Nothing is as it should be; everything is upside down. That is what Rebecca Wright thought. For months now, Rebecca had felt what she could only describe as a certain subtle wrongness—not within herself, but in the world. She found it impossible to place its source, for the fault in the nature of things seemed to reside both everywhere and nowhere. Countless things just felt a little off to her. Sometimes she would fork a thick eggy chunk of French toast into her mouth during a Sunday brunch to find that a faint taste of soap lay beneath the flavor of maple syrup; sometimes when she kissed her husband his breath smelled of loam, as if he'd been surreptitiously snacking on top-grade soil. Sometimes the setting sun seemed to her to be hanging in a slightly incorrect place in the sky, to be a slightly inaccurate shade of red. And take the President, for example. Sometimes, when Rebecca would see him on television, giving a speech on the pleasures of austerity or making a cameo appearance in the reality show that detailed the lives of his two teenage sons, she'd think: Something's a little wrong. He seems like the wrong person. Not because he didn't deserve to run the country, or because he was some sort of impostor, but because when he stood behind a podium with the golden presidential seal framing his head like a halo, he seemed to be the wrong person in the wrong place, a misunderstood character in a misremembered history. When Rebecca had finally confessed her weird, persistent unease to her husband a week ago, it had done little good. Philip Steiner was not a man who readily comprehended the irrationalities of humans— they puzzled him to distraction on those rare occasions when they manifested in his own behavior, and when he observed them in others he usually figured they could be exorcised easily enough with judiciously chosen language. “You’re not making any sense to me,” he said to Rebecca when she woke up just after he’d come home from the lab at six a.m., after she’d told him she just felt like something was, well, wrong, with everything.
“Just listen,” Rebecca said as she sat up in bed, the old, oversized Stratton University T-shirt that served as her sleeping wear hanging loosely off one shoulder. “It’s like—you know, that feeling you have when you walk into a room intending to do something, except when you get there you forget what it is you came in there to do. I feel like that all the time now. I just woke up from a dream where I had that feeling. But that’s all I can remember about it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Philip said, removing his left shoe by pushing at its heel with his other foot, then doing the reverse. “I don’t ever have that feeling.”
“Or like when you put your keys down when you come in the house, and fifteen minutes later you reach for them where you thought you put them and they’re not there. Then you spend two hours turning the whole place upside down, even though you don’t have anywhere to go right then, because until you find them you’ll feel like there’s a fishhook stuck in your brain. Tugging.”
“I’ve never felt like that, either,” Philip said. “My keycards move from the nightstand to the right front pocket of my slacks when I leave for work. They only leave my pocket when I need to open doors. When I’m done they go back to my pocket. At the end of the day they return to the nightstand.” He tossed the little bundle of rubber-banded RFID cards there, by example. “It never fails.”
“Oh Philip you’re worthless.” Rebecca slipped beneath the bedcovers and yanked them up to her chin.