“What do you mean by fill the gap?” I said. “Fill it with what?”
“Start typing. You’ll see.”
“How long?”
“Depends. A couple hours your first time. Maybe more.”
“Any advice?”
“Nope. Just get in there, get it done. You’ll know when you did it.” He patted my shoulder, then left me alone.
The typewriter didn’t look ancient, but it didn’t look new either. It was boxy, plastic, and grey, from the seventies or eighties, I guessed. I’d never used one quite like it before. But in very little time, I had the basics down and was pounding away like the pro I used to be. I planned to leave after two hours of work, whether something happened or not. I couldn’t be gone too long. I’d told Lou and my sister that I wanted to go on a hike alone to clear my mind. I felt bad for lying, but I didn’t completely trust Lou—I didn’t completely trust anyone after Hugo’s betrayal—and I hadn’t been able to talk with my sister alone yet.
The first two pages of the user agreement actually held my attention somewhat. For example, I learned Apple had the right to track location through iTunes. But after transcribing five pages, my mind wandered. What was supposed to happen? Was my rekulak going to materialize in the real world? Was I a snake charmer and this typewriter my flute? By page seven, I was in the flow, on a mission to get this over with as soon as possible. Then, on the tenth page, it happened. I smelled menthol and strawberries. And when I stopped typing, writhing worms of blue mold swirled over the ink freshly stamped on the page. Then they disappeared, leaving behind new words, words I had never typed.
With my mouth hanging open, I pulled the page out and read a formal letter to a health insurance company asking for something called an out-of-network exemption to be applied to a kidney surgery performed three hundred miles from the nearest in-network provider. My name was at the bottom of the page.
Lonnie was in his lazy boy, smoking, watching cable news when I came into the living room.
“I think I did it,” I said.
He spun around in his chair and threw up his hands. “Hey, that was fast.” His eyes were glassy, and the wrinkles around them told me he was smiling under his blue mustache. He stood, swayed a little, then walked a crooked line toward me. “Let’s see.”
I handed him the letter. “It was covered in the blue stuff, then the words changed.”
“Scrill,” he said, looking over the letter. “Looks like you did it. You got a genuine homunculus diary here. Not bad, kid.”
“What’s a homunculus diary? It looks like some letter to an insurance company to me.”
He shook his head. “We live in the fourth stomach of Arawok. He only has seven stomachs, but he has an infinite number of bodies, which means we have an infinite number of bodies. When you take away your choices from a rekulak, you put a hole in its identity, and it fills it with whatever comes easiest. Kind of how our eyes work when things move too fast. In this case, your rekulak pulled in something from a version of you that apparently has kidney troubles, a version of you that was typing in the same place at the same time in a stomach with a timeline somewhat like ours, or close enough.” He slapped me on the back. “Got it?”
I was struggling with what question to ask first when my phone rang. May was on the other end. Her voice was frantic, on the verge of cracking: “I can’t find Em, Charlie. I lost her. I lost her.”
Chapter 12
IDROVE MUCH FASTER on the way back to the coast, roaring up hills and out of turns, throttling the steering wheel, clenching my jaw, and trying not to spin out on worst-case scenarios. In just over thirty minutes, I arrived in Arcata, a small college town a few miles south of McKinleyville. The sky was dark by then, and the street lights were on. May had been grocery shopping here to avoid being seen by the Friends of Blanche at her usual store. I found her walking on a sidewalk near the downtown plaza with Lou. I honked, parked, ran to them, and hugged my sister. Her face was red.
“I hope the hike went well,” Lou said.
I couldn’t tell if he was being facetious, so I ignored him and turned to my sister. “What happened?”
“We were in the store,” May said. “I told her to get some apples and she didn’t come back. We’d been fighting. I thought maybe she went back to the truck but she wasn’t there.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Can’t risk it,” Lou said. “These Friends are definitely in the police.”
“Who cares?” I said, losing my temper. “This might have nothing to do with them. Some man could have taken her. Some human man. Even if it was one of the Friends, we still need to know.” I turned to May. “Call the cops right now. I’m going to the store. Maybe she went back.”
I strode up the hill in the direction my sister pointed. I was so afraid for Em the world seemed to lose dimension, like everything was flat, expanding,
