This Is Not Really Happening

Heather stood before me with open arms. Her freckles had faded slightly over the decades, there was some gray nestled within her dashing red locks––I too, had gray overtaking my dirty blonde hair, but her green eyes…it was her, a grown up Heather! It had been decades since I last saw her, since that night, in fact.

“Oh my God, there you are!” I cried out as we hugged. After my grandparents whisked me away to Plano in the aftermath, I desperately tried to get in contact with Heather and the other girls. But the parents wouldn’t let me speak with any of them. When I stole my grandparents’ Buick, I drove all the way back to New Orleans and climbed up to Heather’s window, but she was gone. Her parents placed her in boarding school. After that, I drove out West and drank and drugged myself into oblivion, sleeping with men way too old for me. Thirty years, it had been thirty years, and here she was!

“You look heavenly, Heather,” I said. And it wasn’t just flattery. She looked fantastic.

“And you look even more ravishing in person than on TV, Rhiannon! I recorded every time you were on PBS Newshour, CNN, or TikTok.”

Nobody, not even Dmitry, ever referred to me as “ravishing” since the Wontan Women days. I held her arms out to get a good look.

“I can’t believe it! So, you’re with The Passage?”

Heather gave me a sheepish grin, and then it hit me. Heather. I learned that the leader of The Passage was a woman named Heather. I never suspected it was my Heather!

“Wait.” I released my hands from hers. “Did…did you recruit my daughter?”

She shook her head. “No, Rhiannon, I didn’t recruit Madeline. I wasn’t even the counselor back when we were The Golden Horn, just another follower.”

That was true. It was the Golden Horn back then. But when Golden Horn Farms, a subsidiary of Archer Midland, issued a cease and desist order, the counselor left and it was rebranded The Passage with a new leader.

“Madeline found us,” Heather added. “But I knew the moment I saw her that she was your daughter, those captivating eyes. I suppose that’s divine order in action.”

“Well, this is incredible. I’m so glad I found the both of you and that you’re both okay!”

Heather grimaced. “Unfortunately, the Ecstatics killed and injured a lot of us.”

Madeline put a solacing arm around her. It was so bizarre seeing my daughter with Heather, two completely separate parts of my life together.

“Heather, why don’t you introduce my mom to some of our friends,” Madeline suggested.

Heather led me to a cafeteria table with a group of the devotees they referred to as “Passengers.” Each of them greeted me like I was a Rock star, which felt weird. We reached another table where more normal looking people sat.

Heather turned to me. “Doctor Wessinger, this is Doctors Orloff in Mathematics and Sam Berkenstein in Chemistry over at Princeton and Northwestern.”

I was initially taken by surprise with Heather using my formal title in introducing me, but she did so to convey how I was a fellow colleague.

“And this,” she continued, “is Doctors Howard Floyd and Nura Rajj both in particle physics at the University of Chicago.”

I wasn’t familiar with the others, but I remember meeting Dr. Floyd who stood up.

“I don’t know if you remember me, Doctor Wessinger,” Dr. Floyd said as we shook hands.

“Oh, I do. At the Ontological Symposium last year in Minneapolis.”

“That’s right!” he confirmed enthusiastically. “I appreciated your insights into how the Cartesian ERMs rely more on classical physics in their worldview. It was a very effective way to translate religious paradigms to us physics geeks.”

I blushed because I remember us talking afterwards for an hour and he asked if I wanted to get a drink. I had to decline because I wasn’t ready for such things yet.

“And I enjoyed your presentation on dark energy. It was very enlightening.” I didn’t intend to, but apparently I made a funny as Doctors Floyd and Rajj belted out in laughter.

After the introductions, I whispered to Heather, “I have to admit, I find it very unusual for scientists to be part of your…community.”

“My God, Ravishing, you make it sound like we’re a cult.”

“I don’t mean any offense, but how did you reel those people in?”

Heather led Madeline and I out of the cafeteria into the hallway. “The researchers aren’t members of The Passage, but we’re working together on a project.”

“A project?” My skepticism must have shown, because Heather smiled and wrapped her arm around mine as we walked down the hall, just like we did back in high school.

“Rhiannon, do you remember our last night together?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“I want you to think. Try to remember. I know it’s difficult. I pushed it out of my mind for decades.”

“Pushed what out?” I asked slightly bemused. Heather wasn’t making any sense.

She pressed on. “We were in the living room. Barbara handed us more tea to drink and said she wanted to show us something.”

I shrugged, claiming ignorance, but somewhere her words stirred something.

“She led us into the hallway.”

Whenever I dream, I dream I’m back in the house I grew up in. I come across a door that I always overlooked.

“And there at the end of it, there was that door. It was a door we never noticed before,” she said as if reading my thoughts.

I scoffed. “Heather, we were on drugs. The door that’s not supposed to be there?––that’s just something from my dreams. Maybe I told you about it or…”

Talking past me she said, “And then she opened it.”

I open it to find a part of the house I never knew was there before.

“There was a door that wasn’t supposed to be there, Rhiannon, and it led to an entirely different part of the house that none of us knew existed.”

No. It didn’t make sense. It was just the recurring dream. The room I never knew existed? A door I always overlooked? It was in that moment that it dawned on me that I recalled anything from that recurring dream.

Heather moved closer. “You spent the rest of your life pushing the impossible memory out, didn’t you? I know because I did. But it did happen. It was real.”

When I looked into Heather’s eyes, the dream came back, part of it. And it was as though I had been hiding it from myself.

“I…I thought it was all in my mind,” I stammered. “The three of us––you, me and Barbara. We walked into that room that shouldn’t have been there.”

Heather nodded.“Barbara waved us over to...something.”

“Yes!” I cried out. “And then…” but the resurgence of memory ended there.

“The next thing I remember was you and I back in the hallway being woken up by the cops,” she said. “The door was no longer there. Barbara vanished. ”

Things started to coalesce. The door to the room that came into existence and then disappeared again. It sounded like a glitch decades before the Glitch occurred. Heather put her steepled hands to her chin, the way she used to whenever we quizzed each other with flashcards before a World History or Bio test.

“I believe we tapped into something, Rhiannon, something to do with this entire simulation.”

She led us down the hall and we rounded a corner where a duo of armed Unitarians stood guard. Heather nodded to them and knocked on the door.

“It’s me. I’m coming in, okay?”

Heather slowly opened the door into a former classroom. It was dim inside, illuminated mostly by portable lamps. Huddled on a couch was a woman holding her legs together, rocking back and forth, her head buried into her thighs.

Heather approached cautiously. “Barbara, there’s someone here to see you.”

No, it couldn’t be. I crept up to the form, the frosted blonde hair, her skinny frame. “Mom?” I trembled. The woman stopped rocking and slowly lifted her head to look at me, her steel gray eyes, the shape of her convex nose, the same as my own. But…Oh my God. She…she didn’t age!