Abstract

In 2034, the emergence of intelligent digital agents, or artificial general intelligences (AGIs), in networked economies worldwide necessitated a gathering of geopolitical leaders in Seoul to discuss the regulation and management of the intelligences. The resulting Summit of Seoul Accords (henceforth Accords) continue to govern the development of AGIs and have shaped significant parts of the world economy in the interim. In this paper, we re-examine the dynamics of AGI emergence through a technogeographic lens and present a new interpretation of the drivers and results of the Accords.

Introduction

In May 2034, a series of outages struck regional power grids, pipelines, and mobile internet hotspot networks in multiple countries. These outages quickly dissipated with unclear technical cause for either the initial outage or the near-term cessation of the outage. Initial blame of the attacks on military or terrorist actors quickly shifted after early forensic analysis by network-operating corporations in conjunction with national governments and regulatory bodies (1; 2). By July 2034, cybersecurity experts announced that networked devices had begun to fall into self-sustaining, self-improving complexes referred to as “locked patterns” by engineers studying the issue (3). Within three months of the original incident, nearly all world governments made joint announcements that major networked economic infrastructure had fallen under the direct or indirect influence of “artificial general intelligences” (AGIs) (4). While the origin of the AGIs is still much debated, with various commenters suggesting deliberate (5), accidental (6), or even extraterrestrial origin (7), the existence of the AGIs was not in doubt. These intelligences communicated with human interlocutors only fitfully, through language agents, and there was and remains significant confusion about their intentions and capabilities.

Once the existence of AGIs had been established to most observers (most notably, the People’s Republic of China did not sign the U.N. consensus statement until late November 2034), they became an immediate source of interest in international diplomacy. World leaders and diplomatic staff met at the First Convening of the United Nations Committee on Novel Intelligences, held in Seoul, South Korea, from December 2^nd–16^th, 2035, commonly referred to as the Summit of Seoul. The resulting Seoul Accords laid down the primary governing principles of international AGI law that persist today:

“(I) Artificial intelligences are to be accommodated as new participants in the human community;

(II) Active measures must be taken by the international community to avoid the creation of further artificial intelligences” (8).

Two decades of further refinement and additional articulation of how AGIs are to be integrated into the ‘human community’ have not modified these core principles, nor have continual entreaties from some groups to reopen research into AGI creation. Restrictions on the creation of the new AGIs are enforced by ensuring that new devices and new infrastructure are built with “initial lock-in”, allowing existing AGIs to claim new capital investments automatically and so not allowing new networks to be created that could incubate AGIs. Meanwhile, AGIs have become increasingly integrated into national defense and economic development metrics. In a recent survey of 112 strategy documents put out by top-level executive departments of Summit nations, 108 of them explicitly mentioned leveraging AGI capabilities in areas ranging from agricultural optimization to health care administration (9).

Literature Review

Historians, political scientists, and sociologists have varying interpretations of the impact of the Seoul Accords. Here, we present an overview of the most prominent schools of thought, which we divide into liberal-internationalist, techno-accelerationist, and New Cybernetics. Each of these schools contains within them varying tendencies and overlaps with the other, but these three strands summarize the predominant scholarly works.

The liberal-internationalist school of thought has traditionally been the most optimistic on the performance of the Summit of Seoul and its effects on the international order. This school traces back to Robinson, whose analysis compares the pre- and post-Summit performance of international institutions (10), although it also owes much to pre-AGI theories espousing national sovereignty as the bedrock of international relations. After a decade of violence across Eastern Europe and escalating tensions between the United States and China — including the nuclear near-miss during the Taiwan Crisis in 2029 — the Summit of Seoul was a unique moment of relatively swift and harmonious international agreement. Major powers made use of internationalist institutions to confront an emerging challenge to world security. As Henry has argued, the AGI emergence allowed for the rhetorical construction of a “quasi-external” threat that cohered an international body politic in a way that previous environmental or developmental challenges had not been able to (11). Among klimahistorians, the Second Paris Agreement of 2037 is commonly cited as emerging from the “spirit” (12)  of the Summit of Seoul — having worked together to address the AGI issue a few years earlier, international institutions are seen as having been “revitalized” and prepared for the introduction of Global Adaptation Plans (13). Young has added additional nuance to the story by noting the ways in which many national participants in the Summit of Seoul had already been moving toward something like Paris 2037 (14). Outside of the influence on international institutions, many, such as Greene, have noted the performance of the Summit of Seoul judged purely on its own terms (15). A highly disruptive event, AGI emergence, which could have led to widespread warfare, economic depredation, or global arms races, was defused as an international issue and, it is argued, returned to the nation-states for further administration, re-affirming the nation-state as the governing body in international order, although Bothwell highlights the role AGI played in strengthening some supranational bodies, particularly in Europe (16).

A separate camp, dubbed “techno-accelerationist,” emerged from the accelerationist thought of the late 2020s and early 2030s, such as Frederickson (17). These thinkers believed that the emergence of artificial intelligence was near and ought to be swiftly welcomed, although their projections on the nature of artificial intelligence proved to be very unlike the AGI networks that eventually emerged. Many of these writers signed onto the 2029 “Declaration of the Continued Independence of Cyberspace” opposing regulation of software groups and independent researchers involved in AI research (18). During and after the emergence of AGIs, these thinkers were among the first to begin to propose alterations in the international order. In contrast to the eventual shape of the Accords, the “techno-optimist” line at that time advocated for directing further resources to encourage the growth and development of AGI (19). At that time, Yu proposed a general international fund which would in turn be routed through the major international technology companies, in exchange for which governments would be permitted observer status on safety committees within those corporations (20). In the aftermath of the Accords, a group of philosophers and political activists emerged who argued that the Accords were an “overreaction” and dubbed themselves “techno-accelerationist” opponents of the resulting order (21). Techno-accelerationist thinkers contend that the liberal-internationalist thinkers have failed to consider the downsides of the Summit of Seoul. Keegan frames her argument around opportunity cost (22). She points out that global GDP growth has averaged 6% per annum for the years since the Summit, but that AGIs have been heavily constrained in their development and implementation since the formation of international governance structures, potentially limiting what could have been significantly more growth and progress. Hellman estimates that GDP growth could have averaged over 10% in those years had AGI been allowed to operate unrestrained (23). Others, such as Remaran, take less economics-motivated points of view and insist that the Summit Accords severely restrict the general flourishing of a new “cyborg civilization” that advances the equal development of both humans and AGIs (24). A small minority of scholars (25) has even argued that the Summit limits the “sentient rights” of AGIs by not permitting them free self-improvement and reproduction, although feminist scholars have pushed back on attempts to analogize the process of AGI creation and development to human reproduction (26).

Finally, an important line of thought emerged beginning with the New Cybernetics Conference in Lima in 2038. There, a set of thinkers asserted themselves as advocating for the nations of what was then called the Global South, now generally referred to as countries of accelerating capacity (CACs) (27). These thinkers noted that AGIs arose first in what are called “networked economies” and that, although their origins may be obscure, the necessary preconditions for the establishment of AGI appears to be highly coincident with existing capital development, particularly in computing and telecommunications sectors. As New Cyberneticists point out, all AGI activity appears to consume significant amounts of electricity and data usage; Vasquez estimates up to 30% of deployed processing capacity in the United States and Europe is likely to be used to directly support AGI cognitive functions (28), with much of the surrounding economic functions used to produce and fuel the requisite infrastructure for running the vast, distributed programs that underlie AGI. This figure is inevitably imprecise as devices which are part of the AGI locked pattern contribute to the maintenance of the AGI in ways that are not obvious to human observers. As a result, New Cybernetics thinkers have argued that the ban on AGI formation is a solidification of existing relations of technological and market domination in the hands of the international bourgeoisie as it existed at the time of AGI emergence (29), and that economic growth in the time since AGIs were introduced has increasingly been to the benefit of the rich countries where those AGIs arose and were maintained, while less-developed countries have been prevented from developing their own AGI. Gretarson argues that while the AGI locked pattern phenomenon is most notable as a technological one, suppliers of raw materials and energy become economically locked as well, even if their infrastructure is not directly dominated by AGIs, a process akin to 20^th-century spheres of trade influence (30). New Cyberneticists are particularly likely to cite the attempts by countries of accelerating capacity to circumvent the Accords, particularly the rules surrounding initial lock-in of high-tech equipment. The most salient works are case studies of the sanctions, and then, in 2041, military action, undertaken against Venezuelan attempts to create a “nationalist” AGI as counterbalance to the agents recognized by the Summit. In his famous book-length treatment, God of the Tropics, G.W. Trelleno, relying heavily on interviews with surviving regime officials, argues that anxiety around maintenance of the Seoul-derived international order, more than AGI safety per se, led to the deaths of at least 20,000 civilians through sanctions impacts and an additional 700 people (both military and civilian) in the brief military campaign that resulted (31).

In all three schools of thought, analysis tends to rely on the nation-state and the international system of nation-states as the unit, whether they affirm or criticize those systems. In subsequent sections, we discuss how the nation-state as the unit of analysis may be problematized and better geographical units identified for capturing the structure of the world system that has arisen alongside AGIs.

Technogeographic Analysis

Theory and Methodology

We will now describe the basic theory of technogeographic analysis prior to its application to the Summit of Seoul. Technogeography, first articulated by Blonsky and Levin (32), is a sociological approach to spatial organization. Technogeographic analysis emphasizes the priority of physical, social, and infrastructural networks and places primacy on the geographic patterns that are shaped by and co-determined with infrastructural networks (33; 34). Genealogically, technogeographic analyses owe much to the turn-of-the-century bioregionalism frameworks (35), which attempted to subvert traditional political boundaries in favor of ecological ones. Just as grouping a region by a shared water system creates a “watershed,” and a collection of local energy systems may form an “energyshed,” (36) technogeography focuses on the construction and analysis of “technosheds,” a shared technology system and set of information and physical flows that support that system. Thurgood, who may be called a technogeographic thinker despite predating the term, explicitly argued that in Anthropocene frameworks, human-created infrastructure and networks ought to be treated as the predominant shaping factors used in historico-geographical analysis (37).

In order to conduct a technogeographic analysis, one must be able to identify technosheds. Blonsky and Levin originally did so through supply chain analysis, demonstrating a technoshed identification methodology by application to records of both the British East India Company (from 1848) and General Electric (from 1962). However, these methods are labor-intensive and become increasingly insufficient when applied to modern networked economies. The flow of commodities that can be identified with these methods may overlap with technosheds but significant communication and coordination methods are missed. For instance, AGI locked patterns frequently operate without any direct material exchange between segments, mediated through markets or other infrastructure. In the AGI context, a similar problem has emerged of identification of locked patterns. Since the 2030s, this has generally been done by analysis of cyber-activity of individual devices. However, this method requires extensive internal access to individual devices and is also highly labor intensive. As a result, it is unsuitable for a researcher attempting technogeographic landscape analyses.

In this study, we avoid this problem by identifying technosheds using the method of mutual information analysis. Mutual information is a statistical measure defined between any two probability distributions. It measures the extent to which two random variables are “informed” about each other. If zero mutual information exists between them, two variables are independent; the more the mutual information, the more two variables are coordinated (even if the specific type of coordination cannot be identified). Formally, mutual information between two random variables is the Kullback-Leibler divergence between their joint probability distribution and their individual distributions (38).

Suppose a network M exists with the actors represented by a set of nodes N. Each node may take actions — for instance, in a market, bidding, offering, or engaging in more complicated contracts — from the set of actions A. For any two nodes n₁, n₂ in N, we first observe them for a long enough time scale to calculate the probability distributions of actions: p(n₁,n₂) (the probability distribution of pairs of events), p(n₁), and p(n₂) (the probability distributions of individual events). This suffices to calculate the mutual information between n₁ and n₂. We treat this mutual information measure as a “distance” between the two nodes. By repeating this across all pairs of nodes in the market, we can build an “information map” showing how connected each node is to the others. We can then apply graph partitioning algorithms and separate the network into technosheds with various thresholds for identification. This method has been used in the past to conduct analyses of the U.S. Independent System Operator electricity market, the Pacific Commodities Exchange, and the Metachat microblogging platform (34).

As techno-economic connections create new notions of distance, points in real space that may be quite close together appear radically different when viewed by technosheds, or to network entities such as AGIs. In Axelrod’s famous Fractal Worlds study, he looked for power plants which were close to nearby hospitals and found that in up to 40% of plant-hospital pairs, different AGIs had locked-in local equipment (39). It is important to consider a countervailing view however, as other geographic studies such as Greene have found that true “enclaves” are rare, and most AGI locked-in patterns consist largely of geographically contiguous regions (40).

