Eight: On the street, as our bewildered hero blinks in the sun, a roving reporter with a live feed:

“You’re an educated man, mister Set—”

“Set Zero was, at least, yes. I like to think that I am being a good steward of his talents.”

“That’s a good place to start. In the frequent interviews given in your ninth life, after your goal of eliminating your backups with inTrust was publicized, you made a clear distinction between yourself and the as-yet-inactive backups. Why is that?”

“You’ve caught me at a bad time, I’m afraid. I have just woken up and have a case of the cobwebs.”

“How do you react to the evidence that individuals who own at least five personal backups have on average a fifty percent higher life satisfaction rating than those with four or fewer?”

“May I have a moment to review my predecessor’s leavings? I’m afraid that I was given only the audio diary, and—”

“What did you leave for yourself, mister Set?”

“I would prefer to retain the rights to my predecessor’s intellectual property, for the time being.”

“Do you subscribe to the Original ideal?”

“I’m sorry, which?”

“How long can the public expect to wait for the completion of your quest?”

Set Eight, with a smile, “I’d quite like a cup of coffee.”

#

Seven: As a secondary, more idle curiosity Set wondered how many different ways he could die. So far he had suffocated himself inside a plastic bag and leapt from a moving train as it passed over a trestle. There were still a half-dozen dirt naps left to take before he satisfied his primary curiosity. If he could manage not to repeat his predecessors’ methods, then so much the better.

The only thing was, he might not know it if he did. Memories only flow in one direction and each backup could only remember up until the time of its creation. One could just as soon ask a river to gush uphill than expect Set to awaken each morning after death with any experience of life, or death, beyond the basic template, the state he had been in when he first backed up.

The backups were stored at various havens around the world, warehouses position so as to be optimally safe from flood, tsunami, eruption, and earthquake. Set Zero, an adjunct professor at a modest American college, had been able to afford eight such backups through his school’s insurance policy, with the option of stacking more if he so chose.

Set Seven could remember arriving at inTrust’s satellite office. He remembered checking in with the scowling young nurse who verified that he understood the risks and would not hold the company liable in the event of any disasters arising from his monumental vanity. He remembered the liquid diet they put him on for two days while the chips were inserted and the unique patterns of his brain were archived. After that, all he could remember was waking up that morning in a colorless apartment with a migraine, a craving for a cup of coffee, and a message from Set Zero playing like an unbroken daydream until he gave it his full attention.

Set Zero had had thirteen good years of life without dipping into his stock of selves, apparently. In the message, he attempted to justify, to himself, his decision to tear through his backups, to live once again on the cusp of death. Set Seven smiled; Zero had awkward phrasing and a familiar crack in his voice. He must have really meant it. It was evident that Eight had gone along with the idea and a few minutes on the news feeds told him how, but not exactly why. It seemed Set was a bit of a celebrity; there was even an informal game underway to try and find his next backup before he did away with himself again.

Set was in no special hurry to die. He got dressed and strolled outside. “London,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I’ve always wanted to visit London.”

It was a lot like Seattle, only people spoke faster.

#

Six: “I thought I’d find you here. When I heard that your next was in Seattle—”

Set looked up. The stranger had long hair, expertly cut, and a coat of stubble so thin it looked to have been painted on. 

“I’m sorry,” said Set. “I know you, don’t I?”

The stranger took a step forward, edging onto Set’s horizon of comfort. “I was Zero’s friend. My name is Gunter.”

“It’s nice to see you again, Gunter,” said Set with a smile. Gunter hesitated a moment — and Set thought he looked like a man trying to come up with way to explain to the neighbor children that he just ran over their cat — then he shoved out a hand to be shaken. Set took it and gestured for Gunter to join him on the bench, which he did.

“Did I come here a lot?” asked Set.

“This is where we did our guard stint,” said Gunter. 

“I was in the guard?” asked Set. He turned and tried to face Gunter but a park bench is not an ideal place for a conversation. Gunter was staring out at Puget Sound and answered with a nod. “That doesn’t sound like me at all,” said Set. 

“You might have been drunk,” said Gunter. Then, “I’ve been reading a lot about you. You never struck me as a wasteful guy.”

“Is that what I’m doing? being wasteful?”

Gunter nodded. A seagull hopped over and pecked at his shoes. “Did you leave yourself a message?” he asked, kicking the gull away. 

“I fail to see how it’s wasteful,” said Set. “I’m an organ- and tissue-donor, after all.”

“You jumped fifteen storeys, the first time. There were no organs left.”

“Granted, but the gun left everything below the neck just fine, and asphyxiation doesn’t harm a thing. Well,” he added, “Apart from the obvious.” Gunter ought to have at least smiled.

Instead, he said, “I never liked your sense of humor.” Here came the push off down a racing slope. “I hated the way you talked down to my brother when we were in the guard, and I hated that I laughed about it with you afterward. I couldn’t stand it that night you tried to get him drunk, and it pisses me off that you don’t have the scar anymore. Hell, I even think you’re ugly.” He scowled and let the words fly out to sea with nothing there to echo back against.

The gull had returned and was pecking at Gunter’s shoe laces. He jerked, like a patient having his reflexes tested, and sent the bird hop-skipping away. Then he almost smiled. 

“I’m sorry,” said Set. “None of this means much to me.”

Gunter shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Why did you come back here?”

“This is where my body—”

“No, I mean right here.”

Set thought for a moment. “I don’t honestly know,” he said. 

Gunter stood up, showing Set his profile. He jammed his hands in his pockets and hunched as though expecting rain. “Why don’t you stop playing your life like a video game, yeah?” Then, “I know why you came back here. Your body wanted to go back to the scene of the crime. This is where you killed him. Remember?”

Set tried to protest as Gunter walked away, but “It’s a nice view,” was the strongest he could come up with.

“I’m notifying the police,” said Gunter over his shoulder. “Go to hell.”

#

Five: The librarian was an old man. His knuckles were large with arthritis; he smelled like pipe smoke and baby powder. Leaning close, he tapped the screen. “Right here’s the ones you want, son,” he said.

Set thanked him and apologized again for not knowing his way around the new reference system. The librarian shrugged and smiled and shuffled off to finish the morning chores that Set had interrupted.

The particulars may have changed, but the basics were the same. Set did a search on his name and sat back to read. Hours passed. His eyes started crawling with concentration spots. There had been plenty of mundane events in his life, citations by his employer, that sort of thing, but there was one article of more interest. It was dated two years previous and told of a murder on the quay for which there had been no arrest. The victim had been named Halt, and he had been active in Seattle’s gay community. He was survived by one brother. Set was quoted with a vague witness statement, saying he was close to the victim.

“When did I realize I was gay?” Set wondered aloud. The librarian ambled back over holding a hard-copy newspaper. Set looked him up and down, tried to find him attractive. Probably not my type, he thought.

“You made page three,” said the librarian, offering the paper. Set took it and read. One of his bodies had been found in a Peruvian drainage ditch, missing its head and liver.

“How many you got left, then?” asked the librarian. 

“Zero didn’t make a backup in Peru,” said Set.

#

Four: “Would you like anything?”

“Thank you, mister Set, but no. May I record your opinion of the Originals?”

“The original who? Isn’t there a band—”

“The phrase is used to denote individuals who claim an ideological stance in line with the One Life manifesto, published three years before your first death.”

Passing up the chance to make a snide remark. “I love a good manifesto. How does it read?”

“I don’t have permission to quote verbatim, mister Set, but I can inform you of the basics. The author desired to preserve original life. Many of the author’s philosophies originated in eighteenth-century aristocratic sensibilities, though such criticisms have gone unmet. Each human, the author argued, is allowed one life, and one life only. The merits of medical transplant procedures are espoused in an addendum.”

“Fascinating,” said Set.

“Thank you for your time, mister Set. I have won the tee-shirt.”

#

Three: A sunrise in Saskatchewan is instant, like a switch being thrown. There are no valleys or crevices for stalwart bands of night to hide in. Set had to shield his eyes. He had woken up at three in the morning, which seemed like an odd time for his predecessor to die. Periodically, he checked the news, but his death notice hadn’t hit, yet.

He was waiting for businesses to open so he could get a cup of coffee. It seemed like a very long wait. The small cell he had awoken in belonged to inTrust, and they would evict him after he felt he had full control of his functions. He had been furnished with feed access, a cot, in case he felt weak, and a window to help him remember where he was.

“So, I’m number three,” he said to himself. He let Zero’s daydream message play again and felt a shiver run up his back. There was something Zero hadn’t said, Set was certain, something he had hidden from his descendents. Set remembered back in grade school when his father hadn’t let him come home after classes, had him play in the yard while he and Set’s mother zipped back and forth in front of the living room window like ducks in shooting gallery. When they finally let him come inside, the air smelled like Lysol and there was something that looked like blood on the carpet.

And when he asked about his dog, Bones, they said he ran away.

Set wondered what had really happened, and if Zero had ever learned. On an impulse, he checked the feeds; his father had died four years ago. “Dropping like fruit out of season,” said Set. 

There was a knock at the door. When set didn’t immediately rise to answer it, there was a second, and then someone on the outside coughed and said, “It’s the police, mister Set. Open up.”

Faintly bemused, like when a student asks a tough question, Set opened the door. There were two officers, one with his gun drawn, and a detective. The detective looked as if he were a couple weeks past retirement. His badge was pinned on his lapel, identifying him as detective Hyssop. He saw Set read his badge, so he didn’t bother introducing himself.

“May we come in, mister Set?”

“Oh, well, it’s not my property, exactly, but please.” Set stepped aside. As they stepped in, the other officer holstered his gun, but didn’t snap the clasp. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you coffee,” said Set. 

Detective Hyssop smiled like lightning and coughed like distant thunder. “I have to ask if you are aware, through natural or artificial means, of the warrant issued for your arrest. Just in case,” he added to the officers. 

It sounded as if it needed a strong reply, but all Set came up with was, “No,” and a widening of the eyes. 

Detective Hyssop sighed and gestured to one of the officers. The officer removed a length of zip-tie from his pocket and stepped up to Set. “Put your wrists together, out in front, please.” Set did so. The sound the tie made was like corduroy pants.

“You’re under arrest,” said Hyssop, but he was cut off by his violent cough. He drew a misfolded handkerchief from his pocket and spit dark phlegm into it.

“That’s a nasty cough,” said Set.

“Call it habit,” said Hyssop. “You’re under arrest, and have been charged with the murder of Halt Greenaway of Seattle, Washington.”

“I didn’t do it,” said Set.

“There is significant evidence to the contrary, mister Set.”

“I didn’t do it, detective Hyssop—” he pronounced it incorrectly “—because I was just born. I’ve never set foot out of this room.”

Detective Hyssop sighed and leaned back against the wall. He rubbed his eyes as though tired and tried to suppress another cough. “Jonathan Set is charged with the murder of Halt Greenaway. Are you Jonathan Set?”

“That is my name.” Set wasn’t the type to stand up to authority, but he was feeling petulant as a newborn. He stiffened his back and tried to stare detective Hyssop down.

“You’re under arrest, mister Set. Do you understand?”

“What if my name were Lee Harvey Oswald, detective?”

The officers were settling into a stance that suggested they would be here for a while. They folded their arms over their chests and bent their knees slightly.

“Are you a religious man?” asked Hyssop. 

“No,” said Set.

“No, you wouldn’t be,” said Hyssop. “Got to tell you, I don’t think I’d be here if you were. You people are filling the earth right up with your carbon copies, and each copy means what? means that there’s that much more room for the soul to spread around in. Just my personal theory. But you keep dying, and you keep living, and you’re making heaven too fucking crowded.”

Set felt as if he had been called in front of the principal. “I didn’t do it,” he said.

They took him out to the car and stuck him in the back seat. Hyssop and one of the officers rode with him, the other officer following in an unmarked car. Set tried to order his thoughts, tried to uncover some hint within himself about what his predecessor’s may have done. It was hard to concentrate, because Hyssop kept coughing.

The officer turned and asked, “When you goin’ in?”

“Tomorrow,” said Hyssop, spitting. “Tomorrow. Lungs of a thirty year-old.”

“Nice,” said the officer. 

“Yeah.” Hyssop twisted around in his seat to peer at Set. “What do you think about that, son?”

“Congratulations,” said Set. 

Hyssop made a crooked grin and nodded as though he had scored a victory. “You know what you remind me of?” he asked. “My son had a cat when he was a boy. Stupidest damn thing I ever saw. Chewed on mouse traps. Stuck its claw in a wall socket. It was dumber’n the kid, I swear. Last straw was when it climbed up the tree out front. Tried for ten minutes to get it down, then I said, Screw it and left it up there. Made a noise like you wouldn’t believe. Too damn curious for its own good.”

They were driving into the sun. Even squinting, Set couldn’t see a thing. “I have faith,” he said, just because he knew that word would summon up a cough in Hyssop. “No idea what I’m going to see when I get to the top,” he went on. “But it has to be something worth seeing. I’m a very trustworthy man, and I’ve known some.” The sun disappeared behind a warehouse that looked as if it might house a space shuttle. Set could see inTrust’s logo, the daisy-chained stick figures holding hands, plastered on the side. “What are we doing here?” he asked.

The car stopped and Hyssop got out. “Welcome to your new home.” He chuckled. The officer opened Set’s door and helped him get out. As Set stood, he saw the officer’s holster, still unbuttoned. He didn’t say, You’re not the police; he guessed they knew already. He felt a flash of anger at his predecessors and seized onto it. The heat in his brain was quickly transformed into the warm gun in his hands. He broke away from the officer and tried to run. He tripped over his own feet and ended up on his back in the dust. The officer was running at him and Hyssop had turned to watch. 

Set fumbled the gun around, barrel toward his head, and put his thumb on the trigger. “Someone else’s problem,” he said. Let the cat get down on its own. One step at a time. That’s how you move mountains. As much as you can lift, one load at a time.

#

Two: Set listened to Zero’s message and then opened his eyes. He was lying down and there was a bare fluorescent tube crackling above him. He tried to raise a hand to shield his brow, by found he could not move either of his arms. His legs were similarly restrained. He craned his neck, felt the vertebrae pop, and looked down at himself. He was spread-eagled on a bed, nylon straps looped around his wrists and ankles. There was an indistinct shape near the door of the tiny room. Set could feel his pupils contract against the light.

“Welcome to earth, mister Set,” came a voice from the shape. Set blinked to bring the shape into focus. It was a middle-aged woman, slightly overweight, wire glasses on her nose, the pencil-pushing type. She was carrying a clipboard.

