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"Here," he pointed, "Here's where you came in. You sit down at the table, and Shelly takes your order."

I watched in confusion and a growing fear as I watch myself on the screen. Shelly brings me the tea, I lace it, drink it, and then I get up and go to the restroom, where I'll no doubt be gone for ten minutes or so.

"Okay," the bartender nodded, "You come back to your table here. Then Shelly brings you your chowder."

He fast forwarded the video, hitting play when I stand up.

"And then you just leave a twenty under your fork, get up, and leave. See, no brother, no altercation, no Taser, and no cops."

I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but there it was, plain as day. I had come in alone, drank my tea, eaten, and left, and none of what I remember happening actually happened.

I thanked the bartender, apologizing for my confusion, and he shrugged, "Hey, don't mention it. I can't even begin to understand why you think anything happened, but I hope you get things sorted out."

I sighed, "Yeah, me too."

I returned to my table, drank my cooling tea, left a five on the table, and left the bar and grill. As I walked outside, I felt as if I might pass out. I made it to my car without collapsing, and just sat there, trying to make sense of what I'd seen compared with what I'd witnessed earlier. Could it be as my mother had said, that Micah didn't exist? If so, that meant that everything I remember about him from my childhood was a lie, something I'd made up in my mind. Even then, after what I'd seen, I wasn't ready to believe that I could've imagined something as elaborate as a brother, through childhood all the way into the present. This whole issue, by itself was monumental, but, combined with the wrongness of the world everywhere but inside my apartment, it just seemed overwhelming, much too much to deal with.

Finally, defeated, I returned to my apartment. I called my mother again to let her know I was... not really okay, but still here.

"Gary!" she exclaimed, surprised, "Where are you?"

"I'm at home right now, but I feel pretty shaken," I admitted, "I'm still trying to figure out how I could've... I don't know, how could I remember having a brother so clearly, all through childhood, all the way up until today, if he doesn't exist. Have I mentioned a brother before?"

"You mentioned him a few times, but never until today that you thought he was your brother. Maybe you should see a psychiatrist. I'm sure they'd help you figure things out."

"Maybe," I felt hesitant about seeing a doctor who might think I'm crazy and have me committed or something, "I'll consider it. I think I'm gonna take a nap or something. Maybe I'll feel better after some rest."

"Okay, just give me a call later if you want," she suggested.

"I'll do that," I promised.

After hanging up, I went into my bedroom to lie down, kicking my shoes off on the way, and collapsed into bed. One thing I could always count on was the ability to fall asleep within a few minutes of putting my head on the pillow, and even the events of today had no ill effects on this ability. Of course, I was never before able to remember dreams; I wasn't sure I'd ever even dreamed before, I just assume I did. But this time I dreamed a vivid dream. In it, I was running, terrified, and, on my heels, was the darkness, but not like I'd been seeing today. Instead, it was complete darkness, swallowing the world inches behind me, and I knew that if I slowed, it would swallow me up with it, and I would cease to exist. The thought of that horrified me, all my memories, everything that made me who I was just blinking out of existence, nobody even remembering I was ever there to begin with.

It was three in the morning when I woke up, drenched in sweat, breathing heavily as if I'd been running. I got up, and fell back down onto my bed again. My legs refused to bear my weight. I had to crawl into the bathroom, but I got there and started the shower. I stripped there on the floor, shedding sweat-sodden clothes and getting in the tub. I let the cool water sluice the sweat from me until I was able to stand, and then I washed off thoroughly. After that, I just stood there under the showerhead, letting the water beat on my back for a bit. Ten minutes later, I turned the shower off and dried myself, gathering my clothes and putting them in the hamper once I'd checked the pockets of my pants. I felt even more tired than I had been when I'd gone to sleep. I put on some fresh clothes, went to my living room, and sat down in my recliner.

I wondered how much longer the world outside my apartment would remain wrong. Of course, at three forty in the morning, it was still dark out, but what about when the sun came up? What if the world, at least, for me, never returned to the bright, normal state it used to be in? What if it remained this way for the rest of my life? And the real question, the one that had been lurking in the back of my mind for hours, the question that had shaken my faith in reality, was I insane? I wanted to say that I wasn't, that, whatever was going on, there was a valid external reason for it, and that the problem lay not in my head. Of course, what insane person would want otherwise?

I waited until sunrise to call my mother. It sounded as if she was making breakfast, and I could almost smell the bacon sizzling, the eggs frying, and the bread toasting.