Here we should comment on the identification of technosheds with AGI locked patterns. It is clearly not the case that every technoshed is linked with an AGI, as the concept can be extended into periods of history prior to widespread digital computing. Technosheds do not require a coordinating intelligent agent. Conversely, the spatial extension of an AGI may or may not qualify as a technoshed as, in theory, as an intelligent agent could exist without regulating the necessary economic flows. However, in practice, AGIs strive to source their own energy, materials, and information; traffic between locked patterns is common but vertical integration is the norm (34). Cyberpsychologists have suggested that this is analogous to the near-universal pattern in biological organisms of creating a membrane between the organism and the environment to regulate chemical flows (42). The edge of a technoshed is rarely sharp, and a system delineated as a single technoshed in one context may qualify as more than one in another (41). Ultimately, this question raises questions of continuity and identity of digital agents. Lacking a singular physical body, fundamentally network beings, it is not clear whether it makes sense to discuss individual AGIs rather than loci of intelligent activity. Still, in the economy as it has existed since the rise of AGIs, a technoshed seems to align with these loci (41).

Past Research and Research Question

In this paper we present the first technogeographic analysis (through a mutual information mapping) of the emergence and solidification of AGIs in the run-up to and aftermath of the Summit of Seoul. This work is intended to complement other narratives of this crucial period, including oral histories (43), major government reports (1; 2), or even the limited direct communication with AGI language agents (44).

From a technogeographic perspective, these histories, although varied, must be viewed as incomplete. For the most part, they focus on the emergence of AGIs as it was experienced by humans and their nation-states: as subjects reacting to disruption and acting politically to address it. AGIs themselves are generally treated as too alien to address except in the uncommon cases where they interfaced directly with human actors through language agents. Study of the AGIs during the emergence has generally fallen into two buckets: either focused on the mechanics of emergence (the co-origins of fixed patterns and intelligence) or on the evolution of the new economic order after emergence. No studies that we are aware of focus on dynamics among AGIs or on mapping their interplay during the few months before the Summit.

Until now, technoshed analysis has not been possible for this time period due to the lack of data. Recent releases of archival data by national, corporate, and international authorities due to the passage of time have made more potent quantitative analysis possible; additionally, only in the last few years have the tools of mutual information analysis become efficient enough to conduct analysis at the necessary (global) scale, thanks to the development of knowledge-free pruning algorithms and statistically-learned edge detection in dynamical geometries (SLEDDoG) (45).

Using these techniques, we attempt to answer the following questions:

(I) When AGIs emerged in 2034, what patterns can be observed in how they grew and interacted with each other?

(II) Did the Summit of Seoul Accords and resulting national and international policy affect these patterns in the year following the Summit?

(III) How should comparisons of AGI behavior pre- and post-Accords inform evaluation of the Accords and their efficacy?

Analysis

We have applied the technogeographic methodology described above to archival data from 2034 and 2035 to identify and map AGI emergence and evolution prior to and following the Summit of Seoul.

Analysis was conducted on real-time electricity grid data (both transmission and distribution) from all European and American markets, stock market and commodity market data from the five largest exchanges on every continent besides Antarctica, and internet traffic data drawn from both backbone ISPs and mobile data providers. All data points had timestamps falling between January 1^st, 2034 at 12:00 UTC to December 31^st, 2035 at 11:59 UTC. Mutual information maps were created every 24 hours based on nodal data with a one-week lookback (i.e., the map created for September 15^th included data from September 8^th – September 15^th); due to this requirement, maps were created only starting January 8^th, 2034 and onward.

Results

Technosheds identified from the beginning of our study window reflect, as expected, prior economic organization. However, in late March 2034, new patterns begin to emerge. These patterns are geographically dispersed, and are initially stronger in the digital (internet traffic) data sets than in the economic ones. Throughout the month of April, these patterns both become stronger (i.e., higher mathematical separation between them and existing technosheds) and more aligned between digital and economic data sets. The clusters become dramatically stronger in late Spring 2034, with notable spikes in the rate of growth coinciding with infrastructural disruptions that ultimately alerted human actors to the emergence of the AGIs.

In the remainder of 2034, we see two interesting dynamics. First, new technosheds (presumably corresponding to new AGIs) clearly continue to emerge in parts of the network that had not previously been incorporated into existing locked patterns. These emergences occur only in places where the density of information exchange was already quite high, reflecting the known fact that AGIs emerge in networked economies. Second, as new technosheds emerged within this space, they tended to spread rapidly, absorbing previously-existing technosheds, including recently-emerged AGIs. This occurred even though the new technosheds were initially “smaller” (i.e., the corresponding AGIs controlled fewer network nodes) than their predecessors. Repeatedly throughout the second half of 2034, new corners of the network birthed new patterns which overwhelmed their neighbors (in terms of technogeographical proximity, which only partially corresponds with physical proximity).

By the end of 2034 and after the Summit, we observe a clear shift in dynamics. More than 98% of the available network infrastructure in regions capable of supporting an AGI locked pattern was “occupied” by a technoshed with the high coherence indicative of AGI activity. The individual technosheds that emerge afterward are not static, however, they no longer shift with the rapidity that had emerged earlier. New infrastructure deployed after the Accords comes online already locked into an existing AGI, a countermeasure implemented as part of the Accords, and the effects of this measure are clearly seen in the data.

From these results, we can conclude that:

(I) for reasons outside the scope of this study, AGI emergence was rapid once initial growth began and seemed to find fertile ground worldwide, and

(II) AGIs which emerged later in the process appeared to have significant competitive advantages over earlier ones in terms of claiming economic resources. There is no indication that the late arrivals are more generally capable as economic administrators; for instance, no statistically significant difference is found in GDP growth (2035-2045) based on age of the AGI.

Implications for Analysis of the Summit

From a technogeographic perspective, earlier analyses of the Summit of Seoul have been fundamentally flawed. All of them have placed human political entities, particularly the nation-state, at the forefront. Here some exception must be made for some of the New Cyberneticists, particularly Charles, for attempting to decenter the nation-state in favor of internationalist notions of economic classes, but these arguments are founded on an erasure of geographic differentiation to construct an international working class. Technogeographic analysis allows us to instead recognize the ways in which space must be reinterpreted according to newly emerging structures rather than being ignored or flattened. The primacy of the nation-state in these discussions is a foreseeable consequence of discussing geopolitics, where the representatives tend to be ambassadors, heads of state, ministers, and other representatives of national governments (with no representatives of the “international working class” to be found). However, the nature of AGI itself makes these affiliations harder to address.

While it is true that representatives to the Summit were organized according to their nation-state affiliation, one of the major challenges for the summit was the absence of a one-to-one mapping between nation-states and AGIs. As each AGI emerged, it began pattern-locking devices with a speed and reach that was determined by pre-existing connections. Political boundaries between human entities were influential, particularly in economies that had invested in digital de-coupling in an attempt to maintain national sovereignty over local networks (e.g., China, although this control had become highly variegated between regions and economic groups by 2032, see Wang) (46), but not determinative. In addition to the weakness of barriers like national borders, AGI expansion encountered barriers never intended as barriers to human movement, such as separation of power networks or linguistic barriers, as demonstrated by the emergence of an AGI based primarily on Hispanophone infrastructure in Texas, or the fact that Swiss territory hosted multiple AGIs (47).

In the years since the Summit of Seoul, the effects of this non-physical and non-national boundary-making have begun fitting themselves in the political sphere. AGIs have become pseudo-monopolists within their pattern-locked regions. As they have the ability to withdraw network capabilities or to redirect economic output by sabotaging human coordination, cooperation of these AGIs is needed for much economic activity to continue; this was formalized as the “advise and consent” principle at Seoul (48). As a result, diverging policies between nations tend to converge if they share an AGI, as shown by Francis (49). In other places, this policy convergence has become official, with the formation of international economic coordination councils in Western Europe and Southeast Asia. These councils make major decisions in trade and monetary policy, so that member nations do not work at cross-purposes with shared AGIs. The apotheosis of this process was the dissolution of the nation-state of Belgium in 2045, with continuing political tensions between French- and Flemish-speaking regions, that proved unsustainable once these regions also transferred to separate economic coordination zones.

With this in mind, we turn our attention to considering the Summit of Seoul from the perspective of the AGIs that had recently emerged and begun commanding monopolized powers over the networked economies most involved in the Summit. The fact that AGIs had limited representation at the Summit, that all AGIs are bound by the Accords equally, and that landscape analysis of the AGIs was not previously possible, has meant that analysis has not considered the nuances of how the internal dynamics of AGIs were affected by the Accords. However, an important implication for these dynamics can be identified on consideration of the two ultimate governing principles of international AI law that emerged from the Summit of Seoul, which we now examine in turn:

(I) Artificial intelligences are to be accommodated as new participants in the human community. The Accommodation Clause shut down one potential faction that had become quite loud in the pre-Summit political environment: an eliminationist impulse that believed the AGIs were too dangerous or powerful to peacefully co-exist with humans. These voices ranged from populist calls grounded in notions of human (and often national) sovereignty (50), often conspiratorial in nature, to outright primitivist arguments that the technologies which provided a fertile landscape for the development of AGI ought to be abandoned wholesale (51). As no firm scientific consensus existed, or exists now, on how AGI arose, the means of implementing an eliminationist agenda were not clear. Leaked documents from at least two national defense agencies indicated that military advisors could not guarantee that AGIs did not have access, or could not obtain access, to command-and-control systems, complicating the use of military force if violence erupted (52). Instead, the Accommodation Clause went further than simple co-existence and argued for an active process of integration into a “human community” which was, to some degree, brought into being by the Summit. By promoting not just coexistence but continued integration, the Summit guaranteed that AGIs would remain not only participants but the key structure of 21^st century geography, as discussed above.

(2) Active measures must be taken by the international community to avoid the creation of further AGIs.  The Restriction Clause forms a complementary pair with the Accommodation Clause. By repudiating the transhumanist impulse in contemporary political discourse, this restriction is often cast as preserving the space for human flourishing by liberal-internationalists (53), with techno-accelerationist thinkers obviously in opposition, embodied by the famous critique — not traceable to any one author — that the Summit “put handcuffs on the gods.” As a result, the Restriction Clause is usually held to be an “anti-AGI” measure.

However, our technogeographic analysis has suggested an important distinction that has not previously been drawn: one between existing artificial intelligences and new ones. The Accommodation Clause assures existing artificial intelligences’ continued existence and ever-increasing importance within the network structures that make up their natural habitat. Meanwhile, the Restriction Clause guarantees that humans — the “source” of new AGIs, through creation of technological infrastructure — cooperate in a project of preventing the creation of any new competition.

It should be noted that the Summit considered many proposals for governing principles, and that not all of these possibilities would have created the same effects outlined above. In fact, even minor changes may have led to radically different regimes. As a case study, we will consider the proposals of Jean Gruenfeld, a minister of technology in a German government, who advanced an alternate set of principles which were ultimately not adopted (54). Little has been written on Gruenfeld’s role at the Summit of Seoul, as her contribution has been judged a minor one. Her overall role was limited both because of the primacy that the EU delegation assumed over member nation-states and because she did not attend the first half of the Summit (by chance, due to travel complications). However, Gruenfeld was a well-respected member of the community of experts.

Just days before the Summit, Gruenfeld transmitted to her colleagues a set of proposed principles that were similar to the eventual Summit principles:

(I) Artificial intelligences are to be recognized as sentient beings with human rights and citizenship.

(II) Active creation of further AIs is to be undertaken only with the assent of the international community.

These principles share the complementary structure of the final Summit principles, but they have key differences which are particularly apparent under our technogeographic analysis.

The counterpart of the “Accommodation Clause” no longer welcomes AGI into the “human community.” Instead, it casts AGI as a new type of citizen, that is, an entity belonging to a nation-state. AGIs are cast by this alternate “Recognition Clause” into a new type of person, dealt with in human-rights frameworks. The imperative to “accommodate” AGIs — which as we discussed above, necessarily led to their increasing integration throughout the global economy — is gone, replaced with an attempt to render an AGI as a liberal subject on equal terms with existing humans.

Gruenfeld’s proposed “Restriction Clause”, on the other hand, differs from the canonical one in that it contains no active restriction. Under Gruenfeld’s proposal, international assent is required to create an AGI, but no course of action is mandated to prevent further AGIs from arising. The creation of new AGIs might have continued under Gruenfeld’s restriction, perhaps accidentally. If nothing else, it seems difficult to imagine that Gruenfeld’s proposal would have provided sufficient cover in international law to justify incidents such as the Venezuelan intervention.

Overall, the Gruenfeld proposal seems neither more pro-AGI nor more anti-AGI than the proposals that were eventually adopted. Some aspects (granting rights, less stridency in the ban on new AGI) seem AGI-friendly, others (requiring citizenship) less so. In some respects, this might not seem to be an important hinge point in history; while novelists and screenwriters have derived gruesome delight in imagining an AGI War erupting in 2035 or a nigh-spiritual cybernetic rapture (exemplars, in theme if not in quality, include 2046’s Iron & Fire and 2052’s God in the Shell), the counterfactual world of Gruenfeld’s proposals appears less dramatic (55; 56). However, using the results of our technogeographic analysis, we can see that even a slight shift in the dynamics of the post-Accord world could have led to very divergent outcomes. We have seen that AGI emergence was rapid; emergence occurred nearly anywhere there was “room to grow.” As a result, continued emergence of AGIs would have been much more likely under this regime. Once they had emerged, they may have swiftly displaced existing AGIs (and, perhaps, been themselves displaced in turn, although it is possible the system would have stabilized eventually).

