The Shadow Men

You Won’t Make a Fool Out of Me

Once, Trix had dreamed that Jenny loved her. More than that, she had dreamed that they were in love, and so fiercely that when she had woken from that dream, it had broken her heart to realize it wasn’t real. It hardly seemed fair. She had loved Jenny since college, constantly fighting not to be the love-struck lesbian her friends had warned her she might become, mooning over the straight girl she could never have.

Over the years she had forged her love for Jenny into something sweet and mostly selfless. In the beginning, Trix had wanted to hate Jim, but she’d found herself unable to do it. They had too much in common. They had Jenny in common. And over time, Trix had come to realize that she cared for Jim nearly as much as she did Jenny, though in a very different way.

Then Holly had come along, and that had caused a metamorphosis in Trix. All the romance and lustful thoughts she had harbored for her best friend over the years had receded as her dedication to Jenny became a love for and loyalty to this family. Jenny, Holly, and even Jim… they were as much her family as anyone related to her by blood.

But sometimes she remembered that dream, and the love she felt so deeply that waking had broken her heart, and she let herself fantasize about making her way up to the apartment and entering to find Jenny alone. She toyed with the scenario in her mind, a conversation that would finally set fire to the spark between them. They would make love, Jenny discovering a part of herself she had never acknowledged. They would hold each other afterward, and it would feel so natural.

Trix never relayed these dreams to Jenny and Jim, not even in jest. After eight years of joyful marriage, Jenny might not understand.

Now Trix stood outside the door to Jim and Jenny’s apartment. She was shaking. Anticipation was part of it-she had found the one person who seemed to accept what had happened to her, and now was the time to see just how much he had changed as well-but the climb up the stairs had shaken her. She never took the elevator, always kept in shape, and three flights of stairs were more beneficial than standing in a moving box held up by a few wires. But since she’d changed, even the way she moved felt strange. She was thinner than before, more wiry, stronger, and the effort she needed to do things was different. Before, she would have walked up the stairs and been breathing a little heavy. Now she had run up and wasn’t even breathless. Her heart thumped in her chest, and she could see her T-shirt rippling beneath the leather jacket. When she closed her eyes the whole sense of herself was different-her awareness of limbs, the space her body occupied, and her personal space surrounding her. It was as if she had been removed and replaced, and the world around her refused to adapt.

It’s not the world, chick, she thought. It’s you who’s not adapting. There was an unbearable truth in that-the world was ambivalent, at best-but she couldn’t face it right now. She had to believe that she was still Trix Newcomb, and that perception of herself had changed because of quirks in the world around her. There was the pink hair and the sleeker body, yes… but inside, she was still her.

Remembering Jenny and Holly proved that. She and Jim couldn’t both be crazy, could they?

“Can we?” she whispered, and she slid Jim’s key into the lock.

He’d remained down in the parking lot, sitting in his locked, darkened car. No, she’d confirmed, she’d never seen him in the Mercedes, either. He drove a six-year-old Audi. He couldn’t face coming up here again, not right now, but he’d asked her to look for a few things.

Entering Jim and Jenny’s home, Trix thought of how much her own place might have changed. She hadn’t returned there yet. When she had felt this impossible change while out shopping, she had wanted the company of friends, not the silence of her lonely apartment.

Even the smells were different. She pushed the door closed behind her and heard it snick shut, then stood there with her eyes closed for a few seconds. The apartment felt different, smelled different, and when she opened her eyes and took a few steps into the hallway, it sounded wrong as well. She looked around. The large leather sofa looked the same as before, but it was newer, unscuffed, and not smothered with the usual mountain of scatter cushions. She was sure that the big flat-screen TV was a different make, and the Wii game console was gone, along with the slew of game boxes usually piled beneath it.

It could have been a different apartment entirely, but Trix didn’t believe that for a second. All the spaces were right, it was just what those spaces contained that seemed so wrong.

