Arthur/Penny: That's settling in TOO much!

Jessica eventually made it to Montreal, just a few days late. After spending a couple nights on my couch, she was looking forward to spending a few more days on Louisa's bed.

I was kind of surprised to hear Louisa talking about going to Montreal, but soon after I last saw her, the folks she was working for as a researcher had to make some tough decisions about how to allocate their visa sponsorships, and "Marie" was the odd one out. She did a good enough job that Parker's boss put in a good word for her with some people in Vancouver, but she didn't like it there. She put in a call to Jean-Michel, found out that André Trudeau had a new girl half his age and wasn't particularly concerned about Marie Desjardins any more. The coast being clear, she moved back to Montreal, and with recommendations from both Hollywood and Vancouver, was soon doing similar work there.

I imagine Jess and Louisa were happy to see each other; they became close on their road trip - I don't think Jessica would be nearly as open as she is now without Louisa. Jess was heading up north to do tourist stuff, so I was a little surprised when I saw her name pop up on my IM friends list, especially she immediately sent me a message: "Talk to Ashlyn. Now."

I texted back, saying I wasn't ready, and she said she didn't care. She sent me a couple of links to stories in the local papers, and said that being in a newspaper office myself, I could probably find more, and Lyn needed to know. As soon as I saw the first story, I knew she was right.

Jean-Michel Therriot is set to be tried for murder in late September.

Jean-Michel Therriot, for those who haven't been following the blog since the beginning, used to be Ashlyn Shelley, before she and Elizabeth Lee took a trip to the Trading Post Inn and... Well, it's all in the archives. We always knew he was involved in some shady things up up there - that's why the original Jean-Michel Therriot and Marie Desjardins were so hard to find, they opted to keep a very low profile lest some of their old lives came back to find them. Lyn used to keep in closer touch with him, but he's wrapped up in a lot of bad stuff - local mob boss André Trudeau on the one hand, Pygmalion on the other. Even if Lyn hadn't severed her ties with Pygmalion as much as we'd thought, she was staying away from that more.

I admit, I was still mad enough at Lyn that I didn't just drop everything and go tell her, although I told myself that the weekend baseball preview wasn't going to write itself. I finished that and called her. She said she had to work all night, a little frosty, and I said fine. Then immediately felt like crap and went to Headlights.

I've been there before in his body, and I'd like to say that I found places like it tacky even when I was a man, but, yeah, it's an experience walking into that pool of testosterone alone as a woman. The stripper-looking girl who greeted me at the door asked if I was meeting someone and I said sort of, I need to talk to one of the employees, Ashlyn. She said there were two, I said the redhead, and she pointed me at the bar.

Lyn was tending bar that night, and looked a little surprised when she saw me. She asked what I wanted, in an angry way, and I told her scotch, neat, and get one for herself, because she was going to need it. She said that me coming to her place of business to bitch at her was crossing the line, and I laid the printouts of the stories on the bar for her to look at.

She poured the drinks, and downed them both.

Then she surprised the hell out of me. She asked one of the other girls to cover for her and walked into the back. I ordered a beer from the new girl, and had just about finished it when she came out wearing street clothes. I said it was probably a good idea to take the night off, and she sort of grunted, saying she'd quit.

I knew why, but I still made sure I found a place that served fancy coffees and got her the most expensive one on the menu. She didn't say much as she drank it, just pored over the news stories. I got English translations where I could, but a lot were in French. The thrust of the matter was still the same, though - noted Trudeau family associate Jean-Michel Therriot had been careless taking out a bookie who was withholding the organization's cut earlier this year, and there'd been a witness. There was speculation that the prosecution was going to try to turn him, but so far, he'd refused to speak with anyone but his attorney, a noted mob lawyer. Everyone was very confident of a conviction.

Lyn read them all, and then just started crying. "I don't know why this upsets me so much... I mean, things are going so well with me and my boyfriend, Jean-Michel is no more Ashlyn Shelley these days than I am Jake Mathews, right? It's got nothing to do with me."

Some folks were starting to look our way, but I gave them a look that said to buzz off. "But it is all about me, isn't it? It's all about how I just slipped right into the life Ashlyn would have led if she hadn't gone to that Inn, just like she became a gangster. I mean, fuck, some nights, when someone would give me a ridiculous tip or a basketball player came in, I'd think this is better than being me, that my whole life as Jake existed just to get me to that Inn so that I could have this one. How stupid is that? I thought I was doing real well, taking a bartending course so that I could get some hours there. But if this is what Jean-Michel gets brought down to... Where's my bottom? Stripping? Hooking? Porn? Marrying Matt because I've got nothing else? Or just following some trail that some god-damn ghost has quietly laid in front of me?"