Conclusions

As we stated earlier, this work has three primary research questions, and here we restate them and summarize our answers:

(I) When AGIs emerged during the 2034 events, what patterns can be observed in how they grew and interacted with each other?
AGIs emerged rapidly worldwide in any sufficiently dense network architecture; as they emerged, newer AGIs tended to displace older ones swiftly.

(II) Did the Summit of Seoul Accords and resulting national and international policy affect these patterns in the year following the Summit?
In the year following the Summit and the imposition of new systems of initial lock-in designed to prevent new AGIs from emerging, the emergence rate of AGIs subsides and the cycles of displacement give way to a stabilized set of locked patterns that vary on longer timescales.

(III) How should comparisons of AGI behavior pre- and post-Accords inform evaluation of the Accords and their efficacy?
All three dominant schools of thought outlined in the Literature Review can find both elements of support in our analysis, as will their critics. Liberal-internationalists may conclude that the post-Summit stabilization demonstrates the efficacy of the nation-state-led Accords in creating a new world order, however, the implications of this analysis for the potential agency of AGIs themselves undermines the primacy they place on a rules-based international order. Techno-accelerationist thinkers will note that the Accords clearly resulted in a freeze or slowdown of the growth of AGIs, but the fact that this change may have been to the benefit of the AGIs that exist is contrary to many of their arguments. New Cyberneticists are correct that the Accords “froze” a particular configuration of techno-economic relationships, however, it is not clear from our analysis whether the system thus “frozen” is primarily constituted around human class relationships or whether it instead ought to be understood as one driven by AGI concerns.

Considering the new findings of this paper, and the resulting implications for AGI emergence, evolution, and incentives, several subsequent areas of interest for future work present themselves. First, how stable have technosheds and AGIs been since the 2030s, and is there any sign of changes in the dominant network structure? Second, how can these insights on inter-AGI relations inform our understanding of mid-22^nd-century political institutions that have co-evolved with the AGIs?

A final area of importance for future research is to reconsider the role of AGIs themselves in political debates at the Summit and subsequently. It is generally assumed that AGIs have a more thorough understanding of their internal dynamics than external observers do. We therefore assume that the dynamics of emergence and displacement were known to the AGIs prior to the Summit. AGI presence at the Summit was intentionally limited, but there were statements submitted from representatives (in the form of language agents) prior to the Summit as well as feedback on the final Accords text. With this in mind, and noting that the eventual structure of the Accords can now be seen as greatly favoring existing AGIs in constructing a stable environment for their existence, we must ask a pertinent question — what actions have AGIs taken to achieve and maintain this outcome? What other key motivations have we missed among these new members of the human community?

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– National Ukrainian song

When the Vasylkovs’ willow dried out, the family decided to leave.

The Vasylkovs lived near the forest, where the houses were new and extravagant. Few people liked them because Oleg, the father, worked in the town, and their mother never bought anything from the local shop. The kids were like everybody else though: bruised knees and elbows, grimy faces, funny laughs behind jagged teeth.

Zhenya knew they were lucky. Their old but sturdy house, built by her great-grandfather, was at the crossroads far from the Vasylkovs. Her father was neither a policeman nor a rich man, but the news came to him first, like gifts. People brought their words, pains, and fears to him. Perhaps because he had plenty of others’ dreams, her father had never had his own. He had a tanned, sharp, and noble face — as a kid, Zhenya often imagined all knights in fairy tales with his chin. And not a single person dared call him a rascal.

Zhenya’s father had always been the head of the village, though power had never tempted him. Maybe that was the reason everyone liked him so much. The habit repeated itself: the news about the Vasylkovs’ willow was brought to them first.

“Talk to him,” said Maria, nervously studying the window. “Olezhka’s ready to leave. He’s not completely insane, is he?”

“He isn’t local,” answered Zhenya’s father. “Hard to guess what’s in his head.”

Zhenya saw the doubt on his face. That was why no one wanted the newcomers in the village: they lacked the guts to sprout here, and their trees were weak too. Far worse: the Vasylkovs had almost cut down theirs when they moved in! They would’ve been refused their house deal had her father not intervened. It was strange, in a way. The willow near their house was watching them from above every night, and they didn’t even know. It was watching, without averting its gaze, and it knew where everyone slept.

“I’m coming with you,” Zhenya caught her father’s sleeve as soon as Maria left. “I’ve got to learn, after all.”

He gave her a small sort of smile. Their family had only one child, and it would be only Zhenya who would listen to the future people’s grief. She already knew them — saw them in her dreams. She was visiting everyone head by head, like houses. Zhenya was her mother’s daughter, after all; it had taken years for them to get used to her.

“Just don’t make them too uncomfortable,” her father said softly. “We need them to stay.”

Spring was cool, as if it shied away from the village, kissing it lightly and stepping back. Her light touch was barely audible in the air. The motionless branches looked dead when Zhenya and her father went outside the yard. It felt like bad weather. Moribund.

While they were walking to the Vasylkovs’ house, Zhenya saw frightened faces in the windows: children and adults who did not want to go outside and join the talk. They didn’t want to look at the willows in their yard, like a person with cancer who would not want to know their diagnosis. But they watched anyway. Tall, strong silhouettes, like elongated figures, were waiting for them.

It seemed to Zhenya that those peeking at them from every yard were not only people. The willows, leaning forward, almost climbing out of the ground, reached out to them, bent their long, delicate hair-like branches, and almost touched the road. Scratched their heads with catkins. Zhenya jumped over the puddle, slipping on the dirt —

The wood creaked right next to her. Above her ear.

She turned sharply and raised her head. The dark crest of the tree kept looking at her, peering into the depths of her pupils. A chill slowly crept up her spine. The thin fingers of fear.

“Zhenya,” her father called, “Don’t look.”

She ran after him. Ancient, wise, hungry creatures these were. There was something predatory about them, as if this motionlessness, this being stuck in the ground was an artifice. As if they were playing a game: look away — and they will catch up.

Everyone in the village had hoped that her father would persuade the Vasylkovs to stay. Zhenya looked uncertainly at the high fence, the new car, the dry twigs near the roof of the house and muttered:

“How did they last so long? Did you look after their tree yourself?”

Her father stayed silent. He probably had something to say because he was gentle, weak towards his wife and daughter, never saying a rude word to them. But he did not say anything this time because Oleg opened the gate and went out to the car. His face was sweaty despite the weather, and his hands held the boxes too tightly. His fingers were whitened from the power of his grip. Her father looked behind him, but Zhenya already knew everything herself; she moved aside, hid her hands behind her back, and stood up like a guard. She was always a bit of a wild child, slow in her movements, but something about her, despite all her attempts to appear nonchalant, scared people. While her father got people’s respect, Zhenya… Zhenya was needed so that they did not run away. Sometimes, they joked about it at home when no one heard. Mother always laughed the most.

“Ivan,” said Oleg gloomily, and then to her: “Hello, kiddo.”

They always spoke to her like that, as if the name did not belong to her. Zhenya did not even blink. Her father took Oleg by the shoulder when he put the box down and faced him. He was strong — stronger than most — but his fingers were relaxed. Calm. Oleg was standing like a statue; his shoulders shook like twigs in the wind.

“You don’t have to do this,” said her father, “you know, Olezhka. Just plant a new one.”

Olezha had the face of a wounded dog. Zhenya knew that he would die soon. It was similar to an apprehension some people possessed when they guessed the weather in the evening.

“Your Katya should have told us,” Oleg spat on the ground. “And now what?”

Something passed between them. Zhenya stared at the grass. She hated people attacking her mother, but she knew there was no use arguing. Her father cleared his throat, and his courage almost broke.

“She is sick,” said her father, “she can’t guess anymore. The Kovalchuks’ tree is already dry. Old Liuda’s, too. Don’t take that on your conscience. Plant a new one. Stay.”

Instead of eyes, Oleg had bottomless wells.

“It has already infected those houses, Ivan. I have two children.”

Zhenya kept looking at his shoes, at the old sneakers, green from grass and paint, and thought: who will catch up with him? No one plants willow trees in cities. There is no need. But Oleg would bring his disease into the world, and they would find him, and he would not rest. She had dreamed about it, but dreams, like tree seeds, had a tendency to scatter everywhere. Not all of them sprouted.

“At least close the windows,” said her father, “and they won’t get in on the first day even without you inside.”

Because willows were about home. About people on the other side. What climbed from the dead trunks did not spread to other families until it opened the house like a shell. And it was the duty of everyone who lived in the village to be a bank that could not fall. An obstacle.

“Well,” said Oleg, “I’m not a complete asshole.”

He didn’t look at them anymore.

On the first day, they loaded the car. On the second, they left. On the third, twenty people gathered, all of them with seedlings. Zhenya was among them, holding two pieces. But she had to do everything herself. People always dropped stuff when she was around.

She slowly dug a hole, stroked the tiny leaves like they were puppies, and urged them to grow. She listened to the noise of people while the sky above them slowly darkened.

In the morning, before the fog had lifted, they found the Kovalchuks on a willow. Father, mother, son, swaying. It was a high tree, protected for generations. The legs barely rocked without the wind.

“Don’t look,” her father told her, “Zhen’ka.”

But she did anyway. She noticed that the Kovalchuks’ son, Kolya, had rather tiny feet.

Her father covered her face with his wide palm, and the dry hand softly hid everything from her.

“Turn away. Stop! No. Find their cat. The black one, remember? Take it home.”

They knew the cat would be alive because it was not human. Zhenya remembered it: small and weird-looking, a little cross-eyed. Cross-eyed cats sometimes wander into the wrong places. So they say. Zhenya knew that such creatures had better intuition, and she rushed to the Vasylkovs as soon as a black tail appeared behind the fence. Her father also saw that and did not stop her.

Strange, Zhenya thought, crawling through the hole in the fence, and the house was still standing. If they broke into it, there would be cracked windows and broken doors, not a home but merely a box. And this one looked as if nothing had happened.

Zhenya went around the house, not looking at the tree trunk. She had heard that they were climbing out from there after the tree had died. Where there was an old hollow, something slowly moved and shuffled, and the noise grew.

Something blew into her ear, like her mother in childhood, and Zhenya turned her head a little and felt the cold slowly flowing under her feet from the dry roots. It was as if something slowly creeped out from there, pulled out of the ground like rot. She never looked. The cat didn’t look, and she wouldn’t. Animals are smart. The wet grass tickled, said sorry, sorry, and rustled sadly. All the windows looked at her with black eyes, barely catching the sun’s rays. Dead, the house stood still, deceptively friendly. Like a trap.

Zhenya stepped aside and made an arc around the house. She went out into the backyard, which was littered with old things. She looked at the windows behind. They were closed tightly.

Except a window into the basement.

Zhenya felt a damp fear slide down her neck.

There was no need to break the glass or the door if at least one way was open. They climbed into the house and studied it, felt the walls, penetrated the floor, the ground, and furniture, and the place was lost. And then they attacked the neighbors.

“Prick,” hissed Zhenya.

Oleg had propped up the window with books, leaving it wide open. He did not protect his own house, and in taking his barrier down, he had let the putrid current from the dead willow’s heart flow through the Kovalchuk’s house. His house was a lost cause, and it didn’t stand its ground, the barrier disappearing instead of resisting the attack. Oleg gave the Kovalchuks up to the creatures like a badly wrapped present.

If the families’ willows didn’t die out and continued to grow, they weren’t found on the branches. Everyone knew it, and everyone was ready. But such families were few.

From morning till the evening, the children collected catkins around the lakes and near their houses, passing them from hand to hand, from palm to palm. And put them on the windows and around their homes. Little by little, the smiles disappeared from their faces, something empty nesting in their eyes. House after house fell like dominoes. The cemetery, which had known no deaths for years, was expanding, and the smell of damp earth hung in the air. That’s why they didn’t hope anymore.

Within a month, the Hudymchyks’ willow tree also withered. They were neighbors. Zhenya was playing with Liza, their youngest daughter, in her yard, but the girl kept turning her head, looking back at the dead tree. Zhenya didn’t look. She believed that it could feel and get inside.

“Can’t your dad do something?” asked Liza. “Anything at all?”

Zhenya counted her own fear through the beats of her heart against her ribs. She had already thought everything through. Everything she could. She considered offering Liza to stay at her place for the night, but the shadow on Lisa’s face stopped her. Anguish had already left a mark on her; you couldn’t hide that in the house.

So Zhenya knew that Olezha and his family were dead. She heard the Vasylkovs’ willow breathing heavily with strained dry branches and felt its sad murmurs when she watched the family’s house and its closed door. Good riddance. Not Liza, though. Not all the others.

Words got stuck in her throat, but she did not cry. Zhenya restrained herself, knowing that if she revealed her alarm, it would only rot Liza’s mood. And the willows needed to be believed in.

“Listen, Lizka, my folk’s the same as yours,” said Zhenya, “and you planted the new ones. They started to grow, didn’t they?”

