Chapter 76: Chapter 21: Meet-cute

> “The box was left behind when Gracie was forced to sell his estate. A pity that he forgot how to unlock it, as it would have perhaps saved him from financial ruin. I sent the children off and hoped for the best.”

“What the fuck are you doing here, Duncan?” I said without thinking as I stared at my ex-boyfriend. His hair was a far cry from its purposeful messiness, he had about two weeks worth of stubble on his face, and I couldn’t tell if the yellow t-shirt he was wearing was like that when he bought it or whether he just hadn’t taken it off yet this month.

“Jen,” he said, as if he was a middle schooler caught looking at an old Hustler by his mom. “Umm, hi.”

“Hi to you too. Now, I’ll ask again, what the fuck are you doing here? This isn’t Sun Valley or TC Disrupt or that random meetup in Hell’s Kitchen you dragged me to our on our third date. So I have to imagine that you are here because you are following me.”

Duncan stared at me as I felt a wave of anger wash over me that somehow paled in comparison to the one that had manifested 20 minutes ago. Because for all the shit that the Guild had put me through, this was the man who had cheated on me, proposed to me, and likely had gotten me fired from my job. The shock of me catching him off guard finally wore off and suddenly his entire demeanor changed, as he went on the offensive.

“What did you do to me?” he asked.

“What are you talking about?” I replied. I knew damn well what I did to him, having erased the same five minutes of our last dinner together so I could get him to admit that he was cheating on me.

“I think I figured it out for myself, but I want to hear it from you.”

“Hear what?” I said. “How mad I am that you got me fired? I don’t have a lot of time before I head back to New York, but I promise I’ll listen to whatever you bullshit have to say, as long as it takes less than 30 seconds.”

“Sure you will, right before you wipe my memory again.”

“Wh-what are you talking about?”

“I’ve been busy the last few months, but I finally caught on to you.”

Duncan fished something out of the pair of ratty jeans he was wearing and shoved it in my face. I instinctively shut my eyes, but when I opened them again, all that greeted me was Duncan’s phone.

With the Quest Board open on it.

“What is that, another video game company you invested in because RPGLab turned out to be a bust?”

“It’s not a bust, but no.”

Duncan pulled the phone back, before tapping on it a few times and showing it to me again.

My eyes went wide as I looked at the profile screen of UnDunc, who I assumed was Duncan. He was at level 31, which seemed impossible.

“Looks familiar, doesn’t it?” he said. “You were always a terrible liar, Jen, so just stop the act and maybe we can have a real conversation for once.”

“What if I say yes? And that I know exactly what that is? Then what?”

“Then what? Then you can start by telling me what you did to me during that dinner. Was it cadmonium? That’s what I thought at first, but it turns out that it only makes the person experience time so fast that it seems like no time has passed at all. Or how about hyphrosia? That was somewhat promising, but after some experimentation on one of my Cathay Lounge girls, the only thing it does is make the subject fall asleep immediately and wake up a minute later. Maybe it was pure Wood’s metal. But that’s been hard to find since the 50s. And then finally, it hit me: a bathtub gin version of letherium.”

I tried my best not to let my jaw figuratively drop down past my knees. How did he know about any of this from finding an invite to the Quest Board and spending the last three months grinding non-stop? Even I hadn’t heard of any of the prima materia he rattled off like they were old hand.

“I’ll tell you what I did,” I said, after several awkward moments of silence. “But not here. Not out in the open.”

“No, we’re doing this here and now. Because if we don’t, then I might not remember that I found you.”

“What do you mean?”

Duncan put his phone away and then slowly walked over to one of the benches abutting the hotel entrance. He hardly looked like the confident, suave, and ruggedly handsome guy who had strolled into my office one random afternoon what felt like so many years ago. Instead, he looked like Kate had the night of the encounter I had just relived. Was all this because of me?