Eventually, we went back to my place - she didn't really want to see Matt tonight, just in case he was part of some Pygmalion plot. She demonstrated some mean bartending skills after we made a stop at the liquor store, more than enough to put herself out.

I don't know what she's going to do next, but I guess I'll wind up helping. She needs someone to trust, and I may have a ton of my own issues right now, but I don't know who else can be that for her.

-Art/Penny

Ashlyn: Is this all my fault?

Damn.

I didn’t think anything would come of it. It seemed so harmless--but I should have known better. I've been dealing with "my secret admirer" - the man/woman/demon, for all I know, that we've taken to calling Pygmalion - for longer than any of the rest. Not always wisely—obviously--but I've seen enough to know better. But I also accepted my new life much earlier than everyone I know in the same situation (except maybe Jessica), and being Ashlyn is something I'm invested in, in all its details.

Art's a sweetie - she called me today, as soon as her interview with the police was over, to warn me. She figured it was a long shot, but if something had happened to one person who's been to the Inn, and another was falsely implicated, she figured it could involve all of us, or at least more than her and Liz.

She didn't know how right she was. It involved at least one more. It involved me.

A year and a half ago, Pygmalion sent me a DVD which was basically a sex tape. It scared the hell out of me at the time, but after a few days, I realized that was silly. So the original Ashlyn had made a sex tape. Big deal. I knew she'd been promiscuous, and it wasn't any big secret from the rest of the world. So what if Matt found out? It was from at least a year and a half earlier.

Of course, I didn't figure the man was anybody important. It turns out he was. Nobody I'd recognize, me being from Texas and the guy not being very well-known outside of Providence. Maybe not even inside Providence, but he's married to money and not interested in his infidelities becoming well known. So that's hanging over my head for a year when I get another letter, asking me to do one little thing: Just get "Penny" and Ray into a social situation every now and again.

What's the harm in that? Art would probably appreciate it, even though she would never do it herself.

If I'd known it was going as far as it did, I would have told Art what I'd done, especially since I'd seen how on edge Liz has been. But nothing seemed to have come of it. I was waiting for another letter, since this bit of manipulation didn't seem to accomplish anything. But...

I'm worried. Pygmalion, as far as we can tell, works by influence, setting things up in ways that are nearly untraceable. Was I the first step in some sort of Rube Goldberg device that ended with Liz killing Ray in a jealous rage?

I hope not. But that's the way it looks.

-Lyn

Arthur/Penny: Three "generations". Man, there should be a word for us.

Or a pair of words. Something like "ancestor" and "descendant". You can form a chain between Louisa and me: Jeremy became me, Nell became Jeremy, I (as Liz) became Nell, Liz (as Marie) became herself again, and Louisa becomes Marie. I don't know if that makes us any closer than two random visitors to the Inn, but maybe there is. We acted like there was when she came up this weekend; our situation can be an isolating one, so we try and find any connection we can. The reflexive disbelief upon meeting another person changed by the Inn was a little less strong this time; I'm pretty sure it's beacuse seeing her confirmed that the woman I saw waiting to check in was, in fact, Liz-as-Marie, so she at least had a face I'd seen before.

Louisa's been flying solo for the past couple weeks, with Jessica having headed home for the holidays. She's sort of in limbo right now, still waiting to hear back about the original Marie's whereabouts and having trouble renting an apartment in L.A. without a long-term visa. I told her the U.S. should be grateful to have a Canadian who wants to move here with the current economic and political climate, rather than vice versa. She makes a comment about bureaucrats just wanting to make everyone jump through hoops. She's checked into a residential hotel, worried about how quickly that will drain her finances. She's starting a new job on the recommendation of "Parker Costello" this week, but won't really be comfortable until the sale on the house she inherited closes.

She tells me all about Nell, and I'm glad to hear that she really is doing well in her new life. She's curious about meeting the original Jeremy, but I don't want any part of that, and try to convince her not to. He's a jerk, so why taint your impressions of either me or Nell by getting any first-hand experience with him? Well, she says, maybe I've been hanging around Jessica too long and her paranoia is rubbing off on me, but isn't it kind of strange that Jeremy bailed on the trip to switch back at the last minute, sending Nell and R.J. instead?