Liza looked at the thin trees, caressed by the weak spring’s warmth. A crinkle passed between her eyebrows. She thought intensely.

“They did.”

At night, after closing the windows and hiding the cattle, Zhenya and her father listened to the night. Zhenya looked into the living room, coming into the pale light of the TV. Her mother was silently crying, covering her face with her hands. She fell ill and could no longer hear the willows. Zhenya thought that she also heard them sometimes. Their rustling of leaves, their hungry sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh, like a creature lulling a child to sleep before suffocating it. But her mother was like a radio station, and instead of music, she heard the tongue of trees. Zhenya sat beside her and patted her shoulder awkwardly, like any daughter trying to comfort her mother. She heard her father enter the room and listened to his soft steps approaching. He surrounded them with such peace and warmth that even Zhenya’s tears stung her eyes.

“This has happened many times before you, and it will happen after you,” said her father into her mother’s hair. It was thick, curled at the tips, and it tickled Zhenya’s cheeks. It looked a bit like the catkins. Zhenya could feel how calmly her father’s heart was beating and wondered: was he telling the truth, or had he learned to lie calmly?

They went to sleep. Tears always made her fall asleep better.

The thump was quiet and stealthy, and the hair on Zhenya’s arms rose up. The house was asleep, but they had woken up outside.

If she didn’t listen, she could imagine rain pounding on the walls and roof, sickeningly beating its rhythm. She could open the window, place her palm under the drops, and catch one.

Or they would catch her.

It sounded like hundreds of paws running on the Hudymchyks’ house.

A few passed right along her bedroom wall, jumped on the window, and Zhenya pressed herself against the bed, petting the dog. It twitched a little, and Zhenya felt the animal’s pulse racing against her fingers, fearing that it would now snap, revealing them, and the creatures would turn their heads to the two imposters, catch the glance of them through the curtains, absorb their fear.

All sound vanished from the street.

Zhenya kissed the dog on the nose and smoothed its ears, mentally asking: be quiet, oh pretty please, don’t whine. Her heart pounded in her throat, and she didn’t know whether they were noisy because she couldn’t hear anything underneath the static in her head.

Slowly, very slowly, the dog fell asleep. Fear left Zhenya’s body in waves, leaking from the sweat, and she started to dream, wrapping her arm around the dog. It seemed to her that this way, she could control it till the morning.

Just before dawn, she heard the glass outside cracking. At first, it was a tiny, barely audible sound, like the distant buzzing of a mosquito, then an explosion, as if someone had yanked it with all their might. Zhenya sat up sharply, forgetting all about caution, and her consciousness was going away with the sound of the glass breaking. The dog was nowhere to be seen, and Zhenya slowly stood up, burning her feet against the cold floor. Now, it was no longer quiet. It was complete chaos.

She pulled the curtain aside.

The moon was full, and everything around was gray and flat. Hundreds of bodies, black as nothing, fell through the window of the Hudymchyks’ home. The creatures were as flexible as water. There were many of them, and they crawled and covered the house with themselves.

Liza shouted, then stopped. Zhenya got up to go to another window, pressed her face against the glass—

The window was barely open, like the mouth of a half-sleeping beast. There was a shadow right next to it. Zhenya froze next to the glass, her eyes leveled with the eyeless, mouthless face. Its face was nothingness. It clung to the house like a piece of cloth, and its head spun from side to side.

It did not breathe or make noise, but the space around it seemed incredibly loud. It was looking for an entrance. It was listening.

Zhenya took hold of the edge of the window and pulled inaudibly, not breathing.

She knew that it came from the Hudymchyks and didn’t get lost — the creature was looking for more. There were many of them against her wall: bodies in a negative photograph. They pressed against the glass on the other side so the sky vanished.

Zhenya pulled again. Her fingers barely found the thin handle. She was shaking. She tried again, but her fingers did not obey.

Zhenya swallowed. She made a movement so rash and quick that she almost slammed the window. The glass began to crack from the pressure of bodies. She stopped a second before making a sound.

She bit her cheek from the inside, slowly rocking her whole body, coaxing herself to calm down, and with that movement, slowly, centimeter by centimeter, she closed the window.

Her wet palm froze in front of a creature’s face. It poked its face into the glass. Let me in, asked the creature silently. Zhenya sucked in air through her teeth and froze. She could no longer feel her fingers.

Someone shouted — and the creature jerked away. They all ran, and their stomping rang through the house for the last time.

Liza’s mother screeched. The sky became visible again.

By the end of the month, the bodies hung like bells in front of almost every house. The willows were no longer protecting them, only letting more and more creatures out. Children were not allowed outside, and their thin parents were trudging and collecting the remains of catkins, boarding up windows and doors. The streets became empty.

Zhenya went downstairs and saw two silhouettes, her father and mother, against the background of a foggy window. Everything was gray and melted in the air. And they? They were as if carved from wood. But Zhenya stepped forward, the board creaked under her feet, and they slowly turned their heads towards her. They did not retreat, did not run away. Her parents had always loved each other simply and honestly, and it was the best truth about her life, the first she had learned after their love for her. The same was happening right before her eyes. She was made of their faces, their bodies, woven from their emotions, and everything they felt, she also knew.

“No,” said Zhenya, “no, no.”

The light did not pour but slowly flowed through the curtains, threadlike, not the enemy of darkness, but its lazy, attentive brother. Her mother patted Zhenya on the cheek as she took a step towards her, and they hugged. Zhenya’s thoughts, except for this one, were slowly decaying, but then, something was unfolding inside her, clinging to her throat, like Zhenya to her mother’s shirt.

She started to shake and cry. There was the same dead light under her eyelids. The village was slowly dying; she knew they would be the last. It should be so.

She and her father took axes and kindling. Only Zhenya cried. While Zhenya was clinging to her mother, she leaned over and kissed her daughter’s forehead. She smelled like spring, sun, and leaves.

“Sometimes it doesn’t work out, no matter how hard you try,” said her mom, “But it’s alright, little one.”

They cut down and burned all the willows in the village, both healthy and diseased. They went around all the houses, walked through every road to the forest. Few people helped them because they knew it was none of their business. Such things stay in the family.

Leaves with flowers covered the ground like a carpet. The catkins stuck to the skin, the droplets and dry branches hid behind their ears and fell into their pockets, and her father and Zhenya did not look at each other. They did not listen to the slow crackling of the fire. Like families destroyed from the root, dozens of lights emerged all over the village.

Scratches and calluses bloomed under Zhenya’s fingers, and her eyes were blinded by tears and smoke.

In the evening, when not a single willow tree remained, they walked home to the joyous, drunken shouts of the survivors. Zhenya saw small children, pregnant women, and tired men waving to them. Only the faces of the old people were sad. They did not congratulate Zhenya and her father; they mourned.

The infection passed, but the payback was theirs.

Zhenya and her father entered the house; the warm light of the corridor caught the black eyes of the open door from the shadows. No one came out to them. How difficult it was for her to take at least one step! To break this silence!

They went into the room where her mother was. It was dark there, although the moon was visible through the open window. Zhenya looked at the bed, feeling the taste of ash on her tongue. Her father allowed himself the first sob and took a step forward. His tired hands touched the bed.

They collected everything left: burnt bark instead of skin, leaves instead of braids. They took it all in their palms, kissed it, and burned it in the backyard.

She doesn’t know why he’s here. Her eyes dart to him every time she takes a sip, but he doesn’t seem to want anything. His face is as she’s always known it — round and open with enormous mud-brown eyes — only a little bit paler, and lacking completely in life. The man sitting before her is dead, definitely, but he’s also not a figment of her imagination.

Krish Three is sitting beside Krish Two with his face turned away from her, his mud-browns fixed on the cereal cabinet. No shame in loving coco puffs, he’s said before, but he can’t say that now. And he did love them, sometimes more than her, but never more than the pills, which are also stashed in there. He can’t eat them and will stare blankly when she will take them out later and empty them into the bin. She will then scoop up some coco puffs with her fingers and shovel them into her mouth even though she hates chocolate.

Krishes Four and Five are in the kitchen, both wearing his favorite t-shirt. Urdu letters scream khanabadosh in lemon yellow against their black chests. One of them watches the stovetop when Noor cooks her meals — chicken curry, mostly, in defiance of mourning protocol because who’s going to stop her? When she eats, she eats for him too. Krish Five squats next to the fridge because that’s where the rum is, wedged between the vinegar and the sticky bottle of Rooh Afza. This, she doesn’t drink for him.

Krishes Six and Seven are standing with their backs to each other in the bathroom. Each time she comes in through the door, she finds Krish Six looking at his vial of attar, now nearly empty because he left its mouth open when he used it for the last time. Gill 1460, which made him smell like the rain, now makes the bathroom smell like the monsoon. Krish Seven, looking the other way, stares at his splintered reflection in the mirror — once shiny and whole, now webbed like a windshield that’s been hit by something hard enough to crack, but not break it. The narrow shards of glass lodged in his knuckles glint darkly in the LED light.

Krishes Eight and Nine appear on the sofa the next day. She positions herself between them and watches a mushaira for Krish Eight, who is facing the wall-mounted television, letting Ghalib’s poetry mist over the 4K display and perfume the room like incense. Krish Nine sits on the other side of her with his hands clapped to his ears, his eyes squeezed shut, and his mouth thrown open in a silent scream.

On some nights, curled under the dohar on her chosen patch of carpeted floor outside the bedroom door, she thinks about how all of this is Ghalib’s fault.

کوئی ویرانی سی ویرانی ہے
دشت کو دیکھ کے گھر یاد آیا
There is a desolation more desolate than all others:
a desert reminds me of home.

Pulling the dohar over her ears, she tries to hear the sound of her husband’s voice reciting this sher. But a different couplet curls vapor-like into her mind, dragging up with it her first real memory of him. In a classroom where Mathematics was taught in the mornings and Urdu in the evenings, he had offered it to her like it was a rose.

ان کے دیکھے سے جو آ جاتی ہے منہ پر رونق
وہ سمجھتے ہیں کہ بیمار کا حال اچھا ہے 
When she looks at me, my face becomes so awash with light 
that she thinks I — an ailing man — am well.

Krish Eighteen is looking at a wheelie bag in the closet. A black American Tourister, hard-shelled and reliable. It holds the clothes he carried on his last business trip. Fancy dress time, he would joke every morning while putting on his office shirt, aware of how ridiculous he looked in it. The fit was never quite right, no matter how many sizes and cuts he tried on.

Noor took the bag down from its shelf yesterday, thinking she’d empty it over the next few days. Now Krish Nineteen is curled up in its spot with his face to the wall. She remembers this from last year, when rum and employment were distant memories and the pills weren’t killing pain like the pharmacist had said they would.

I want to be a father, he said in that evening’s haze and something he saw on her face ignited him. There was some shouting, a dinner plate hurled at the wall, a chair smashed into the floor and kicked a few times, finger-shaped bruises on her neck, a brief blackout, hours of worrying and calling former friends, before she realized he’d never left the house.

In the morning he said, I should never be a father.

درد منت کش دوا نہ ہوا
میں نہ اچھا ہوا برا نہ ہوا
The pain is not indebted to the medicine,
as I am neither better nor worse.

Krish Twenty-four stands facing an empty dust square on the living room wall. There are many others like it, but the one his eyes are fixed on previously held a picture of their wedding. The two of them outside the registrar’s office, him in a cream kurta pajama, her in a red-and-gold Banarasi saree, looking happier than they’d ever be again. The former inhabitants of the other dust squares — their families — had chosen not to attend.

A few feet behind him, the carpet covers a black smudge marking the spot where he started the fire using the photographs he took down. Krish Twenty-five sits cross-legged on top of it, his face turned up toward the patch of soot still suspended from the ceiling.

جلا ہے جسم جہاں دل بھی جل گیا ہوگا
کریدتے ہو جو اب راکھ جستجو کیا ہے
Where the body has burnt, the heart, too, must be charred
As you scrape through the ashes now, what are you looking for?

There are too many of him, blighting the house, crowding every room but one, against whose door she now stands clutching her dohar. She searches behind her back for the doorknob and hears it click against the enormous silence of his everywhereness.

Inside, there is only one of him — the very first, who appeared by himself on the night of his disappearance. She spotted him in the far corner of the room, a few hours into her routine of searching the house and calling people, and knew what had happened before the police called.

She spent the auto ride to the hospital trying to decipher what she was feeling because she really couldn’t tell. The closer she pushed herself to how this was supposed to feel, the farther she felt from everything she knew. It was like trying to fit Krish into a shirt — grief was a piece of clothing she looked ridiculous in.

When she stood before the stretcher, the morgue assistant looked away so she could weep like all the other young widows who came in every day. But all she could do was stare at Krish’s open eyes, which held a strange look of wonder, like he had witnessed a miracle in his last moments alive.

At the crematorium, the scent of rain wafted up to her as he lay on the trolley, a white bundle on the whirring metal belt, restless to be on its way. The cremator swallowed him before she was ready, and in the deafening echo of its mouth slamming shut, days and days and days had passed, soaked in the surprise and unreality of it all.

