Entry Number Fifty

I didn't sleep that night.

It wasn't insomnia, and it wasn't bad dreams from seeing a disgustingly dead guy or finding myself in yet another situation where I have to wait around for a more-prepared version of myself to take the reins of my body. It was more of a crisis of identity, a thing I couldn't stop thinking about. I brought Amy back to the hotel where she got her dad's car and went home, then I came up to the room and tried to inhabit every inch of the bed but couldn't find sleep. The TV helped pass the time, but through all the commercial breaks I sank right back into my brain and kept re-thinking the same things.

I wished I had a computer. I thought I might head to the store and just buy a computer, like I'd done before. Something about that made me feel impressive. Like those people who can just go into a store and buy whatever they want and not even consider the prices. Too bad, I thought again, that such things come at the price of death and destruction. More to think about, less to sleep for.

Dawn came eventually, light began to slowly blot out the darkness and brought sounds of morning; birds chirping about whatever they have to be happy about. Reruns of shows long-canceled and advertisements for hair removal cream were replaced by morning news shows and morning talk shows. First we banter about recent news events, then we have a fun little game, then someone comes to talk ever-candidly about the movie they happen to be in that happens to come out on Friday, then somebody shows us how to bake a pie with half the carbs , then someone comes to drone on about a book they just wrote. Somewhere in there, a band plays and somebody in the audience wins a trip to someplace depressing like Boston or Seattle, places millions of people live day by day and don't consider it a vacation. Betwixt all these segments are three minutes of advertisements for cars, coffees, and travel websites.

I got tired of telling myself that if I slept now I'd probably sleep until 2PM, then 3, and so on. I got out of bed, opened the window the rest of the way, and took a shower in the bathroom connected to my room. A few times I nearly nodded off with hot water hammering my neck, but I held on to my lucidity. I felt like I needed a massage, if not from the car crash at least from all the stress. When we first got to the hotel I made a point to see if they had a spa and they didn't. Maybe when I'm out buying computers by the armful I can stop for a day in a spa. Drape salad toppings over my eyes while some Dominican rubs sea-salt cream or ground up snapping turtle shell all over my body. Pish, it's only money.

When I was through the bathroom and into my other outfit, I got my knife out of the plastic FBI evidence bag and dumped it in the sink and ran some hot water on it, then wiped it dry with a towel and clipped it in my pocket. I went into the kitchen and opened the front door to get the newspaper and found a plastic bin with the groceries we'd asked for yesterday. Trying not to make too much noise since my mom was probably still asleep, I brought the bin inside and started putting the food away. Crackers and granola bars in the cupboards, bottled waters and green tea in the fridge. I probably should have specified a brand of green tea when I wrote it down, since they got the cheapest and most notoriously-awful brand. When I put the three bottles in the fridge I thought about having one then, for the caffeine, but figured I'd get something better down in the lobby later.

The room phone rang, loud and annoying. A quick wave of concern pulsed through my mind, but I scrambled over the phone and answered it as casually as I could manage.

"They won't give me your room number," Amy said through the handset.
She must have been at the front desk. "Well, you could be a crazy person," I said. I tried to get a handle on what time it was and why Amy would be here, but I could only manage one thought process at a time.
"When has my being crazy ever gotten in the way of our visits?"
"You're going to scare the person at the desk," I said before telling her the room number and hanging up.

It could have been a trick, or she could have been making the call under duress. I could never seem to figure out whether I was the one who was in danger or I just kept stumbling into danger. My only source of information on this matter, the Federal Bureau of "Information" was being tediously glib on the subject. I'd have to call one of those boys sometime in the day and find out if they know who hired Scrooge McDuck to kill Comstock or why, and whether I should be concerned.

I watched through the peep-hole until Amy finally appeared, alone. I opened the door before she could knock.
"Good morning, sunshine," she said. She was wearing khaki-colored cargo pants and a striped button-up shirt. No bands I'd never heard of.
"Do you know what time it is?" I asked, still in the doorway.
"Do you?" she asked.
"No," I admitted, dropping my arm from the door and letting her through.

She took a few steps in and looked around at the kitchen area, the couches, the tv, and the open door to my room.