Yep. I can't say I haven't been thinking of that, ever since they told us about Pygmalion being more than a stalker. I've put off asking directly, because I didn't want anything to do with Jeremy, but because I was a little afraid of the answer. I didn't want to be a chump. Or at least not a total chump; as much as I was the victim of Jeremy deciding to keep my life, the idea that someone had been laughing at what I didn't know was... well, something I'd rather not know about.

Louisa's right, though. If we want to find out answers, we can't hide from them, no matter where they may be.

So, it being Saturday night, we head to one of the bars I've heard "Arthur" hangs out at. Our luck's good, since we find him on the first try. Which is a bit of a relief for both of us; neither of us is really comfortable with the bar scene, and this place is a big-time meat market. Louisa comments that at least I can say I have a boyfriend to anyone who hits on me; I say not so much. Neither Drew nor I is seeing anybody else, but his (that is, R.J.'s) practice is picking up, I work a lot of nights. We still see each other on a regular basis, but it's not really a thing. Louisa says she might actually think about dipping her toe into the pool, but the age thing is though for her to get past. Men her apparent age are all children to her, and she's kind of disturbed by Mindy/Carson having a child's mind but an adult's urges.

But, I digress. We find Jeremy at the bar, and each get on one side of him. He looks at Louisa and smiles, but that fades when he spots me. "What do you want?"

I smile at him, because it will get me into less trouble than ripping out his spleen. "We're wondering if there's something you're not telling us."

"About what?"

Louisa doesn't bother with the sweet smile. "We're wondering if you've had any contact with people who knew about the Inn aside from us."

"What? No! If not for you, I might think I'd always been Arthur Milligan. Dorky name you saddled me with, by the way."

I snorted, so Louisa continued. "I've got a little more faith in people than Penny here does. I don't think you'd just screw her over like you did for no reason. Did someone offer you something?"

"No, just..."

"Just what?"

"Some fed came and visited me after I made the reservation. Asked if I'd had any contact with... well, with me. Went on about deserters in a time of war, scared me real good. Then the next night I get drunk, strike out with Nell, take a bit of crap from her boyfriend..."

I think he's actually looking for me to feel sorry for him. "Do you remember the fed's name?"

"It was almost a year ago!"

Even though Louisa doesn't look her age, she still knows how to give the look that keeps you from lying to your grandparents. "Jeremy. How many times has the FBI come to talk to you? I'm sure you'd remember the details."

Jeremy's looking at her, so I don't see the expression on his face, which is probably for the best.

"Langan. Something Langan."

I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. "Son of a bitch!" I storm out, and Louisa follows me.

I'm pacing back and forth when she makes her way through the bar. "So much for my faith in humanity. Jessica knew he was dirty."

"But why? Why me? Why me and not everyone else who tries this?"

Louisa doesn't know. Maybe Pygmalion just didn't have the resources to screw things up for Jeff, or Liz, or other folks. Maybe he finds Jeremy interesting or useful and was defending that. Maybe it's something else we can't see because he's the only one who knows the whole pattern.

It doesn't really matter. Someone's been using my life as a toy, and it ticks me off.

-Art

Arthur/Penny: You start to wonder

I haven't written in this blog in over a month. More worrisome, I haven't written at all, outside of what I do to prepare copy for the nightly telecast, in a few weeks. When Lyn called the other night, as freaked out about what Jessica and Louisa had found out as you might expect her to be, I joked that I was showing solidarity with the striking Writers' Guild of America.

Note one: I'd never worked in film or television in my original life, so Jeremy has not inherited a WGA membership. I'm also not a member of the union as Penny, since news broadcasts are not covered under that agreement. The only issue with writing this would be if we had an eye toward developing it into a television series or movie, and I don't know if we could even if we had a mind to. But I completely support the striking writers.

Note two: If Lyn wants to talk about our post-Pygmalion phone calls, she can. The revelation that her "secret admirer" is probably far more than a typical stalker obviously affects her more directly than any of the rest of us, and I'm not really comfortable speaking to her state of mind based on what we've said over the phone.

Still, as much as Lyn is the most directly affected, we all have to wonder how much we've drawn the attention of Pygmalion. Lyn certainly has. Mark and Vinessa did, although that might just have been targets of opportunity if he already had someone working in the INS. The new Dex maybe turned out useful to him.

