Chapter 4: The Purge
The light was wrong.
That was Robert’s first thought as consciousness seeped back in. It was too clean, too sharp, cutting across his pillow in a straight, dust-moted line. His sheets smelled like the air after a thunderstorm—crisp, oddly chemical, but clean. He blinked at them. Since when were they blue? He was certain they’d been a dull grey yesterday, the color of old smoke.
A deep, thudding headache announced itself behind his eyes, a familiar drummer keeping a beat of absence. The craving was there, too, a physical hollowing behind his ribs, a twitch in his fingers. But it was quieter today, muffled under this strange, clean-smelling blanket.
He pushed himself up. The room came into focus slowly, like a camera lens grinding into place.
Everything was different.
The layer of dust that had perpetually coated every surface was gone. The stacks of magazines and scripts were now neat, squared-off piles against the wall. The postcards and torn ticket stubs that had been scattered across the dresser were arranged in a haphazard collage. The whiskey bottle was absent from the nightstand. In its place sat a glass of water, perspiring in the morning light.
Silence. A thick, heavy silence he wasn’t used to, devoid of the late-night hum of a television left on or the restless shuffling of his own feet.
He swung his legs out of bed, his bare feet hitting a floor that felt sticky with recent washing. Padding into the living room, he stopped dead.
The chaos had been organized into submission. Records were alphabetized in the crate. Books stood soldier-straight on the shelves. The windows, usually clouded with a film of city grime, were clear, letting in a punishingly bright Los Angeles morning that illuminated every remaining flaw. And on the couch, curled into a tight ball under a throw blanket he didn’t recognize, was Elle.
She was asleep, one arm dangling off the side, fingers still loosely curled around the handle of a feather duster like it was a fallen sword. Her vibrant purple hair was a shock of color against the beige fabric. Her face, usually sharp with skepticism, was soft in sleep, but even then, it wasn’t peaceful. A streak of black eyeliner was smudged down one cheek, giving her the look of a weary warrior who had fought the good fight against grime and lost only to exhaustion.
He stared at her. The hollow feeling behind his ribs shifted, became something else.
A floorboard creaked under his foot.
Her eyes flew open. Immediate, full consciousness. No groggy blur. She looked at him, at the duster in her hand, and let go of it as if it were electrified. It clattered to the floor.
“You’re alive,” she said, her voice raspy with sleep. She pushed herself upright, wincing.
“Debatable,” he said, his own voice a dry croak. “What did you do to my apartment? Did you hire a tiny, obsessive army while I was out?”
“You were out for fourteen hours,” she said, stretching her neck. A joint popped. “I got bored. And then I got anxious. Cleaning is a… coping mechanism. From my time. We have robots for it, but the principle is the same.”
“Coping with what? The traumatic sight of my decor?”
“With the fact that I’m stuck in 1995 with a man whose most cherished possession was a bag of blow.” She looked around, a flicker of satisfaction crossing her face. “It’s not clean. It’s just… less likely to give you tetanus.”
He ran a hand through his hair, his gaze drifting past her to the kitchen counter. The pack of cigarettes she’d taken was there, unopened. Next to it sat a bowl of brown, mushy something. “What is that?”
“Oatmeal. Or it was. It’s… cement now. I was going to be nurturing. It backfired.” She stood up, folding the blanket with a military precision that felt both alien and deeply impressive. “How do you feel?”
“Like someone replaced my blood with sand and my brain with static.” He could feel his hands wanting to shake. He shoved them into the pockets of his sweatpants. “The phone call. Last night. It was my agent. They want me in New Mexico a week early. For ‘pre-production bonding.’ Which is code for them wanting to keep an eye on me.”
Elle nodded slowly. “When?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
The number hung in the air between them. Forty-eight hours. The static in his brain got louder. He walked to the window, looking out at the sun-washed street. The craving sharpened, a needle-point of pure need targeting the center of his skull. He knew a guy. He knew several guys. A call, a drive, ten minutes of numbness.
“I can hear you thinking,” Elle said softly from behind him.
“It’s loud in here,” he muttered.
“I bet.” She moved into the kitchen. He heard the clatter of the hardened oatmeal being scraped into the trash, the run of the faucet. “So we need a plan for today. And tomorrow. A distracting, exhausting, utterly consuming plan.”
“’We’?” He turned to look at her. She was scrubbing the bowl with a ferocity it didn’t deserve.
“Unless you have a better one.”
He didn’t. The silence stretched. The static screamed.
“Okay,” he said, the word feeling pulled from somewhere deep and rusty. “What’s the plan?”
“First, real food. Something that doesn’t turn into building material.” She opened his refrigerator, peered into its barren expanse. “We have… a jar of pickles, something green in a Tupperware that might have been guacamole once, and a six-pack of beer.”
“Breakfast of champions.”
“Right.” She closed the fridge. “We’re going out.”
The word sent a jolt of panic through him. Out. Where people were. Where they could see the sweat on his brow, the tremor in his hands. “I don’t know…”
“You’re an actor. Act.” She walked over to him, her expression softening from its earlier determined intensity. “Look, you just have to get through the next ten minutes. Then the ten after that. We’ll take it in ten-minute intervals. Deal?”
