Quick update on my present predicament. Baby Face Beau had a henchwoman make an appearance. She was black and wore a black suit. Her hair was buzzed into a flattop with lightning bolts slashed into the side of her head like razor marks. She lacked Beau’s charisma but matched his confidence. 

            “One more day, Mr. Tarot,” she said with a scowl. “Tomorrow at dawn. That’s your deadline to tell us where Lonnie is. If you don’t give us a location, with specific coordinates, you will be punished. Is that clear?”

            She said it the way a principal threatens students with after school suspension. This woman wearing short leather gloves that showed a gap of skin on her wrist had more than after school suspension up her sleeve. Her tone was businesslike. Her eyes were as firm and resolute as the Declaration of Independence, the irony, a document I was pretty sure had been burned at the Cleveland Riots of 2011.

“It’s nighttime,” I said. “That’s half a day, less even.”

            “Get that big brain thinking,” she said. She slapped the container door, turned on her heel, and marched off.

            That happened ten minutes ago, right before I planned on telling you about another Ernst dream, which I’m going to do now, but not before I say I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this punishment. Lonnie, and his memory, are a key cog to their future machine. What does that mean for me? Maybe stick around a little bit more, will you? I could use moral support, if even from a distance. 

            The phone battery is at 27%. Back into the fray. 

            I woke once again as Ernst. I no longer required a mirror to know I was experiencing the stories from his journals. There was a TV show when I was a kid called Quantum Leap, where the main character, Dr. Sam Beckett, jumps through spacetime by inhibiting the bodies of various people, all to correct what he deems mistakes in history. Once he’s in their body, he’s in control. He can fix the mistake. And then leap to the next person and mistake to correct. The show aired for five seasons, and then ended abruptly, with a title card at the end of the series finale that simply said, “Dr. Sam Becket (sic) never returned home.” They didn’t even spell the character’s name right. I hope I don’t go out that way. 

            That wasn’t the case in my dreams. I had no choice but to follow along with Ernst’s story. The night of my party, with me passed out on the couch, my consciousness leapt back in time to November 1st, 1941. That’s what The New York Times told me as I sat in an office at The Petoskey Daily News. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray next to a stack of complaints about the All Hallows Eve show. Ernst’s hangover clung to my forehead like an ice-cold leech. The headlines read “Nazis Claim Toll Over Desert” and “CHRYSLER TO PAY DIVIDEND OF $1.50” and “British Envoy in Ankara Reports Attempt on Life.”

            Three pages in, I found the story Mom – that being Helen – had told me about. The one that made the hangover worth it. “Halloween Radio Program Shocks Audience.”

            Police stations around the Midwest were inundated with phone calls from frightened citizens yesterday evening following a broadcast of what they believed to be a real story of scientific experimentation gone wrong.

            The program went on air at 7:45 PM Eastern Standard Time. A broadcaster named Ernst Tarot introduced the program – “An All Hallows Eve Story” – with a clear warning that some of the content might shock and scare the audience, and thus might not be suitable for children or “those with hearts too faint for the stress of a new Halloween scare.” 

Mr. Tarot and actors from the Petoskey Recording Studio performed their version, described as an updated Frankenstein, and titled “A Modern Prometheus”, based off Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. “The All Hallows Eve Story” is about a scientist who loses his wife in childbirth. Distraught, and with a baby girl to care for, he seeks to bring his wife back to life. No indications were given that the story was fact or fiction, just that it was a story. That lack of distinction led many listeners to call their local police department asking if they could check on the well-being of the so-called characters in the story. 

            “I thought someone was being murdered,” said Mary Cunningham, from Manistee, Michigan. 

            She wasn’t the only person with concerns over the production. Jack Baldwin, from South Bend, Indiana, drove to his local police department. “I put on my hat and gloves. It was cold out there last night. That’s perhaps why the story scared me so much. The chill was in the air. I recorded the broadcast to play for the police. I was afraid they weren’t listening. When I got to the station, there was no need for my recording. They were listening live. They were just as afraid. One of them told me he wished he could call the station himself.”

Police from a hundred different departments in five states reported a combined two thousand distress calls, with most of them requesting that the department check on the people, or characters, in the story.

            The production took four commercial breaks during the hour performance. Mr. Tarot said they were placed during specific areas of the broadcast to quell fear and remind the audience they were listening to a fictional program. “I intentionally broke for commercial after the more intense portions of the program,” said Tarot, a lifelong resident and admirer of the actor Orson Welles. “I’m a big fan of (Orson) Welles. His adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” was a clear inspiration. He reminded audiences four times during that broadcast that the alien invasion of New Jersey was a dramatization. Millions of people still called in a panic. I tried to avoid that trap. The childbirth scene, for instance, ended, and an advertisement for Cheerios followed. The morgue scene ended, and war relief locations were promoted. Those were planned with relief in mind. I suppose for some shutting the program off altogether might have been the better solution.”