I wonder about me, though. I mean, I haven't written. I've had a lot of reasons to be busy - one of the other anchors for the Ten O'Clock Report went on maternity leave, I've been reading up on the San Jose Stealth's players and indoor lacrosse in general. Nell's father had big holiday plans that involved his daughter, for both Thanksgiving and Christmas (I've thankfully begged off New Year's). My phone's been ringing off the hook to do speaking engagements, and those are nice. But I've written as long as I can remember, keeping journals, writing short stories, and then in school and professionally. For me to not do it for so long feels like something even more fundamental than my body has changed.

And when there's something like that, there's a tendency to try to assign responsibility. Is Pygmalion doing this? Does he want to see if I take up Nell's life completely? Does me getting wrapped up in this life mean I'm paying less attention to Lyn, and thus give him freer reign with her? Or is it just a coincidence and I'm assigning myself far too much importance.

Hell if I know. But I'm going to go work on the book some more, just because I can.

-Art/Penny

Jessica: So close...

None of us who have been transformed by the Inn really envy others. I mean, not enough for it to be common. We all know just how traumatic it is, so even when someone gets the draw that Louisa did - younger but not a child, in a more comfortable socio-economic position, no sex change - we take it for granted that it hurts for them too. We know it hurts bad, and it's hard for us to conceive of ourselves as lucky until we meet someone who is worse off.

Take Dina, for instance. On the surface, it looks like she got off easy - she even got to keep her family. Look below the surface, and she's in pretty rough shape. What's worse is, she knows it - she's smart enough to see that the past eight years have stunted her natural growth as a person in some ways, and I pity the psychiatrist who has to try to unravel her parental issues down the line almost as much as I pity her for having them.

Ashlyn, Arthur, and Louisa at least got relative independence. I at least got a mother who loved me even after she knew the truth. Dina got something I don't even have words for.

And when I called her the other night, she still acknowledged that she got off easy compared to the original Cahills.

We've been driving with a little extra urgency since Wyoming - we've got an idea that even though we only have a few people left on our list, they need to know about Pygmalion before their lives are fouled up incontrovertibly. It's silly - in most cases Pygmalion has had months or years to do his worst, so what's a couple of days on our part going to matter - but no-one wants to be too late. But unless Pygmalion is in control of whose body changes into what (and the current best theory is that it relies on proximity, rather than the will of any person or thing), there's not much more he could do to the Cahills.

We got to Seattle late at night, and checked into a motel. We dilly-dallied the next morning - I think it took me two hours to eat my pancakes at the diner we found, and even Louisa wasn't as nosy as she usually is when some element of my past comes up. We were within miles of the original Jessica Brooks, and a million strange thoughts were going through my head - would she approve of how I'd lived her life? Would she resent me? Would I find out she wasn't a very nice person? I've been carrying a mental image of Mom's Daughter around in my head, and she was eternally ten years old. Could I even handle her being something else?

Finally, though, we got out of the diner to let them serve lunchtime customers, and headed to the address Louisa had coaxed out of the Wrights. We walked up to the door and knocked.

No-one was home. Pretty much the only thing that could make me more tense.

Made sense; it was a weekday afternoon, so everybody was going to be at school or work except people on months-long cross-country road trips. We made sure the name on the mailbox - "Costello" - matched, and then settled down into the car to wait for someone to show. Louisa, thankfully, kept the "stakeout" jokes to a minimum.

At around four o'clock, one of the people getting off the bus at the end of the road made a turn there. She was an asian girl, seventeen-looking, with her hair in her eyes and wearing ripped jeans underneath a skirt and a Sex Pistols T-shirt. Figuring that no good could come of waiting until the last minute, I jumped out of the car and ran up to talk to her. "Excuse me," I said, a bit taken by her not exactly looking like a Costello, "do you live here?"

"Have all my life," she said. "What do you want? Did I piss you off without knowing it? Did my father?"

"No, not at all. It's just... Uh... Well, I'm Jessica Brooks."

She looked confused for a second, then squinted at me before the realization hit her. "Oh, you mean the new one! Although after eight years, it's not quite "new", is it?"

I agreed it wasn't, and she got out her keys. "This is amazing... I didn't think I'd ever get to meet you, although we've considered heading back East to try every once in a while, but once those assholes who wound up with our lives made it clear that they weren't going to let us try to get our real bodies back by staying in the inn in reverse order, we figured it might hurt too much to see the new us... I'm Phuong Costello, by the way, although I was born a Molly. Who were you?"

"Conrad Mancini... I was a cop in Baltimore. So you're not Mindy or Jessica?"