“Why am I tied down?” asked Set. 

“You’ve been belligerent,” said the woman. “I’m sorry.”

“I apologize,” said Set. “Did I hurt anyone?”

“No,” said the woman. She took a step forward and clutched the clipboard like a weapon. “I work for inTrust Corporation, and I wondered if you would be willing to take a look at a couple of forms.”

Set fumbled his tongue around in his mouth. It felt thick and fuzzy and in desperate need of coffee. “Is this the first time you have asked me?”

“No, sir,” said the woman with a rueful smile.

“What are they?” asked Set. The woman brought her clipboard over and positioned it in front of Set’s face. 

“How’s that?” she asked.

“Back a little,” said Set. The forms came into focus. Set read quickly. “Cloning authorization,” he said. Then, “This is backdated. Two years?” The woman said nothing. “What am I doing here?” asked Set.

“You’re a difficult man to get a hold of,” said the woman. “Like a greased pig.” She pulled the clipboard out of reach. “I’ve listened to your message,” she said. “It’s nothing; it’s not poetic or religious. I can’t understand why you’ve put seven bodies in the morgues, nor can my superiors.” She took off her classes and cleaned them, scowling at the grime. Her countenance lifted when she slid the frame back over her ears. “Now, I’m afraid, you’re going to have to be patient.”

“For what am I waiting?”

The woman looked as though she were about to leave without answering, but she paused on the threshold and said, “To be born again,” and Set could tell she had to cut the laughter out.

She left the lights on. Set tried tugging at his restraints, but there was no give to them. He listened to Zero’s message again, to the compelling conviction that he didn’t know his vocal chords could muster. 

One more left, he thought. They’ll probably have him under guard as well. I wish I could record a message for him. I’d say, Sorry I dumped this in your lap. Nothing I could do. Seemed the most appropriate action at the time. 

He debated trying to choke himself to death, trying to swallow his tongue, but it wouldn’t pull far enough back. He wondered if he could make himself vomit, but after a few minutes of flexing his stomach muscles all he had was heartburn.

He kind of wanted to laugh. They wanted his permission to make additional clones, to be farmed off as organ donors for those who didn’t want to spring on a backup, or who didn’t want to lose a few minor years of experience. 

A few minor years. He was reminded of the time he spent three years in college hot on the heels of a girl named Lace. He signed up for the classes she attended; he tried so hard to make her laugh that she actually did. She hated smoking, so he quit for a while. She liked going to church on Wednesday evenings, so he gave it a shot and quite liked the music. He knew, just knew, that a little perseverance would go a long way, and it ended up going five miles to the bar to pick her up one night after her ride bailed, and then six miles back to her apartment, twenty-three steps up to her room, and ten feet to her bed.

Set realized he was smiling. He pulled the corners of his mouth down; they were sore with effort. That wasn’t me, he said. That’s just context. I am Set Two, newborn. There was a convergence in the past, but it was like a myth, a story to enlighten purpose in the present.

He remembered Lace once saying, Faith is being sure of what is hoped for and certain of what remains unseen. That did the trick. He felt his throat clench and bile crept into his mouth. A flex and twist of the body and a whole wave sloshed up. He coughed and choked and some of it came out his nose. 

He held his breath as long as he could. 

#

One: The body had been shipped, upon receipt of payment, to an aluminum building in Peru where two surgeons with identical accents removed its unconscious brain, just in case, and then took his liver for an elderly economist who was too much in love with vodka. The surgeons had no outstanding requests for the other organs, so they dumped the body in an irrigation ditch where it floated into a field of hops and was spotted by the farmer’s son.

#

Zero: It was an explosion, a burst ill-aimed and wide. Seven bullets, four went into the bushes, three punched an Orion’s belt across Halt’s chest. He fell, twisting on his knees, his weight jerking front-to-back. He landed face-down on the cement and coughed. The gunman — he had a wispy mustache and couldn’t have been more than eighteen — took two running steps down the path, then stopped, slipped, came back for Halt’s wallet. He ripped out the twenty bucks in cash that was supposed to be for dinner and then ran off, not looking back, just like a coward.

Like a coward, thought Set, and crawled out of his hiding place. He had spotted Halt from a distance and had slowed, just because he liked to look at him. He had thin German features, and was trying to grow out his hair. Just as Set was about to raise an arm and holler, the young gun had slouched up to Halt, hand out, asking for a light. Halt had shaken his head. The kid’s hand came out again, this time with a folded twenty in it. Halt had smiled — wide German mouth could carry a smile a hundred yards — and again shaken his head. The kid’s hand disappeared and came out with the gun and Set had leapt into the bushes.

Like a coward, though Set, along the path of least resistance. He rushed to Halt’s side and wasn’t the first one there. “I’m a doctor,” he said, which had never quite been true. He got down on his knees and looked into Halt’s eyes. One was open, one was fluttering like a butterfly shot down by a child’s water toy.

The police came and took his statement and then he tried to sleep. Almost fifteen years in the same job, same city, same bed. It had never been comfortable. Apathy had left him tired and depressed, a parasite emotion. Set had realized this; he was a smart guy. Joining the guard for a couple weekends a month had been good for him. There, he had met Gunter and Halt and their beer nights became Set’s best memories for a time.

One night, after Gunter had passed out, Set and Halt sat on the bar’s front steps and talked about the goals of their lives. Halt wanted to be a painter, and Set wanted to stop being a teacher. Halt said, You can do anything you want, because your brain is so damn big. Set said, Oh yeah? Halt said, Absolutely. You have to trust a brain that big and beautiful. Set grinned and let his head fall under all that weight. Halt leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

There was a memorial service for Halt back in Spokane, where his folks lived. He had had no backups; he blew all his money on paint and canvas. Before boarding the train over the Cascades, Set went to inTrust’s Seattle offices and recorded the message for his descendents; they provided the service, but it wasn’t in high demand, since most of the deaths they dealt in were sudden.

“Aren’t you curious?” he said into the microphone. “I am. I have to do this, and I hope you’ll do it with me. There is no tang in this life without the risk of loss. I can not communicate in words what I hope you will understand. I have faith you will understand. Who knows?” He bit off a laugh. “It could be fun.” It wasn’t quite what he wanted to say. The recorder clicked off. “I’m sorry,” he added.

On the train, he had a beer in the dining car and then went back to one of the sleeping cars as they passed over the mountains. He forced the door open; the wheels threw up steam and locked. A bubble of questions and mild screams grew and burst and forced Set right on out. 

They were on a bridge. The chasm was deep and dark, like hell, but cold and fresh, like heaven.

It seemed poetic. It seemed fair.

It seemed easy.

It was two weeks before Pash got up the nerve to stage a proper escape. During that time, the old man had him pull weeds in a ratty garden, haul water from the nearby stream, and dig up rows and rows of potatoes, which he then had to clean and store in a damp, spider-crawled root cellar shoved into the side of a hill like a nose bone into a brain. Pash worked every day until his finger nails tore, knuckles cracked, and tongue thickened from lack of water. Then the old man would give him a drink and have him work some more. Pash felt his brain slowly falling behind his body, tired and listless in thought, which might explain why it took so long to come up with his first escape plan.

He was working in the garden, on his knees. Altoid sprawled at the theoretical boundary between garden and rough, panting through her nose, turning her head this way and that in the balmy sunlight. Pash’s plan was simple: run like hell as soon as the dog fell asleep. The garden was nestled some distance into the forest, close to the stream. The wide plain and the bluff were half a mile away, through thick unexplored brush.

Pash worked slowly, clearing the carrots from his reach, inching forward to a new section of the patch. He cast frequent glances at Altoid; the dog looked bored, blinking in the labored way that dogs have. Pash’s skin again was crawling with invisible filth; his hands were writhing under it. Perhaps it was the closeness of potential, but Pash felt that he could take no more of the work. Each time he plunged his hand into the soil, he froze a shudder of revulsion. Altoid watched.

Finally, she laid her head on her forepaws and closed her eyes completely, her nostrils flaring with each breath. Pash wiped his hands on his pants and waited to see if the dog would notice he had stopped his work. She sighed, her huge chest inflating to the width of Pash’s torso.

That was good enough for him. He set his eyes on his point of escape, on the city miles away through hills and trees and leaves. He scrambled to his feet and ran.

Altoid chuffed as dirt flung up by his shoes pelted her fur. She opened her eyes.

Pash reached the underbrush and flung up his hands to ward away branches, berating himself, as he did so, for not blazing a trail beforehand. Dew from the ground covering and devil’s clubs leapt into the air in front of his shoes. It wasn’t long before his lower legs were soaked. He tried to run as quietly as possible, pussy footing around brittle twigs and aiming to land on the balls of his feet. He was not a runner. He was a watcher, a guy who would go to cheer on Oasa at her track meets while cartoons unspooled across his eye. He tripped and fell head first into a trunk. He wrapped his arms around it, hugging it, shoving himself back to his feet with so much force that he feared either his spinal cord would slip and shatter or the tree would uproot. In this moment of scraping silence, he heard the three soft repetitive taps of a running four-legged beast. He shoved away from the tree, leaving a finger nail in a sap-filled crack.

He ran. His body dissolved into points of pain. One just right of the stomach, pulsing on each breath — it was better when he didn’t breathe so hard. One at the end of his torn finger; he couldn’t slow his blood to ease the throbbing. A constellation across each foot, the hundreds of bones unused to what he asked of them. One large nova from his sinuses, a bright flare that threatened to engulf his whole head. I have paid enough, he thought. This is debt free, right here, and then it was easier just to curse god with each breath in, the old man with each breath out.

He stumbled again, this time on a sudden clearing, as when you expect there to be another step on the ladder and there is not. He whipped his head left and right; he was standing in the middle of a road. It was old, the ruts paved over with a layer of dry pine needles. The road lay parallel to freedom, but Pash could hear Altoid’s never-gone bark closing behind him, so he picked a direction and tore away.

Altoid howled, which wasn’t the bad part — the bad part was that Edge returned the howl, and she sounded no more than a hundred yards away. Pash beat his feet against the road, cursing in and out. 

He rounded a bend and slid to a halt. It was a dead end, and blocked with a dump, a barricade of rusty metal. There were three red hulks, machinery that looked completely foreign to Pash, all boxy angles and heavy gauge iron that wouldn’t fly in a million years. They looked like nothing more than prisons to Pash; but, he though, prisons not only keep prisoners in, they keep other people out.

He ran to the nearest one. There was something that looked like a door. He gripped the handle with the tips of his fingers and tugged. Something creaked in the metal, and something snapped in his elbow, but the door popped open, not swinging, but rushing between closed and open without passing through the intervening points.

Altoid hit him in the back, then. He flung out his arms to stop his fall. One hit the top of the door and the jagged remains of the window that used to be housed within. Blood painted a diagonal across his hand and over his wrist. He fell beneath the weight of the albino bitch.

Goodbye, Oasa, he thought. No, goodbye everyone.

“Git, Altoid. Edge, stay.” The weight on Pash’s back rose, leaving behind one rotten breath. “You owe me, boy,” the old man said.

“I hurt— I—” Pash panted. Every point of pain expanded, consuming him in a ball that he pretended kept growing until it devoured the old man, the dogs, the swine, the frozen magic wilderness.

#

“Ten minutes. I’m impressed.” Pash opened his eyes. He tried to move them, but it hurt, and a simple shift in focus left a trail of blurred images behind, as though his eyes were frantic to send their signals, had been afraid they never would be able to again and now never wanted to stop their work. He pulled in a long breath. He was cold, and lying in a shaft of sunlight.

“What’d they breed out of you, boy,” said the old man. “You faint at a little blood and you stay fainted. My god. You keep an eye on that hand. It’s clean, but you start seein red trails, you tell me. Don’t want you dropping dead before you done paid your debt. So, you start seein red—”

Pash nodded. His eyes felt coated in heat, like early tears, but no wetness. They took in how brittle the old man was, inflated with his shirts and hide coat, and how easy to break.

Edge and Altoid were there, licking themselves with that complacent air that comes from the confidence that the spirit of the hunt can be summoned any moment, and will take no more than a moment to arrive. 

The old man nodded at his dogs. “I’d like to stop em sometimes, but I can’t. You understand that, boy? I want to, but I can’t. Not when they really want it. So don’t test em. They like you, but don’t test em.” The old man slouched down the road, shaking his head at uneven intervals, and, once, laughing abruptly.

Pash lay in the sun, pillowed on his right hand, the fingers of which crawled to his ear lobe and gave it an habitual tug with no result. It took almost an hour, and a centipede’s tickling walk across his thigh, to get him on his feet.

#

The passage of time was marked for Pash by escape attempts. He had no way of keeping time equidistant between them, so it became a sort of calendar of significance. He could assign vague notions of time to each interval — it was quite a while between the rusty car and the long day spent hiding in the root cellar. It was not very long between the root cellar and the cold mad dash down the stream. 

He didn’t make so many as the weather turned bad, not because he was getting tired, but because he couldn’t run very far in the snow. Pash had never seen snow before. He had seen ash, from time to time during school cookouts and such, and more recently when he had to clean it from the old man’s stove every third day, so his first impression of the change in the weather was that the end of the world had come, that pure ash and cinders were raining from sky.

The old man laughed when he heard this.

Winter was hard; Pash had never known such cold in his life. He spent the majority of his daylight hours chopping wood, which kept him almost warm, so that he could burn it at night, which kept both him and the old man warm, though Pash had to wake up every hour to refuel the stove. They ate venison the old man had shot with his rifle. It didn’t take long to become sick of salt venison.

When the days reached their briefest, the old man had a surprise. He took a bucket packed hard with snow and disappeared into the cabin while Pash split and stacked rounds on a tarpaulin. In an hour or so, the old man beckoned Pash inside for a break. There, he gave Pash a bowl of the snow and a spoon, and said, “Dig in.” Pash stared at his reflection in the concave face of the spoon. “Well, come on,” said the old man. Pash dug a trench in the snow and took a bite.

The stuff tasted like old sugar, a little dusty, but cool on his throat. He smiled. The old man grinned back and dove into his own bowl. 

Pash finished what he had been given and set the bowl on the floor. He got up and went to the door, turning back to look at the old man. The old man was chewing slowly, staring at the wall. “Never tasted anything like it, I’ll bet,” he said. “No sir. It’s my own concoction,” taking another bite. “Won’t find this in your city.”

Pash opened the door and went out.

