[NOTE: This scene may never end.]

“Oh,” Aaron said, and laughed. “Sorry, I went off on a tangent there.”

“It’s okay. This situation seems to lend itself to philosophical tangents.”

“Yes, it certainly does. Where was I?”

“You were becoming fast friends with pastor Jim. And I’ll guess that Nils was about to enter the picture.”

“Yes, that’s right. That was very strange. One day Jim calls me in a panic. He says some kid had showed up at his door calling him ‘Dad’ and making all kinds of strange demands. I ask Jim what kind of demands and he says, ‘Like I’ll have to stop pushing him into the ministry.’ Jim says he’s been going round and round with the kid and he doesn’t know what to do. ‘Maybe you can talk to him,’ Jim says. ‘He’s closer to your age. And he asked for you.’

“So I rush over to Jim’s house and there’s this kid on the couch. When the kid sees me he jumps up and runs over to me shouting, ‘Tell him, Aaron. Tell him who I am!’

“So I say, ‘Okay. But first tell me who you are.’”

“The kid stops yelling and goes white as a ghost. He looks back and forth from me to Jim a few times, as if we are pulling some kind of cruel prank on him. Then he runs out the door. We didn’t see him again for days. Not until Sunday when he came to the late service.”

Foley studied Aaron’s face for signs of deceit. He saw none. And so far Aaron’s story fit what Foley would expect, what he imagined it would be like for someone in the pastor’s situation.

Foley said, “What did you do after the kid left?”

“It took me an hour to calm Jim down. The kid really shook him up. He said the kid had told him things that a stranger wouldn’t know. Like stories about Jim from when he was a kid.

“Like this one. One day when Jim was eight years old he found a litter of newborn puppies in a ditch. It was the middle of winter and there was ice all over the roads. Jim touched one of the puppies and it was cold. He touched the others. Seven of the puppies were dead, but one of them moved a little bit when he touched it. He took that one home and tried to nurse it back to health. He kept it in a blanket in shoebox and fed it warm milk with an eyedropper. But three days later the puppy died. Jim hadn’t thought about that puppy in maybe twenty years. And here was this kid telling him about every detail–the number of puppies, the milk from the eyedropper, everything. It freaked him out.”

Foley said, “Your family must be going through something similar right now. Jeremy’s return must be bizarre and awful for your mother and Gil and…” Foley stopped, unsure which name to say after all of the confusion of the past two days.

“And Deena,” Aaron said.

Deena! There it was, the slip that Foley had been waiting for. He called his sister Deena. Was there an explanation? Had Aaron heard her name from Gil or Jeremy? Foley decided to probe a little harder.

Aaron was still talking. “… I know they’ve had time to work through my running away, but still they don’t need to be stirred up even more right now.”

Foley said, “I regret that my visit may have stirred them up even more. Gil seemed quite upset, although Deena– Is it Deena or Nadine? Gil called her Nadine, but she insisted on Deena.”

“Deena is a nickname. Her real name is Nadine, but–” Aaron’s cheeks whitened slightly and he appeared to hold his breath. He looked at Foley and narrowed his eyes.

“But?”

Aaron took a sip of soda from his bottle. “But, uh, Gil couldn’t pronounce Nadine, so he called her Deena. We all liked Deena better than Nadine. All except Mom, that is. Every time we said ‘Deena’ in her earshot, she would ‘correct’ us.”

“Ah,” Foley said. He had the confirmation he needed. Aaron was lying about Deena. Foley didn’t know what that meant, but he knew Aaron was trying to deceive him.

But Foley didn’t want to push further and tip his own hand. “I guess Gil is taking your mother’s side now.”

Aaron took a bite of tuna salad.

Foley said, “You said Nils is your right hand man now. After that initial confusion, how did that come about?”

“The Sunday after he showed up at Jim’s house with his crazy story, he came to Sunday service. At the end of the service he ran outside. I went out to look, and he was shaking each person’s hand, calling them by name, and looking them in the eye. I asked him what he was doing. He said that he knew every one of these people by name. He had known them all his life. ‘One of them will recognize me,’ he said. ‘One of them has to recognize me.’

“I stood off to the side and watched as person came out of the church, shook the kid’s extended hand, and walked away glancing over their shoulder wondering what that had been about.”

Foley said, “That must have been awful for him.”