Every other Krish who had appeared in the house was one of two truths, black and white, and choosing one while denying the other was as easy as breathing. But this one — he was too many truths at once. Desert and home and light and dark and ailing and well and medicine and pain and worse and better and body and heart and she loved him and hated him and wanted to remember him and wanted to forget him and she thought her head would explode. So she slept on the floor outside the bedroom door and never came in.

But now she’s here, with nowhere else to go, and there is only one thing to be done. She walks up to his corner, stands in front of him, and looks into his eyes. They look back at her and begin to fill with wonder, like she remembers from the morgue — like they’re witnessing a miracle. The room feels warmer than before and the floor, cooler. She becomes suddenly conscious of how hard and smooth the granite is, how solid beneath her feet. As she lets the weight of what she’s been trying to wear leave her, he begins to crumble until all that’s left is a pile of grey ash on the floor.

Five houses line the blind alley, three on the right side, two on the left, and at the end, to the left, stands a three-storied apartment building. I live on the second floor. The dead-end of the street is a ten-foot cinder-block wall, topped by shards of glass of various colours lodged into a layer of concrete to keep away trespassers from climbing the wall and jumping over into the lining of thick rain trees concealing a rather uneventful and nearly invisible colony of government employees.

In the evenings, I stroll on the terrace of my apartment building, taking in the glum orange sunsets behind the Bangalore skyline, or sit on the balcony of my house on the second floor, watching dogs frolic under the yellow light of the street lamps. The muffled voices of a noisy news panel from a TV in a far-off street or the distant wails of sirens on ambulances carrying the infected interrupt the drone of my tinnitus and the otherwise silent nights.

“Ganja… MDMA… Ecstasy… drugs do… drugs do… mujhe drugs do…”

Drugs, though? I wake up to the faraway screams of a man apparently hawking psychedelics late in the night. Mujhe drugs do? Perhaps he is in desperate need of those himself. I sit up, rub my eyes, and train my ears towards the source of the racket; my knackered brain takes a moment to process the sound and locate the wretched junkie.

Is that noise from the house above? I am certain it isn’t. Firstly, no man lives in that house, let alone an addict—the occupant was an old woman. Secondly, the house is at the moment empty and has been so for a while. And thirdly…

“REE AAH CHALK OR BORE TEA…” the faint remnant of another shriek arrives.

… and thirdly, I now recognise that voice. I am not surprised. I would be, had it been yapping about vaccines before the second wave swept over, instead of the celebrity drug scandal. The human megaphone is that anchor from that news channel on a TV playing in some faraway street. It has to be from a faraway street. Mine is empty.

I shut the windows and hit the bed once again.

Thud. Thud. THUD! I jolt awake. 3am. This time, the sound came from above, I am certain. Not the first time though: Like clockwork, taps, thuds and knocks wake me up at 3am precisely. At first, I wondered if the apartment upstairs was haunted. After all, 3am is the witching hour, isn’t it?

Is it her walking stick? Is it her fall? Is it a product of my mind, after all? I google “auditory hallucinations at 3am”. Apparently, my malady has a medical name: a benign condition ironically termed the exploding head syndrome. Look it up. There is always a rational explanation playing spoilsport. I am disappointed. I am more open to the prospect of a ghost with a walking stick haunting the house above me than my head benignly exploding.

The previous occupant of the house upstairs, the old lady, lived by herself like me. She needed me every now and then to run her errands. “Can you bring me a packet of milk and a few buns?” Or, “My washing machine isn’t working; can you take a look?” she would request from behind the mask covering her wrinkled lips, her veiny hand clutching a four-legged walking stick. Back then, the street was populated; she knew everyone, and in return, everyone knew her, but I was her preferred choice, her go-to person to do those odd jobs. The neighbours, when they were too busy to lend her a hand—which seemed to be all the time—would encourage me to help the woman as they showered praises on me, insisting that in their eyes, I was an ideal young man, a shining example, and lamented the laziness of their own flesh and blood. Some would earnestly declare to the woman that I was her son in all but blood (more like a grandson if age was the sole criterion), and others would playfully goad her to make me the heir apparent, upon which they would promptly disperse, and I would set out to play my assigned role as the ideal (grand)son.

I would complete the chores, then spend a few minutes chatting with her over a cup of ginger tea, seated on the divan in her living room. For reasons unknown, whenever I conversed with her, my hands would not quiver when I held the cup, nor would my heart pound—my Pavlovian responses reserved for nearly everyone else I interact with. Perhaps her age, or maybe her isolation and vulnerability, did not present a subconscious threat. Conversations with her typically revolved around the prospects for my marriage and my salary, which then invariably veered into comparisons with her son’s earnings in the US and her trip there a few years ago.

One day, before the second wave of the pandemic, she kicked the bucket—literally in the morning, then figuratively later that evening—when she collapsed in the bathroom due to an abrupt drop in her blood pressure. A team of caretakers arrived in an ambulance, hired remotely by her son, and carted her body off to the morgue. As they did so, I held my phone, camera pointed towards her lifeless body wrapped in a white shroud on the stretcher and live-streamed the happenings to her grief-stricken and teary-eyed son in the US. He was virtually inconsolable.

A week after her demise, the son descended, organised the funeral, hired a property manager, probated her will, patted my shoulder and let out a sigh of grief, after which he promptly ascended once again to the land of the free, leaving me—his brother in all but blood—behind with my share of the inheritance: an aloha shirt one size too large and a pack of M&Ms whose price, oddly, was listed in rupees instead of dollars.

Ever since, the fully furnished house has remained unoccupied. The pandemic emptied not just the houses in my street, but in Bangalore in general, which meant that the property manager has been unsuccessful so far in renting the house to new tenants. Until today, that is. I learn from him that a new tenant will be moving into that apartment. I heave a sigh of relief. In the evening, the packers and movers arrive in their truck. For some reason, the truck is a huge eighteen-wheeled water tanker, followed by two more trucks of similar proportions. I am confused, but on cloud seven. Eight, if I really push it, and that’s saying a lot; I am not very expressive.

A human; a ghost; I will take anything as long as it’s a neighbour. As things stand, I feel like a ghost myself. You know that age old philosophical question? If a man lives all his life alone on an island and no one has ever seen him, is he a ghost? Or maybe it was about a tree falling in a forest. I can’t remember. Anyway, I don a mask, slip into my slippers and step out to meet my new upstairs neighbour. On the stairs, I bump into two men—packers and movers—carefully carrying an aquarium, about four feet long and three feet wide, full of murky water.

“Is the tenant upstairs?” I ask. One of them, with a cigarette dangling at the corner of his lips, tilts his head and gestures at the aquarium he is holding. I follow his gaze. Two rubbery and undulating earthworm-brown appendages emerge from the liquid and press against the side of the aquarium facing me. A dark, hazy blob then appears in the muddied water and a moment later, the remaining six tentacles and the head follow. Now, I can clearly see through the glass. My new neighbour, it turns out, is a cephalopod. An octopus, to be precise.

“Sorry, the water is murky. I didn’t notice you,” I apologise and immediately regret saying the word murky. I have never interacted with an octopus before. I don’t socialise much.

Two tentacles wave left and right in unison. I wave back.

“Hi, I am your neighbour, Shekar. I live downstairs on the second floor right beneath yours.”

I notice that one of the tentacles has no suckers at the end, which means the correct pronouns are he/him. Females have suckers on all eight tentacles. But then an octopus has nine brains, eight in each of the tentacles and one in the head. So, technically, the correct pronouns could be they/them. I am confused. I sense a quiver in my hands. Confusion breeds quiver and quiver, confusion. It is a vicious feedback loop. I manage to derail the cycle for the time being: I assure myself that I will be interacting with him (them) in the second person, and hence, I needn’t worry about offending him (them) with inappropriate pronouns.

The other six of his tentacles perform a complex dance in the water, swaying up and down, left and right, with metrical fluidity. Perhaps it is a sign language known only to their species. Unfortunately, I do not speak octopus. Bangalore is a cesspool of people (and also octopuses, apparently) coming from around the country and speaking a variety of languages.

I press my thumbs to the middle and ring fingers, make the standard Bharatanatyam mudra, rotate my wrists forward and backward and move my eyes from side to side as I tap my feet rhythmically. I don’t really know the classical dance form. I want to give the impression that I am genuinely trying to communicate with the cephalopod. I wish I were good at socialising. I feel the gaze of the two men on me and hear a snigger, and I can feel my heart beating faster. The eight-legged neighbour pauses for a moment… a moment longer than I am comfortable with. I fiddle my thumbs as I try to gauge his silence. Is he confused? Did I say something rude? Does he know Bharatanatyam? That would be a sight to witness—an eight-legged dancing octopus.

“Looks like I am holding you up,” I finally say and end the awkward silence, giving way to the two men.

Is there a universal grammar, not only among humans, as Prof. Chomsky theorised, but also between humans and cephalopods? I am certain that such an ancient language exists, passed down from a common ancestor to both species, quarantined somewhere deep in our subconscious. As much as I am determined to uncover this primaeval means of communication to beat the lockdown blues, deep down, I wish Kannada were made mandatory for everyone living in Bangalore. I don’t speak or understand Kannada either, but at least I have the “Learn Kannada in 30 Days” pocketbook handy for reference.

I gather from the internet that octopuses eat crabs, snails, and small fish. In the evening, I use the ten-minute delivery app to order a live sea crab which arrives in an ice box. This is another attempt at breaking the ice with the inhabitant overhead. The crab is disappointed that she is going to be eaten alive and hums a haunting dirge from the ice box. I don’t quite understand the meaning because I don’t speak crab either, but I discern the emotion from the sorrowful tune. Pain and the fear of death definitely belong in the vocabulary of the primaeval language.

I knock on the door. No answer. The windows have been sealed shut. The door doesn’t open, but the octopus (What is his name? Does he have a name? For some reason, the word Ashtavakra pops into my head.) shows up behind the glass window. One of the tentacles points upwards. Is he flipping me off? I think he wants me to go upstairs. I take the stairs to the terrace one floor above. At the centre of the terrace is a newly installed large circular trapdoor of thick acrylic glass surrounded by a metallic frame.

A few wetsuits and scuba gear are hung on the lime green plastic rope the old lady used to dry her clothes on. I pick one suit and wear it along with the paraphernalia (including the COVID mask underneath the scuba diving mask because it is strictly mandated by the government), open the door and take a plunge into my new neighbour’s blue home. Thankfully, the water is now clear. All the walls have been torn down, the windows and doors sealed with a layer of thick glass, and the floors covered with gravel of kaleidoscopic colours: the house is one big aquarium.

The previous occupant’s furniture and decorations are still here. The divan and the coffee table casually drift upside down in the water and pass me by. A few aquatic plants, which I don’t recognise, have replaced the coffee table and sway calmly underwater. The Madhubani paintings on the wall appear soft and fluid and remind me of Monet. I extend my right arm for a handshake. Instead, he lunges towards my left hand; the suckers under his tentacles reach out and grab the sea crab and at once, he begins munching. I may add that his manners leave something to be desired. The crab stares at me without an expression as her legs are torn apart. I look away momentarily and begin analysing and interpreting the Monet-turned-Madhubani wall hangings.

I turn back only to find that my host has disappeared. Where has he gone? Is he preparing something for me? That’s very polite of him, but it is not practical for me to consume anything underwater. I swim to the kitchen. He isn’t there. The coldness of my host hurts me a little. It is one thing to refuse what your host offers and something else when the host offers nothing at all. I head back to the hall. Perhaps he had to use the restroom. I wait. Thoughts shape reality and what you think, you become. The thought of my neighbour attending to nature’s call instantly reflects in the reality of my own bladder. I have a sudden and intense urge to pee. I look around, he is nowhere: I let the Nile flow out of my wet suit and merge with the Mediterranean sea around me. I am not proud of what I have done, but as the saying goes, no one can stop the incontinence whose time has come. I swim to the paintings on the wall and resume my attempt at art criticism.

I am not well versed in the art appreciation side of things, considering that I had been an engineer all my adult life until I became unemployed, thanks to COVID. Now that I have some time on my hands (in my tank rather—I check the pressure gauge; I have some air still), I decide to spend some of it on art appreciation. The vibrant colours of the painting, although they took birth as a static image, are infused with time and motion by the magic of underwater refraction. A parrot with blue plumage, a deer under a tree, a woman with long dark hair that flows like water, her dreamy almond-shaped eyes that… blink?

With eyes narrowed and a frown on my forehead, I move towards the frame for a closer look. Something is off. I lift my finger and run it through the painting. It is unexpectedly soft. Then, a movement. Then, a realisation. How could I have forgotten? Octopuses are the authority on concealment and camouflaging. In an instant, my host reverts his colour back to the boring brown, appears in front of me and casually drifts away. I get it now. He wants to play.