“What the fuck is this?” she said aloud, and the apartment swallowed her voice. She’d always been careful not to swear here in case Holly heard. She walked past the living room and gasped as something moved to her left. She stumbled back against the wall, bringing her fists up, shock surging through her until she realized it was herself. The mirror was a new addition to the hallway as well, perhaps there to make the space look larger. She stared into the mirror and only just recognized herself. Her sporty, urban chic style was gone. Her hair was more spiked and punky than she’d ever worn it, even as a rebellious teenager. Her face was thin and delicate, body hard and lithe instead of curvy. She knew her eyes-the pain and shock there, as well as the subtle green color that had always been her most distinctive feature.

“Trix,” she said, and the reflection named itself. “Okay… okay…” She hurried on, because being somewhere so familiar and yet so utterly different was freaking her out. In Jim, she’d found momentary respite from the nightmare her life had suddenly become, and she wanted to return to him as soon as possible. But first there were two places he’d asked her to look, and one she wanted to see for herself.

She entered the bedroom, and here Jenny’s absence was harsher still. It was obviously a man’s room; although Jim’s artistic flourishes extended this far, there were no feminine touches. Bedside cabinet, he’d told her. Third drawer down, hidden beneath the file of old newspaper clippings at the bottom. A poem I wrote to Jenny the day Holly was born. I never gave it to her, because I was embarrassed. Stupid, I know. But I could also never throw it away. Trix had nodded, understanding where he was reaching. The poem was entirely to do with him, and because it had never been a part of Jenny’s awareness, perhaps it would still be there now.

She sat on the bed and opened the drawer. Blinked. For the briefest instant she thought, They’re doing this as a practical joke, maybe they’re even filming. But that idea went as quickly as it had come. In these days of the Internet, she didn’t even know that guys looked at magazine porn anymore. She took the magazines out and laid them on the bed beside her. They seemed safe enough, and there was almost a retro feel to the covers, as if they might even show pubes instead of the preferred shaven parts of modern porn. But the dates were recent.

Beneath the magazines was a brown folder. Trix took it out and flicked through the contents. Newspaper clippings, as Jim had said-a variety of stories and features that often inspired him for a painting. And beneath the folder in the drawer… nothing. No poem. No envelope or folded paper. She examined the drawer in case it had a false bottom or she’d missed something. Scanned through the paper clippings more thoroughly. Held the magazines up by their spines, shaking them, expecting the sheet of paper to fall out at any moment. But there was nothing, and she didn’t even bother placing the items back in the drawer before moving on.

After she had encountered him on the street, Jim had sat in the driver’s seat of his car with her beside him, his hands gripping the wheel, his face a mask of concentration as he tried to think of something that would provide evidence of his wife’s and daughter’s existence. The poem had been one idea, and then as she’d opened the car to leave, he’d reached out, hooked a finger into her belt, and pulled her back inside. Then he’d leaned across the seats, so close to her that for a second Trix had been a little scared. Jim had never unsettled her before, but his breath had smelled of fear, his eyes were wide as a rabbit’s in headlights, and she’d wondered, Am I really on my own after all?

“There’s a painting,” he’d said. “It’s… special. Jenny knew about it, but no one else, not even Jonathan. Not even you.”

“Special how?” she’d asked, and instantly felt at ease once again. She was as eager to cling on to Jim as he was to her, because right now he was all she seemed to know. In Tallulah’s, the waitress had recognized her right away. No shock at the pink hair, no confusion over this subtly changed woman. I’ve always been like this here, Trix had thought, and the idea distressed her more and more.

“I painted it before I met Jenny,” he’d said. One hand rested on Trix’s knee, and the warmth was comfort to both of them. “I don’t usually do portraits, and this one… well, even this isn’t quite that. But it’s me and a woman, bodies enveloped with storm clouds, sunlight, reveling in the natural. And the woman is Jenny.”

“What do you mean?”

“I painted it before we even met.” He’d waved his hand. “Oh, there are differences. It’s like Jenny how she might have been, not exactly how she is. But it was as if I’d created a vision of my perfect woman, and then two years later…” He’d sobbed then, and Trix closed her hand over his and squeezed.

“Just tell me where it is.”