"Gary, I thought you were going to call me," she said with a note of disapproval.

"Sorry, Mom, it turned out to be much more than just a little nap. Is it okay if I come over?"

"You know that it is," Mom answered sternly, "If you hurry, breakfast will still be warm when you get here."

I put my shoes on, grabbed my keys, and was out the door in less than a minute. As I drove, careful not to speed, though my foot seemed to feel the need for speed, requiring me to check the speedometer often. I reached my parents' house in about ten minutes, about five or six minutes faster than usual, and parked my car at the curb. As I got out, I felt a wave of vertigo settle over me, and I had to hold onto the side of the car to keep from falling over. Once it passed, I looked up at the house with a sense of astonishment and unreality. This could not be the house I grew up in, that my parents inhabited; this house was abandoned, and seemingly for a very long time.

I stared at it, the faded, peeling paint, the siding broken and dented, the boarded over windows, the boards sprayed with graffiti, the rocking chair gone, it was as if nobody had lived there for years. I walked on legs that felt wooden, up to the porch steps and onto the porch, which yielded slightly under my weight, the wood rotting away. The door was covered in more plywood, and the words CONDEMNED stenciled onto it with red paint. I was hesitant to touch the plywood, as if I feared it would not be real if I refused to acknowledge it as such. I went around to the side of the house, to the door to the basement. If there had been more plywood on this door, it had been removed. I could see the nail holes along the doorframe where it might have been. The door was locked, but it was a simple latch, easily solved with a card from my wallet. I slipped into the basement, assaulted by the smell of mold and must in the air. Some kids apparently used the basement as a hangout, same as I had as a kid, gaining access to an old abandoned house in the woods behind the house to get away from Micah and other kids who picked on me.

There were beer cans, a few empty bottles of lower-shelf whiskey and vodka, some blankets that I wouldn't so much as touch for fear of disease or insects, and spray paint all over the walls. The basement had been finished long ago, when I was a kid, with drywall and carpet. The carpet was all stained now with whatever fluids had been spilled on it, and the drywall had several holes in it. I headed up the stairs to the kitchen, which had fared similarly. The linoleum was faded, cracked, and peeling up, the cabinets missing their doors. Something unidentifiable was in the sink, which had been filled up to the brim. The appliances were all gone, no stove with bacon sizzling or eggs frying. I took out my phone, remembering my conversation with my mother, her promise of breakfast waiting for me. I checked my sent and received calls, and saw my outgoing call to my parents' phone number. The total time of the call was about four minutes. I redialed the number, and was promptly informed that the number I was trying to reach was no longer in service. I hung up my phone and put it back in my pocket.

I felt a splitting headache coming on from trying to make sense of all of this. If what I was seeing was real, and it certainly seemed like it, then not only had I made up a brother, but I had made up my mother and father, all in startlingly real detail. But how could this be even remotely possible? I walked into the living room, which was empty of furniture, but not more beer cans, a few empty, discarded condom wrappers, and a torn pair of pantyhose, up the stairs, one of which had rotted through, and to the room that had once been mine. It now bore no signs of me ever inhabiting it. My posters of rock bands that I liked, Primus, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, and several others were gone. My bed, dresser, and full length mirror were also gone, not even indents in the carpet remaining from when they had been there. I sat on the floor in the center of the room, my pulse racing with fear, wondering how much of my life here had even occurred, and how much had all been in my head.

No answers came to me, and I wasn't likely to gain much in the way of new perspective by staying in what felt more and more like a sarcophagus, a death chamber, a crypt, and the tomb of my childhood. So I got up, went back downstairs, careful not to step in the hole of the missing stair, and went out the way I had come in, locking the door behind me purely by habit. I got back in my car, vaguely aware of the fact that the sun was at the apex of its ascent in the sky. I had been there for more than six hours, though it had only seemed like twenty minutes or so. Of course, with everything else that had happened since yesterday, this was only one more little glitch. I started my car, put it in gear, and returned home. As I let myself into my apartment, feeling a little cleaner once I stepped across the threshold and out of the dim, I went over to my computer and logged in. I did a search for my mother and father, Vivian and Jacob Barnes, and clicked on the first of the results, but it had nothing to do with them. The second and third results also shed no light. But the fourth, the Trenton Gazette, turned up something on them in their archives, which they must've transferred onto their website. According to this article, both of my parents were dead, and had been since I was eight.

