Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

get a handle on the time and why Amy would be here, but I could only manage one thought 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 if 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, and whether I should be concerned.

I watched through the peephole 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 rock 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 down at the parking lot through the window near the couches.

“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 through with it. I mean, after all this, it just seems like…”

“Another life.”

“Right. How do I go back to business as usual, 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.”

“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 are you going to do today?” she asked.

“Was thinking about getting some 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 love 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, computers, and some inexpensive 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, pointed inside, 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 forgot to specify which 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, “All right,” and set the plastic bottle down in the sink, I could hear it running down the drain.

“We’ll get some coffee downstairs,” 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 when 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 clothes and stuff.”

“Okay”, she said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

“Don’t drink the tea they brought, it’s unpleasant,” I said as I pushed the door open and went through it.

Amy and I went down, drew ourselves each a cup of coffee from the food area, and got in my car. She told me where the nearest Costco was, about 20 minutes away. 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?” I asked her.

“Some,” she said, “no worse than after the day in Lorton or after the siege 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 to, in the future, not 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.”

“All right.”

“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.

“Okay,” 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 what 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. 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 bad guys 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 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.

“All right 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 die and regenerate 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 preconfigured 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 high above the door seemed to cook the top layer of my skin as we stepped into the giant warehouse. Soon we stood surrounded by flat-screen HDTVs. Delicious, reasonably priced televisions. Suddenly I could feel the debit card attached to hundreds of thousands of dollars burning a hole through my wallet, pocket, and skin.

“Come on,” Amy said, “I need something for this headache, the pharmacy is 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 knew 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 the shelves 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 were 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 front entrances have two sets of heavy steel gates and the back entrance and loading dock seal from the