So now she climbed the narrower staircase to his studio, desperately hoping that the painting of Jim’s wife-her friend, the woman she’d loved for a long time-was still up there.

When she clicked the studio lights on she knew to squeeze her eyes shut. Jim had special lighting there, designed to be as close to real daylight as possible. She waited a few moments, then opened her eyes slowly, letting them adjust as she looked around the room. The fact that the studio appeared completely different was not what surprised and shocked her; she’d anticipated that, and the canvases propped around the place lived up to her expectation. Most of them seemed to be part of one advertising campaign or another, but their style was markedly different from what she was used to seeing from Jim. Before, his paintings had always had a soul about them, some element of tone or mood that she always found moving, whether they were seascapes painted for his own pleasure or advertising images for a new brand of sneaker. He’d always found some way to affect the viewer, and Trix always attributed that to Jim’s own sensitive personality. These paintings were different: brash, loud, technically brilliant but lacking in something profound. She imagined that they pleased many advertisers with their directness, and probably earned him a lot of money. But the soul had gone.

She crossed to the rear of the studio where the large storage racking system still stood behind two doors. Pulling the racks out and pivoting them aside, she flicked on the soft light inside the cupboard and entered. There was a mess of old canvases at the back, and he’d told her that the painting of him and Jenny lay buried behind them. Not because it was bad, but because it had always unnerved him. Jenny found it beautiful; he just wondered where it had come from.

Trix moved canvases aside, frowning at the different sense of Jim these paintings gave her. That’s the Jim I know down there, she had to keep reminding herself. But in that case, where was the Jim who had painted all these? She shivered, shook her head, and started whistling as she searched. But the whistle made the studio feel even more deserted, so she stopped.

The painting was obvious when she saw it, but she did not recognize the place it represented. A man and woman, yes, but like no one she had ever known, their features emphasized and stylized in a strangely cartoonish manner, his enlarged penis and her rounded breasts more explicit than anything Jim had ever painted. The sex in the picture was brazen and rich, the figures painted with loving attention, but it only made her feel uneasy. She stared at their faces, but there was nothing familiar there. The man seemed to stare over her shoulder; the woman glared right back, eyes wide and harsh.

“You didn’t paint this,” she said, backing away, rolling the racks back in after her, and closing the doors. This was not Jim’s studio, at least not the Jim she knew so well. “What the fuck is this?” she shouted again. There was no reply. She wondered what she would discover back in her own apartment, and the thought of going there and seeing unknown things filled her with dread. This place lacked not only touches of Jenny and Holly but the imprint of Jim himself. And yet it was his place still.

Trix turned to run from the room, then froze.

On the pedestal beneath the wide windows stood one of her nightmares. Since a brush with death at the age of seven, she’d had disturbing dreams of an unknown city. But since her near-fatal car crash three years before, another city had intruded upon her nightmares just as powerfully-different, yet hauntingly familiar. And now here it was. She closed her eyes, fighting the queasiness that swept through her, biting the inside of her lip to prevent herself from fainting. When she looked again, she was hoping it would have changed, that she’d imagined it… but no, it was still there. And it was the only thing in the whole apartment that she truly recognized.

“I never told Jenny,” Jim said. They were sitting in the car together again, Trix panting as she tried to catch her breath. It was fear that had winded her, and uncertainty. “She never liked those paintings, but she thought they were all mine. I never told her that some of them came from you. She was weirded out enough that we both saw these two strange places in our dreams.”

“Nightmares,” Trix said.

“Whatever.” He was staring ahead, and she could tell by the set of his jaw that he was fighting hard.

“It was exact,” she said. “Just… as if you plucked it from my mind.”

“But that one was based on my dream,” he said. “I’ve done others after talking to you, but that one was…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Last night.”

“That can’t be,” Trix said, but those words seemed weak and ineffectual in the light of what had happened. “Maybe you should go and look, see if-”

“No!” he said. “I’ve finished with that place for tonight.” He glanced sidelong at her. “Can we go to your apartment, talk this through? Try and decide what the fuck is going on?”