"Oh, no... We've got stories to share, I guess. And I'll bet you do too, Miss...?"

"Louisa Torrence, although my passport says 'Marie Desjardins'."

"Passport, huh? I know that feeling. But come on in, it's too cold to keep this up out here."

Phuong opened the door, dropping her backpack in the entryway. "I don't remember there being so many books my first time through high school. Do you?" I shook my head, but said I wasn't one for studying that time. "Ah, me neither. Not really now, but you lap your classmates in elementary school while being an asian besides, you wind up on the 'gifted' track. Sounds like a good idea when you're thirty-four-going-on-ten, then you hit junior high and find out how hard those kids work..."

I laughed at that, and we swapped stories about being adults in children's bodies. Our stories were different, of course, although they had points of similarity: It took us a long time to feel like we belonged in a locker room during sports and gym classes, although she had more luck getting her friends to dig her favorite music. It was so amazing to find someone who had had so many experiences close to my own - it was something I'd been missing for most of the past decade - even Dina wasn't this close to my own experience.

We must have talked for an hour and a half straight, and we didn't realize where the time had gone when we heard the door open again. Phuong quickly looked at her watch and then ran to the door. "Honey, come into the living room! You'll never believe who found us!"

She leads a man through the door. He's a big, burly guy, with a bit of an unkempt beard just starting to show some gray. He's wearing a Mariners cap and a grocery store nametag that reads "Carson". He introduces us as Conrad Mancini and her friend Louisa, and mentions that I'm the person who became Jessica. He looks me up and down for a moment and I wonder whether or not I should be uncomfortable. There's the "older man checking out a younger girl" thing, sure, but we're both aware that the inside doesn't necessarily match the outside. He nods, saying that "she" turned out pretty, and I blush a little. Phuong gives him a kiss on the cheek and says she's sorry, we just got caught up talking, but she'd get dinner started. He thanks her and heads to the bathroom.

She suggests we take it to the kitchen where she pulls a package of chicken breasts out of the fridge. "Yeah, I still do the cooking; old habits die hard. You guys are going to stay and have dinner with us, won't you?" I say I'd be glad to, and Louisa nods agreement.

"It's nice to see that you and your husband still get along," Louisa says. Cautiously. "A lot of relationships might not be able to handle the strain."

Phuong stops with her hand on the oven's temperature control, and sighs. "Yeah. Well... You know how I was talking about being on the gifted track because I knew so much more than a nine-year-old usually would? Well, one of the things they teach you in the AP physics courses is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

"Carson wasn't my husband. Carson was Mindy."

I stop thinking for a bit there. Nothing is going through my head. I hear Louisa say she's so sorry, and that it's worse than Dylan; I think she may have suspected something like this. She says she's not much of a detective, but while I was comparing notes with Phuong, she was looking around the house, and I think she's a good half-dozen steps ahead of us.

Finally, I'm able to think again, and tell Phuong I'm also so sorry.

"Yeah, me too. People talk about kids having to grow up fast these days, but Mindy... Mindy was so totally unequipped to live Carson's life. He was a lawyer - family law. That's why the Costellos had adopted Phuong - he'd been moved drawing up adoption papers for another family. The partners at his firm were livid when his wife drove him in to work a week late from vacation so that he could say he couldn't do the work any more and was resigning effective immediately. We had to refinance the house and the school loans so the family could get by on one income because I wasn't old enough to work. And Carson... Mindy... felt so bad about it. She thought it was all her fault somehow."

Louisa asks where the dishes are, and Phuong points to a cupboard. Louisa reaches in, pulls out a stack of four plates, and closes the door. I'm not looking terribly smart at this point as I sputter out that that can't be enough if we're staying for dinner. What about Jessica, and Mindy's father.

"There's been a divorce."

I turn around and see Carson Costello (né Mindy Cahill) standing there. I try to see him as someone who's only lived eighteen years, but it's hard. Eight years can bury one's old self pretty deep.

Louisa gestured at the walls. "It is a small house."

Phuong nodded. "It is indeed. Too small for a lot of things. No spare bedroom, for instance, and you couldn't expect Mindy to share a bed with someone who used to be her father. Couldn't expect Barry to share a bed with the nine-year-old girl who used to be his wife. Mindy and Jessica had been best friends, but one suddenly being the parent and the other the child drove a wedge between them." She almost automatically turned to her father/daughter, barely leaving a pause. "It's not your fault, dear. We're just not made to take this."