"It's seven," she said, "the time you used to have to get to school every day."
"Huh," I said, rubbing my head. "Yeah, I used to go to school."
"So did I," she said, looking out the window by the couches down at the parking lot.
"Not anymore?"
"I don't know," she started, then turned around. "I woke up, got dressed, got in the car, and drove towards the school, but I just couldn't give myself any real reasons to go. I mean, after all this, it just seems like..."
"Another life."
"Right. How do I go back to that, seeing what I've seen? FBI, hitmen, it's all way above high school level stuff. I don't know how you went back, after your dad and all that."
"You made it easier," I said, leaning now against the refrigerator. "I didn't stay very long, anyway."
She nodded. "So, it was either home or here."
"Home away from home," I said to myself.
"So, is there any sleuthing for us to do, perhaps?"
"Not today," I said, "I'm going to leave that to the professionals. Maybe this afternoon I'll call Rubino or Bremer and see if they know anything, but I don't really feel like sticking my neck out anymore."
"Then what were you going to do today?" she asked.
"Was thinking about getting some of the shopping done with the home insurance money. I need clothes, a computer, maybe some food for here. Do you want to go shopping?"
"Well, they tell me I'm a girl," she said, "so I guess that means I like to go shopping. Where were you going to go?"
"I don't know," I said, "if I had a computer I'd probably just buy it all online."
"Do you have a Costco membership?"
"I... do not."
"I do," she said. "It'd be a good place to start. They have food and some cheap clothes. They have furniture, if you want to start decorating your new house."
"I think the decorating will be my mom's job, but we could go there."

"Do you have anything to drink?" Amy asked. I pulled the fridge door open and went back in my room to get my wallet, phone, and keys.
From the kitchen I heard Amy cough and say something to the tune of, "Eugh!"
I came back out and saw she was holding one of the bottles of green tea. "This stuff is nasty," she said.
"I know, I didn't tell them what brand to get," I said. "Did you shake it? I think you're supposed to shake it."
"I shook it," she said before taking another sip and wincing. "It's bitter," she said after forcing it down. She held the bottle out and said, "You try it."
"Well, with such a ringing endorsement..." I said, not moving.
She said, "Alright," and set the plastic bottle down in the sink, I could hear it running down the drain. "We going?" she asked.
"We going," I said, opening the front door and letting Amy through.

I held the door open for a second to make sure I had a card key, and the door to the other bedroom in the suite opened and my mom came out in a bathrobe.
"Hey," she said, "are you going to school?"
Amy was in the hallway, so my mom didn't see her. "No," I said, "I was going to go get myself some clothes and stuff."
"Ok, she said, sitting down at the kitchen table.
"Don't drink the tea they brought, it's nasty," I said as I pushed the door open and went through it.

Amy and I went down and got in my car, and she told me where the nearest Costco was. It was about 20 minutes away, so I opened and closed my eyes a few times to make sure I was awake enough to drive.

Once on the road, Amy asked, "Did you not sleep or something?"
"Why?" I asked.
"You look like you didn't sleep."
"Did you sleep?"
"Some," she said, "no worse than after the day in Lorton or after the siege whatever on your house."
"I didn't sleep," I said.
"Why? Afraid of--"
"No," I cut in. "Just, thinking."
"Thinking?"
"Thinking."
"About what?" she asked.
"It's complicated.
"Everything's complicated with you."

I sighed, realizing this conversation wasn't going to go away, and resolving not to bring up with a female something I don't want to talk about.

"It's just, when someone talks about their body, or their arm, it's 'my body' and 'my arm'."
"Right..." she said.
"And when they talk about their mind, it's 'my mind.' Like, your body and your mind are both something you own. But if you aren't your mind or your body, what are you?"
"You... what?"
"What makes you you, what makes me me? If your mind and body are just possessions of yours, what exactly is the 'you' in that scenario? There's that thing, 'I think, therefore I am,' like there's no real way to know that you even have a body because the only way we experience it is through our senses -- through our mind, and our senses can be tricked, so the only thing we can know for sure is that we're at least thinking. So, the only guarantee is that you have a mind."
"Alright."
"So if the you in 'you' is your mind, how can it be your mind if your mind is you?"
She thought for a minute. "I don't know. Your mind exists on a conceptual plane and your body exists in the physical plane. Maybe the only way to bind together something from both planes is with an abstract concept like the self."

I drove in silence for a while.

"Ok," Amy said, "maybe we are nothing but our minds. Maybe our bodies are just manifestations to serve the purpose of the mind, since our minds would be useless if they couldn't move around and interact with objects. Like, if the purpose of a knife is to cut things, then the physical knife is just a manifestation to allow for the knife's purpose."
After exactly five seconds I said, "I don't think I'm high enough for that to make sense."
Amy laughed her little laugh, then said, "So what's the point of all this? Are you considering a career in philosophy?"
"No," I said. "I'm just... I don't know. Most people are content with that they are because their minds and their bodies are all they have and they're both the products of chance and effort. But me, if I'm to believe Schumer, my body is the product of some genetic screw-turning and half of my mind was given to me like people get organ transplants. If I'm nothing more than my mind and my body, there's very little here that's me. The only thing I have that I made myself is the me that I am now, when there aren't any guns or badguys around. The body, not mine, and the part of my mind that keeps me from dying a few times a week, isn't mine."
"But Schumer also said that you can have all the hypnosis-garbage removed if you want, so it'd be all you up there."
"The problem is, though, that I like it. I like being able to do the things I can do. I like being able to protect myself, and you. I like the answers to all my questions popping into mind before I even ask them. I just don't know if I like it enough to always be wondering what's me and what's the other guy."
"Ok, I can imagine losing sleep over that."
"I'm glad," I said.
"Alright look, there's that other saying. That a man is nothing more than the sum of his actions. It's not your body or your gray matter that makes you Chris Baker, it's the things you do. Your cells are dying and regenerating a million times a day. You're not even the same physical person you were a few months ago, and your mind changes just as often. The only thing that makes you you is that through it all, you do what you do. If I told you to draw a picture of yourself you'd probably draw yourself in that shirt and those pants, but those are just as peripheral as your hair and your body. The you is what you want it to be, whether it's a high school kid with a dead dad or the pre-configured Marine running around inside your skull."
"You just put that together yourself?" I asked after a bit.
"Yes, but now I have a headache."