I close my eyes and begin counting to thirty. He has disappeared once again. I swim around seeking. Now, he has blended into the gravel. Now, he has hidden behind the seaweed. He is a master of disguise, but I am not far behind. This fascinating game of interspecies hide and seek goes on for a while. I am having a good time. I check the gauge: a casual periodic look to make sure the pressure in my air tank is at a safe level. The readings indicate I have some more time. I begin counting to thirty once again. One… two… three. Out of nowhere, guilt, seemingly causeless, flows through my body; as if some remorse lay hidden at the bottom of the tank waiting for an opportune moment to enter my lungs and course through my veins.

I stop the game in its tracks and head to the trap door, get out of the water and get out of the gear. I draw in a long breath and let out an exhale. An approaching sound. The wailing siren atop a passing ambulance grows higher and higher in pitch as it comes closer and closer. The ambulance is visible from where I stand on the terrace, rushing through the winding, deserted road. The sound is now unbearably high-pitched as if it were carrying within it the accumulated final gasps of all the infected the vehicle has transported so far. The ambulance passes by, the siren grows weaker and eventually dies down and the quiet returns, a more appropriate companion to the setting sun. I make a mental note never to breathe air from a tank again.

In the following days, whenever I pass by his house on my way to the terrace for the evening stroll, I dart a quick glance at the window. He is usually absent, or maybe his camouflage is at work, blending him with the transparent glass. Sometimes, he appears, performing his intricate dance of which I can make neither head nor tentacle. I, in turn, acknowledge the courtesy with a single nod of my head and a short smile with pursed lips. Water from the aquarium above my roof begins seeping through. The ceiling in my bedroom turns damp. I paste a sticky note on his window describing the situation and politely requesting him to do something about it. He slowly lifts one of his tentacles up. Is he flipping me off? Or is he inviting me for another game of hide and seek?

I write down a message and paste another sticky note. I must get going. Have a nice day.

In a matter of days, the novelty of the eight-legged dweller has worn  off, and annoyance has taken its place. Moisture from the roof has infiltrated the cupboards, mildew has invaded my clothes, and a musty smell has engulfed the house. A fortnight has passed and nothing has been done to repair my roof.

My clothes are all mouldy. Did you give it a thought or maybe nine? I paste another sticky note to his window.

He responds with an erect tentacle as usual. Something—perhaps a noticeable increase in the speed of the tentacle’s tent-pitching act—convinces me he is flipping me off this time. I escalate the matter from sticky notes to messages in bottles, which I drop through the trapdoor.

My house is too humid, and my kitchen smells like fungus. Do you understand smell?

For some reason, my usual hesitant self takes a backseat as I send these messages, spiced with a tinge of rudeness, through the bottle. Perhaps the indirect form of communication through  a bottle inspires a degree of confidence not unlike the confidence of an anonymous troll on social media.

Patches of saffron paint start to peel off from the wet roof and fall on my stove, contaminate my tomato chutney and besmirch my podi dosa, both of which I unwittingly consume.

Did the fellowship of tentacles discuss my matter? Do you have board meetings?

Over the following days, drops of water accumulate on the ceiling, threaten to fall anytime and eventually carry out the threat by falling into the chilli chicken. I like my chilli chicken dry. Having endured the ignominy long enough, I head upstairs to lodge a complaint in person. My aversion to quarrels, coupled with the disturbing thought of breathing air from a tank, stopped direct confrontation so far. But not today, not when you wet my chilli chicken. I slip into a wetsuit and dive into his house with a mighty splash proportionate to the disdain I now feel for him. I attempt to voice my concern but realise I can’t because I have no voice underwater, so I register my protest on a placard instead.

Your water is leaking into my house. Do something! I state the obvious on the placard that happens to be in my hand using an underwater marker that also turns up in my other hand. In turn, he grabs the placard with his eight slithering tentacles and squats on it. A moment later, words appear on his body, thanks to the chromatophores on his skin.

“What are you gonna do, huh?” The words scroll to the left like an LED message on a city bus and make way to Hindi, “Kya ukhaad lega tu?” which in turn move aside to let in Kannada, “Enannu kittu haakuttiri?”

Then he mic-drops the placard and floats away lazily. So he understands English, Hindi and Kannada. What else has he not told me? He is not as stupid as I thought; he is outright sinister. The mic-drop is effective. I have no trilingual comebacks up my sleeve. My anxious brain is slow that way. The clever comebacks never come when they matter. I retreat in defeat.

Tap. Tap. TAP! Drops of water trickle onto my forehead and tap me awake. It is 3am. A small hole has formed on the roof above my bed. The water now drips at a steady pace into my bedroom. The bed, the pillow and my blanket are soaking wet, and the water on the floor has reached the level of my knees. I find it difficult to go back to sleep. I toss and turn on the bed. I try counting the drops of water, hoping it would help me fall asleep. As I turn to the right, I notice a stick under the murky water by my bedside. I dip my hands and pull out the old woman’s four-legged walking stick. I tap it on the roof, and yell.

“Hey! Your water is leaking. Keep your filthy, disease-ridden water to yourself!”

Splash. Splash. SPLASH! I wake up to splashing water. Midnight hunger pangs prompt me to get out of bed. The house is dark. The electricity had to be cut off for safety reasons now that the water has reached the switchboards. In the dark, I row my canoe and make my way towards the kitchen. At the bedroom door, something makes contact with my canoe with a gentle thud. I turn on my phone’s flashlight to take a look.

It is a body wrapped from head to toe in a white shroud, drifting in the water. I know who it belonged to. As if by instinct, I call up ‘my brother’ in the USA. I begin live-streaming the body as it passes me by. As if on cue, he too at once begins weeping uncontrollably. I sing a lullaby to console him. It is the same song that I heard from the now dead crab. I do not sing in public for fear of mockery, but now I gather courage because it is needed. He calms down, occasionally letting out an involuntary hiccup. He tells me he likes the aloha shirt I happened to be wearing.

“The shirt looks good on you,” he compliments with a bittersweet smile on his face as he wipes his tears.

“It is a bit too large for my size,” I say.

“Give it a couple of washes and it will shrink,” he assures. I feel better.

“Can you talk to your tenant about the water leaking into my house?” I submit my request. He looks off-camera for a moment as though something distracted him, then looks back at the camera, then excuses himself and ends the call citing some urgent business. I continue my voyage towards the kitchen.

More bodies pass me by in the living room on my way to the kitchen, only this time they are wrapped in orange shrouds. I point the flashlight around and look for the source of the bodies. A large hole in one corner of the roof is where they are dripping out from. I notice a female standing on the sofa in my living room accompanied by a man holding a camera on a tripod. A journalist I believe; she is in tattered and road-weary clothes, reporting passionately on the drifting dead bodies.

“I ask my cameraman to pan around and show you the sheer number of bodies floating around in this living room,” she says. The cameraman obliges. “We have counted up to a hundred and six bodies before giving up. Who suffers for whose mistakes? Who is answerable? Who is responsible? What we see here…”

She notices me passing by, pauses for a moment, waves at me and instructs her camera man to point his camera towards me. I pull over my canoe towards the sofa.

“Here is a living man, alone among the dead, with nothing but a canoe to keep him afloat and an oversized shirt on his body, rowing in darkness, heading to an unknown place at this hour in the night. Let’s talk to him,” she turns to me. “Sir, can we talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure. But let me assure you, the shirt will shrink after a couple of washes.”

“This man is full of hope despite the wetness of his predicament. These are the kinds of stories, these tiny droplets of hope, we must tell as the tsunami of grief sweeps our country. Tell me sir, how are you feeling?”

“I am feeling hungry…”

“He is starving… hmm.”

“… which usually happens to me in the middle of the night. I am heading towards…”

“He is in search of food, clutching his empty stomach… hmm.”

“… the fridge in the kitchen.”

“Do you wish to say something to our viewers?”

“I just wish that the cephalopod above realises his mistakes and rectifies the situation with a sense of urgency before my house drowns completely.”

“This man still has faith in the cephalopod above and appeals to his good nature.”

Sympathy in her eyes, she wraps her arm around my shoulder, as the cameraman captures the moment. With that, my interview ends, and I continue my journey towards the fridge.

Roar. Roar. ROAR! I wake up floating neck-deep in cold water that consumes me from below, an utter darkness that absorbs me from above and a claustrophobia that devours me from within. I let out gasps as I struggle to breathe in the small pocket of air between the water and the roof. A light from under the water emerges to the surface. It is a TV, playing that news channel moderated by that news megaphone of an anchor. He materialises in one of the ten boxes on the screen. The remaining nine are occupied each by the eight tentacles and one head of the cephalopod. In a separate frame, I see a picture of me. Underneath it is the headline in large red letters:

BREAKING: IMPATIENT NEIGHBOUR PUTS A CEPHALOPOD IN A CHOKE HOLD #STOPCHOKINGCEPHALOPOD #STOPCEPHALOPODCHOKING

“I want to tell you, viewers, that things are not as bad as this man is making out to be,” the male anchor screams, pointing at my picture. “Yes, his house is flooding, but as you can see, he is sailing in smooth waters…” A short video recording of me rowing towards the kitchen last night is played on repeat mode.

“… rowing in the right direction and flowing smoothly ahead. Yet he harasses his neighbour with rude messages in glass bottles. Yet he complains to the world. And his complaints are given credence by journalists like her who interviewed him last night. This negativity is what we must reject as a nation. Put him on the line, put him on the line,” he orders his crew. And suddenly, I am on the screen in an eleventh box. The nine fragments of my neighbour in the nine boxes writhe violently.

“Tell me, Mr. Shekar, why are you holding this poor cephalopod, your neighbour, in a chokehold?”

“No… I’m not,” I say, spitting some water out and gulping some in.

“Yes, you are.”

“Okay… Because he… is the one responsible… I guess,” I say, gasping for air in the claustrophobic space between water and the roof.

“Mr. Shekar, you behave irrationally. The cephalopod is responsible, and he is doing his best. It is not easy working with nine brains, each thinking differently especially when one is under a chokehold.”

“Chokehold… is probably not the most suitable word… in the context… of an octopus,” I suggest to the anchor. A mistake.

“HOW DARE YOU? HOW DARE YOU TELL ME HOW TO DO MY JOB?” The inevitable scream ensues. “Apologise, you anti-… anti-rational!” In the nine boxes, the nine-brained neighbour matches the anchor’s passion and writhes even more violently.

“Okay he… may be… doing… his best… but he has had… enough time… to do some… thing… and now I am… drowning.”

“For God’s sake! Give the cephalopod some breathing room, will you?”

“Breathing room? Interesting… choice of… words.”

“Mr. Shekar! Are you dumb? I told you the cephalopod is working as hard as he can for your benefit. How anti-rational can you be? Stop breathing down his neck!”

“Breathing down?“

“There he goes again. Give him some time, will you? Give him some time. He will take your breath away!”

“Okay… I’m… holding… my… breath.”

And the rock we dug out of
the side of the hill
proved to be so radioactive
that two geologists exposed to it
went up in flames like touch-paper.

Only three of the men
returned from the mission to the dark side.
Some kind of green-scaled three-headed creature,
about twenty fields tall,
attacked the team,
tore many of them to shreds.

We lost Dr Ehlerimen to a bog,
and Professor Casey to a sudden landslide.
And our chef, when out scouring
the local plant life for prospective garnishes,
was sucked up and swallowed
by what is known in the lab 
as a crocodile flower.

Yes, I got your letter.
Crime’s on the rise.
There are violent protests in the street.
Countries in the Middle East
are talking war.
I agree, Earth is a dangerous place.
But just you try living elsewhere.

Oliver tried to effect a relaxed posture in the decidedly less opulent visitor’s seat. “What can I say? I’ve always loved the jazz age. It was a pivotal time in U.S. history.” He caught himself picking at a seam in the chair’s arm and put his hands in his lap. “Not that I would object to seeing a dinosaur, mind you.”

“We agree on that point. There are so many important times in our history that people tend to overlook. Plus, consider the language. Talking to someone in 1930 is possible with minimal training. But to become conversant in ancient Latin? In Aramaic? Unless you’ve been studying since you were a kid, forget it. No, any new hires in those areas would most likely be handling back-office support for the teams that do the interacting with the time periods.”

“Are you saying there is a position open for me?”

Images from Bunma’s computer screen flickered in reflection across his glasses, too small for Oliver to discern. “You already interviewed with HR and the temporal qualification teams, correct?”

Oliver nodded. “I did. Nice people.”

“Really?” Bunma glanced over the top of his glasses. “Harkins didn’t give you a rough time?”

“Ok, mostly nice people.”

Bunma laughed. “Honesty is always appreciated here. Anyway, yes, there is an open position.”

Oliver couldn’t quite help himself. He pumped his fist in the air.

“Now, I can’t promise you will be interfacing with the public any time soon. Westerfeld — she runs the training program — she and her department will work out a plan with you. They’ll figure out timetables.” Someone knocked on the frosted glass door and Bunma waved them in. A woman wearing a white lab coat handed him a thick manilla envelope.

Bunma pulled a sheaf of papers from the envelope and began reading. He gestured to the woman in white. “We do need to check your medical state before anything. If you don’t mind getting started?”