#

Spring followed. If Pash could have looked at himself, he would have seen a profound change since the previous summer. His arms were thicker and he could hold them still if he wanted to. His hair had grown down to his shoulders; he dipped it in the stream when it felt too greasy, but even so it lay on his neck in loose filthy curls. His clothes had been torn and left unmended and didn’t fit right anymore.

He had long since ceased trying to talk to the old man, and he didn’t think the old man minded.

With spring came time to plant the garden. Pash, using his hands for a trowel, dug clean rows for the carrots and potatoes. Altoid watched, grinning. Pash grabbed a handful of seeds from a plastic bag the old man had given him and squat-walked down the trench, sifting the seeds through his fingers and into the soil. By the end of the row, his knees were wailing for a break, so he stood and stretched them. Altoid grumbled.

“It’s okay, girl,” said the old man’s voice. Pash turned in the middle of a yawn, met the old man’s eyes, then finished it. “You’re puttin too many in,” said the old man. “You’ll just have to thin em out again.”

“Gives me something to do, yeh,” said Pash.

The old man shrugged weakly, his shoulders compressed by the weight of his two shirts and his long coat. He strolled over to a rotten stump and sat, letting his legs loll apart, bracing his hands on his knees as though he intended to hold the position for a while. When he didn’t offer any more criticism, Pash returned to the bag of seeds, dipped another handful, and started his squat-walk down another row.

“Beautiful day, ain’t it,” said the old man. “Sun shinin, trees doin their thing.” Altoid yawned. Pash waddled down the row. “Smell that air,” said the old man. Pash couldn’t help it. He could smell the air, the soil, the sweat from his arm pits, the stink of human grease built up over weeks, which was a smell he could not get used to, could not accept and let fade into the background of the senses.

“Yeh,” he said. He worked in silence; he could sense the old man’s discomfort, a pressure of unspoken words.

Finally, the old man said, “Doin good. Keep it up.”

“Yeh,” said Pash.

#

“It’s time,” the old man said. The first buzz of summer was in the air. Pash no longer had to keep the stove burning through the night and had taken to sleeping rather heavily. The old man repeated himself a couple of times, and then kicked Pash lightly in the head. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s do it right this time, yeh?”

The old man waited with his hands in his coat pockets while Pash levered himself to his feet. 

“What are you gonna do after,” said Pash. 

The old man shrugged. “Get the tools,” he said. Pash went to the cubby hole behind the stairs and retrieved the felt roll of butcher blades. 

The old man led the way to the pen. There was a new feature, an inverted wooden L, like the arm of a gallows. A chain dangled from its end over the pen. The hog was sniffing at the end as it shifted in the light wind.

“Do it right,” said the old man. He had Pash unroll the tools and selected a long thin knife. He climbed over the fence and beckoned Pash to follow. “Quiet, now,” said the old man. “Adrenaline makes em taste like shit.” Together they approached the hog, sticking in the mud and scraping over clumps of tough inedible grass. Pash hadn’t yet crossed completely into wakefulness. He felt the breeze, as though in a dream, lifting his skin and cooling him off underneath. He watched the sun’s reflection on the old man’s knife as it bobbed and traced illegible words on his retina. 

“Where are the dogs,” he said.

“Tied em up,” said the old man. “They spook the hog.”

Pash nodded and watched the knife, burned heart shapes in bright green which he saw during every blink. 

The old man stopped and held the knife out to him. “Reckon you could do it.”

Pash looked to the hog and beyond to the bluff. A hawk circled in the sky a decreasing spiral centered on a lone tree. It landed, shaking a branch, too gently for a killer.

Pash shook his head. “I’m a pacifist.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll pass a fist right through ya.”

The old man laughed and spit and nothing more needed saying.

#

When the hog was butchered, Pash went down to the stream to wash off what he could of the blood. He didn’t notice the old man come up behind him.

“Know what day it is,” the old man said.

“No,” Pash replied, digging at his finger nails.

“You done quite a bit of good, boy. Kept us alive.”

“No,” said Pash.

“It’s been a year and a day since you and your friend killed my sow, vandalized my property.” The old man leaned back on his heels and sighed outward. Pash stood up and faced him. 

“So,” said Pash.

“So you paid your debt. I won’t stop you leaving.”

“The dogs—”

“Still tied up.”

Pash wiped droplets of water from his chin. He stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it to dislodge a bung of wax. He tugged his ear lobe. He was singing a song in his head, a song he hadn’t heard for a year and a day; it was popular during the last days of school. The teachers didn’t like it. Oasa had the DJ play it at prom. She and Damper had danced, and cemented the banal lyrics into Pash’s mind. He couldn’t stop repeating them, couldn’t stop seeing their rhythm reflected in the sparkling chaos surface of the stream, in the melancholy waving of the trees, in the listless hums of winged insects.

His breath came on the downbeat. He brushed past the old man, who said, I’m sorry, as he did, and didn’t follow.

Pash found his feet walking automatically to the old man’s cabin, but he had nothing to take with him from there, so he lifted himself from the rutted path and stamped through the grass, past the pen, past the grave the old man had, grumbling, dug for Oasa’s body, to the bluff, to the hawk’s own tree, to the long hills, to the city.

#

It looked different. The skyline had changed, and, as Pash drew nearer, he saw that the wall had changed as well. It was twice as tall as he remembered it, and the outer surface was a different color. With his hands in his pockets, fingers playing in the holes, he approached the gate. The ground was dusty, the grass perimeter had receded a few feet. Pash kicked at the foot prints surrounding the gate, looking for his, for Oasa’s. They had long since blown away.

“Let me in,” he said. He knocked on the gate, the sound swallowed deep within the wall’s body. “Hey, you burks, let me in.” No answering activity came. He sat down in the dust, grateful for the solid wall behind his back, and closed his eyes.

A wash of cold air made him choke and cough. He opened his eyes. Four armed men stood in a semi-circle in front of him. A man in a white suit and jacket was kneeling next to him, probing his body. 

“Get off,” said Pash, slapping his hands away. “Where did you—”

“His pace was off,” said the man in white, whose face was turning the sick gray of old meat. “My god, how long— Get him inside. Right away.”

The four armed men picked Pash up, one on each limb, and carried him through the gate, which now stood open, though Pash hadn’t heard it. He thought about struggling, about going limp fish on the officers, just to make it hard on them, but figured being carried wasn’t so bad after all. He felt tired, a deep tiredness that makes everything comfortable as long as it smells like home. He took a deep breath and fell asleep.

He woke up in a small room; muted light came from a heavily shaded floor lamp. He was lying on a long soft bed, facing the wall. Experimentally, he pressed his head into the mattress and then raised it again. The mattress took a few seconds to return to its former shape. A real bed, he thought. His back hurt.

There was a knock at his door, closely followed by the squeak of disused hinges folding open. 

“Hello, Terrence,” said a feminine voice. “I’m glad to see you’re awake.”

“Ain’t my name,” said Pash, rolling over. The voice belonged to a young blonde woman in a nurse’s uniform that probably was meant to convey cheerfulness, but looked to Pash like a frozen fever dream. She was smiling.

“What is your name?”

“Pash,” said Pash, and realized he hadn’t heard it, except in memories, for three hundred sixty-six days. It sounded foreign, as a word does when you repeat it too often, but in reverse.

“I’m glad to see you’re awake, Pash. Welcome to the Scott Variety Children’s Home. I’m Monica, and I have the pleasant duty of reacquainting you to the city.”

“Let me go home,” said Pash.

“I also have the unpleasant duty of informing you that you no longer have a home, except for this one.” Monica moved closer to him. Her shirt billowed around a hidden body. She got down on her knees, her head blocking the lamp.

“You might think this is pretty damn special, Pash,” she said. “But you’re the oldest man in the city.”

Pash sat up and rubbed hard granules out of the corners of his eyes. “How long was I out,” he said.

“You were out there for eighty years,” said Monica, smiling. Her lips were black in the occluded light. “The news thought you were dead. You were a cautionary tale when I was growing up, a boogey-man. How does it feel to be back?”

#

She wasn’t joking. Pash escaped that night, after a string of doctors and nurses and smiles and Monica standing next to him with an occasional possessive hand on his shoulder. It wasn’t hard. The windows weren’t even locked. He sat on a slidewalk and let it take him from one end of town to the distant other. He was drenched in advertisements for products he had never heard of. The Callow haunts were gone. The school was still there. Pash threw a handful of sod at the library. Then he went back to the children’s home.

He slept with Monica that night, and a few nights later he moved out of the home. He got an apartment near the wall and a job caddying at a nearby golf course. Monica called him every other night, for a while, and then every third night, then once a week. He spent his time away from work sleeping and reading the news —not what he had missed while he was gone, but what he was missing right now. It was an exciting time to be alive, to hear of it.

One day, at the golf course, he was hauling irons for two old men and idly listening to their conversation. His eyes climbed up and rolled down the lay of the fairway, touching on the paper-thin grass, the bunkers that wouldn’t grow a cactus. One of the old men was complaining about all this walking, and joked that Pash ought to carry him from tee to tee. His friend laughed like a car horn and said, Scott, you sorry weak sack.

Pash got a good look at the sack’s face on the seventh hole. It was Damper’s, brought low by gravity. Pash laughed at his jokes. The sun traced arcs on all their eyes as it clattered for a hold down the length of each swinging club.

Soon after, Pash started taking kendo classes. He liked the challenge and the long minutes of meditation while his hands twirled a rattan sword through the differentkata. He stopped reading the news and slept more. He caddied every Thursday afternoon for Damper and a rotating cast of pals. He started to joke with them, told them his name was Emilio. Damper’s attention always came accompanied by a faint puzzlement at one corner of his mouth. 

After a year or so, Pash quit the job. Monica called to ask him out to dinner, to ask why. They agreed on spaghetti at seven. Instead, he went to a weapons shop and bought a sword, a wakizashi. He was ready to test for the rank of nidan at the dojo, but hadn’t yet. He walked to the edge of town, each step amplified by the speed of the slide. He made good time. There was a guard on duty, asleep. Pash hit him over the heat with the hilt of his sword, opened the gate, and left with the sound of sirens boiling slowly in his ears. They wouldn’t follow as far as he planned on going.

It didn’t take long to retrace his steps to the old man’s cabin. Even a year out, the hills seemed familiar, like a childhood memory revisited, and had the same ethereal white hot quality of memory. Pash reached the bluff, looking over his shoulder for following city folk. As far as he could tell he was alone, except for the hawk in the tree, airing its wings. Its eyes were on him but couldn’t follow. He knelt for a stone and found only dirt. He packed a fist-sized clod and threw it at the bird. The clod exploded as it left his hand, and its particles sank into a dull cloud a few yards off, slowing, nearly stopping.

The implants that the doctors had rewired him with were pulsing in his head and neck. He reached a hand around to the hidden panel near his spine, the power center of his internal webwork system. One more look over his shoulder revealed nothing. He turned off the power.

The cloud of dust exploded into motion, drifting to a fine coating on the grass. The hawk flapped twice and took off, crying once.

Pash slid down the bluff; at the bottom, he drew his sword. The pen stood empty, dominated by the gallows swing that had held the hog, back feet in the air, while he and the old man worked it. Pash flexed his fingers around the sword’s hilt. He thought he saw a face at the cabin’s one window, but it may have been a cloud in swift pursuit of the sun.

On the watch for Altoid and Edge, Pash crept around the cabin to the front door. He waited, but heard nothing from inside except for the nail-wrenching sound of the old man’s rocker. Pash opened the door, closed it behind himself, and dropped the latch.

The old man was sitting in his chair. On a table next to his elbow stood a half-empty jar of amber liquid. The old man picked this up and took a swig from it.

“Been drinkin off my hangover,” he said.

“Where are the dogs,” said Pash.

“Still tied up.”

“How long has it been.”

“A day or so for me. I keep passing out, though; ain’t too reliable.”

“Okay. Okay. Last one,” said Pash. “How did you do it.”

“Electromagnetic pulse in the grass. Someone gets to close, no matter what time they livin in, it goes off Shorted your pacemaker, and everything else.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Pash took a step closer, falling into stance and shifting the blade around so it would be ready to fall across the old man’s belly.

“You should thank me, boy,” said the old man. “I took you that much closer to utopia.” He laughed and spat right onto the floor. Pash could smell tobacco and alcohol, mixing together in a forbidden perfume. “You want a drink?” The old man offered the jar, drew it back and took another drink. “You’re looking good, strong,” he continued. “How long was it for you?” Pash didn’t answer, but the old man didn’t seem to want him to. His eyes had rolled  back in his head and his lips were moving as though praying to a god that listens. “Little over a year, huh,” he said, finally. “Yeh, not bad.” A sob burst from between his lips, forcing them open like flapping tent leaves, once, twice. “Not bad.” He leaned back in the chair, stopped its rocking. “Old men reminisce amongst themselves,” he said. “And I’m the oldest man in the world. So you’re going to listen to me; you’re going to listen to me bitch and moan and, damn it, you’re going to bitch and moan back so I don’t feel so alone. You owe me that, don’t you, don’t you.” The old man trailed off. Pash’s calves were complaining; he held them still. “No,” the old man went on. “You don’t owe me nothin. Less you killed those dogs. Didn’t, did you. No. No. My wife gave them to me, as puppies, as a joke. She was a woman of irony, and of little forethought. You woulda liked her. She worked sixteen hour days in the code shops; I worked tens at the fish and game. She thought the pacemakers were a great idea — she thought they were Christ come again. I didn’t like em. She said we’d be able to eat dinner together again. Split us up, damn things did.”

“Nobody told me,” said Pash.

“What’d be the point,” said the old man. Then, “I’ve seen cities rise and fall in an afternoon. It’s fun to watch; you should do it some time. But the cities don’t move. You notice that? Got no need to. Less power drain on the individual when your pacemaker fields can overlap. Get more done in a day.” The old man took a long swallow and the sun wrapped itself in a cumulus cloak.

“You knew,” said Pash.

“I knew,” said the old man. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, kid.” A silence stretched out, drawn by the tip of Pash’s blade in the air. He lowered the sword. It was getting heavy. “But I didn’t do it just to punish you. I never had kids of my own. I didn’t do it just to punish you. I needed your help, with the sow gone. Hard winter, you know. It was. It’s gonna be again, but we got time.”

Pash pulled himself from the waking dream he had entered and crossed to the old man, who stared up at him wit  dumb animal eyes. Pash slipped the jar from his grip and raised it to his lips. The liquid tasted like honey and bird meat, but mostly like alcohol. He gave it back.