At Costco, Amy flashed her membership card to get us through the door. A quick gust of heat from an industrial heater mounted right above the door seemed to cook the top layer of my skin as we stepped into the giant warehouse. We were then standing surrounded by flat-screen HDTVs , delicious, reasonably-priced televisions. Suddenly I could feel the debit card attached to hundreds of thousands of dollars in insurance money burning a hole through my wallet.

"Come on," Amy said, "I need something for this headache, the pharmacy and stuff are over here."
"I thought you were joking about that," I said.
"The real joke is that we'll probably have to get a bottle of 400 pills when I only need one."

I followed her past the TVs, around a corner with a few laptop computers set up on display and told myself I'd be coming back here. As we approached the white, boxy pharmacy inside the store Amy stopped in an aisle covered in over-the-counter meds . While she looked through those for something for a headache, I looked around at the store, the shelves, the door, and the stuff they carried.

"You know something?" I said, still looking around.
"What?" Amy asked, looking at a box of some kind of medication.
"If there was ever a full-scale zombie outbreak, this would be the perfect place to come."
She set the pills down. "Zombie outbreak?"
"Yes. Zombie outbreak. Like, zombies everywhere so you'd have to hole up someplace safe."
"And you'd go to Costco?" she said, looking at another brand.
"Yes. Just look at it. Tall, brick walls. No windows, the only entrances are at the front, and there's two separate sets of locking steel shutters with a vestibule between the two. The store is laid out so you can see each corner wherever you're standing, whereas most stores are set up in sections so you can't see very far, so there'd be a lot of blind corners and places for a zombie to pop out. There's a ton of food here, a whole meat section in the back, bottled water, clothes, plenty of tools for makeshift weapons, they even have grills and stuff here. And generators. And there's a gas station out front. You could live in here for a year or more, I bet."

Amy turned around and looked with me. Her face seemed to show some of the pain from her head ache, and she rubbed the base of her neck with one hand.

"But there's no guns or ammo here," she said. "A Wal-Mart or something like that would have all this plus guns and ammo."
"Yeah, but they all have windows, and glass doors. Plus, like I said, the different departments are walled off and there's a whole warehouse in the back of those. It would be impossible to lock the place down, and it would take forever to clear the place out of any residual zombies."
"Residual zombies."
"Yeah, zombies already in the store," I said.
"But here...?"
"Since everything is so sparse, and you can see through all the shelves, there's very few places where you'd have to make a blind turn or anything."
"But how would you clear out the residual zombies if there's no guns here?"
"You'd need to start off with some guns first, to get here. That's the only downside, really."
"Uh huh."
"Oh, and look at those shelves where the food and stuff are. They go all the way to the ceiling, practically, and the top few levels are just storage. You could clear out the stuff off of those and use the top shelves for sleeping, and use ladders to get up there. If zombies did ever get in, they couldn't get you up there since they can't use ladders; so you could use the shelves as a fall-out spot."
"Zombies can't use ladders?"
"No, they don't have the coordination."
"I see," she said, going back to the painkillers.

After a few minutes of complaining about the headache, she grabbed a package of Excedrin and said, "Hrrr."
"What?" I asked, turning back to her.
She made the sound again, dropped the package onto the floor, and brought her hands up to her jaw. She said a few more garbled words without opening her mouth, then her eyes went wide and she started breathing faster. Her arms went stiff and she shot backwards a step and backed into the shelf. She kept breathing quickly, her eyes darting around, her arms at odd angles and her fingers half-taut.

It was a decent imitation of a zombie.

I half-laughed and said, "What are you doing?"
She didn't laugh. She kept trying to talk but her jaw wasn't moving. He breathing quickened more and she started to whimper. Tears began to flow from her wide eyes. I repeated the question, but she fell to the floor before I could finish.

I caught her as her legs gave out and she slid against the shelf, dragging allergy pills and decongestants down with her. Her arms and legs were flailing in quick bursts now, her chest heaving with each breath. Her eyes begged for something.

"Hey, is she alright?" came a voice from somewhere around me.
"I don't know!" I yelled.

I shook Amy slightly, called her name. She just looked at me, and kept twitching.

"I'll call an ambulance," said the same voice.
"Ok," I said, "I think she's having a seizure."