I joined him on the bench, and he retrieved a small spiral notebook with a pen lodged through the metal loops from his pants pocket. He flipped through the worn pages quickly until he reached a blank one toward the end and began scribbling furiously for several minutes. Satisfied, he stowed the notebook and turned to face me.

“That one I started yesterday and thankfully, no episodes so far. It took me a few weeks to realize what was happening. I would be out having drinks with some of our founders, when suddenly things would skip forward a few seconds. Almost as if someone had hit fast forward in my brain. Or I’d blink and be back in my apartment, brushing my teeth. At first I thought I was just drinking too much. God knows how much alcohol I’ve consumed in the service of my job. But then it started occurring at all hours of the day. Lost minutes here, lost minutes there. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and told Jeff I needed some time off, that I was creeping toward burnout. He gave me a few weeks, and I flew back to New York at the end of March.”

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“Why didn’t you reach out to me then?” I asked.

“I didn’t think it had anything to do with you. It wasn’t until I got an email from Jeff a few days after I landed I heard you had gotten fired and that’s when I finally remembered how weird our dinner had been.”

“Yeah, and thanks again for that.”

“That wasn’t my doing, Jen. But I know you had something to do with this,” he said, gesturing to his head.

“Yes, you keep saying that. But all I see is a man who cracked under the pressure of his job, who invented a fantasy about a real-life video game after spending too much time flirting with every female engineer he came across.”

“You know what, Jen? Fuck you. You think you’re so sweet and innocent, but I know the truth, that deep down, you-”

Duncan’s jaw suddenly went slack and his eyes stared off into space, just like at dinner that night. I waved my hand in front of his face cautiously, waiting for him to come to, a pit forming in my stomach. Finally, after another 30 seconds, the look of recognition reappeared in his visage, and he nearly fell backward off the bench.

“Jen, I, umm. One second.”

He pulled out the notebook again and perused his notes from just a little while ago, and when he looked up at me again, his demeanor was noticeably calmer.

“How much did I lose this time?” he asked.

I paused for a moment to consider how to respond. Could I take advantage of the flaw in Duncan’s notebook “system” and make him think that we had spent hours together and hashed out our differences? Or was this just a test, and in reality he had written the timestamp at the end of every entry and knew exactly how long he had been “out.”

“What’s the last thing you actually remember?” I said.

“I was on the train, one car away from you, earlier this morning. I hadn’t initially planned on following you down to DC. It was too big a risk, straying that far from home. But I chickened out before your trip to Boston and concluded that if I didn’t go after you now, you might never come back.”

“I see. So you’ve lost almost the entire day. I can’t imagine how that must feel.”

“No, you can’t,” said Duncan. “But you can help me.”

“How so?”

“You can cut the act, admit what you did, and help me find a cure.”

I looked at the man Duncan had become, with his memory notebooks and his memory blackouts, and I felt pity for him and guilt for what I had unintentionally done. But I didn’t have the time or the mental space or the knowledge to help him. And I suspect Beatrice didn’t either, if I could ever find her. She had been using the serum on her husband and her kid for who knows how long and had never mentioned anything like what Duncan was now experiencing. Something else had to be going on and I was determined to figure out what.

“I admit it,” I said. “At our last dinner. I did something to your memory.”

Duncan’s eyes widened at my admission, and he quickly began writing down what I was saying in his notebook, convinced that any moment he would lose this knowledge forever.

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to. Because I thought you were cheating on me and I was right. Because I needed to know if our entire relationship had been a lie or only part of it. Because I deserved to know the truth.”

I finished and let Duncan finish his live transcription, secretly hoping that this memory would give out and I could swipe the page he just wrote. But after a few more seconds, he stowed his notebook away, and I silently cursed my bad luck.

“I hope it was worth it,” he said. “I hope it was worth destroying my life to find out that your long-distance boyfriend was sleeping around. Of course I was! I thought it was pretty obvious.”