“Damn you,” he said, and didn’t even remember opening the door.

The dogs were tied to two saplings down toward the creek which bent and bowed against the beasts’ lunges. Pash felled Edge with two clumsy strokes, and got a heavy bite across the wrist. He cried, sloppily. Altoid near ripped her lungs with barking, but the old man remained in his chair. Pash could hear its squeak, wrenching at his nails, as he passed one last time on his way to the bluff.

He walked back to the city with his pacemaker off, abrading his slow thoughts against the southern breeze. At the top of a hill, in view of the city, he watched the sun set, and the flickering artificial days and nights within the walls. Something sparkled like a jewel; something sang like a dove.

#

Damper had died. Heart attack, or a string of them. Pash found himself on the cemetery green, in silence. He had turned on all his systems, again, but one by one had shut them down — his cartoons, his music, his cameras and palm viewer —until just his phone and the pacemaker were live.

He could hear kids across the street, laughing in their secret way. He stood beneath the leaves of a great dying oak and watched a group of three climb a porch. One carried a brown paper sack. She set it in front of the house’s door. Another, sidestepping the sack, rang the doorbell. The three took off at a dead sprint down the slidewalks. 

The door opened and an old man stuck his head out. He saw the bag, scowled, and then shot a glance either way down the street. He spotted the kids; he disappeared, then emerged a moment later with a camera.

Pash tore the sod as he shot off in pursuit. It didn’t take him long to catch the kids up, though they tried their best to dodge him.

When he got close enough, he panted, “Don’t stop.”

“Bain’t gonna,” said the girl who had had the bag.

Pash grinned. “Don’t stop. The old man tagged you. Don’t stop. Keep running. Keep—”

He breathed a full breath.

“Sing somethin’ beautiful,” said Bents. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted up. His throat kept moving in waves, as though he were drinking something straight from the ceiling. He looked a bit like a hamster at its drink bottle. 

He buzzed a chord on his acoustic and we all jumped in with him on the chorus for Awesome God, except we kept our eyes open. 

Youth group on summer Sunday nights was a tradition in my family. All five of us good little boys — I was smack dab in the middle — looked forward to that day we could stride in the double glass doors with the rest of the high schoolers. High schoolers sometimes went to Dairy Queen; high schoolers sometimes talked about sex. It was a rite of passage for my brothers and me, akin to getting our first pocketknife at age seven, or helping dad in the garden at age ten.
So far, I wasn’t too impressed. It was fun and all, and I had the answers to all the hard questions, having grown up in a church in which the answers never change. 

We guys in the group were all at that certain age and the oscillating pitches of our voices soon tired Bents of the singing; the girls just couldn’t hold a tune if their salvation depended on it. Putting down his guitar, Bents had us count off into groups of three. I was the kid who, when it came to his turn to sound off, held up the correct number of fingers and said, Two million, at which nobody laughed. Gravol and Carne were the other Two Millioners. Gravol had just started coming a couple weeks before. He was boisterous and he had big ears. The girls all loved him. 

I had known Carne since the tragedy of arson at our pre-school brought us together in the east side park; our parents muttered and turned up their noses at the sight of the school’s sharp ribs while we mixed ash and dirt and water and smeared it on our faces. I may have eaten some. 

I had always had a crush on Carne, but never acted on it. I used to get in these epic debates with myself, rationalizing my affection for this girl with whom I sang in the children’s choir, played in the Little League, and represented Grand Fenwick in the seventh grade Nation Fair. The debates would go like this: 

“Carne sure is cute.” 

“I’ll give you that one. She is cute. But is she beautiful?” 

“Define beauty.” 

“Beauty is that which endures.” 

“She’s awfully cute.” 

“Yes, but does she have the staying power of, say, Pamela Anderson?” 

I often lost against myself. I don’t think Carne knew I was so fixated on her. She never let on, anyway; not even when she started leaving youth group in the company of Jenkins, the Dude With No First Name. He may not have had a first name, but he sure had first bragging rights for just about anything that mattered. He was the first in his grade to get his license, the first to go all the way with a girl, the first to ace the final in auto, and the first to run down the suicide hill.

The suicide hill was not a clever name given to a bit of local geography, as make out point or lover’s leap were; it was a clever name given to an historic bit of natural landscaping that was stained with cultural significance, the blood of the ancients, and the sweat of rodeo promoters. It was a near vertical drop that went from some patient lady’s back yard to the shallow river two hundred feet below. The natives used to send their young men down it, mounted on sure-footed horses, as a rite of manhood; at least, that’s what they told us in third grade, and fourth, and at a big assembly in seventh. Now the natives had to fight against PETA for the right to run their burliest men down it, mounted on sure-footed steeds, as a rite of closure for the yearly stampede. It wasn’t that big a deal, Jenkins bragged after he had run it on his own two legs. You just pick your feet up, and when you set them down, you’re almost done.

“What are we playing?” I asked Bents.

He came around to each group with a faint grin and a bag of water balloons. Carne whined, and said she didn’t want to get wet. Bents put into her hand a single deflated pink balloon and then moved on to the next group.

“Extra long Bible study tonight, Bents?” I asked. 

When every group had a balloon, Bents cleared his throat.

“So, we’ve got the Creation festival coming up in a few weeks. Those of you who came to church this morning heard pastor Lyle mention that we’ve already gone into the red on our budget this year. So we’re going to have an auction.”

“Five bucks for the blue one,” Gravol said, pointing at another group’s balloon.

“Please be quiet, Gravol. The church is receiving donations from a number of places, but I thought it would be good if we could help out, you know, since we’ll be benefiting from the proceeds. So we’re going to play a game called Trade It Up. You’ll each go out into the town with your single water balloon and the way it works is this: you stop at a house.” He pantomimed. “You knock. You ask the nice lady or man if they have something just a tiny bit more valuable that they would be willing to trade you for your water balloon. If they don’t, then be polite and move on. But if they do give you something — like, say, a nice pen, for instance — then you take that and move on to another house and do it again. The goal is to get what you think is the most valuable thing.”

“That’s lame,” said some guy from the blue balloon group. “Who would trade anything for a water balloon in the first place?”

“You might be surprised what people are willing to get rid of,” said Bents. He sat down on the floor, wrapping his arm around the neck of his guitar as though it were his wife. He stroked its strings. “Now I’ll stay here and keep the doors unlocked. Maybe I’ll go get some donuts or something. Does every team have a watch? We meet back here at nine-thirty. Shoo.”

Some groups had cars, and enthusiasm, and piled in with whoops and hollers. Gravol, Carne, and I slid our easy hands into our pockets and strolled down the street. It was a warm evening. I thought about Bents strumming lightly on his guitar and it seemed like the perfect soundtrack. 

“Where should we go first?” asked Carne. Gravol shrugged and I copied him.

“The Hilarys live three blocks down or so,” I said. “They gave me a hundred bucks for graduating the eighth grade.”

“Worth a shot,” said Carne. We ambled along in our flip-flops, catching bits of gravel on our toes and launching them ahead like bullets.

“You guys doing anything for the fourth this year?” I asked as we segued onto the sidewalk.

“There’s a party at the lake,” said Carne. “Jenkins asked me to go with him.”

“You going?”

“Probably.”

“What about you, Gravol?”

He acted as though he were about to sneeze, but caught it right before he did. “I haven’t decided yet. My family usually does something.”

“Quiet evening at home?” I asked.

“I have a big family.”

Carne and Gravol were on either side of me. I tried to slow down my pace, to fall in behind them — I always feel more comfortable in the back — but they slowed down with me. We still had a couple of blocks to go.

“Last year,” I said. “I went to some guy’s party.”

“You?” said Carne with a giggle.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That was when I was hanging out with Rusty.” Rusty’s name had faded out of use, recently. He had been caught smoking pot before school. He dropped out of the group and, eventually, wasted away to a sliver and blew away to Los Angeles with his mom. He and I had hung out for a year, throwing bags of sugar off of our town’s only overpass and rolling tires down cliffs into the lake, which didn’t seem too much of a sin to me, since I was one of the honor students who had been volunteered to keep the shore clean.

The three of us were walking lockstep. The padding of our feet on the oiled pavement sounded to me like the rhythm of a drum circle. I always fancied myself a storyteller, or a poet. I timed my first words so that the troches took their beat from us, but after that Carne fell out of sync and I got lost and plowed on.

“Rusty brought along a bottle full of gasoline, and another full of black powder. We waited until dark and then snuck into the alfalfa field of the guy’s neighbor. Ripped up a bunch of the junk. Then Rusty dug a little hole to put the bomb in. Wanted a bigger blast radius, or something. Like when you cup your fist around a firecracker instead of leaving your palm open.”

“I’ve never done that,” said Gravol.

“Well it hurts less if you leave it open. Then he ran a couple leads back across the field and plugged them into the car battery. Most of the other guys were drunk and weren’t expecting it. The thing was dim; I barely saw the explosion, but man, I felt it. Like an artificial chest compression. That was something else. I turned and ran as soon as it happened, because I was scared the farmer was going to come find us. Halfway to the car, I turned, and saw Rusty staring at me like I let him down. I was probably wearing some dumb outfit or something. He liked to tell me to be mature, to grow up. I think that’s why he hung out with me. He walked to the car in the time it took between the farmer’s lights coming on and his door opening. Then we drove off and read about it in the paper on Wednesday.”

“Grow up, Bird,” Gravol said. I laughed with him.

“I felt like praying for those poor drunk people. Couldn’t go to sleep that night until I did, actually.”

“I never heard about it,” said Carne, folding her arms across her breast as though cold. I was hot from my words, about ready to take my shirt off when a cool breeze tickled the hair on my arms.

“I would have told you,” I said, bumping into her shoulder with mine. “But you lost my phone number.”

The Hilarys had a stone footpath that wound across their lot-size lawn. We tramped straight for the door, our rhythm going all to pot. At the porch, I reached for the bell, but Gravol got there first. 

Mister Hilary answered, doubled over and panting. 

“Uh. You okay, mister Hilary?” asked Carne. He looked up and grinned. He smelled like sweat in an airtight room. 

“Just fine. What can I do for you kids?”

“Bents has got us on this game,” I said. “We’re trying to upset the balance of the economy. We want to trade you this for something a bit more valuable.”

Gravol held up the balloon. He had rolled most of the rubber around its small opening. It looked like a miniature condom.

“It’s a balloon,” said Gravol. Mister Hilary laughed, or he might have just been breathing heavily. He invited us in and offered us something to drink. Carne and I declined, but Gravol took a proffered soda. Something more valuable, mister Hilary muttered, digging through a hall closet.

He raised his voice. “Sorry things are kind of a mess. Hillary is away for a bit, which means I get to be lazy with the house work.”

“I thought she sounded real nice this morning,” said Carne. Missus Hilary was the choir’s leading soloist and, going by weight, three-quarters of the soprano section.

“Yeah, thanks,” said mister Hilary. “Ah. Here we go.” He gave us a tennis ball, took the balloon, shook his head, and grinned us right out the door.

We went to the next couple of houses on the block. Gravol kept smiling and laughing to himself as though remembering a joke only he had thought was funny. We traded the tennis ball for a pound bag of candy, and the candy for an old copy of Stratego. It was missing a couple of the red pieces.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” said Carne. “Let’s go to doctor Bar’s.”

I shrugged into a nod and turned down a block toward the comparatively rich side of town. 

“Bargain hunting?” said Gravol, now a few steps behind me. Carne was at my left, her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans.

“Shut up,” she said. Then, to me, “You weren’t in church this morning.”

“I slept in,” I said. I had stayed up way too late the night before. I’d already outed my sin of incendiaries, though, so I decided she didn’t need to hear about how I’d discovered a message board on the net that was full of stolen passwords to members-only porn sites. It makes it hard to sleep, the thought of getting so much for free. And I wasn’t about to mention it to Gravol. For all I knew, the guy would cop the best ones right out from under me.

Carne pulled in the first half of a sigh.

“What is it?” I said.

“Can I tell you something, if you promise to keep it private?”

At the end, she would probably hug me. “Sure. It’s story time. Why not.”

“I can’t tell Bents or Clara. Last week, I—” She kept the sound of the letter coming, a single long note, while behind it her mind worked to produce an entire melody. “I was taking a shower after practice,” she went on. “Mom and dad weren’t home, yet, and I was just going to watch TV until I fell asleep. I didn’t lock the door when I got home. And when I got out of the shower— my— my boyfriend was there.”

“Jenkins?” I asked.

“God, no. I broke up with him a month ago. But he, my boyfriend, you wouldn’t know him, he brought me some flowers.”

“That was nice of him.”

“Well, parts of flowers at least. It was sweet, yeah. Yeah, it was.” I glanced sideways. She was opening and closing her mouth. I thought she might be fumbling for a metaphor. She finally settled on:

“It was like getting struck by lightning. You know what I mean?”

“An explosion.”

“Yeah, yeah that’s kind of how it was. So I turned on the TV, kinda low. He gave me the flowers. And there were soap operas on. I left it on. And he tried— well, he tried hard. And it’s summer, you know. You know how it gets hot in your house with the windows open all day and the sweat is practically telling you it wants to evaporate. Even after the shower, it was just all— I don’t know. Urgent, I guess. And when you’re naked— don’t look at me like that. I know you like getting naked. You and the guys went skinny dipping on the hike last year.”

“That wasn’t me,” I said. “I was the one that screamed and ran, remember? Anyways. Go on.”

“I’ve heard this one before,” said Gravol. Carne shot him an evil look over her shoulder.

“It was nice, being open in the air. It was warm enough to be a layer of clothes; it wasn’t bad at all. To move and not feel your clothes pulling against you.” She trailed off, then, and pulled her hands out of her pockets. She crossed them over her chest, gripping each shoulder with its opposite fist. 

“Keep going,” I stammered. Her mouth fell open and wide at the corners; it took a few seconds for the laugh to come.

“You little sicko,” she said, and punched me in the kidney. Then she tilted her head as if listening to a particularly good poem, or the school fight song. “It was nice. It’s summer, you know.”

“Yeah. Um. Are you going to get pregnant?”

Gravol snorted. “No,” he said.

“Shut up,” said Carne. “I’m not scared,” she told me, which is funny, because she ended up a bug hunter. I’ll get to that later. “But I broke up with him,” she went on. “He didn’t call.”

“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” said Gravol, equidistant from Carne and me, now. We were a triangle crossing the quiet street. Doctor Bar had a house built like a geodesic dome, assembled from larger triangles, the skeleton on the outside. We stopped at the end of his driveway.