"If you say so, Mom."

Phuong chuckled at the looks on our faces - it just seemed so incongruous coming out of Carson Costello's mouth. "Yeah, he calls me 'mom' sometimes. It's a joke with the neighbors; they think growing up in Cambodia made me mature beyond my years and treat it like a pet name. We're known to have a weird family dynamic."

"And I thought my mom and I were unique."

Phuong started laughing hysterically. "That's right! When you were talking about you and your mother, I forgot that would have to be Kathleen! Oh, man, I hope you made it easy on her! She was always such a great neighbor and friend."

"Not hardly. I got into fights, and was anti-social, and she only was able to know the truth because I said something horrible when her father died."

"That's nothing," Carson said, giving Phuong an elbow. "Tell them about the time you found my porn stash."

(About a second later, Louisa said something in French that I think translates to "Pardon me, I've just thrown up in my mouth a little.")

Phuong turned beet red, but soldiered on. "You have to understand... Mindy was about twelve but Carson was about thirty-five. Barry tried to find a job where he could work nights so that he could look after Mindy during the day while I took the night shift, but it didn't always work out. We tried to pretend that he wasn't a grown man with his needs, but when he had a day to himself, he could watch R- or X-rated movies, and he is kind of ruggedly handsome. Women notice him, and that energy had to go somewhere... We were just too blind to see it until I was getting the laundry and saw what my little baby had stashed in a closet."

"Oh, they yelled at me good. Dad had to give me 'the talk', which was all kinds of weird."

They were laughing, so I decided to broach a subject that gave me fits. "So, what did you wind up doing... about that stuff?"

"Well, they reminded me that I was technically still a married man, and pointed out that I of all people shouldn't think of women that way. But they also agreed I needed an outlet, because I'd go crazy without it, and I was about to start my job at the supermarket and it wouldn't be right for someone with a kid to look so ignorant about sex."

"But we also told him that just because he looked older didn't mean he was dating before he turned fifteen."

"Right. I could touch myself, but no-one else."

The two of them were laughing, and it had me pretty confused. "How can you...?"

"Comedy equals tragedy plus time. Trust me, we were just as horrified then as you are now."

"Yeah." Carson's laughter stopped kind of abruptly. "I was a real jerk to Jessie. She was going through her own stuff, missing her family, and I was lording the fact that I was a grown-up and she was still just a little kid over her. That's why..." He stopped, tearing up.

Phuong was serious now, too. "That's why Carson has custody of me, as far as the government is concerned, and 'Parker' has custody of 'Dana'. It was easier for everyone that way."

Louisa touched Phuong's hand. "But still not easy, right?"

"Not at all. Don't get me wrong, we still talk - we try to have a vacation together every year, although it's been harder since we all decided to let ourselves be attracted to people. A week is about all we can do anyway, and you add other people and the jealousy gets really ugly. When Barry got the new job, it was a good thing for us to get some distance."

We all got quiet, so Louisa mentioned that she saw Carson's Mariner's hat - did that mean they'd abandoned Red Sox nation. That led to a lot of sports talk - Carson had gotten into sports in a big way to try to fit in with other guys, and there was still enough New Englander left in Phuong for her to be excited about the World Series and Super Bowls. That led to other, lighter topics that kept us up late that night.

We probably would have stayed all night, but Phuong's boyfriend called. She put him on hold, claiming another call. "Sorry, new boyfriend, and aren't newly-besotted teenagers clingy? High school boys haven't changed in the past twenty-five years, that's for sure. It's totally not going to last, and a dumb idea because we're in the same band, but man, he is so cute, and is that stuff about men being at their sexual peak at nineteen true or what?"

I declined to comment, and she smiled wickedly before getting back to her call. Carson said she could be hours, so Louisa and I got our coats, said goodbye, and headed for the door.

Before we left, Phuong held up a finger for us to wait. After she found a scrap of paper, she wrote an address down and handed it to me. "You've been very nice," she said, putting the phone on her shoulder for a moment, "to act so interested in us. But I know why you came here. Give them my best."

I thanked her, and put the piece of paper in my pocket without looking at it. It only stayed there until we reached the car, when I took it out.

And laughed. Harder than I've laughed at anything in a long time. Louisa asked what was so funny.

"I put off going to college in Pasadena for the semester to do this trip. But check this out - Parker and Dana Costello live in Malibu."

Louisa was a little confused until I pulled out the road maps I'd bought six months ago, in preparation for living down there. Then she laughed, too.

