Account 14: Night Drives

Background information

• Name: Avery Waters
• Pronouns: They/them
  
• Date: May 13, 2020
  
• Occupation: Musician
  
• City of residence: Atkins, Michigan
• Date(s) of account: 2015
  
• Subject of account: A trip from Atkins, Michigan to Chicago, Illinois
  

Account

My name's Avery Waters. My family's from Atkins, but my sister Haley moved to Chicago back in 2011, so I drive there every summer to visit. It's kind of a long drive from the Upper Peninsula down to Chicago and back, but I don't mind that much.

The main problem is that it tends to be night by the time I get there. When I was a kid, I always loved night drives, but that's just because I wasn't the one trying to drive when everything's dark and half the people on the road don't even use their brights. As long as you're playing music, it's not that bad, really. I'm fond of indie music myself. Acoustic guitar over a guy singing quietly about someone he broke up with, you know, that kind of stuff.

Anyways, the point is that something weird happened when I drove to Haley's place in 2015. It all started when it began to get dark. Since it was in summer, probably July, that only happened around 8 or 9 at night. I wouldn't know for sure, because when I glanced at the car's clock, the screen was completely blank.

I was still on the highway by that point. No stop signs, no traffic lights. I couldn't exactly pause to check my phone, so I just kept driving.

Eventually, I noticed a rest stop, one of those janky little spots you see with some vending machines and some dirty bathrooms and nothing else. When I parked my car and looked at my phone, it didn't display a time. I checked the clock app. It was gone. I didn't even think you could delete the clock app, and I definitely didn't remember doing so. I tried downloading it again, but as you may have guessed by now, there were no results, first-party or otherwise. I was pretty confused at this point, so I decided to head into the rest stop. There were no clocks inside, and nobody else was there- not before I went into the bathroom, not inside, not after I came back out. The whole place was empty.

At this point, I was freaking out a little. I got back in my car, and as I was parked in an empty lot, I texted Haley to tell her what was going on. After a second or two, she texted back saying it was 8 at night and asking what I was talking about. I sent her a screenshot of my phone to show her that it didn't show what time it was, and she told me my phone said it was 10 in the morning.

I didn't understand. Was she messing with me? Why could she read it when I couldn't? Why did it say it was the same time it had been when I started driving?

She asked where I was. I told her I was at a rest stop somewhere in Illinois and asked her to wait a second while I checked the GPS on my phone.

I didn't bother seeing if I could find another app where I could check my location when I saw that the map was gone. I sent Haley a screenshot of a phone screen without a map and explained what was going on. It didn't even surprise me when she asked what I meant about the map being gone, when she said she could see it right between the clock and calculator icons.

I told Haley we could sort everything out when I got to her place. She asked if I'd arranged some kind of surprise visit. She said I hadn't said anything about coming over.

I was sure by this point that she was messing with me, or maybe even trying to gaslight me- trying to make me think I was losing my grip on reality so she could manipulate me.

But that wasn't it. She couldn't have deleted my apps and disabled my car's time display remotely. Not to be mean, but half the time she forgets her computer password. Something else was going on, I just had no idea what it could've been.

I waited there in my car seat for God knows how long, just trying to figure out what to do. Eventually, I shut my phone off, buckled up, and left a parking lot that I was sure had been empty as long as I'd been there, though as I looked around, I saw cars stationed firmly in the other parking spaces and people leaving the rest stop.

The road signs were still there as I drove. They were the same signs they'd always been. But I knew I had to turn around and go home when my phone's GPS told me to turn onto Jedidiah Drive, a road that I know for sure does not exist.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I started crying when my lights turned off on their own. When I turned them back on, I wasn't on a highway anymore. Now I was on a dirt road that white text on a green sign identified as Jedidiah Drive.

At this point, I was too tired to even think about what I was doing. I just drove until I saw a house.

It wasn't my sister's, of course. I'd never seen it in my life- it was white, modern, more window than house. It looked much more well-kept than its grassy, overgrown surroundings, sheets of rusted metal scattered about. It didn't belong there any more than I did.

I turned my phone on and took it with me as I prepared to walk up to this stranger's home for reasons I didn't quite understand, my eyes still red but my mind too frayed to keep crying.

As I stepped out of the car and walked up to the porch, I idly wondered when the music had stopped playing.

I knocked on the door. There was no response. I was just about to knock again when the door opened. There was a tall, thin woman standing before me. She was wearing a black T-shirt with some kind of mathematical formula on it. There was a key written beneath it, labeling what each number and variable meant, but I didn't understand any of it.

She asked if she could help me, but her voice sounded wrong somehow.

There was something about looking at her eyes that made my head hurt. I tried not to make eye contact as I asked if she knew what time it was.

She told me it was 8 at night and asked if that was all.

No, I said, and then I asked if she was Dr. Mira Solomon. I'd never heard the name in my life.

She laughed in a way that made my ears feel like they were bleeding as she asked if I was familiar with her work.

I almost asked what she meant, but before I could, I remembered.

Well, I didn't exactly remember it, since I hadn't known in the first place. But I knew exactly who she was now, and I felt very afraid.

She had been a physicist researching the many worlds hypothesis. But there was this one formula, the same formula written on her shirt- I don't even know what it represented, but apparently she'd gotten obsessed with it.

One night, while she was working, she only realized she had fallen asleep when she woke up. But the formula was solved. It was complete.

It didn't matter to the world she found herself in. Nobody knew her there. Her coworkers didn't recognize her, and when she went home to her apartment, she found only confused strangers.

Even as Dr. Mira Solomon tried to find work and housing in a world that did not know she existed, she kept having dreams about that formula, dreamed of numbers twisting into impossible shapes and letters forming strange fractals. She walked through a landscape that should not have been each and every time she went to sleep. Eventually, she couldn't separate her dreams from her reality, and it broke her.

Dr. Solomon laughed as she watched my face with impossible eyes. I think she'd been laughing the whole time. She waved goodbye as I walked, drained and empty, back to my car.

Don't even ask me how I got to Haley's house after that. My memories are fuzzy at this point. But I got there, somehow, and when I did, she didn't remember any of the messages we'd exchanged earlier that night. Both of our phones confirmed her story. By that point, I didn't feel like considering the possibility that she was lying or that she'd deleted the texts we'd sent one another. That wasn't how that night worked.

I don't blame you if you don't believe this. I barely believe it either. I mean, how can I? All of it's true, but none of it happened.

Analysis

Avery Waters left their phone number at the end of the email. I called them around a week ago asking if they'd be interested in a follow-up. All I heard on the other end was an automated voice saying "Turn left onto Jedidiah Drive," and then silence for a few seconds, at which point the same automated voice as before said, "You have arrived at your destination."

Searching the name Mira Solomon gets no results that seem particularly relevant, even when narrowed down to "Dr. Mira Solomon," "Doctor Mira Solomon," or "Mira Solomon PhD." This isn't entirely surprising, given the nature of this account- after all, supposedly, she doesn't exist. Or comes from another reality. Or... something. The whole thing is confused. On the one hand, that's sort of the point. On the other hand, that also makes this account very difficult to look into.

I, for one, have never heard of a Jedidiah Drive in Michigan. There are some results that crop up, but the vague nature of this account means it's hard to get specific enough to be particularly helpful.

I can't say I blame Waters, though. This entire experience sounds like it would've been exhausting, assuming they went through it as they say they did. (Or, well, assuming they didn't go through it as they said they didn't.)

I'm almost reminded of Antigonish by Hughes Mearns:

"Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

Oh how I wish he'd go away."

One way or another, I'm really not sure what to make of all of this. That's not exactly surprising, though, is it?