“Is that the door?”

“No. I think that is.”

We took a gamble and knocked. Maxine, the doctor’s wife, answered.

“Hi there, kids. What’s up?” We explained the game to her. “Wait here,” she said, and closed the door behind her. Gravol leaned against the wall and rolled his shoulders.

“She’s kinda hot,” he said.

I laughed. “That cinches it. We’re all going to hell.” We had only painted pictures of some lake of fire to imagine. And I’m sure we all saw ourselves dancing on the beach, listening to something stupid and infectious on the radio, telling ghost stories and roasting wieners over the liquid heat. Hell was no threat; hell was nothing more than pigment on canvas, and not even that in the brain. Even we were more.

“Here you go,” said Maxine. “We’ve had this thing around for years.” She was struggling not to bend over with the weight of a dinosaur computer. I jumped forward to take it from her.

“Have any games on it?” asked Gravol. Maxine laughed and dusted her hands against each other. 

“I’m not sure. It was my husband’s, but I haven’t seen him use it for years.”

“It’s just a word processor,” I said, trying to fit its bulk under my arm and nearly dropping it. 

“Here,” said Carne, offering Maxine the battered copy of Stratego.

“Oh, no thanks, honey. I think we’ve already got that one in one of the kids’ rooms.”

We thanked her and left.

“Need any help?” Gravol asked me at the end of the driveway. 

“Sure.” We adjusted the machine between us, each grabbing a couple corners. My hands were starting to sweat. 

“This has got to be worth a couple hundred dollars, right?” said Carne. “We ought to go back.”

“I sure as hell don’t want to lug this thing around longer than I have to,” I said. “But it’s only worth about fifteen, my friend.”

“We could get my car,” offered Gravol. “I only live a couple blocks from the church.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “What’s a couple blocks, anyway. Besides, we haven’t heard your story yet, Grav.” My theory is that summer pollen lames me up a bit more than normal. I’ve got bags of evidence. Think back on what you have heard; I guarantee you that the bits that drip with gum-thick fondness and idealism were written at evening, with the window open and the smell of cut grass in my hair.

“Don’t call me that,” said Gravol. “That’s what my mom used to call me.”

“She’s dead?” Tact decreases as lameness increases.

“No, asshole. She’s in Seattle.”

I felt a sick thrill at the forbidden insult rush my ribcage. I grinned.

“Sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said, loosening his grip on the word processor and sticking me with the extra weight. “It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t see much of her, anyway. An arm here, a leg there.”

“You close to your dad?” I asked.

“Now, that’s the interesting answer.” We turned a corner. Carne was in the lead, hands in her back pockets again. I watched her legs move, more than a little mesmerized. “Not really close to him. But he taught me a lot of stuff.”

“What does he do?”

“Drink beer. Oh, and he’s a mechanic.”

“How do you, how you say, drink beer?” It was a strain and Gravol’s smile looked about as tired as my sense of humor felt.

“I do a lot of stuff to get happy. It’s called hedonism,” he said.

“Learn something new every day,” I said.

“I haven’t really tried drugs, because they’re so damn expensive, but I’ll go for pretty much everything else. Food, girls, being on stage— it all works the first time, and then a little less the second, and even less the third time, but by that time it’s a habit and it keeps going on, even though I stopped being happy a long time ago. But there is one thing that works.”

“Lift up a bit on your end,” I said. “What’s that?” I added.

“When I was twelve,” he said, “my dad taught me how to change the oil in his car. An old Honda. I’ve always loved how he taught me. He slid me under the car on a scrap of cardboard. I was skinny enough to fit clear under without putting the thing up on ramps. Then he told me to look for a bolt. I found quite a few, so I asked him which one I was supposed to twist, and which way I was supposed to twist it. He told me to look for the only one that could hold oil in. Use my freaking head. So I spotted the one at the base of the oil tank, like it would have been any of the other ones. I was a pretty stupid kid,” he confided.

“Glad to see you’ve grown out of it,” Carne tossed over her shoulder.

Gravol went on. “It was great. Dad had just run the car around the block, testing the lug nuts or something. He gave me the ratchet wrench and I went to town. Felt like fifteen minutes unscrewing that thing. Dad kept grumbling at me to go faster. The bolt started turning loosely in its well, but it wouldn’t come out. I told dad; he said the threads were probably stripped. A tiny trickle of oil was licking around the body of the bolt; most of it was dripping onto my wrist, and from there into the pan. It smelled kinda good. Solid and real and heavy, like dirt. Dad told me to get rid of the wrench. Just grab the bolt in both hands and pull on it while twisting, try and get the threads seated again. My fingers were slippery. My finger nails were too long; when I pulled, they hurt.

“Took another five minutes of me pulling until I felt resistance and then twisting. Then, suddenly, the thing popped out like a bottle rocket and there was oil gushing everywhere. Stupid kid me had both his hands right under the stream— but I didn’t move them. I didn’t even say, I got it, for a few seconds. The oil was warm and thick; it felt like blood pumping over my hands. I flexed my fingers in it and played with the splash patterns in the steaming pan.

“That’s the car I got when I turned sixteen. Probably should get that bolt replaced, but I kept pulling it out the same way, and pounding it in with a rubber mallet when I was done.”

“Blah blah blah,” said Carne. We were at the church’s front doors. None of the other groups had come back, yet. We trooped inside and plopped the word processor down on the foyer floor. Gravol went to the bathroom to wash his hands; I poked through the kitchen for anything other than water to drink. Found a two liter of 7-up. I brought it and three glasses out. 

Bents was sitting on the floor next to Carne.

“How’d you guys do?” he asked.

“All right,” I said. Then, holding up the bottle, “Can we drink this?”

“Yup.”

I poured three glasses. Gravol came over, drying his hands on his pants. He sat down as far away from Carne as he could and still be one corner of a recognizable shape and took a glass from me. Carne sipped hers, staring out the glass doors at the sky brushing down from light blue to dark.

One by one, the other groups barged in, singing and holding their prizes aloft. When the pile of booty was finished, we had the word processor, a mountain bike, a box of cigars, our old copy of Stratego, and a giant inflatable stegosaurus. 

“All right,” said Bents, swigging the last of the soda straight from the bottle. “Let’s total up the values. I’ll take the winning team out for ice cream.”

“Hang on a sec,” said Gravol. He bounded up and out the door. We argued about whether smoking was a sin until he pulled up in front of the doors in an old gray Honda. It sputtered when he turned it off.

“One last trade, Bents,” he said, yanking open both of the double doors as though he were a movie star arriving on the scene at the crescendo in the sound track. “I’ll take that computer; you can sell off my car.”

“Are you sure, Gravol?”

“Come on. It’s only worth a couple hundred dollars, now. I’m happy to. I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at writing,” he said. “I’ll need some help carrying that beast home, though.” I volunteered.

After ice cream that night, I never really spoke to Gravol again. He was in a class with me, sophomore year, and we had to do a presentation together, but he acted as though he didn’t remember ever stringing two original words together with me, much less having told me his story.

I never got together with Carne, though I did kiss her once. We were both drunk at a post-Prom party, and she even let me cop a feel. Her breasts were saggy; that was a couple years after she had the baby. She had gotten pregnant after all, and I never knew who the father was, but I’ve never been a smart kid.

After graduation, I didn’t hear a thing about her, until I got a twice-forwarded message from my mom. It was originally from Carne’s mom, a plea for prayers for her daughter’s peace as she was on her last few days of fighting against AIDS. One night, soon after I read that, I walked home smelling like whiskey and thought I would call her up. I got her number from my mother, whose hobby it is to keep in touch with people.

Carne sounded as weak as I expected.

“Hey, Bird,” she said. “It’s been a while.” And we chatted. My focus was nowhere, and she sounded medicated, so I doubt the conversation would have made much sense to anyone listening in. She told me about how she started hunting bugs in college, and now I can’t get the image out of my head of her running across a meadow with a butterfly net held like a club in both fists. She explained that she had learned from her gay friends that there was a whole subculture devoted to sleeping with people who were infected with STDs. She paid good money to fuck three men who were HIV positive. The first two left her with nothing more than sore legs in the morning. The third one had gotten her infected.

“Why in God’s lengthy name would you do that?” I think I screamed it at her, but she was already giving me the answer, so she probably didn’t notice.

“I’m not scared. I wasn’t scared anymore. I could do anything I wanted, and I’d never have to worry that I’d get more than I was ready for.”

“Aren’t you scared of dying?”

“Not while my redeemer liveth,” she said, and hummed. “I’d fuck you so hard if you were here right now.” I hung up on her. She died a week later.

Gravol didn’t even make it that long. He committed suicide at the end of senior year. The memorial service was held at the church. We raised money for his dad by raffling off tickets to swing a sledgehammer at the old Honda, which had served the youth group well for a couple of years, though we always got headaches when we rode in it.

“I knew something was wrong when the gun spit flowers instead of bullets,” said Troy. He was sitting in the grass on a hill overlooking Brahmton, Mississippi. There was a zeppelin drifting overhead like a cloud, blocking out the sun. “Not flowers, exactly,” Troy went on. “Just some green vegetable thing. Turned out that any sudden impact in that version of the world was a catalyst for plant growth.”

“How unusual,” said father Van. He was tall and stooped and covered head-to-toe in a brown fur, thin as a boy’s first beard. In Troy’s old world he had been short, stocky, and bald.

“That’s not even the worst of it,” said Troy, tearing up handfuls of grass, like a child unsupervised, and letting them blow away in the wind.

Father Van gave an animal grunt and sat down across from Troy. “What is the worst?” he asked.

Troy stared down at the priest, and then out over the valley. “Sometimes it’s easy, getting back into things,” he said. “Sometimes not much is different. Here, at least, the sky’s the right color.” He looked up, as if to prove the point, but one of the zeppelin’s was blocking his view. An unfamiliar flag decorated its pellet-like body. Troy had been a pilot for the Air Force back home; it had been the thrum of broken air against his ears that had drawn him to that profession. He figured he wouldn’t have the patience to drive a zeppelin, at the mercy of the wind instead of being its ruin.

“I’m glad that you approve,” said father Van, scratching one of his legs with the other. “But I have two appointments yet this afternoon, and, as I can recall, you have not told me anything that requires absolution. Do you consider harming yourself?”

“No, father,” said Troy. “Do you remember — do you know Deseret?”

“I am not qualified to absolve sexual sins, mister Danagog. Cardinal —”

“It’s nothing like that,” said Troy.

“Then what?” asked father Van. When Troy didn’t answer immediately, the priest stood and brushed dust off his pants.

“You married us,” said Troy, blowing a handful of grass seeds into the wind. Some of them got stuck in father Van’s fur. “Sorry,” said Troy.

Father Van picked out the seeds and crushed them between his fingernails. He gave Troy a look under arched eyebrow. “Should I be apologizing? Are there problems between you and —”

“Deseret. No,” said Troy. “No, I don’t know what is between me and Deseret; I don’t know how much of it there is, either. That first time, with the gun flowers, I stood up, baffled. My muscles were twitching as though hooked up to a current, kinda the way you feel when a spasm jolts you out of a doze, you know. I went out into the kitchen, where Deseret had been making dinner, and found a strange woman there. Deseret was five-foot-nine. This woman was, uh, height-challenged.”

“A runt,” offered father Van. He made a gentle turn and began to walk down the hill in the direction of the steeple. Troy pushed himself to his feet and followed. At their walking pace, they remained always in the shadow of the zeppelin.

“Yeah,” said Troy. “I can’t tell you how strange it felt, right in my skin, and deeper.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” said father Van. “I am quickly turned to nightmares.”

“Of course,” said Troy; then he laughed. “I’m sorry,” he offered father Van as explanation, though the priest hadn’t seemed curious. “It’s just little things that shock me, sometimes. Not even the fact that you’re covered in fur —” Father Van snorted — “not that there’s anything wrong with that! But it’s that the father Van I used to know sponsored Brahmton’s yearly Romero/Raimi marathon.” Father Van continued on, a minute shrug his only response. Troy caught up to him and buried his mirth. “We were married for a year,” said Troy, evenly.

“What happened?” asked father Van. They had reached the chapel. Troy stood with his hands in his pockets as father Van kicked at a thistle by the door, then retrieved his keys.

“I very nearly died,” said Troy. The chapel was cool and dark.

“The gun,” said father Van, dipping his paw into a font of holy water and making a circular design on his chest.

“It was an accident,” said Troy, dipping his own fingers in the water and making the sign of the cross. “I had been cleaning my pistol — my brother-in-law and I had been down at the range earlier — while Deseret fixed the steaks. She called me to come in and unwrap what was left of our wedding cake, you know, from all that tinfoil.”

“Of course,” said father Van.

Troy got the impression the priest wasn’t listening anymore, but he kept on, anyway. “So I wasn’t done cleaning, and I hadn’t pulled out the old clip, and somehow my thumb slipped onto the trigger, and —” Troy shrugged. “Boom. Flowers.”

“And the runt.”

“Yeah,” said Troy. “It was a boneheaded thing to do, I know. Went out to the kitchen, and nothing was the same. That was a year ago.”

Father Van nodded and disappeared into his office for a moment. Troy sat down on a pew and stared up at the altar. It was made of slat-wood panels painted a marbleized green. On his world, the altar had been white plaster. He thought about how Deseret’s dress had camouflaged her when they stood there to be married, how she had made him forget to blink.

“I have just clapped my hands to be sure,” said father Van, emerging from his office with a book in his hand,”but saw no resultant vegetation.”

“No,” said Troy, shaking off his reverie and standing. “That was in another world.”

“Ah,” said father Van. “I believe you may have chosen poorly to whom you confess.”

“I couldn’t take that world,” said Troy. “Not right off the bat. I went to the bridge, and I swear I didn’t even think about it. I jumped at low-tide.”

“I take it your efforts failed,” said father Van.

“I don’t think so,” said Troy. “I think, in some universe, it worked just like I planned. But I didn’t stay around to see it. Some other poor me got splattered in the mud flats.”

“Thank you for that image,” said father Van. There was a series of shouts from outside, like those of children on a playground. “My next appointment,” said father Van. “Or, I should say, my first appointment.” He put his arm on Troy’s shoulder and steered him toward the door. Just as he was reaching for the handle, the door flew open. There were two figures on the steps; the one holding the door screamed quickly and then covered its mouth. Troy couldn’t tell what gender either of the figures were; they wore the same trousers and loose shirts as father Van.