“My place?” She’d been trying on a blouse in the changing room of her favorite clothes shop, Francine’s, when the faint had washed over her. Something’s gone, she’d thought as she leaned against the mirror, closing her eyes and then snapping them open again when something had twisted through her. That was the best way she could think of describing it-there had been no actual pain, but it felt as if every part of her body flexed and shifted, just for an instant. And as her breath faded from the mirror’s surface, a stranger stared back at her.

Somehow, Trix had managed not to scream. She’d smiled in apology -something’s broken the mirror, and I’m looking into the next changing cubicle at a cute-looking woman with pink spiky hair and a designer torn top that I like but would never have the guts to wear- and then when the woman returned her smile she’d taken a step back -I don’t know her, she looks harmless enough, but there’s no telling just how -and then the realization as her hands traveled up over her unfamiliar body, her eyes went wide, and every move she made was imitated by the woman in the mirror. Thinner, more athletic; just as she glimpsed the unknown tattoo peering from beneath her sleeve, her palm passed across her breast and felt the piercing in her nipple. “No!” she had gasped, leaning forward and misting the mirror again.

The next few moments were a blur. Fleeing the changing rooms, the browsers and shoppers not staring even though something was terribly wrong, somehow remembering to pay for the new clothes she wore, the clothes she’d never have been daring enough to wear before. And then in the street outside, the instant decision-she was much closer to Jenny’s than her own apartment.

She had wandered at first, freaking out, trying to find some proof that she was hallucinating. In a bar near Kenmore Square, she had stopped and had a shot of rum, and then another, but the woman looking back at her from the mirror behind the bar remained the same punky chick she’d first encountered in that dressing room.

At last, not knowing what else to do and needing someone to hold her, to tell her she was still herself, she had gone to Jim and Jenny’s. Finding no one at home, she’d waited in Tallulah’s for them to return.

“I haven’t been back home,” she whispered. “Not since…”

“Trix,” Jim said. He was trying to comfort her, but there was desperation in his voice, too. She reached out and took his hand, and they sat silently for a few moments. He knows I’m me, Trix thought.

“I don’t know what I’ll find there,” she said.

“Maybe an answer,” Jim said. He’d leaned in sideways so that he was almost resting his head on her shoulder. Trix felt the drip of a tear, and she squeezed her eyes closed and pressed her lips together. He’s lost his wife and daughter, she thought. She’d already phoned her father and brother, several friends, and they all knew her. So far as she could tell, the only number missing from her mobile phone was Jenny’s.

“Okay,” she said. “Have you called the cops?”

“And said what?”

“That Jenny and Holly-”

“Jenny and Holly who no one else remembers?”

“I remember, Jim,” she said softly. “If it was just you, then yeah, you’d have to admit that you might have a bit of a problem. But there’s two of us. And we can’t both have been hallucinating the same thing for… however long.”

Some people emerged from Tallulah’s and came around the corner, laughing and joking as they passed the parked car. One of them glanced inside and looked away again, a nervous smile playing at her lips. They think we’re lovers, Trix thought.

“Jonathan’s dying,” Jim said into the darkness.

“What?” Trix knew Jonathan. They weren’t the best of friends-there’d always been something between them that made them not quite fit together, as if their personalities abraded each other in all the wrong places-but she knew how much Jim and Jenny loved the guy.

“Remember he was ill a few years back?”

“When he had his scare?”

“Yeah,” Jim said. “Scare. It was Jenny who persuaded him to go see the doctor.” He sat up again, wiping his face with his hands and drawing his cheeks down, as if to see more clearly. “He’d been having dizzy spells, headaches. Put them down to age, or booze. Jenny talked to him and said he should get it checked out. He did, they did a scan, found the tumor, removed it. Benign. He got better.” Jim laughed. “We were drunk a couple of years ago, and he told me he’d once gotten a blow job after showing some guy the scar across his scalp.”

“Ew,” Trix said.

“I saw him today, Trix. And he’s dying. Brain cancer, he said. And he acted… angry, as if I’d forgotten on purpose. Months to live. Because-”

“Because Jenny never told him.”