He studied her face—the smudged makeup, the piercing in her eyebrow, the utterly serious, sleep-deprived concern in her eyes. She was a stranger. A bizarre, anachronistic angel of cleanliness who had marched into his chaos and started folding it into squares.
“Deal,” he heard himself say.
The diner was a stark, fluorescent-lit slice of the real world. The air smelled of fried eggs, coffee, and pine-scented disinfectant. Robert kept his head down, but a few glances lingered, followed by whispered recognition. Elle watched him shrink into the booth, folding in on himself like he wanted to disappear into the cracked vinyl.
A waitress with a name tag that read “Darlene” and endless patience took their order. Elle asked for eggs, toast, bacon, hash browns. Robert ordered black coffee.
“And for you, honey?” Darlene asked him, her pen poised.
“Just the coffee.”
“He’ll have the same as me,” Elle said, giving Darlene a smile that brooked no argument. “And a large orange juice.”
When the food came, Robert stared at the plate as if it were a complex puzzle. Elle ate with a methodical focus. “Eat,” she said, not looking up. “Protein. Sugar. It’ll help.”
He picked up a piece of bacon, took a bite. It tasted like ash and salt. He forced it down. The orange juice was violently sweet, a shock to his system that made his teeth ache.
“So,” Elle said, chasing a hash brown around her plate. “Tell me about this movie. The one in New Mexico.”
He shrugged, staring into his coffee. “It’s a crime thing. I’m the… charismatic, troubled friend of the lead. I get shot in the third act.”
“Spoilers.”
“It’s not the twist. The twist is I agreed to do it.” He took a gulp of coffee, wincing at the heat. “They’re shooting in Santa Fe. Middle of nowhere. Nothing to do but work and… think.”
“Sounds awful,” Elle said, deadpan.
A faint, real smile touched his lips. “Yeah.”
“You’re good,” she said, putting her fork down. “I’ve seen… well, let’s say I know your work. You’re good. You just have to show up and be that guy. The one who isn’t trying to escape his own skin for five minutes.”
He looked at her, his eyes finally meeting hers. They were dark, bloodshot, but focused. “Why are you doing this?”
She leaned back, considering. The diner hummed around them. “I told you. I need a project.”
“Bullshit.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Because when you looked at me in that alley,” she said slowly, “you didn’t see a problem, or a freak, or a story. You just saw a person who needed help. And you stepped in front of a car. Dumb as hell, but… real. I haven’t seen ‘real’ in a long time. I’m just returning the favor.”
He held her gaze, the noise of the diner fading to a buzz. The static in his head dimmed, just a little.
Back at the apartment, the quiet felt less oppressive. Elle commandeered his record player, putting on something he didn’t recognize—a driving, electronic pulse from some future she wouldn’t explain. She blasted it. “For the noise in your head,” she yelled over the beat.
They played cards. Gin rummy, sitting on the clean floor. His hands shook so badly he dropped his cards twice. She pretended not to notice. He lost every game.
He tried to read a script. The words swam on the page. He threw it across the room in a sudden burst of frustrated anger. Elle calmly walked over, picked it up, and placed it back on the table. “Ten-minute intervals,” she reminded him.
As afternoon bled into evening, the physicality of the need became a trembling, sweating beast. He paced. He couldn’t sit still. His skin felt too tight, crawling with invisible insects.
“I can’t do this,” he muttered, clutching the back of a chair, his knuckles white.
“Yes, you can.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like inside me right now.”
“Probably not.” She stood up from the couch. “Come on. Put your shoes on.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. We’re going for a walk. A long one.”
They walked for miles, through streets growing dim in the twilight, past houses with glowing windows, down into canyons where the only sound was their footsteps and the distant rush of traffic. He walked until his muscles burned, until the shaking was from exhaustion and not need. She matched him step for step, a silent, steadfast shadow.
When they finally stumbled back through the apartment door, it was deep night. He was drenched in sweat, hollowed out, but the screaming static had been walked into a dull whisper.
He collapsed onto the freshly vacuumed carpet, staring at the ceiling. Elle sank down beside him, breathing hard.
“Tomorrow,” he said, his voice raw. “They’re sending a car. To take me to the airport. A chaperone.”
Elle turned her head to look at him. “Okay.”
“I want you to come with me.”
The words hung there, simple and immense.
She blinked. “To New Mexico.”
“For the pre-production bonding. Or just… for the ten-minute intervals.” He propped himself up on an elbow, looking at her. The vulnerability in his face was stripped bare, terrifying. “I don’t think I can do it alone.”
Elle looked back at the ceiling, at the clean, blank expanse of it. She thought of 2026, of its polished surfaces and profound disconnection. She thought of a bloodstained script and a flushed baggie and a man who, when not trying to escape his skin, had kind eyes.
“What would I even be?” she asked quietly. “Your assistant? Your… sober companion from the future?”
“My friend,” he said, the word tentative, fragile. “You could just be my friend.”
The record had ended long ago. The only sound was their breathing, slowly syncing in the dark.
“Okay,” she said.
Just that.
A single, solid word in the vast, quiet space of the clean, strange room. He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, lying back down. They stayed like that for a long time, two exhausted survivors on a carpeted shore, staring at the ceiling and the impossible, ten-minute future that stretched out before them.