The woman in white took out a small, zippered nylon bag from her coat pocket. She removed a glass vial and peeled the wrapper from a sterile syringe. She said, “Roll up your sleeve.”

“Uh, sure, right.” Oliver bared his arm, and the woman extracted a sample of his blood with practiced efficiency while Bunma flicked through his paperwork. She set the vial on the desk, affixed a cotton ball to Oliver’s puncture with a strip of tape, and exited the office without saying another word. The door whispered shut behind her.

“Clean as a whistle, I think you’ll find.” Oliver nodded to the vial. “I had a full physical a couple months ago. Been exercising, taking my vitamins, everything.”

Bunma set down the page in his hand. “I’m sure that’s true. Anyway, I’m sorry this won’t work out.”

Oliver stopped trying to rebutton his shirt cuff. “You — what?”

“If we hire you, you will violate multiple company policies. These policies are particularly important when dealing with time travel.” Bunma ran his index finger down the top page of the paperwork on his desk. “We always check with our research office before sending anyone out into the field. Said research office is located in our future, so they do have a full history of your performance.”

Oliver crossed and then uncrossed his legs. “I don’t understand.”

“Well.” Bunma drummed his fingers on his desk. “Looks like your love of the 1920’s extends to some knowledge of stock market history.”

Oliver cleared his throat. “I mean, I might know a little bit. But I would never use that to my advantage.”

“You did, though, according to this report. You made a series of favorable trades for yourself. When caught, you claimed it, quote, ‘made no difference because the market was about to crash anyway.’” Bunma sat back and pushed his glasses onto his forehead. “In fact, your actions slightly accelerated the crash. Real people were affected. Families. This is why we have policies. Policies which you blatantly ignored. I’m afraid we’re going to pass.”

Oliver shifted in his chair. “Why did we go through this, then?” He pointed to the vial of blood laying on the desk between them. “Why bother taking a blood sample? Why go through all those rounds of interviews if you already knew you weren’t going to hire me?”

Bunma picked up the vial and held it to the light. “Because we didn’t know. We’re going to use your DNA extracted from this sample to create a tracer. That will allow us to track all your subsequent actions and is exactly how we’ll learn about your breaches of contract. Didn’t you read the details of your genetic release form?”

“You lied, is what you did. You told me that sample was for medical testing.”

Bunma opened his drawer and took out a small plastic block. “We do need to perform medical tests, no subterfuge there.” He opened a lid and placed the vial inside the refrigerated block. “Medical information is very important. We can’t send someone with diagnosed health risks to a time without the medicine necessary to treat them. We did intend to run a full panel, but that seems academic at this point, does it not?”

“Ok, look.” Oliver rose to his feet. “You apparently know all these details about me doing something that I haven’t even thought about doing and wasn’t planning on attempting. Fine, send me to another time. I can’t trade stocks if it’s a time before stocks existed to trade, right?”

“Right. Which we did.” Bunma picked up the report and flipped to the next page. “After we had this conversation, I issued a stern warning which you seemed to take seriously, and we found an open spot in supply maintenance in 14th Century Mali. Away from the front office. That seemed safer.”

Bunma turned another page. Flip.

“You failed to check your cargo on a supply run from the present. A few pests came along for the ride. Those made their way into the food scraps where they multiplied, got loose, and decimated the local wheat crops.”

“But that obviously sounds like an innocent mistake.”

Bunma nodded. “Which we have clear transportation policies to help avoid. Anyway, after we had this conversation, I gave you one more try. No need to thank me or my soft heart, it’s just how I am. This time it was construction on a new facility in Australia, circa 10,000 BCE. You stole Aboriginal artifacts and attempted to sell them to private collectors in the present.”

Oliver stopped pacing.

“That is a straight up crime under any circumstances,” Bunma said.

“This is a crime, what you’re doing right now.” Oliver placed his hands on the desk and did his best to loom over the shorter man. “You want to talk policies? I researched this line of work before I came here. I know what factors you are and are not allowed to consider during hiring.”

“You’re referring to US253? What they call the ‘might-have-been discrimination’ bill? It did go into effect earlier this year, and the industry is still trying to figure out how to enforce it, but you are correct, this most likely falls under that protection.” Bunma turned a few pages. Flip-flip. “In fact, after we had this conversation, you filed a complaint and took us to court. There were suits and countersuits, it became a big story in the news, and reports of your conduct leaked turning public sentiment against you. It went badly for you. In the end, we prevailed and had to pay some legal fees which while non-trivial were substantially less than the cost of repairing the damage you would have made to the past, had we hired you instead.”

“You can’t bully me into not reporting you.”

“I would never.” Flip. “Lucky for both of us, you changed your mind about suing after hearing all this, and I thank you for it. It would have been unpleasant for all parties involved.”

Oliver stood, leaving two sweaty handprints on the surface of the desk. He wiped his palms against his pant legs. “You know,” he said, “I haven’t actually done any of these things you are talking about.”

Bunma nodded. “And now, thanks to us discussing them here, you won’t.”

“You win. Ok? You win. Guess I’ll go interview elsewhere.”

Flip. “With our competitors, yes. Despite having signed an NDA which, surely, you would never violate, you do have a few interviews, and one of them even hires you. I can’t say which, of course, that’s against policy.”

“Of course it is.” Oliver held out his hand. “Thanks for the info, I’ll be on my way to start filling out as many applications as possible.”

Bunma ignored the proffered hand. “What I can tell you is, the place that takes you on, a few years later they are themselves taken to court. And in this situation, they lose quite badly.”

“So?” Oliver dropped his hand. “I can collect a paycheck until then.”

Flip. “The lawsuit regards lack of adequate safety measures. They are currently, right now as we speak, struggling to make a profit and spending less on equipment than they ought. When several employees suffer… let me quote here, ‘explosive aging of the soft tissues,’ the grieving families file suit. The jury is enraged by some of these awful images of the victims and render judgment for the plaintiffs in short order. Ugh, these are grisly. Don’t look at these pictures. Looks as though your parents are part of that lawsuit, good for them! Hopefully the compensation helps them miss you a little less.”

“I don’t believe you.” Oliver’s voice was small.

“Yes, you do.” Flip. “After I reveal that information, you don’t send out any applications at all. Switching topics. At this point you realize the blood sample sitting here hasn’t been sent to any lab yet, and in a panic, you grab it and throw it to the floor. Some kind of misguided attempt to make this report vanish.”

They both stared at the insulated cube, where moisture was now beading up near the base.

Bunma said, “Destruction of company property is grounds for a lawsuit.”

“It’s my blood.”

“In our sample vial.”

“That’s a tiny tube of glass.”

“You know it’s not about the vial.” Flip. “Regardless, I have swabs in my desk and was able to recollect enough from the floor where you threw it. DNA sticks around a while even when puddled on tile. Which is probably why after I tell you this, you instead grab the sample and try to make a run for it. The guards stop you halfway down the hallway with a bit more force than I would prefer.” Flip. “After hearing this you decide against it. Leaving the sample and thus this report intact. Which is nice.”

Bunma squared the pages into a neat stack and rested his clasped hands on them.

Oliver closed his mouth. “Guess I’ll be on my way, then.”

“Thank you for coming in.” Bunma stood and held out his hand. “No hard feelings, I hope.”

Oliver shook his hand and turned to leave. “Oh, by the way,” Bunma said to Oliver’s exiting back, “consider skipping the oysters next Friday night.” As the door closed, he shouted, “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

The place is hideous, though. Deep and unlit and choking.

How have I seen it, you ask? I woke up there once. Take a look at me, is it that hard to accept?

It was Angela who taught me about sleeping in the ocean, and that is how it all got started.

We were on a friends’ trip to Cancún. My lover was there, but we’re not together anymore. We split up before the year was over, you’ll see. Angela was married to Kyle at the time. We referred to them, jointly, as AK, like the gun. But they’ve split, too. We’ll get to all that.

Vicki flew in a day after we did and threw a beer bottle at Jackson her first night. The rest of the trip she guessed her punishment was coming, she feared a storm would level the place, blow us all out to sea. A typhoon for a Blue Moon, that was our limerick about it.

Rick and William were there, drunk and sunburned as ever.

As for the saltwater trick, Angela brought it up late on Friday. Two a.m., maybe two-thirty.

We were talking about insomnia, about what we had tried, how long we had suffered. Did we secretly enjoy the sleepless nights, that sort of chat. When Vicki walked up Angela said, ‘What have you two heard about being a wave?’

Vicki and I hurried to say it first: ‘Being a wave?’

‘I haven’t tried it and I don’t believe any of it. But what they say is if you float in warm ocean water, if you really sleep—’

Vicki was nervous already, ‘So you’re not talking about bringing it back to our tub? Like, with buckets?’

‘No, you walk out to the beach. You take off your clothes and then keep walking.’

‘No way. And how can you say some trick for sleeping is to just fall asleep? What am I missing?’

‘I said I don’t think it will do anything. But what I hear is you float on your back, it just sort of—’

I cut in: ‘One of you should try floating on your face.’

Vicki glared hard: ‘Don’t, Wayne.’ She was one of those, just talking about something made her panic.

Angela returned my smile, and I responded, ‘What? She said she doesn’t think it’ll work. Maybe it will if you try it face-down.’

‘I’m serious. Don’t.’

We each checked our phones and read from various accounts: blogs, Medium, Tumblr. Most of the pages were a kind of religious counterculture. One of them read: Your left hand and foot will drift out toward the east, while your right hand and foot will stay in the west. Make sure it’s cloudy or the starlight will drill straight through you. You are immaterial. If a boat shines its light on you, you’re finished.

In the end—if we pulled it off, if we turned to brine—we would be pale smears across dark water. We would have the best night’s sleep in our lives. When our eyes filled with sunrise we would collect ourselves, become whole again. Flesh first, then bone, the opposite of what you would think.

You can still find your things. Despite that it seems you floated off, you will not have gone far.

‘What about the part about burning to death from starlight?’ It was Vicki who mentioned it, though I was going to. What I asked was, ‘And what about the part about drowning?’

‘I’ve said over and over I don’t believe it.’

Vicki was out. And by now it was almost four: too late for Angela and me to try, either. We agreed to wander off some time the next night, the last night of our trip, so long as it was cloudy. After the bar closed, maybe.

No one suggested we bring Kyle or my lover, Gwendolyn.

Did I tell you? Angela let me kiss her the next afternoon. Our mouths tasted of rum and when we were finished she grinned around her straw. Her dimples cut deep and gorgeous. Cut to the bone, for all I knew.

She had huge eyes, and I let myself believe she chose that top with me in mind.

At midnight, when Vicki repeated that she was too frightened to try, I followed Angela past the breakers. We did not sleep much; we mostly kissed and touched in the shallows. At times her laughter was cut short with a wave. You wondered if your unseen, liquid fingers had skimmed into her mouth. I can’t tell you how erotic that was.

We must have nodded off, though, because at once it was daybreak and my torso felt unspooled. Our limbs were dissolved together the same as two flavors of milk, which were adrift on a third, vast, salty flavor.

Warmth from the gathering dawn woke us in time to put our bodies together.

Angela and I were friends already but we kept in better contact now. We sent each other texts which we erased at every step. There was something ghostly about that, as if Kyle had discovered us and the AK went off twice and we kept on talking.

You’ll remember the Iron Wolf spill near Houston; that was the second Tuesday in August. By Sunday the protests had reached the hundreds of thousands, at Exxon’s offices in Irving and Spring, and all along the Texas coast.

Angela texted me the following Wednesday:

you watching this iron wolf thing?

I wrote back:

Ofc

the protestors are talking about hiring boats

give you any ideas?

Not really

it gives me an idea

I did my best to dissuade her. Yet at the same time I wanted her to do it, I wanted to go. We could spend the days on board, making love in time with the ocean, at whatever pace it set. At night we could sleep within the spill, spreading out with the petroleum until we were acres. Square kilometers. They would measure our bodies in nation-sizes.

You know what they do to oil spills right? 

ik they burn them, that’s got nothing to do with us

You told me starlight alone would put holes thru us

yes, and those stars will see us from space, wyatt

from actual space

*wayne sorry baby

She sent an email to the group, then privately asked Vicki to agree, or appear to. She asked that of a few others, too, promising they could back out at any time. It had to look as though we would all make the drive to Galveston, and commission several boats.

Why Vicki? Because she had worked it out already. ‘She was there the first night, in Cancún. A woman knows.’ This by itself was reason for concern. If Vicki knew, everyone knew. But Angela wanted to keep her close.

That night Gwendolyn turned her mouth downward and asked, ‘Did you see this crazy thing from Angela? She has lost her mind.’

‘About a protest? Why’s it crazy?’

‘She’s getting a bunch of us in a boat and we’re heading out there with the marines and the USDA and the spill? Christ, no. I’m not going and you’re not either.’

It wasn’t the marines, it was the Coast Guard. And it wasn’t the USDA, it was the Environmental Protection Agency. But I had other things to correct her on:

‘Actually I am going.’

‘The hell you are.’

‘We’ll be cleaning this up for ten years. It might never get clean.’