Jim nodded. “She wasn’t here to tell him.”

“I’m dreaming,” she said, and that was the only alternative, wasn’t it? She was dreaming, because this was impossible. If she spent some time and started thinking back, she’d reach the moment when she’d fallen asleep, and perhaps that would wake her again. She’d snap back into the world she knew and feel her hair with one hand, blond and cut short, not pink and spiked up. And with the other hand she’d clasp her unpierced breast, and then lift her sleeve to see the smooth, non-tattooed skin of her upper arm. But she could not think back to that moment because it did not exist. Even if she was dreaming, she might well be here forever.

“Look,” she said, turning the car’s interior light on and lifting her sleeve. It was a Celtic band, intricate and beautifully wrought.

“But you hate needles nearly as much as I do,” he said softly. He didn’t sound surprised.

“Tell me about it,” she said. It had been a constant joke between them-one that Jenny always found a little weird-that she’d never liked pricks. She glanced around quickly and lifted her T-shirt. She was braless, something else she’d rarely done before. The light glinted from the ring in her nipple.

“Shit, Trix,” Jim said, startled and embarrassed for a moment. Then he saw the piercing and looked up at her as she lowered the top again.

“Fucking hate needles,” she said. She nodded down at his lap. “Think you should be checking?”

Jim smiled. It was good to see. The surreal, gentle moment of humor amid such trauma lasted only for a second, but that second seemed to clear her head a little, and in that space an idea began to form.

“Okay, my place,” she said again. “We can’t stay sitting in the car forever.”

“Right,” Jim said, and he placed both hands on the wheel.

“Er… best to start the motor.”

“Yeah.” But he made no move to turn the key, just staring ahead at the building before them. A couple passed along the sidewalk arm in arm, and Trix watched Jim’s eyes follow them. He and Jenny had a strong, safe marriage, and she knew that even though she was sitting here with him right now-the only person he’d found to acknowledge the impossible thing that had happened-he must be feeling very alone.

“It’s okay,” Trix said, and she felt tears burning behind her eyes. But she had to keep them in, because Jim was suffering more. He’d lost his entire family.

“That’s our home,” he said.

“And it will be tomorrow. But maybe for tonight it will be best to stay at mine.”

“What if they come back?” he said. “What if they find their way home and I’m not there, Trix?”

Trix had no real answer for that, though she thought: Wherever we are, Jenny and Holly have never been here. It was an odd idea, and it shocked her to think that maybe she and Jim had gone somewhere else instead of the other way around. But in some respects it seemed to fit. This was not the exact world she had known a few hours ago-there were differences close to her and Jim, and those changes must stretch farther afield-and she dreaded what she would discover when she arrived home. “Losing it won’t help them,” she said. “We need to recharge. Think it through. And maybe find someone who can help.”

“Someone?” he asked. Trix just shrugged. She remembered everything they had to do, and where they had to go. That is, if the Trix she was now would even consider such things.

“I’ll come back later,” he said, nodding at the apartment. “Tomorrow. I’ll come back.”

“Good plan,” she said.

Jim started the car and drove them across the city, and Trix watched from the windows. She searched frantically for signs of something being as wrong out there as it felt inside, but the shop names were the same. Dunkin’ Donuts wasn’t spelled differently, and the mix of old and new Boston architecture presented familiar facades. They passed Monument Square, and the Bunker Hill Monument looked exactly the same as before. But Trix couldn’t tell how high it was, nor could she read the inscriptions or identify the face on the statue standing before it.

Boston looks just the same, she thought. It’s just us who are different. But that wasn’t quite true, either. Jim’s agent, Jonathan, was dying. The brain cancer that had been cured due to Jenny’s involvement years before had run riot, and soon it would take him. “Because Jenny’s not here, and never has been,” she whispered.

“What?” It had started raining, and Jim turned on the wipers. They whispered left and screeched right, a rhythmic gasp and moan.

“Jenny and Holly,” she said. “I was just thinking aloud. It’s not just that they’re gone now, but that they’ve been gone…” Forever, she almost said. But that was too final. “Their past has been stolen, as well as their present.”