            The 48-minute program took Tarot and his team four months to write, perform, and edit for air. It had an estimated two million listeners. Not all of them took the performance as fiction.

            “I don’t believe it’s fake,” one anonymous person said. “I believe the recordings are real. I think there is a lab where wicked experiments are being done. There are actors in the presentation, just not during the lab parts. Those are real people, and animals, having terrible experiments done to them. That is why I’m concerned. Ernst Tarot and the Petoskey Recording Studio should be reported to the FCC and the authorities.”

As if on cue, there was a knock on the closed door in my office. The window glass was frosted so I could only make out the shape of two figures. “Coming!” I called. I folded the newspaper and opened the door. Two police officers stood their dark blue uniforms. One of them – Peter Bigsby – I knew from school. He had excelled at writing enough that I had recently checked with him on his interest in a monthly creative writing club. He declined politely, citing his third child having only turned one year old. 

            Peter was just past skinny and balding. The uniform added ten pounds. He wore it well. His partner was his stark opposite, stocky with or without the uniform. He had a strong chin and mustache. If I could grow facial hair, I’d want it to be as thick as his. 

            “Hi, Peter,” I said, and to the other officer, “Sir. How can I help you, gentlemen?”

            “Mind if we come in?” Peter asked. 

            “Of course, of course,” I said, shifting two chairs from the side of the room to the front of the desk.

            “That won’t be necessary,” the other officer said. 

            Despite what I was quoted as saying in the news article, I knew the story behind the story was real. The axolotl was real. The man, chimp, and dog were real. The morgue and padded cell behind it. The suicide. It was all soul-crushingly real. I didn’t know what the consequences would be for dad if anyone found the lab. Was his work illegal? Were there laws about testing reanimation? Had I inadvertently set his lifetime of work up to be destroyed? 

I saw mom checking on me from behind the officers. She was making her disapproving face at me. Yet, she was also concerned.

            “Wyatt,” Peter started.

            “Mr. Tarot,” the other officer cut in. “What can you tell me about the laboratory out on Fisher Road?”

            “Excuse me?” I said. “My father’s lab?”

            “That’s correct.” He pulled out a flip notepad and a pencil. Peter had done the same. He licked the tip of the pencil the same he’d done when we were sixteen.

            “Well,” I started. “It’s a laboratory. I don’t really go out there much so I don’t know what else I can say. There are beakers and an exhaust system. I know he’s been doing government work. Blood testing or something like that.”

            I wasn’t exactly lying. He had not given me, or any of us for that matter, including my mother, who was waiting patiently behind my interrogation, any sort of explanation of his work.

            “But you have been out there?” the officer asked.

            “Yes,” I replied. “I have been out there.”

            “When was the last time you visited your father’s lab?” The officer’s cadence had gotten us into a rhythm that promoted quick answers, which were harder to fake.

            I knew the answer but pondered it anyway, stalling to come up with a lie. “I brought lunch out to the staff last week,” I said, which wasn’t a lie per se. I’d left containers of meatloaf and mashed potatoes in the refrigerator of the break room, which had shocked me with its distinct contrast from the lab’s cold setting. The break room was off the lobby, far enough away from the lab fridges used for cold storing blood samples and serums. Originally meant to be a patient waiting room, Marjorie blessed it with her charm so her lab mates had an area for refuge.

            “Were any of the staff there when you visited?” the officer asked me. Peter was taking the backseat on this one. 

            I picked the smoldering cigarette and saved the dying ember with two quick puffs. The end lit up and smoke billowed. “No, they were off,” I said. “I wanted to surprise them with lunch for the next day.”

            “Were they surprised?” Peter butted in. It threw the officer off his spot. The pencil wavered in his hand. 

            “They were! These are difficult times. Anything to make people smile, right?”

            The officer cleared his throat, playing the part perfectly. “As I was saying, have you ever recorded footage from your father’s laboratory on Fisher Road?”

            It was time to lie. Not that it was illegal to record real people doing real things, however out of this world and on the cutting edge. Hubris had gotten the best of me. All I’d wanted was to produce a program that belonged in the same conversation as Orson Welles’ masterpiece. It should have been noted in the news article that Howard Koch had written the adaptation of “War of the Worlds.” Orson Welles had directed and acted in it. I would have to send my notes to the woman who wrote it, Nancy Bedard.