“I apologize, father Van,” said the one at the door. “Are we early?”

“No, missus Take, mister Take,” said father Van, nodding at them both. “You’re right on time. Excuse me for just one moment. Go on in; I won’t be much longer.” He grabbed Troy firmly by the elbow and escorted him down the stairs.

Once they had passed the Takes, Troy heard a low whisper, like the crack of a whip. It was mister Take. “You need to be more careful,” he hissed. Missus Take responded, but father Van had accelerated and left her words behind.

“Well, mister Danagog, I appreciate your coming to see me,” said father Van. “If you’ll allow me a moment of candor, though, I will say that it is disheartening to see someone maltreat religion as you do, and I do not find it funny.”

“I’m sorry,” said Troy. His lips had a natural curve in the corners, and even when somber he looked as though he were smiling. “I just wanted to talk to a familiar…” he trailed off, searching for the right word. He decided on “Name.”

“I’m glad I could be of service,” said father Van. “But if I leave the Takes unsupervised for very long, they’re liable to swear in the chapel.”

“Wait a sec, father. I do have a confession,” said Troy.

Father Van sighed, and to Troy it sounded like a horse’s neigh. “A direct confession?” asked father Van. Troy nodded. “A confession to be made under the sky, in the sight of God?” Troy nodded again and allowed his natural smile to broaden. Father Van ignored it. “Let’s hear it, then,” said the priest.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned —” began Troy.

Father Van shook his head. “What is this? I can no more bless you than can you bless me.”

“It’s a custom on my Earth,” said Troy.

“Never mind,” said father Van. He glanced up at the sky. The zeppelin had made a slow curve around Brahmton and now was heading East; it would pass over them again in a few minutes. “What is your confession, my son?”

“I killed a man,” said Troy. Father Van said nothing. “Are you going to call the police?”

“Depending on the circumstances, I may be obliged to,” said father Van. “Though I might sooner call them after waking from a bad dream. Was this also an accident?” asked father Van.

“Nope,” said Troy. “This was on purpose. After the gun and the bridge, I felt like a gag, like some trick pulled on other people. I went to a bar. In this world — the world in which the surface tension of water was enough to gently support my fall — the bars served this stuff that was like syrup, but burned all the way down. I couldn’t swallow it fast enough. I don’t guess I was thinking clearly when I picked a fight with the guy in the corner. I felt like a sick man, like there was bile in my throat. The guy wasn’t doing anything; he was just sitting there with a pint and an open book. I asked him what he was reading, and he said something like, ‘There is a balm in Gilead’. Didn’t even look up. That just pissed me off, like I can’t even tell you. I mean, what was wrong with this planet? No common decency.

“Something was creeping up into my skull, like the syrup had gotten into my blood, and my own heart was pumping it where it didn’t belong. I knocked the guy’s pint away, and then he looked up. He would’ve looked familiar to you — or, no, he wouldn’t have. Not to you. But he did to me.

“‘Father Van,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’ He closed his book and said something small; I don’t remember what.” Troy cast his eyes up and to the left and took a deep breath. “His was the first familiar face I had encountered, really. The first time I saw that in a separate universe, a parallel evolution had occurred, and must have occurred in countless other iterations. I say it calmly, now, I know, but the concept — it felt more like fantasy — hit me like some needle sinking through my skull. It was sharp and cold and I wanted to yank it out. I wanted to scrub him out, retribution for doing this to me. I didn’t blame him for the whole problem, just for giving me ideas. I was in no shape for ideas.”

The zeppelin’s shadow crawled down the lane, leaping over kick stones and smoothing down the summer colors. “I did it with my fists,” said Troy. “I beat him to death with my fists, and I hardly even noticed. Like slowly boiling water for a frog, it started out benign. Who could believe he had the power to kill a man with his fists? I mean, look at them.” Troy held out his fists, so they got hit first by the zeppelin’s shadow.

With the sun blocked out, the temperature dropped in an instant. “Wait,” said father Van. “Wait until God can see you again.” The priest stared at Troy, long and unblinking. Troy couldn’t guess his emotion. The zeppelin passed overhead, its only effect intangible. Troy blinked when the sun came out of eclipse.

“You do not belong in this place,” said father Van. Something in his voice was burning. “I can not absolve you of the guilt of murder; to do so would require you to have a contrite spirit, or for me to find you worthy of absolution. Neither are present.”

“Don’t take it personally,” said Troy.

Father Van turned on his heel and strode back toward the church. Troy trailed along behind.

“I need your advice,” said Troy.

“You need nothing from me,” said father Van. “And I wish you would leave. Whatever world you like to live in, it does not overlap with mine.”

“You’re absolutely right, father,” said Troy. “A Deseret is out there, I know, in a world in which everything has evolved the same as on my Earth, except maybe she never met me, or maybe I never took up shooting. But I don’t want her in this place. I prefer my women somewhat more shaved. Truth be told, I really just wanted to see what you were like in this world, if you were in this world, and to apologize.”

“Yes, well, I feel no more dead than usual, so your apology is unnecessary.”

“Not for that,” said Troy. “Behind your back, after our ceremony, I said you had a voice like Tweety Bird would have if he huffed helium. Your neck was a lot shorter in that world. I had to fight not to laugh all through the vows. Until death us do part,” mocked Troy, his voice cracking.

They were at the chapel door. Troy could hear the Takes arguing inside; there was a growl of frustration and then the tinkling of glass. Father Van paused with one hand on the latch. “It seems to me,” he said,”that deliberate actions are much easier to take back than are accidents. The Proverbs say that we must pay in fair measure for that which we take from the world, be it a wife or a loaf of bread. I could grant you a divorce,” the priest continued, opening the door. “But I do not believe I can help you with your loose tongue, nor your other… problems.” He ducked inside before Troy had a chance to respond.

Troy spent a few moments just gazing around at the strange, familiar geography of Brahmton, the hills, the brown fields, the buildings all white and concrete. The town was motionless, playing dead. Everything moved too slowly. Troy watched the zeppelin as it disappeared over the hills, heading toward Florida. He grew tired of standing still before the ship slid out of sight.

“Until death us do part,” he said, squinting up at the sun.

#

There was a desert; there was no wind. The sand was packed hard as glass. No amount of stamping on Troy’s part resulted in a footprint, so he walked uncertain, perhaps in circles, perhaps in a sharp line. Each option seemed equally pointless, after a time. There was no sun; the sky glowed like flesh pressed up against a flashlight, with no point of origin. Red sky in the morning, red sky at night, sailors take warning and sailor’s delight.

After some time, Troy felt his mind cave in, like a star collapsing. The gravity of his brain became unbearable. Memories, most of them caught up in words, tried to escape — he could feel them crawl through his skin — but they never got far. The strongest, the harshest, those born of hardship, made it as far as the open air before succumbing to the pull. Troy wished they wouldn’t try. As they entered the horizon of his thoughts, he heard them all again.

“It is useful as a tool for the purging of guilt,” said father. “This land is my land. It is an active response to a passive sin. We carefully screen our visitors for responses of pleasure. Security is standing by. Would you like to buy a ticket? There are demons to your right.”

#

“God has a great capacity for destruction,” said Haim. He was reclining in the trench, pillowing his head against a chunk of asphalt, drinking coffee out of a looted thermos.

Troy sat nearby, cross-legged, very carefully cleaning his sidearm. He had enlisted with the infantry by way of sneaking into a makeshift barracks at night and claiming an unused bunk. War isn’t hell, he had reasoned. Death is hell, or at least the first step on the path, and war simply a massively efficient means of inflicting death. Death not being much of a concern to Troy, he thought the actual fighting might be kind of fun, and he would get to meet some interesting people.

He had met Haim during an impromptu chapel service in the basement of a besieged office building. Jewish in both ethnicity and religion, Haim seemed always fascinated with the concept of a creator, and spoke of his convictions as though they had been validated by the good Lord himself, perhaps with a large, red, rubber stamp. He was a delight to bicker with. Troy might once have called it surreal, arguing semantics of the pharaoh’s words to Moses while flipping dense-weave protective mats over live grenades, but no longer. Even Dali turned his art to habit.

“It’s man,” said Troy. “Man has the capacity for destruction.”

“God has it in him, too,” said Haim. “He knew about nukes long before Canada made ’em.”

“God’s unstuck in time,” said Troy. “That’s a bad example.”

“If he can imagine it, he might as well have made it,” said Haim.

“First time I saw my wife, I daydreamed what amounted to raping her,” said Troy.

“The feminists would have it that that’s just what you’ve done, if you married the girl.” Haim grinned. His teeth were dark at the gums from chewing on tobacco. “Listen to us, man; we go at it worse than atheists versus agnostics. I didn’t know you had a wife.”

“Yep,” said Troy.

“Where’s she hiding?”

“I have no idea,” said Troy. “I’ll find her sooner or later.” Something about the rumble of the mortars in the distance, and the mutant woodpecker sound of friendly assault rifles, made Troy feel introspective. He finished messing with his gun and set it carefully down in the mud, its barrel pointing away from him. “I think God’s got a great imagination,” he said. “I mean, who’d have guessed that the biggest threat to our nation would have come from Montreal?”

Haim gave him a confused smile. “Well, ever since the French —”

“Where I’m from, I mean,” said Troy. “I’m not up on your history around here.” Haim nodded and chewed thoughtfully on some cud. “That doesn’t just take imagination, that takes a sense of humor. Same kind of humor that puts me in these places that look and sound so familiar. Every time, it’s something I know I’ve seen before, like seeing some nameless actor in a show, and trying for hours to remember what else you’ve seen that he was in. And not one of these worlds has Deseret. It’s kind of sick. Kind of a sick humor. I don’t think it’s getting better.”

Haim swallowed and spit. He held out a leaf of tobacco. “You want some, man? It’ll help you come down.”

“I’m fine,” said Troy.

Something landed in the trench in front of Haim. With the flair of a magician, he flipped one of the mats overtop it. There was a muffled explosion and a few tendrils of dark smoke leaked out from under the mat’s edge. It still didn’t give Haim enough time to think of what he wanted to say, so there was a stretch of silence, or rather, a stretch in which neither of the two men spoke.

“You treat the universe like it’s God’s alone, man,” said Haim. “That’s just depressing. This is our place. You can run for a thousand miles without running into God.”

“Yeah,” said Troy.

“You’ve got to take what you want from the world, because God’s gonna dole it out to some guy who will use it, otherwise. There’s a cliché about it; maybe a parable, too.”

“Yeah,” said Troy. His head was lolling.

“Now you’re just agreeing with me,” said Haim. “You aren’t listening.”

“What?” said Troy, snapping his eyes up.

Haim shook his head and grunted out a laugh. “You, my friend, are a monkey in the classroom. You’ve got all the tools of learning in front of you, but can’t figure how to use them.”

“Are they edible?” asked Troy.

“Look at ’em,” said Haim, rising to a crouch and peering over the lip of the trench. Troy joined him. The remaining buildings looked like rotten teeth; the ground looked as if it had been chewed on. There were bodies, and sections of bodies, lying near craters. Troy started to count the bodies; he may as well have tried to count stars. The repetitive nature of the task made his eyes droop, but his brain kept firing, imagining a new world for each full body.

“I’m not sure I can take much more of this,” he said, more from his brain than his eyes, and sat back in the trench. Further down the line, somebody was shouting orders. A monstrous growl came from across the bleeding gums of the city, quiet at first, but building in a crescendo of some hunger.

“You won’t have to,” said Haim. His head jerked back, his arms forward. He looked as though he were giving a belly laugh. A cone of what looked like chocolate pudding erupted from his helmet, coalesced into individual drops, and plopped into the mud, where they promptly vanished. Haim’s body continued in the direction of his head, sinking against the trench floor. His helmet slipped off. It bounced over to Troy, its momentum deceptive, like that of a rolling cannon ball. Troy reached out to stop it and felt his palm start to bleed. He lifted the helmet and turned it to see what had cut him. A seven-pointed, irregular star had gone nova dead center rear; its points reflected all the light there was to be had.

Somewhere, thought Troy, there is a world in which helmets are made of stronger stuff, or soldiers are. Somewhere, bullets are obsolete and have been replaced with… what? Try as he might, Troy couldn’t imagine what might take the place of bullets. Fists, feet, gases, and more; these tools had already been invented.

#

There was a desert; there was no sun. The featureless sky met the featureless Earth and, had it had any glimmer of intention, it would have dared Troy’s imagination to make something — anything — of the perfect shapes. It was like being trapped inside an Easter egg, painted on the inside by a thin, persistent brush.

Troy had been walking for long enough that he had had to stop and sleep twice, but with no nightfall, no sunup, he couldn’t be sure if he had slept for hours or minutes each time. His bare feet had formed blood blisters, which had popped. Any hope he had of tracking his progress by the red splotches he left behind was sucked up, along with the blood itself, by the insatiable ground. Troy wondered if, next time he lay down, he would, too, be pulled under.

He tried not to sleep after that, instead just sitting and resting his legs when he felt the weariness rising in his bones like radiation. Without the rhythm of his feet beneath him, the voices escaping and falling back into his head were louder and impossible to ignore.

“You are like an ox,” said the man that Troy had never known. “Look at the flag. This land is my land. You march to that flag, and you don’t look at your feet. You hear me? Absolutely. Absolutely. The flag is your wife. You can not walk a straight line. We value your service.”

Troy thought that maybe he should go to sleep, choke himself on the ground, and wake up elsewhere, or right here.

* * *

“You really let yourself go,” said Troy. He had been psyching himself up to it for the entire month since he had found Deseret and first visited her San Diego apartment.

“I’ve been on a diet,” said Deseret. “I love it.”

They were on the small deck her complex afforded Deseret, playing a game that reminded Troy of chess. He had to keep asking her how the pieces moved, but he would have had to do that with chess, too. She had music playing out of her bones, some choral piece that made each turn of the game that much more dramatic, as though staged.

“I used to be able to pick you up in one arm,” said Troy, capturing one of Deseret’s weaker pieces.

“Never,” said Deseret. “Stop trying to fake me out. I’m kicking your ass. Just suck it up.” She grinned. Troy thought that her lips looked like rubber, rubber that nothing ever bounced off of. He sat back and stared at the game board. He wasn’t sure he liked this world. It was a bit like how he imagined heaven would be: boring, flat, bright. Joy may come from selflessness, but satisfaction comes from sin.

“It’s our anniversary,” said Deseret, kicking lightly at his shin under the table.

“What?” said Troy.

“We’ve been going out for two weeks,” said Deseret.