“And their future?” he asked, voice breaking on the last word.

“I’m going to help you,” Trix said. She eyed Jim in the car’s dark interior, wondering how much he had changed and where. He seemed a little thinner than before, perhaps a bit more heavily muscled, facial structure more defined. He’s a bachelor; he’ll want to take care of himself more so that the women flock to him. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and something about the familiar smells of Boston-wet streets, car fumes, coffee, and a suggestion of Italian food-calmed her. At least the city smelled the same.

As they neared the old townhouse on St. Botolph Street-not far from Symphony Hall-where she had her apartment, Trix sat up and clasped her hands in her lap. She checked out the cars parked along the sidewalks and recognized some of them. She saw a tall, thin woman walking her standard poodle along the street and went to wave. But would Mrs. Wilkinson recognize her with her pink hair and punky gear? In this world, yeah, Trix thought. It’s only me who doesn’t recognize myself. She lowered her window and leaned out to put that to the test, but by then they’d passed Mrs. Wilkinson and Jim was pulling up at the curb.

“I’ll come with you,” he said.

“No, Jim, it’s okay, I’ll-”

“I’m coming with you!” His tone invited no dispute. She tried to smile, and he reached out and squeezed her hand. “Trix,” he said. “Whatever we find…” He looked past her at the building.

“I know,” she said. “Whatever we find, I’m still me.” She opened the car door, got out, and stood waiting on the sidewalk, staring at her apartment’s drawn curtains. They did not look familiar. And when she ran up the three steps and checked the nameplate beside her buzzer, she groaned and leaned against the wall.

“It doesn’t mean…,” Jim began.

Trix went to try her key in the front door, but it had been left unlocked and drifted open as she leaned against it. Inside, she heard music emanating from her apartment. The harsh, thrashy guitars, drums, and growling lyrics of the Dropkick Murphys. You couldn’t be young and living in Boston and not know the Dropkicks, but they had always been a bit too brash for her taste. “Jim,” she said, “I always open my curtains in the morning.”

“Maybe not this morning.”

This morning I was someone else, she thought, and she swayed as unreality washed over her. She felt Jim’s hand steadying her and leaned into him, and then a horrible sense of anticipation lit inside her chest. Who am I going to find in there? she wondered. In her real life in the real world she hadn’t had a girlfriend for over a year, since her last long-term relationship had ended badly. And as Jim’s hand rested against her upper arm, a startling, electrifying certainty hit her.

This was a world with different rules. Perhaps here Jenny loved her as much as she loved Jenny.

She headed for the apartment door, already knowing that her thinking was skewed. No one knows Jenny, she thought. But no one knew the Jenny she and Jim remembered. Maybe here she was someone else entirely.

She tried her key, and it did not fit.

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Jim said.

Trix’s heart was thumping as she reached for the buzzer, but she held back, kneeling instead and lifting the letter flap. It had a draft shield on the inside, and as she pushed her finger through and lifted it, she closed her eyes, because everything was already strange. That music’s not mine, my key doesn’t fit, I smell Chinese and I hate Chinese, and…

She looked into the apartment. “That’s not my home,” she said. The decor was different, the furniture, and as she watched, a strikingly tall black woman walked naked from the bathroom, across the hallway, and into the living room.

Trix caught her breath. Perhaps we’re lovers, she thought, but then a man emerged from the bathroom, naked and sheened with sweat, smiling and still semi-erect.

“Ice?” she heard the woman call, and Trix let the letter flap close softly as she rested back on her heels. Instead of being shocked or upset or disturbed, all she could wonder was how they could still make love with the city falling apart around them.

“Trix?” Jim asked.

“We can go now,” she said, standing and walking toward the stairs.

“You’re sure?”

She turned to him and was sad to see the hope fading from his eyes. “We’ll look somewhere else,” she said. “We need to go to someone who will listen.”

“Who?”

Trix glanced back at the familiar building one more time, glad that the rain would camouflage her tears.

“In the car,” she said. “We need to leave here. I’ll explain then.”