What a strange trip this has wound up being. Next stop, Los Angeles. If we drive through the night, we should get there tomorrow morning.

-Jess

Louisa: Road Trip - Everything's Connected

I'd like to say the title of this post refers to some greater truth that Jessica and I have discovered here in the American West, where you can drive for hours without seeing much in the way of human settlement, but I'm afraid it refers to something more - well, not prosaic, but decidedly human. Jessica and I have been going back and forth over whether or not to post about it the past couple of days, figuring it might be wiser just to mail Arthur, Ashlyn, Darren, Jeff, Jaci, and the others privately, but we figure this is better; we know there are other people like us who read this blog and this is worth knowing. The rest of the world should probably know, too, but of course they won't believe it. We barely do.

Dex Langan was part of Arthur and Ashlyn's group. We met the "new" Dex toward the start of our trip, in Washington, and we've been trying to get in contact with the original for a while. We didn't think it would be that difficult; after all, Jessica had found a lead on him/her even before I'd ever gone to that inn.

It took some doing, though. He'd become Kayla Johnson, so we started in her hometown. We found her parents easily enough, but they didn't have much to say. They hadn't heard from their daughter in over a year; it was as if once she'd finished college she decided she didn't have any more use for her family. Jessica asked if she had any friends in town who might still be in contact with her. "Not according to Kayla."

Detective work it was, then. That meant another public library; I joked with Jessica that I was spending more time in these places than I did when I was in my old life, working as a school librarian. She laughed and said it would be a tragedy if these places ever disappeared completely, to be replaced by the internet and e-books and the like. The internet is not very good at being local, for instance, and even the biggest monitor and best user interface can merely approximate how well spreading a bunch of information out in front of oneself can be.

(This, as my old English teacher friends would point out to her students, is what they call foreshadowing.)

We got lucky in that Kayla is a nice photograph and was involved in a bunch of activities in high school. There were plenty of pictures of her in her school's yearbooks, not just "official" club portraits, but candids and collages. Jessica was methodical about seeing who she stood near for both National Honor Society and field hockey, and then flipping through the book to see who she was standing near in the candids.

This was five-year-old information about Kayla, as opposed to Dex, but it gave us some people to talk to. A number had moved away after college, and a couple really weren't that close to her, but we hit the jackpot with her high school boyfriend.

Johnny Farmer had looked nice in his yearbook pictures and had matured into a handsome adult. His family actually did have a farm, and a couple women our apparent age looking for him made him feel good. We decided to go with the reporter story again - only this time, Jessica had printed out some business cards for me. Simple things reading "Marie Desjardins, Freelance Journalist" along with my cell number and email address; Jess said people respect the no-frills approach and being a freelancer means no-one asks why I have a generic Yahoo! address rather than globeandmail.ca or something. He was a little disappointed that our "story" was about Kayla rather than him, but admitted that there was a story there.

According to him, she had come back home to get her things en route to her new job after being in Maine a couple weeks longer than expected, but everyone noticed how erratically she was acting. She stayed in a hotel rather than her parents' house, she didn't drop in to see old friends. He had run into her by chance, in a bar, and been confused by the way she acted - she had almost never been one to drink enough to get hammered, and while they'd talked amicably enough, she had completely freaked when he made some innocent comment that referenced their prior relationship. She made a big enough scene for them both to spend a night in lock-up, and when her parents were brought in...

Dex had told the truth. All of it. And, of course, it just bounced right off people. Johnny said that she made some comment about it not just being Maine, that this was bigger than anyone thought, and a lot of stuff that didn't make any sense.

There'd been brief talk about having her involuntarily committed, but upon hearing that, she'd started acting, if not normal, then less hostile. After a few days, she left town for her posting with the Forest Service. She didn't write, call, have her mail forwarded, or do anything else. She didn't even come home for the holidays, and don't think that wasn't a sore spot with her family. It was no wonder the Johnsons gave us the deep freeze when we came to talk about Kayla.

Johnny gave us the location of her post, and asked us to mention him to her if she decides to talk to us. We do, and head out again.

December is not the greatest time to try and visit a National Park in a cold-climate state, especially if you're driving an old car like Jessica's without four wheel drive. (Actually, December is not the best time to do anything up north. I can't wait until we reach Pasadena!). We tried to get hold of Dex/Kayla by phone, but neither of us could navigate the voice-mail system. So, when we arrived at the rangers' station, we were just hoping "Kayla Johnson" hadn't been fired or transferred.