“We haven’t gone out, yet, Des,” said Troy.

“You know what I mean.” She gave him a hopeful smile and, when he didn’t return it, moved her weakest piece. “It was two weeks ago when you — you know —”

“Got drunk,” said Troy.

“No,” protested Deseret. She had a glare like a mother. “When you kissed me.”

“I know what you meant,” said Troy. He made a capture. “It was the same night.”

One piece of music ended. Another began. “I always wanted a boy to pursue me,” said Deseret. “Instead of the other way around.”

“That’s because you’re lazy,” said Troy.

Deseret kicked him under the table again, a little harder this time. “You know what I mean. It makes you feel worth something, because you are to someone.” She put her hand on a piece, moved it, then moved it back to its original square and bit her lip. “I had a secret admirer in college,” she said. “He — I think it was a he — sent me silk roses in the mail. Not a bouquet, never that many. Just one red, plastic rose in my campus mailbox every Wednesday for six months.”

“That’s a lot of money,” said Troy. He had a good move coming up, and was impatient for Deseret to just commit her damn piece to action.

“Then they stopped coming,” said Deseret. “One week, there was one on a Thursday, and then after that, nothing. I was so bummed. Midterms were coming up, and I couldn’t even concentrate on them, I was thinking so much about the smallest things that I had done, trying to decide which one, or string of ones, had stopped the flow of plastic roses.”

“Probably a hidden camera crew; they got bored of watching you,” said Troy. He wasn’t looking at her, but he would have sworn he heard her sad smile; she sighed when she did it, and some reluctant curve of her lips bent the sound just so. She didn’t say anything else.

“I think you’re right,” said Troy. “I’m not sure — the calendars keep changing — but I think it’s been a year.”

“Since when?” asked Deseret. Troy didn’t answer. She began to pout, to push her lower lip out. It looked like a pink caterpillar had settled on her mouth, like she had taken a whorish injection of collagen.

“Put that away,” said Troy. She sort of giggled, and then did it.

“Why won’t you tell me?” she asked him. “What happened a year ago?”

Troy laughed through his nose. A lot about this world seemed funny to him. He thought maybe it was the slapdash similarities between this and his first world; he thought maybe the atmosphere was full of nitrous oxide. “You’re nothing like her,” he said. “She was quiet and she had a laugh like a kitten’s purr. She was a vegetarian, and she hated playing games.”

He stood up and turned away from the board. He faced the city and raised his hands as though presenting it to Deseret. “This — this isn’t a heaven here, with you. This is purgatory, a place where work is rewarded by a diminishing torment. But even I don’t believe that! There’s no circle to the universe, no curve; I could keep going forever and never find my Deseret.”

His voice was a hail of punches, each word its own discrete and weak wound, but compounded, like fists, they had the power to make her bleed; it was like the first gentle, distant rumble of artillery.

“I can’t even pretend,” he said. “You’re fat and ugly and, once I’m gone, you’ll cease to exist. Chew that up.” He shoved away from the game board and leaned on the railing, head bowed. There was nothing penitent or humble about the posture. He was just trying to think of how long it might take him to reach the ground.

Behind him, strings swelled. “I wish,” said Deseret,”that I had a thousand tongues to say, You don’t deserve me.”

“Yeah, well —” said Troy, and he jumped. His eyes were forced shut by the rush of air, the sting of tears. The wind in his ears died gently and he rubbed his sleeve across his lashes, wicking up the water, staining the fabric. He was still standing on Deseret’s deck. The game board was still there. Bizarro Deseret was not.

All right, Troy thought. Who runs this place? A tiny magnet of boredom rested at the bottom of his thoughts, drawing the others down.

#

There was the desert; there was a wind. The hard-packed ground remained unmoving. A light smudge grew on the horizon, like a pool of melted, colorless tallow. The sky’s hot breath went down Troy’s neck, his sticky shirt, his eyes and throat. Particles of dust too fine to see dug into his skin like blown ice, but Troy’s blood burned at the points of contact. He tried walking backwards, but the bare skin at the nape of his neck caught fire and he felt his shirt begin to tear along its seams. He raised his eyes and caught a glimpse of unnatural light on the horizon, back the way he had come. It looked as if it came from a spotlight or a skyscraper.

He made an effort at cursing, but it came out as croaking. He thought that maybe he could run in the direction the wind was blowing, and thereby avoid the slashing of the crescendo storm. He made it four slow steps and then his legs gave out. He pulled his head against his thighs, presenting as little of himself to the wind as possible.

Voices echoed in and out of substance, driven through his skull by the combined forces of the storm and his own gravity.

“I have left five husbands behind,” said Deseret. “And I left them all crying. From one end of this land to the other. I own fifteen percent of everywhere I’ve been. This land is my land. Four of them cried when I left. Big, wet tears in the garden. Too much salt in the water. A bed of roses died. I’ve never been good with plants.”

#

“My god,” said Troy. “This place is incredible.”

“It’s funny,” said Commander Beresford. “That’s the word that everybody uses. First time I bring a guest up here, it’s incredible. I’m starting to doubt my own trustworthiness.” Beresford grinned at Troy, whose muscles were too limp to do anything but gape and slouch. The quick ascent felt as though it had shook his insides to water and pulp. “I’m glad you like it,” said Beresford.

“I remember,” said Troy. He paused for a long moment, his hands on the plexi-glass that separated his body from the vacuum. “Washing out,” he said. “I remember washing out of the program.”

“Physical trials?” asked Beresford.

Troy shook his head. “Two tours, I proved I could handle anything from a chunk of styrofoam on up to the flying villages. Spent four hours in the air on a paper plate, damn it. It was the psychiatric exam,” he added. “Four hours in a chair — they ain’t as comfortable as you’d think — and that was it. Grounded. From space, anyway.”

“And from up here,” mused Beresford, “even the passenger airlines look like slugs.”

“Yeah,” said Troy. “Listen, I really have to thank you for giving me the tour.” There was a wash of hot blood through his forehead and he felt sour liquid crackling through his tear ducts. It wasn’t a reaction he had predicted.

“Don’t mention it,” said Beresford. He seemed to be debating whether or not to sit down. He ended up leaning against the bulkhead, inserting himself into Troy’s peripheral vision. Troy’s eyes had the look of polished ball bearings, damp and heavy. “When you were in the fourth grade,” said Beresford, “did your teacher put your names up on the board?”

“Like,” Troy coughed, “you mean like if we were misbehaving?”

“That’s it,” nodded Beresford. “For my class it was first offense, name on the board; second offense, check mark by the name; third offense, circled check mark; fourth offense, sit facing the corner.”

“Fifth offense?” asked Troy.

“Bull whip to the groin,” said Beresford. “This one day, can’t have been too long before Christmas, I was goofing around, showing off for a girl, and got my name on the board for spitting. Damn near twelve feet, I swear. The threat didn’t bother me; I liked the way my name looked, all slapped up with chalk. So, I keep showing off, rocking my chair as far as it would go. Got the check mark for knocking little Frannie Calico over backward and spraining her finger. Then I got the circled check mark for saying the F-word. That day, I tell you, that day was all mine. Not another name up on the board.” Beresford waited for Troy to smile before continuing. “Fourth offense was me telling Frannie Calico her finger brace looked stupid. I didn’t think saying so was as bad as saying the F-word, but there you have it. The teacher scooped me up in his two big hands and dropped me on a stool with my back to the class.

“It so happened he got me set up right in front of the blackboard. No chalk was in reach, but the felt erasers were both close enough to grab. It was silent reading time, so even the teacher had his head down. I snapped up those erasers and just started beating the hell out of them, against each other. Raised this big old cloud of chalk dust. You like that smell?” Troy shook his head. “It’s one of those smells that some people like, some people don’t, like gasoline,” said Beresford. “Anyway, I looked like a ghost by the time the teacher wrenched those erasers out of my hands. I couldn’t fight him off because I couldn’t see. The chalk dust had drifted right into my eyes. Someone else was sobbing — maybe one of the girls at a desk near me, and the teacher, he said, ‘See what you did? You made her cry’.

“I got sent home. Developed a rash — turns out I was allergic to chalk dust. All over my body, these things like chicken pox itched like the dickens. It was miserable.

“It wasn’t the first time I got sent home, so my parents had a meeting with the principal, who suggested counseling. I spent some time in one of those obnoxiously sadistic chairs you mentioned, age nine, exploring myself. I didn’t get to learn what we found, the counselor and me. He gave the report to mom and dad, so I had to sneak up on them to hear it. Counselor thought I had difficulty adjusting to additional stimuli, that I could only manage one familiar set at a time. Kind of a low-level autism.

“Proved them wrong, didn’t I?” said Beresford, tapping the plexiglass and looking down on Africa.

“It’s incredible,” said Troy. “But I believe it,” he added. He waited through an interval of smile and nod before asking, “Do I want to know about my application?”

Beresford bent his eyebrows into apology. “Not if you’re anything like me,” he said. “Sorry, son,” he went on, hooking his thumbs in his coverall’s pockets. “Wasn’t my decision in the end.”

Troy nodded. He fixed his eyes on empty, sparkling space, which could swallow a lifetime of warm sorrow, freeze it, and render it neutral. “Why,” he said.

“Psychobull,” said Beresford. “You were under serious consideration, I know, but someone — you want to hear this?”

“Yeah,” said Troy.

“Someone wrote that you seemed to have undue difficulty focusing during stressful situations.”

“Didn’t seem to be much of a point,” said Troy.

“I’m sorry,” said Beresford again, though it sounded less like a sentiment and more like punctuation.

“Don’t matter,” said Troy. “Just a childhood dream, you know.”

Beresford knew. He clapped Troy brotherly on the shoulder. “Well, drink it in,” he said. “You don’t have to come down for hours, yet.” He turned to leave Troy alone.

“Sir,” said Troy over his shoulder. “Thank Des for setting this up, would you?”

“She was happy to do it,” said Beresford.

“Thank her anyway. Part of a dream come true, at least.”

Beresford triggered the door open; it gave a mechanical sigh. “Drink it in, son.” The door was silent when it closed.

#

There was a desert; there was the woman. She had two voices, and they sang together, scraped together like the hind legs of a cricket, one against the other, the other against one. The air hummed and she hummed and she provided all the echoes she could need.

Troy stood in front of her, reflecting her song back into her lips. “This land is your land,” she said. “This land is my land.”

She disappeared. Twilight fell in an instant; or Troy’s thirst had destroyed him and taken him to a world in which the Earth hid half her face behind a modest lock of shadow. The relief from the heat lasted only long enough for the blisters to remind him of their hot pain.

He walked. The first person he met was a kid, waist deep in a pit of mud. The kid was pulling handfuls from a shuck of straw that sat on the harder ground beside him. He pulled those handfuls under the surface of the mud, and his legs pumped like deliberate pistons. He looked up when Troy gasped for water, but didn’t say anything. Troy bent to the mud and thrust his lips into it.

“Hey, man,” said the kid. “You ain’t supposed to be here.”

Troy lifted his head to see what the kid looked like. He waited for the kid to say something else, but the kid just shrugged and drew another fist of straw under the surface. Troy watched it disappear.

“No,” said Troy.

“Hey God. I think I’m ready.”

“I told you not to call me that, child.” Its voice wavered on the personal pronouns, tearing into — what was the last figure? — eight million part harmony. It started doing that a couple weeks ago, explaining that there were sufficient letters of complaint lodged against it. Too many people were whining that God deceived them, made them think that it was only one entity, when in fact it was many. It was the sort of complaint that, if I were it, I would have brushed off; but God in its unity is far more considerate than I could ever be alone.

“My apologies.” I felt the need to debase myself. I remembered a prayer of contrition from my childhood and said it aloud with my face down. I was willing to do just about anything. The speaker on the wall gave a life-like chuckle.

“None of this is necessary, child,” the voice of voices said. “I have remembered everything about you, and am afraid that today is not the day for you to join me.” The butterflies stung in my stomach. God would say no more until I asked it to, understanding that I couldn’t take both rejection and paternity without a stretch of sleep between, or at least a few rounds of video games. God would be silent.

I thought about asking it right then to tell me a story, or quote me some of the day’s news, or just have it listen to me ramble about Patricia’s latest flight of fancy; instead, I went to the kitchen and got a glass of water that tasted of chlorine. The most important things take the least amount of time to say — “no” is only one syllable — and I felt as though I had to make it up by brooding for the rest of the evening. I didn’t have any scotch in the house, so I settled for baser chemicals.

Fifteen times I had submitted myself for Inclusion — my word, not its or the media’s. This was the sixteenth. That made fifteen trips to the store for ice cream and chocolate sauce. I was just putting on my jacket and trying to decide what movie to watch for comfort number sixteen when the phone rang.

I let it and left.

The supermarket was shot through with fluorescent lights. A bit too bright for me; I sank into my hood. A lady by the door bobbed her head at me and asked how I was doing. I said I was fine, thanks, might you point me toward the frozen foods section. I knew where it was, but people like to feel useful. She smiled to prove it. She was one of those raised in the back waters who weren’t taught that it’s wrong to point with your middle finger. I grinned, because that’s what I had to offer, and stomped rain water off my boots.

“Sure coming down,” the lady said.

“Sure is,” I replied.

“How much do you reckon we got?” she said.

“A couple inches, maybe.” The employees weren’t allowed to carry God around at work. The poor woman had to make do talking with me. I nodded to her and went off toward my vanilla destiny, imagining myself as a marionette.

I passed a woman in the shampoo aisle talking to God about which product would be best for her naturally wavy hair. I didn’t hear the answer. A business type guy in a gray suit brushed past me and, along with the scent of his aftershave, I caught a whiff of his prayer: please help me find a woman for tonight. Don’t yet have a way to talk to it in your head. The strange side effect of the whole project is that, as we find we needn’t talk to anyone other than God, the more observant — or less distracted — of us can listen in on thousands of conversations that never would have made it beyond the wetware before. I once overheard Patricia asking it how she could break it off with me most painlessly, so that she and I could still be friends. I didn’t hear the answer.

Not that I needed to. God has become predictable, which is one of the reasons I thought I would make a good addition to it. It started about five years ago, when a man very much like my godfather, only younger, brought his wife to his lab. He was working on the combining of consciousness with silicone and quantum storage. He had already become rich off of his creation of artificial intelligences imbued with personality. I have forgotten his name a dozen times over. I don’t think it’ll ever stick. The guy is still around today; both he and his wife. Twice over, I’d say, though I’m undoubtedly missing a few of the finer details.