Vivian, 36, and Jacob, 42, were found dead in their home in 1989, which would've made me ten at the time, of carbon monoxide poisoning. As I, Gary Barnes, had been sleeping with my window open, I had survived. It mentioned that I had been made a ward of the state, as I had no other living relatives, and that was about it. Their funeral service, which was held at the Plentiful Oaks Funeral Home, was held a few days later, and their bodies were buried at the Shaded Glens Cemetery. As far as I was concerned, I had no memory of this ever happening. Instead, what I had were memories of growing up with my parents, birthdays, sitting around and watching movies, high school, where I joined the photography club and was awarded second place in a statewide photography contest, graduation, my mom and dad so proud of me as I walked across that stage in the auditorium and received my Diploma, dinner at the Foxtail, a pretty expensive restaurant, to celebrate, and every memory I had was clear and lucid, as any memories should be. How could all of these memories be false, a product of my mind?

I sat back in my desk chair, feeling lost and isolated as ever. I now had absolutely nobody to turn to, nobody to confide in or call on for help in what had become severely troubled times for me. But perhaps... if I could find the orphanage in which I'd been placed, perhaps there might be a few answers for me there. The article hadn't said, but the internet could tell me. I looked up orphanages in Trenton, and there were two of them. I called the first one, but the receptionist told me that their records in the computer didn't go back that far. She said she would have someone check the files in their storage, and I gave her my phone number to contact me. The second one was in the process of transferring all their old files into their computer. The woman asked me my name, date of birth, and social security number, and then she put me on hold for a few minutes.

"Mr. Barnes," she said when she came back, "Yes, we're into the F's right now, so you're already in our computer. Barnes, Gary H., born November 2, 1979. You came here in 1989 after your parents' deaths, and you were here until you reached 18."

"Is there any other information about me in there?" I asked.

"Umm, yes," she responded, "There are a few checkup results in here, four or five notes of... altercations with other boys, and a psychiatric report that was done shortly after you arrived here. It says here that you showed signs of denial of your parents' deaths, you tended to disassociate yourself from reality, and that you were obsessed with photography. You came here with a camera, and you took pictures of just about everything you could. Any attempts to take your camera were met with hysterics. The psychiatrist believes that you didn't see reality as the truth, that this reality was the lie, and, in what you believed to be reality, you still lived with your parents and an older brother. You were withdrawn, unwilling to participate or play with others, and, except for your photography, you isolated yourself as much as possible."

After the receptionist there had finished reading all the contents of my file, I thanked her and hung up. For a while, all I could do is sit there and think. If what I had been told was the truth, then everything I had experienced with my parents and Micah were false, created by my young, troubled mind to deal with the tragedy of my parents' death, some kind of coping mechanism. Disassociation from a harsh reality, a fantasy of happiness to help me block out the pain, this fantasy was much more preferable to having to live, parentless, in an orphanage for eight years, and then another eight years after that. And then, I guessed, this fantasy life of mine could no longer be sustained. What had happened, I wondered, that had caused the true reality of my life to invade my fantasy and shatter it before my eyes? Perhaps it was someone I knew from the orphanage, or at least recognized, or some other such evidence that I could no longer incorporate into my fantasy. I didn't know what it had been, but I wished fervently that I had never come across it, so then my parents and nonexistent brother would still be alive and well. This true reality, I decided, looked bleak.

I gradually came to realize why everything around me, everything outside of this apartment had been dim. In my apartment, it was easier to maintain my own version of reality, my fantasy life. Out there, reality was persistent, insistent, and my mind was doing its best to block it out, and, as a result, my mind was attempting to resist letting me see the world as it truly was. But, unfortunately, I could no longer pretend. I knew the truth, the horrible, heart-wrenching truth. The fantasy was over.

Article in the Trenton Gazette:

Photographer, Gary Barnes, was pronounced dead this morning from what appears to be a suicide. Police, responding to a 911 call made by a neighbor, arrived to find that Gary Barnes had rigged a garden hose from the exhaust pipe of his car to the driver's side window. The engine of his car was still running when police officers arrived.

"He was pretty quiet," a neighbor who asked not to be identified told our reporter, "We never really spoke except to say hello. But I never thought he might be suicidal."

Gary Barnes has no living relatives, his parents both deceased.

"It's always a shame," said Sergeant Matthews, one of the responding police officers, "Any time someone decides that suicide is preferable to living, it's just a shame."