“Then why the hell did you ask me to move to Hong Kong? To mess with my head? To laugh when I said yes and then you could say you were only joking? And then your whole storming out of the hotel room after I got mad that you were giving me an ultimatum?”

“You want the truth?” he said, the temperature in his voice rising.

“I think I’m entitled to it. If you want my help.”

“Fine,” said Duncan. “But you’re not going to like it. And if I tell you, you still have to help me. Deal?”

“I don’t like a lot about you, so how much worse could it be?”

“That depends. Do you care I tried to get you to break up with me so that I could get equity in RPGLab?”

“Excuse me?”

“If I ended the relationship, Jeff wouldn’t have staked me. He didn’t want me dumping you right away, and you getting pissed at me and the fund and somehow sabotaging the investment.”

“What???”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was he really that maniacal that he had resorted to all these mind games just to get me to end things?

“So I took extra weeks in Hong Kong, I missed our daily calls on purpose, I-”

“You thought I needed help getting dressed to go to a party.”

Duncan’s head jerked up in surprise and I realized too late that I should have kept that secret to myself.

“What … how … how did you know that?”

I pursed my lips and paused for a few moments, as if I was about to read his thoughts again like I had at his boss’s party so many moons ago.

“Whatever you think you’ve learned about alchemy, yes that’s what it’s called if you didn’t know, I know more. Much more. But I’m sorry, I interrupted your little confession. Please continue.”

“I will. But afterward you’ll tell me how you did it.”

“We’ll see how I feel about you then.”

And if you still remember this conversation, I said to myself.

“None of those things worked,” he continued. “You seemed perfectly content with our arrangement, but after Jeff’s party, I took some extra time away to work out an even better plan.”

“The proposal,” I said, the solution to the puzzle of Duncan’s behavior last winter suddenly becoming apparent.

“Yep. I thought it was the perfect out. I knew there was no way you were going to say yes. But what woman could be mad at their boyfriend for wanting to marry her? So once you had some time to think things over, I figured it was as good as over. Little did I know who I was dealing with! I doubled down during New Year’s and thankfully your loner instinct kicked in hard, so I was able to make you look like the bad guy. And then everything was all set for our rendezvous in Paris. But you fucked that up, too. Did that have anything to do with what’s going on now with Lisa and Stacy? Or did you do that afterward?”

“What are you talking about?”

Duncan shook his head, but I remembered what the woman at the Night Market had said all too well. I just hadn’t wanted to believe it the other day.

“Unbelievable. You don’t even care, do you? They were your friends! And you made them forget you completely for whatever reason.”

“I … I didn’t mean for it to happen,” I stammered. “It was an accident. It was only supposed to erase what they remembered me doing to them at the Met.”

“Oh, only that? Well, why didn’t you say so? That makes it all better! You think I have it bad, but do you want to know what is happening to them?”

“I know what is happening.”

“OK good. So what are you going to do about it?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You knew this whole time and yet you’re gallivanting up and down the East Coast doing nothing?”

“I found out literally three days ago! It’s not like I’ve been calling them on the phone every night to shoot the shit. They. Don’t. Know. Who. I. Am. I thought it was just best if I left them alone, for now. I’m trying to-”

“You’re trying to what, save your own head while we all lose ours? That’s fucking great, Jen. I wish you good luck in your Ques-”

As Duncan’s mind hit reset again, I again contemplated stealing his notebook and redoing this entire conversation over in a less confrontational manner. Or just fleeing and hoping he wouldn’t find me again. But running away from him and Lisa and Stacy had only brought their problems right to my doorstep, when they were the last things I needed. If I couldn’t shake him, then I could at least use him to my advantage.

It took almost five minutes before Duncan came to again and when he did, it was with the same startled reaction as before.

“How much did I lose this time?” he asked.

“Oh, only about 10 seconds,” I said, with a smile. “Don’t worry, you got it all down in your notebook.”