With the immense space of quantum storage devices, entire human minds could be backed up; that’s how the AI’s got their human touches, by drawing off of stored human components. So, this whatsisface thought, if humans can be backed up, then why not combined? Combined and modified? It would be like having a child, birthed in science and evolved in elegance. He took what he judged the best parts of his wife, and let her pick the best parts of himself, and they melted together in invisible space, creating a self-aware entity that was better, they were the first to admit, than either of them. That’s how God was born.

It sped through five or six generations over the next month, adding the distilled portions of fresh, valuable minds, while a company was being built around it to market the usefulness of an ever-present entity that acted as a kindly grandmother, a wise grandfather, a chiding mother, a wistful father, and a playful sibling all at once. It spoke at seminars, it presented at the Academy Awards, and it started taking applications for Inclusion. Right from the start, it was something I wanted to be a part of. Obviously not everyone could make it as a member of God. It took only those who added something new, whose intelligence, compassion, or experience wouldn’t be redundant. I thought it was funny when the pope was rejected; I thought it was even funnier when Patricia was accepted.

I joked at her for a while that she was always talking to herself, that sooner or later I’d have to drop her off at the mental clinic for a quick drill-and-dash.

Now God is an eight-million member paradox of unity, and getting stronger and more perfect every day. That’s the assumption, at least: a sort of calculus of human nature. The more minds that are added — the closer to infinity — the smoother the line will be, until it becomes an unbroken upward curve. God itself posits that there is an asymptote, but I never caught the reasoning and haven’t bothered to ask.

That’s the only piece of future we’ve stumbled on during my lifetime — if you don’t count the holographic video games — and it’s not even one I read about as a kid. Everything I read was about improving yourself: memory, lifespan, beauty. And how great humanity would be when each member thinks himself god; they all would have to be right. But you can only worship one god at a time; hell with worshiping, you can only have one god at a time. The pantheistic religions died quick civil deaths because they either couldn’t keep the deities straight or wrote those deities into a hundred petty wars, letting them die from a hundred shallow cuts.

I said a prayer of thanksgiving for progress, noted that God didn’t respond, grabbed the latest non-fat ice cream, and made careful steps, so as not to slip on the wet linoleum, back to the front and the checkout lines.

The man with the gray aftershave, or the gray suit and subtle aftershave, was ahead of me in line. He had one finger to his ear, listening to God on an earpiece. His head snapped up, startling me. He squinted off to the right. I followed. Two lanes over was a short strawberry blonde paying with a credit card for what looked like a month’s worth of groceries. The suit turned on his heels and nearly knocked me over. He leaned into me for just long enough to say, I’m sorry, mate, and then was past me. I smiled a bit too late and, shifting my cold carton from one arm to the other, I took his place in the line.

A teen with black hair, and a smile for his natural state, was fussing with the barcode on my purchase when the gray struck up a conversation with Strawberry Shortcake. I caught bits of it slipping through the cracks of white noise, the rain on a high roof. She was named Molly and he still tried to use the line about it being such a coincidence they met. I had thought that one would have been long dead by now.

Maybe he would cook dinner for her, or pay for a night on the town. Maybe she was just the right woman to fill up his gap of need with soft scent and her stories of childhood. Maybe they both needed not to be alone that night. Only God knew.

There were three messages on my machine when I got home. One was from Patricia, and started off with the words “About last night.” I deleted it without listening to the rest. The other two were from my dad. He wanted me to call, didn’t say why. He always does that; he tries to get you interested in everything he says, not revealing much because he thinks that mystery breeds company. I know I do it, too. I guess I can be glad that, as long as I get rejected, God will never have to bear the genetic smear of that kind of drama fishing.

Reason number one that I should have been Included: my hard-hearted nobility.

I sucked in my gut and put the ice cream in the freezer before deciding what to do. I prayed about it, remembering only after a held-breath pause to add that it was okay for God to answer. It did.

“I’m so sorry, child. Your godfather’s immune system could not keep up with the changes being made to it. He died at four fifty-seven this afternoon.”

I would have liked to punch or kick something, but I was to far away to connect; by the time I moved to some place vulnerable, the desire would have faded. Not to mention that I would have had time to berate myself for a drama queen. They’re short words and I’m a capable orator.

We had all been expecting this for a while, anyway. If I had thumped a knuckle on the wall, it would have been mostly my own show; but there was nothing to stop me from remembering it the way it never happened to myself, to my family, later. Godfather Gary — he always loved the alliteration — had had the AIDS sequel. He got it on a hunting trip by quartering an untagged buck. He wasn’t taking precautions (there’s a word I learned in third grade) and got a good shot of arterial blood in the mouth. I was eight and holding on to his bow and quiver while dad brought the truck up as close as he could get.

God never came up with a cure. It’s kinda worth laughing at, if only to take the geniuses down a peg or two. You see: genius isn’t cumulative. It’s more of a binary, on/off state. Either you’re a genius or you’re not. So even though God is about three million certified eggheads, it doesn’t rank any higher than dear departed Hawking or Sagan, or even Dylan.

There’s reason number two: I couldn’t hurt it any.

“He asked me to remember a message for you. I did not understand it. Would you like me to pass it on to you?”

“Please do,” I said.

“I warn you, though: the content is not what you are used to.”

I expected a pause before the message began. I got four seconds of the most ragged Kum-ba-ya, then: “I can’t remember the words. Burn bad. If you’re happy and you know it, crap your pants.” He giggled, and I hate using that word for the laughter of men. “That woman in your pictures. Do you take her out at night. Do you buy her beer. You ought to. A man isn’t any better than the beer he drinks. I don’t even like how it tastes. God, I wish they’d let me have some.” I heard a faint scratching sound in the recording and imagined it to be his wild eyes rubbing against the dry parchment of his eyelids. “You don’t drink Irish beer. You eat it. That ain’t right. Take her to a meal, feed her good. Take her for a drink, get her a fucking drink.”

And that was it. Godfather Gary had never slung me more than two words at a time during all our hunting trips and late hazardous fires. He didn’t need to. I always wished he would.

“How,” I said, and let the word disintegrate. “When did he do this?”

“Two-twelve this afternoon, Pacific daylight time.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“There was a nurse just outside. He asked her to leave before he would talk to me.” There was that fragmented word again. Then silence. My apartment creaked at the corners as the building settled down for the night. I got my ice cream out of the freezer and dished myself up a bowl. Realized I had forgotten the chocolate sauce at the store and shook my head for caring.

“God,” I said, not sure if I was talking to it or just letting it out. I figured God wouldn’t know either, but I heard a quiet sigh, and then,

“I would prefer it if you would call me godfather, child. It is a better word.”

A cold hand pushed from my insides out; something was trying to escape. It was just the ice cream melting. Diffuse the tension to a sleeping room.

The phone rang, sounding like an angry cricket. I put my hand on it, waited for a silence, said, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” then answered.

“Hey. It’s me,” said the voice on the other end.

“Hey Patty.” Patty Last Night.

“I just got paid. Meet you at the bar?”

What was my alternative? Stay at home and argue with a creature deep enough to seem infallible? I wanted a great burst of forgetfulness, just to wipe the whole day away from Hey God onward. With Patricia’s rich eyes and thin fall of hair reflecting in a glass of alcohol, I could at least approach a slow burn off of memory. I told her twenty minutes and was at the Billabong in ten.

Two buzzed guys with yellow teeth, that nevertheless flashed bright in the dim wash of wall lamps, were singing Whitney Houston on the corner karaoke machine.

“I will always love you if you give me a scotch,” I said to the bartender. I knew her pretty well. Her dogs had to be put down last week. Guess why. She grinned and lifted up a bottle of Four Roses bourbon.

“Will this do?”

“I’m an American. It’s all the same to me.”

“Want any ice in it?”

“Plain’s fine.”

An elegant white hand crawled across my shoulder. A pair of lips settled their words in my ear. I wondered what color they were.

“Hey, pretty boy,” said Patty. I turned, dislodging her fingers but not her perfume. They were deep purple.

“Hey, Patty. How’s it going?”

“Not bad, not bad,” she said. She slipped onto the stool next to mine and spun back and forth, grinning as though she had something she wanted to tell me.

“What?” I said.

“Guess.”

“God finally told you it was okay to kill your boss.”

She laughed. “No, silly. Guess again.” My drink appeared. “I’ll have a Miller Lite,” said Patricia. The bartender glanced between the two of us and her face slid into a deer in headlights frieze.

“Yeah, it’s on me this time,” I said. I wanted to add, Green light. Patricia’s playfulness was getting into me. I took a sip to drown it. The bartender grabbed a brown bottle from the ice chest and popped it open, set it carefully in front of Patricia, and set to polishing anything she could reach.

“Guess,” Patricia reminded me.

“Uh. You found the copy of SLC Punk! I loaned you.”

“Oh shit! No. No, you suck at this game.” I allowed this might be possible and took another sip. My taste buds protested. They didn’t mention why. “I got the job in Seattle,” she said.

That was exactly what I needed. I downed the rest of the my drink as one thick drop and finished out the conversation in my head.

“I thought we really had something. This time.”

“Dammit! That’s the problem with you. With this town. You think that just by my staying around, I’m giving you another chance. Forget it. I’m tired of trying to make this town like me, and I’m tired of trying to make you happy. I’m going to go do something for myself. It involves me, this bottle of beer, and a business suit puddle up on the floor.”

It’s no use trying to forget when the brain remembers that you’re trying to forget; it makes a careful catalogue of everything you’re trying to bleed out, gives you big platter eyes and says, You forgot these things today, master: God thinks you’re worthless, your godfather’s ghost scared the crap out of you, and your ex-wife thinks you’re cute. Aren’t you glad you forgot?

Reason number three: the balance.

The karaoke guys were completely shit-faced by now; I envied them. I said, That’s just great, Patty, to the counter top.

With all the whining that I’ve done so far, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: why doesn’t this bastard just do it already and save the fucking kilobytes. I can’t, though. Suicide is harsh, brutal, a surprise. No one understands it, least of all the ones who let it write the last words of their lives. I’m thoughtful enough to pick up the pen, write out the note of apology and farewell; too thoughtful to coil the rope, or even to load the gun.

I was tired. I walked.

My town’s a small one. Main street runs the distance of a good healthy shout long one side. The concrete of the walk is old and growing moss in places. I tried hard not to step on any cracks. Before I knew it, I was outside the cinema. Changed its name to The Theater a few years back, but I don’t mind calling it by its real name. Patricia would rather I just find my way to the present and call her by the name she likes the best.

The box office had just opened for a restricted movie. A knot of teens were chattering about nothing they’d remember and opening their wallets. The tired girl behind the ticket window was explaining through the mechanical filter of her microphone that proper identification was required before she could let them in.

A girl with a very loud voice — must have been why she had such wide lips — suddenly yelled, “Oh shut up! I can see whatever I want.”

It took me a few seconds to realize she was talking to God and not to me. She was looking right at me. But I had my collar up, so she probably couldn’t see me.

“Don’t tell them, please. Oh god. They’d flip out.”

God as little brother tattle-tale. I brushed past them and heard one comment rudely on how I smelled. I wanted to tell him to keep it up, that it wouldn’t be hard to find out where he lived and go pee on all his stuff, or worse. Or better. His parents wouldn’t notice if he disappeared. They could pick another one up at the high school after classes got out on Monday and they would never know the difference.

I had turned around and raised my fist before I even knew it.

A handy God speaker set into the cinema wall buzzed. “I can’t let you do that, Dave,” said God, who has a binary sense of humor. He didn’t need to interfere. If he hadn’t…

I had the kid by the shirt collar and yanked him backwards off his feet. He made a low animal noise. I didn’t know the right way to do it, so I sunk my fist into the back of his head. Each phalange in my fingers popped, it felt like, out of joint. The kid hit the cement and broke all their mothers’ backs.

Behind the window, the ticket girl was mouthing what turned out to be a call to the police. She was too far from the microphone for me to hear exactly what she called me.

They put me into the holding cell for the night along with an eyesore drunk. It was just a ten-foot by ten-foot cube fenced in with chicken wire. I looped my fingers through and watched the guard’s television until I heard snoring from my friend. I hoped he was forgetting whatever made him start on the bottle. Probably forgetting why he hates being drunk.

My fingers still felt out of joint. I flexed them, heard a few pops. I spoke quietly. “Hey God? I think I’m ready.”

“Please, child, call me godfather.”

“That’s a little touchy right now.”

“I understand.”

There was a thick silence. A train of thoughts sped through my mind, too fast for my tongue to catch. I will never lift a hand against myself, what has she gotten herself into, Miss Houston is one of it right isn’t she, and DeMarco is down in round six ding ding.

“So.” I let the word keep coming. “Am I ready?”

“No, you are not ready.”

“I am! I swear I’ve learned so —“

“Space is limited. We have no room for redundancy.”

“Tell me what I am lacking.”

“If I knew what I was lacking, I would have it, child.” I wove my fingers through my hair and pulled just enough to make my scalp ache. “I am sorry. This has been a hard day for you.”

“No. It’s been heaven.” I took a deep breath, feeling for all the world as if I was sitting down to the SAT’s. “I know I’m ready, God. Look where I am. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t ready.”

“There’s a few ways that could be interpreted.”

The SAT’s were eliminated the year after I took them.

“I mean I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t put myself in situations that I can’t help but learn from. And I do learn.”

“I know that you do. I keep as close an eye on you as I can. I love you.”

All those pronouns, forcing its thick voice through a thin vacuum.

“Are you saying there is nothing I can add?” I asked woodenly.

“No, of course not. Good grammar is a plus, but it’s just not enough.”

“Please be serious.”

“I find it hard to be, faced with you. You’ve enough seriousness for two of me.” I didn’t say anything. Would you have? I was all set for a religious experience in the downbeat cells of Poortown, USA, where the only preacher is the announcer in the ring between Jim Beam and the heart. And a religious experience I was having. When Yahweh came down to the Israelites and told them they were pretty much fucked for forty years, that was a religious experience. When Zeus went for a walk, tripped over a cobblestone, and accidentally raped Hercules’ mother, that was a religious experience.

“If I learned anything from Gary,” God said after its synthesized sigh. “It was when to be silent. I’m going to go away, now. Don’t do anything foolish. I love you, child.”

There was a cot for me to sleep on. It didn’t have a mattress. I flopped down on my back, like a body at the morgue.

Space is limited, it had said, lied. I let myself drown in sleep, counting all the names of God I knew.