Infinity: A Jenlisa AU

Chapter 6

Night has dropped and Jennie is standing outside a three-story hotel with bars on the windows and an obnoxiously large sign above the entrance: HOTEL ROYALE

She step inside and checked in to the cheapest room she can have. Then, Jennie goes to the door and check the deadbolt and hook the chain. She kick off her shoes, strip down, and cleans herself. 

In the bedside table drawer, Jennie finds a Holy Bible and a Seoul Metro phone book.

Stretching out across the old fashioned bed, Jennie thumbs to the M's and begin searching for her last name. She found various surnames but only got to five results for Manoban and the only one she knows is her wife's. 

Jennie tried her best to stop from dialing the phone number and instead, chose to locate her maiden name.

Jennie Kim.

Correct address.

Correct number.

Jennie lifted the phone receiver off the bedside table and calls her landline. It rings three times, and then she hears her voice: "Hi, you've reached Jennie, well, except not really, because I'm not actually here to take your call. This is a recording. You know what to do." The voice hang up before the beep.

That isn't their home voicemail message.

Jennie felt insanity coming for her again, threatening to curl her up fetal and shatter her into a million pieces. But she shuts it down, returning to her new mantra: I am not allowed to think I'm crazy. I am only allowed to solve this problem.

Experimental physics—hell, all of science—is about solving problems. However, you can't solve them all at once. There's always a larger, overarching question—the big target. But if you obsess on the sheer enormity of it, you lose focus.

The key is to start small. Focus on solving problems you can answer. Build some dry ground to stand on. And after you've put in the work, and if you're lucky, the mystery of the overarching question becomes knowable. Like stepping slowly back from a photo montage to witness the ultimate image revealing itself.

Jennie have to separate herself from the fear, the paranoia, the terror, and simply attack this problem as if she were in a lab—one small question at a time and the overarching question that plagues her in this moment: What has happened to me? 

There's no way to answer that. Not yet. Jennie has vague suspicions of course, but suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesn't lead to truth.

1. Why weren't Lisa at our house last night? 

2. Why did it seem as though I live alone?

No, that's still too big, too complex. Narrow the field of data.

Where is Lisa?

Jennie holds her ring finger up to the neon light coming in through the window. The mark of her wedding band is gone. Was it ever there?

She tear off a piece of loose thread from the curtain and tie it around her ring finger as a physical link to the world and the life she knows. Then she returns to the phone book and thumb through to the M's, stopping at the only entry for Lalisa Manoban. 

Jennie rips out the entire page and dials her wife's number; The familiarity of Lisa's voice on the recording moves Jennie, even while the message itself leaves her deeply unsettled.

"You've reached Lisa. I'm away dancing. Leave a message. Ey."

Lisa's address is in Seoul and Jennie's down to $75 and change, so she could hail a cab, but she felt like walking.