We got lucky; she was still there. We did the usual little dance: "Do I know you?" "No, but we have some mutual friends - Arthur Milligan, Jake Matthews, Jeff Miller." She was more wary than most of the people we've talked to, but was willing talk with us. Better than going into town and getting hit on by the cowboys.

She (unlike Ashlyn, I never met Dex as a man, so I have a hard time calling her "him") got really nervous when we started asking if she'd had any contact with people who knew who she really was. When Jessica showed her some of the pictures from her phone, the ones she took in Texas, Dex/Kayla took a real long look. She was weighing what we were showing her, and the fact that we just put it in front of her. "Perhaps I should show you the back room."

We followed her to the back of the little cottage, where there was a bulleting board hanging up, with pictures and photocopies of documents and different-colored pushpins and handwritten notes and strings connecting the pushpins. "Damn," I said, "you've got a wall-of-crazy straight out of the movies." And, of course, instantly felt bad about it.

But she laughed. "Don't I just?" She pointed at a couple of documents which matched names from Stephen Jeffries/Jake Matthews's address book. "But maybe it's not so crazy after all."

The three of us stood in front of the wall, just staring, and then Jessica wrote "J & S Motion Graphics" on a blank card and stuck it into the board. Dex/Kayla nodded, and then started stringing lines between it and the places he already knew about. It wasn't connected directly to the question mark at the center of the board, but there was no doubt that whoever the Feds' mystery man was, he was an investor in J & S. Dex/Kayla started adding more, finally putting Ashlyn's name up, as well as Jean-Michel's and then André Trudeau's.

We stand back and stare at the more complicated pattern, not saying anything for a bit. Jessica was the one who broke the silence.

"You weren't in Maine to investigate microbrews marketing to minors, were you?"

"No." She sat down in a chair and stretched her long legs out. "After 9/11, a lot of federal agencies were ordered to share records more closely - you know, Department of Homeland Security. Internal investigations of people in different branches of the government turned up some common leads; once we knew what to look for, we found a few more. The thing that tied them together was vacations at the Trading Post Inn in Old Orchard Beach, Maine."

So, I asked, is that what the Inn's about? Replacing people in the government?

She shook her head. "I don't think so. There's no pattern, and half the people leave their jobs afterward. I think it's more opportunistic - that someone finds people who have changed and gets their claws into them. And even after... There's stuff that looks like corruption, but no bad acts. Just people not very good at their jobs for no apparent reason. The Special Agent In Charge of the investigation thinks that's evidence of sleepers, but now..."

"It's just people in unfamiliar situations unable to tell anybody else why."

Dex/Kayla nodded at Jessica. "Yeah, at one level - but there's an infrastructure here, doing something. But it's been going on for so long - I managed to find stuff in internal investigations from forty years ago before the new me changed my password. And some of the people who left government service wound up doing stuff that just seemed random - and it wasn't just going back to their original lives; they weren't always good at it at first."

Jessica processed that. "So, what do you think is going on, knowing what we know?"

"I think someone is screwing with us. Not all of us, just whoever he takes an interest in, or maybe the ones who can help him with the ones he's interested in. He's been doing this a long time, so maybe he's been to the inn himself once or twice. Maybe he's not a he, or wasn't to begin with. Maybe he's been alive so long his brain's gotten full and he's gone nuts."

This was starting to seem too big for me, so I tried to concentrate one what I could understand and relate to personally. I pointed to one card. "Ashlyn. Why Ashlyn?"

Dex/Kayla laughed. "You've never been a guy, have you? If you had, you wouldn't ask that question."

I blushed, and Jessica laughed. "Yeah, if I were my old self... Maybe it's just a bit of fun."

"And it fits the profile. Like... There's a guy we were suspicious of in the New York INS office. Maybe he threw the monkey wrench into 'Ginessa''s and 'Nicoleta''s visas, just to see what would happen. There's documents that the guys in DC don't understand - can't understand - but make perfect sense to me. He gets off on that - sticking people into difficult situations and seeing not just what they do, but what they become."

We talked all through the night, leaving the next morning. We're not sure posting this is the right thing to do, but anybody who is in our situation reading this needs to know that Ashlyn's secret admirer appears to be into bigger things as well. Besides, now that he's apparently got someone inside the investigation of his network, he might be twice as dangerous. We don't know who he is, but we've got a name for him.

We're calling him Pygmalion.

-Louisa