“You know Jeremy’s thing with the newspaper? That’s what this was like for Nils. As each person shook his hand and walked away in confusion, Nils watched another piece of his reality, of his identity, fall away.

“When the last person left the service, Nils went to the door and looked inside. He stood there for a long time, then came over near me, sat down on the grass, wrapped his arms around his knees, put his head down, and cried. He was so quiet, and he tried to keep from shaking, but you could see he was crying.

“As I watched him, first shaking hands with all of those people, then crying so quietly on the lawn, I found myself crying, too. I don’t know why. I couldn’t figure out what was up with him. I mean, was he crazy? Or a scam artist? Neither one of those seemed to fit. He just seemed so sincere. It was awful to watch. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for him.”

Foley said, “I can imagine.”

“Well, you have more empathy than I do, then, Mister Foley.” Aaron took another sip of his soda. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? There are some things that have puzzled me, and with me talking so much I haven’t been able to eat my lunch. Do you mind?”

Foley looked at his plate, which was empty. “No, go ahead.”

“Why did you go to the police station that night?”

Foley had to take care how he answered. “I didn’t think they would understand Jeremy’s story.”

“And you would?”

“Well, not exactly.” How could he say this without giving himself away? He would have to stick what Aaron already knew. Aaron already knew that Foley remembered Jeremy–or at least evidence of who Jeremy was and who his family was–from before Jeremy was Forgotten.

Foley cleared his throat and continued. “But I knew that at least part of his story was true. A year earlier I had talked to his mother. Your mother. At that time she had been in great pain over Jeremy running away. So I knew that he was Natalie Crowther’s son.

“Then I saw the way he was acting toward that boy who was beating him up at the school. I later learned that the boy was Gil Crowther, but at the time I didn’t know that. I knew only that Jeremy seemed to believe that this boy who was beating him up was his brother. He seemed to believe it with every bone in his bruised and bleeding body.”

Aaron said, “The way I saw something in Nils.”

“I suspect so, yes.”

“But there was something else, wasn’t there?” Aaron picked up a leaf of lettuce and bit off a piece.

“Yes,” Foley said. How far could he go? How much of the truth could he admit and still keep his secret from Aaron? “Do you remember that missing person poster of Jeremy, the poster I mentioned just before you so rudely hung up on me?”

Aaron laughed. “I’ll be apologizing for that forever. Yes, I remember. It’s why I invited you here.”

“Well, the day after I took that poster down off the telephone pole and brought it into my home, it changed.”

Aaron put his fork down and sat up, looking at Foley with what Foley believed was genuine curiosity. “Changed? In what way?”

“It was no longer a poster of Jeremy Crowther. It was now a poster depicting and describing another missing boy. A boy named Paul Quinn.”

“Mister Foley, that is remarkable.”

Foley laughed. “Yes, well at the time I thought it was a damned sight more than merely remarkable. I flipped it over about thirty times, trying to see if I were simply looking at the back side of the poster about Jeremy. I ran outside, nearly forgetting to put on pants, to check the other posters still onthe telephone poles. All Paul Quinn. I searched my house five times. I went through every paper in my filing cabinets, every book on my shelves, every drawer and cabinet, looking for the original poster, the one of Jeremy. Nothing. Finally I called Natalie and asked her what I’m sure was an incoherent question or two about her missing son Jeremy. She assured me that she had no idea what I was talking about.”

“What is remarkable, Mister Foley, is that you remember the poster from before Jeremy was forgotten.”

“I’ll take your word for that. But you asked why I was so interested in Jeremy. It’s because something extraordinary happened that day a year ago. A poster of a missing boy somehow became a poster of a different missing boy. And a mother of a missing boy named Jeremy Crowther swears that she has no such son.

“No, Aaron, that’s more than remarkable. Remarkable is the story you told me about Nils, about a young man who appears and claims to be a person that neither you nor his own father knows to exist.

“Now imagine waking up to find that a missing person poster has inexplicably transformed from one boy to another overnight as it sat on your coffee table. Then imagine having a conversation with a grieving mother about her missing son on one day, then having another conversation with the same mother on the next day, and finding that in the twenty four hours between those two conversations she has forgotten that she ever had such a son.

“No, Mister Crowther, that goes way beyond remarkable, and deep into the territory of the utter and unqualified mind fuck.”