Get your family out of there, Noah. Please. The city isn't safe anymore. None of them are. If you'd been watching the news, you'd know this by now. Please, honey. Please. For me. For your mother. You need to leave New York before it's too late, before your family gets hurt..
Mom left another message.
Noah didn't even hear his phone ring this time. Her voicemails are digital mosquitoes buzzing about his ear at all hours of the day-and night-hungry for blood.
This one landed at eleven. Shouldn't she be in bed by now? Fast asleep?
Paul Tammany must've just gotten off the air.
"Everything okay?" Alicia props herself up on one elbow in their bed, sensing tension.
Noah nods, still listening to his mother.
"Is it her?"
“Yeah.” The frequency of Mom’s calls has really ramped up since Thanksgiving. Something’s in the air. Or maybe it’s the fluoride in the water. Or the cell towers, all that 5G microwaving her brain.
I just watched another news story and they said there have been more protests—these riots and I, Oh God, Noah, I’m so worried for you...so worried about my grandbaby...
When Noah was just a boy, growing up in Virginia, his mom would take him to the library. She’d let him check out two books. Any two. His choice. Their deal was simple: One for you and one for me. Mom would read one book to Noah at bedtime while he had to read the other on his own. He’d pick a picture book to tackle—the easy reads, Sendak or Silverstein—while for his mother, he’d tug the doorstoppers off the shelf. The cinder-block books. Tolkien. Dickens. King. He can still remember the sound of her voice, a soft southern lilt gamely taking on the personas of every last character, her words filling his bedroom, his mind, his dreams.
Noah can still hear her voice now.
When I think of you up there in that god-awful city, with all those awful people around, I—I don’t know. I wish you’d come home to us. You can’t be safe up there. Kelsey can’t be safe...
He doesn’t recognize her at all.
It’s not Mom. It can’t be.
Technically, yes, that’s her voice. But...the words. They don’t sound like her thoughts at all. These are someone else’s words in her mouth. Her mind.
It’s getting worse. She’s getting worse.
“Is it bad?” Alicia’s voice is calm. Fair and balanced. Working as an admin at a nonprofit will do that—her uncanny knack for putting out fires with nothing but the serenity in her tone.
“Pretty bad.”
“How bad?”
They’re talking about a reckoning, son...
Noah stares at the ceiling, phone pressed to his ear, his mind’s eye filled with his mother’s distorted visions of a city on fire, of protests right outside their window, complete chaos.
I know you don’t believe me and I know you think I’m overreacting, but I—I just wish you would wake up, honey, before it’s too late. I wish, I wish you would open your eyes.
“Can I hear?” Alicia slides in closer. There’s that curiosity of hers. That mettle. Probably the first thing Noah remembers about meeting Alicia was how she was the one to approach him at that Antibalas show in Williamsburg—what? Thirteen years ago now?—in the back room at Black Betty. She kick-started the conversation, buying the next round.