. Derace had been an unqualified success. Able to walk around outside his body and identify objects in other rooms with ease. DeMeo was practically gushing. He also noted that his success was “no doubt linked to the extreme dosage administered to subject over a short period of time.”

In short: Derace had been pumped full of these pills in order to make the out-of-body experience work.

But why do this to Billy? Had he volunteered? Had Erna coerced her son to do it to stay in the good graces of that fat pill-pusher?

Meghan found my father’s page after a short while. He had been in the “questionable” folder, and it seemed that the pills had the same effect on the father as they did the son. He was hurled back in time, too, only to his birth year—1949. DeMeo’s notes were snide, dismissive. My father insisted what he was seeing was real, and asked for more time to prove it. DeMeo let him have a few more sessions, then abruptly bounced him from the experiment. “Subject W. clearly wanted to milk the system for more money.”

I shook my head.

“DeMeo didn’t believe him. But my father was telling the truth.”

Oh hell—my father.

Billy.

“What?”

The pallet full of cinder blocks that had been dangling over me finally broke free and smashed down on my head. I scrambled across the room, nearly tripping, and pulled out the death scrapbook Grandpop had made.

“Mickey, what is it?”

I flipped, found the Bulletin article. Billy Derace hadn’t just disappeared from the scene of the crime. He had never really been there. It was his astral projection that had shown up, and it was strong enough and real enough to be seen and shown to a table and order a steak and a beer to bide his time. He’d ordered the steak because he wanted the knife. He couldn’t bring one with him, because his physical body was locked up in the Adams Institute.

I don’t know what I sounded like as I explained it to Meghan. It came out as a tumble of ideas and words. Somehow, though, it made sense to her. I think she was finally believing me—believing that those pills could do what I said they could.

“But what’s the connection between Derace and your father? They were both experimented on, but eight years apart. What made Derace pick up a knife and stab him to death in a bar?”

“I don’t know.”

“I heard him talking to you last night. I heard him say, ‘I killed him because I thought he was you.’”

“I have no idea.”

After a while, Meghan hit my crappy laptop for some Google searches and we filled in some pieces that the notes from the desk couldn’t. First, she found a death notice for DeMeo.

“Says here in the Inquirer that Dr. Mitchell DeMeo died in 2002. When did your grandpop move here?”

“A year later.”

“Oh shit. He didn’t just die. He was stabbed to death on Frankford Avenue at…Sellers Street? Is that nearby?”

“Just a few blocks away. Did you say stabbed?”

“He was walking to his car. Had the keys in his hand. Police say robbery wasn’t a motive, as his car keys and his wallet were still on the body when he was found.”

“Billy.”

“Yeah, I’d say that was certainly a possibility.”

Meghan kept typing; I kept digging. As a reporter I used to love printed sources. They were puzzle pieces. But now, there were too many pieces. Nothing seemed to match up or make sense.

“Um…”

“What?”

“I had somebody in my dad’s office do a little checking for me—and he just e-mailed back. This building is still owned by the U.S. government. I think your grandpop was squatting. Which means that technically, you’re squatting.”

Somehow this news wasn’t the crushing blow it should have been. I was already thinking that there was no way I’d be spending another night in this apartment. Not with Billy Derace knowing where to find me.

And Meghan.

A half hour later, dawn crept up over the Frankford skyline. We’d been digging and reading and throwing questions at each other all through the night. But now, with daylight here, I told Meghan she should probably go home.

“Are you kidding? Just when this is coming together?”

“It’s not safe here.”

“Don’t tell me—Frankford’s a bad neighborhood.”

“You know that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about Derace. Hell, I’m thinking about swallowing my pride, packing up my crap and asking my mom if I can crash in a spare bedroom for a few days. Just until I sort this stuff out.”

“No way am I leaving you now.”

“Seriously, Meghan, I’d feel a lot better if you kept your distance. I promise, I won’t leave you out of this.”

And I wouldn’t. There was nothing I wanted more than Meghan to stay with me right now. To stay with me forever, actually. But I couldn’t risk her life, not because of my selfishness. Billy Derace wouldn’t know who she was, where she lived. To him, she was just another woman. The only connection he had to her was through me.

“I don’t believe this. All of this time, and you push me away now? Seriously, Mickey—what the hell?”

She couldn’t stay. She couldn’t be anywhere near me. Not now.

“I’ll call you.”

When she left this time, she didn’t kiss me. She made sure I saw her face for a moment, her angry eyes, and then she left.

The door snicked shut and I sat on the houndstooth couch, intending to close my eyes for just a minute. One minute I was staring at the cracks in the ceiling and the next utter exhaustion took over. I was out. Gone.

It was good to finally let go.

Sometime later—it must have been early afternoon—my cell phone rang. Through a curtain of gray haze I saw the caller was Frankford Hospital. My mom was probably in my grandpop’s room and wanted to bug me about visiting him. I let the call go to voice mail and rolled back over. Maybe the drool would run down the other cheek, even things out. A while later the phone rang again. Please stop, Mom. Let me enjoy my coma here in peace. Then again. And a fourth time. So I finally picked up the phone and called into voice mail to see what the big panic was about…

But it wasn’t my mother. It was Grandpop Henry, calling from the hospital. I redialed the number. He answered.

“Mickey?”

“Grandpop? You’re awake?”

“Yeah, I’m awake. Been awake for a while. I need you to come here right away.”