            “I have not,” I said, attempting the same casual and confident tone from my previous responses. I thought about adding, ‘Dad would kill me,’ but stopped myself. The natural follow-up from Officer Mustache would be, “Why is that, Mr. Tarot?”

            None of it mattered, I realized. I rarely saw dad. He slept at the lab most nights. When he was home, he took his meals in his study, poring over sheafs of paper covered in equations, test results, and hypotheticals. Dino and I had snuck in one day, two adult men acting like children, wanting to sneak peaks at his original copies of novels such as “The Call of the Wild,” “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” “The Jungle,” “Tarzan of the Apes,” “Spring and All,” and “Red Harvest,” the last one being of particular interest to Dino, whose sole purpose in life was to read every hard-boiled detective story published. I was keener on Upton Sinclair’s expose on the meat-packing industry, a thinly veiled investigation parading as a novel.

            After we stroked the covers and pages, delicately as to not break a spine or rip paper, and smelled the rich must of wood pulp, we returned the books to the shelf. His desk was in the same state of disarray it always was. Papers littered on papers. A picture frame with our family taken outside of the Grand Canyon, the one item showing he might have a heart. “I’ll never forget what he said,” I told Dino as we lifted edges of papers from his desk, peeking at their contents. “If nature can dually create such chasms as this canyon and such breadth as the human mind, then perhaps I can discover the edge of its limitations, should those exist at all.” 

            I scanned one of the sheets of paper. It had a timeline drawn on it, with the years on the x-axis stretching into the future like a science fiction novel, a century and more until 2050. The y-axis simply said “Cases + Percentage.” The line started in 1927. It zig-zagged for the first decade, up, down, and flatlined, until the last two years, when it sky-rocketed from ten to thirty-two percent.

            We left. I should’ve taken his documents and burned them. I fear what that lack of action may cause.

            “Mr. Tarot,” the officer said. 

            I rarely saw dad, but I did that morning, on my way to the newspaper. I stopped at the bakery to grab coffee and bagels for the floor. It had been a monumental night for the Daily News. The staff deserved a celebration. Dad made four expressions: the upturned corner of his mouth with the pleasure of a job well done; the distant stare with jitter-bug eyes while he solved a problem in real-time; the controlled fury of his furrowed brow when “inefficiencies were present and persistent”; and the lip-licking tic when he read books, his tongue flicking from his mouth like a snake scenting its environment. At the bakery, he made a fifth expression, that of mirthful recognition, his eyes lit like my cigarette embers in the haze of the morning. 

            “I listened to your program,” he had said to me fancifully, a tone he never used. “It was quite good, son. I’m proud of you. How very Sinclairian of you. If you had merely asked, I could have provided content for a scene that not even the most steel-hearted listener could have withstood. Perhaps the sequel? Or, blessed production, you ended it with the creature perishing in a fire, did you not?”

            “I did,” I told my father, my nerves standing on end. He hadn’t said five words to me about my work at the newspaper. Here he was giving me a full review. 

            “Of course, with this world we live in, there’s always another creature lurking.” He switched his coffee to his other hand and patted me on the neck with a warm hand. “We’ll see you at home.” 

            “Yeah,” I replied to the officer. “Sorry. What was your question?”

            “What indications have you been given that the testing being done in your father’s lab is harming any people or animals?”

            I’d finished the cigarette without knowing it. That could be a tell. Not that it mattered. I could see the officer had made up his mind. He was visiting the lab as soon as he finished with me. 

            “None,” I said. 

            He flipped his pad closed. “Thank you, Mr. Tarot. That will be all.” 

            “Okay,” I said. “Let me know if I can help with anything else.”

            Peter spoke up. “We will,” he said. “And I just wanted to say, we listened to your program at the station. It was a hit. Very authentic. I can’t wait to hear it again. Will you do another?”

            Mother was back in the open door again, this time with her own stack of papers.

            “Thank you,” I said. “And I don’t know. Might want to let the dust settle on this one first. There’s always another story to be told though. Stay tuned.”

            “Of course,” Peter said excitedly. 

            “Come on,” the officer said, and then to mother, “M’am.” 

            She replaced them in the office, adding the stack of papers to the complaint pile on my desk. “What have you done, son?”

            I pulled deeply off the cigarette, the fire burning in my lungs. I blew out smoke and spoke into it, my words swirling it into the cacophony going on in my head. “I might’ve ended the whole damn thing.”