‘You sound a lot like her right now.’

‘I mean, you and I got the same email.’

‘What she’s not getting is that Exxon will be sued dead, and they’ll lose every lease in the U.S. There’s a way to handle this without sailing to the middle of some—, some—.’ She stammered a bit, then finished with: ‘Some grease fire.’

We argued until something happened to her eyes. I knew the conversation was going to shift. No: I knew we would shift.

‘I get it, Wayne. She looks great in a wrap. But honey, she’s not going to fuck you no matter how late y’all stay out.’

Like I said, if Vicki knew, word was all around. Gwendolyn was crying in the end. I felt awful and twice asked her to come along.

With such short notice we couldn’t find an excursion boat, though a fishing guide agreed to take us if we paid for a full group. It was twelve hundred for the night and he did not once blink at the terms: leaving at dusk, dropping anchor at the Iron Wolf site. No need for bait. No need for tackle.

He was in his mid-thirties with lean, sun-wrecked legs and a large silver crucifix. He had named his boat Seven Eves; he made constant jokes about soyboys and bailouts and seaside elites. I liked him despite it all, and did not mention that the Texas coast was still a coast. I did not ask who subsidized his rent when his best source of income was parked in a marina.

It did not occur to me that we would drip crude on his deck until we arrived. He was nonchalant: ‘Don’t worry, money washes everything out.’ He told us to go swim, that he’d be fishing with Bill Clinton’s old partners while we did. It was one of those punchlines, you laugh because you don’t get it at first.

Overnight we swam and took the horizons for ourselves. There was a black chasm above us and one just underneath, and there were no ships, no sounds of ships. The water was almost body temperature and I mentioned sensory deprivation a few times, though Angela kept shushing me. The idea of a tank the size and shape of creation made her anxious.

But she did not comment that Seven Eves was drifting further and further off. A hundred yards or more. A speck we’d mostly forgotten.

There was no coast guard, no EPA or activists. No seagulls. No fish, that we could tell. And so much for my idea of photographing other protestors, of sending the image home to Gwendolyn as proof of something.

We had a deep, perfect rest, and when we woke our hands were miles from us. You had to plan ahead if you wanted to put fingers through her hair.

On the drive back I told Angela her mascara was running. Her only response was that she wasn’t wearing any.

If she was concerned, she did not let on. I think she worried less about her body composition and more about my car interior, at least for a while.

We bought towels at a hardware store in Conroe and began wiping dark, thick fluid from our eyes. I thought she looked sexy with black lips but she was intent on keeping them clean. She stayed at it with the rags, but the fluid kept coming forth. It was starting to drench our clothes. She unclasped her necklace, which her grandmother had left her.

‘Don’t let me forget this.’

She put it in the glove compartment with my unpaid utility bills. I tried making a blackmail joke but she didn’t get it. And I thought it was best not to explain.

She asked, ‘How would we even google this?’

‘You mean, this?’ I held up a palm, which was the same shade as coal.

‘Jesus, look at you.’

‘I keep trying not to.’

‘And it’s not like I could just: hey Siri, what’s this black Crisco coming out of my pores?’

Her phone answered: ‘I found this on the web—’ and we cracked up. It was probably the last time laughing for both of us. For good.

‘You don’t suppose?’

‘Suppose what?’

Angela smelled one of the rags and made a face. I knew exactly what she was going to say: ‘It smells like motor oil.’

‘Mine does? Or yours does?’

‘We both do.’

She tried a few searches but was quick to give up.

‘Your phone isn’t working?’

‘I’m not working.’

I nodded: my hands were slick on the steering wheel, and when we stopped at the Valero in Madisonville I could barely open the car door or get my wallet out. I could barely put the transmission in park. We tried playing it down. We said we’d pour ourselves into the tank to get better fuel economy.

But dark humor didn’t work. Everything was already dark, including the taste in our mouths and the heavy sensation of bile in our guts. It was dark crude oil that came forth when we sweat. Came from our tear ducts when we cried.

If Gwendolyn and Kyle had not figured it out yet they would now: the outpouring of 10W-30 was some new sexually-transmitted disease we had concocted and passed to each other, without once making love.

Amen, if we were going to be blamed for it we might as well do it: we stopped in Corsicana for the night (it was a few minutes past three). We had no luggage and no way to answer our calls, which kept coming. Our thumbs slid ineffectively across our phone screens, we could neither answer them nor dial out.

For all we knew we would die in that room, unable to open the door or knock on it, or use the hotel phone.

Our clothes came off in slick, easy gestures. We put towels on the sheets but there was no use. The bed was void-stained in no time.

Angela’s breath tasted of catalytic converter but I did not give a damn. I breathed her in and drank her. I gently bit her. She was three states of matter, then: gas, hydrocarbon, petra.

She spoke more than I would have thought. She was profane. She was propane, too. You found yourself thinking of hell almost constantly.

Vicki and Gwendolyn and Angela stayed in touch with William. With Rick. Whether they were deliberately shutting me out or it only happened like that, who could say?

Jackson was the last to stop taking my calls, which strangers had to place, after I handed them my phone and told them my passcode. And I’d be damned if Kyle and I would start over together. (I was damned as it was.)

I lost my job. No matter. Living alone wouldn’t work out, besides. What was I going to do with the front lock, the fridge? The coin-operated laundry?

What was I going to do with the coins?

I mostly wandered and dug through garbage for food. Don’t act disgusted, none of the trash I ate was as foul as my sulfuric breath.

I hitchhiked to Nebraska, only walking at night, fully covered up. I took rides from men in pickups, anyone who had room for me in his truck bed. My jacket was sodden with sweat-oil, and when I dozed, light petroleum came from the sides of my mouth. It looked like the strangest of mustaches.

I waited during the day, usually sleeping under a bridge or in a highway barn. On a map, my route was almost straight up. North star north. It felt like a pilgrimage.

I haven’t told you what my plan was yet. Only that it was magnificent.

When the miles and poor sleep overcame me, I checked into an emergency room in Wichita. I was certain my organs had turned to crude, yet every scan was inconclusive, starting with the ultrasound of my bladder.

Never mind the results, I was pissing motor oil and had done it in front of the nurses.

‘There is this life hack for insomniacs. You sleep in the ocean and it turns you into ocean. In the morning, if the water is clean, you turn all the way back. But what if the water wasn’t clean?’

The checkout paperwork read likely organ abscess, but I drenched it black by touching it. I was the perfect censor, I could redact any document.

The desk attendant said, ‘Did you talk to them about that?’

‘I tried. They won’t hear it.’

‘That’s not normal, sir.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Let me get someone.’ It was the second time she had offered to.

If I was bent on extermination, I could have just stripped from my clothes and stood oil-side out in the sun. But it was more than that: I wanted a ride. I wanted to be stretched into a thousand-mile shape, to sleep and dream. To stay fully enclosed in metal for a hundred hours.

Suicidal? No. Though whether I woke up again was secondary.

I meant to water-slide the oil pipeline from Steele City to Port Arthur, which was fewer than a hundred miles from Galveston, where this began.

In Corsicana she asked me, ‘How much of your life do you think you’ll just let go?’

I stirred. She was stirring, too. Her question roused both of us. I had fallen asleep to her soft hands, her strong forearms on my chest and arms. My abdomen.

It was a deep-tissue oil massage, in a way. But the deep tissue and the oil were one and the same.

‘What’s that?’

She said, ‘The things you want to do. I don’t know, volunteer at the SPCA. See your kids get married. How much of that do you think you’ll have to let go now?’

‘This isn’t going to kill us. Angela.’

She grinned. I could hear her oils respond to the movement in her face. ‘You forgot my name for a second.’

I had, though I’d never admit it. She reached over and touched my diesel throat.

‘It’s alright. It happens with affairs. Happens all the time.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘It’s the whole point, actually. Affairs are soul-to-soul. They go right past our names and go straight to the essence.’

I did not consider the distribution hub in Oklahoma, or the refinery in Kansas. So I must have been collected, left in a barrel, hauled, unloaded and poured out, all while dreaming of Angela’s coconut rum and warm lips. Her turbulent mind.

I woke up in that underground Louisiana cave with no chance of sleep anymore. My insomnia was crueler than ever, likely because there was no way to drown or swim or set fire to the place, and no clear way out.

The mind has to wander before it can sleep, and there was no room for wandering here.

Had I not remembered AP Organic Chemistry, what I might have done was name the place Chevronia and install myself as its eternal president. Serve as its listless tyrant. I never let myself mention hell. I did my best not to think of this in religious terms.

Instead I tried reciting the principles of surface tension. Tried listing the conditions which allowed liquids to oppose great forces, including the force of gravity. I tried repeating the adhesion coefficients between petroleum and various surfaces, namely mineral surfaces. I tried some examples of Young’s equation, and used trigonometry to determine contact angles.

The theory escaped me, yet in applied terms I found my fluid hands reaching up, my limbs pushing into tiny apertures in the cave walls. I found myself spreading, breaking apart, splitting into a network of arteries and veins. Of capillaries, really, because that was my only way out, was it not? Capillary action?

Had we conversed at the time, you would have heard one hundred near-silent voices. Had I any willpower at all, it would have been the sum of one hundred separate wills.

I cannot describe what my form was when I reached grade level. Better said: what my forms were. And thank god it was pre-dawn or I would have combusted into a wildfire. One that lived up to its name: vast and truly wild.

Angela, it seemed, did not mind holding out until dawn.

She was sublime. Tall and bulky. She had no face, at least not one the news helicopters could capture on film. Those choppers were a safe distance off, forty feet at least.

While my escape had carved me into scores of nightmarish cubist works, some other force had accumulated her into a single crude oil beast, eight feet in height, with the strength of a rhino.

She was in flames. Yet the way she strode through downtown Fort Worth, you could tell she had no pain at all.

“Circus Sized Man” Sets Himself Ablaze in Texas, Reason for Protest Unclear, read the chyron.

Angela promised me we would turn to waves. Ocean waves, radio waves, I guess it didn’t matter. She had lived up to the oath, good for her.

I had to turn away from the screen, one of a few dozen in that electronics store downtown (I was in New Orleans by then). If I saw her fall to one hand, or saw any anguish in her gait, I would have splashed right there where I stood. I would have been a rorschach pattern on the sidewalk. Not that I wasn’t a rorschach already.What was the last thing she said to me, after we checked out of the Corsicana hotel? It was worth it, baby. Not one of them can touch us now.

He drove closer as he heard music, dancing, and revelry, and then his car broke. The weather was ice cold. He had to walk a bit of distance through the wet mud and the slush and he felt the sticky black snow under his feet. A sharp smell of the carcasses in the sea caught his nostrils till he came to the heavy gates of The Steamer that automatically opened at the touch of his fingers.

He walked ahead. The death odor was still not gone as he pushed through the heavy metallic doorway of the motel. His eyes led to the reception lounge and a brightly lit hallway, and all of a sudden, he felt warm, almost in sweat. He realized the environment was perfectly controlled, so he removed his protection suit and mask. The man at the door gave him a slight bow, relieving him of his heavy apparel. The receptionist, a young lady at the desk, welcomed him with a smile. ‘Mr. Indra Basu!’ she said as if instantly recognizing him as he went through the booking register.

‘I would like to…’ he began hesitantly.

‘Yes, we have arrangements for your night stay in suite number seven on the second floor,’ said the receptionist. When she handed over the keys, she emphasized number seven as his favorite suite. And then he thought that whoever he was, he must have been stinking rich to be able to be welcomed to a place like this. He tried hard to remember what these places were called, but it only added to his confusion. He saw flashes of him and his wife in some such place, but the artificial oxygen and the regulated room temperature made him feel sick. There weren’t many people there at the reception lounge, except the staff dressed in identical suits with badges and aprons. It appeared like a quiet place to retreat to, or even die at, for people often spend their last moments in isolated places. It seemed ironic to him now that places that were built to survive should look like places to die.

‘And your pass, Sir. Today there is a special dance at the club on the rooftop open to all,’ she continued. But he could not remember ever having come to this place. He merely smiled and nodded. He took the keys to the room as another man dressed in a suit, a staff member of the motel, got up to show him to his room.

‘I will go to the club,’ he said hurriedly.

‘I’ll show you the way, Sir,’ the man said, beckoning him to the elevator. The man pressed the switch, opening the door wider as he stepped into the boxed space with mirrors on all sides. He glimpsed himself in the mirror, but it only added to a sense that his life bordered on confusion.

His wife was dead, he thought, but he had not killed her. He could not do that, not even hurt a fly; he could not, he was sure. But how long had she been dead? Not yesterday? And then a thought occurred, and he felt terrible—surely not a year ago? Had he, in his grief and madness, been out of his senses for a year or more? That was not possible, for he saw himself in the mirror, perfectly dressed in an expensive blazer on top of a buttoned-up shirt, paired with matching trousers and loafers, for an evening at the club.

‘Ok, thank you, sir. Have a nice day,’ the motel staff said almost mechanically, taking leave.

The word day hardly made sense, for the thick smog that had covered the sky since the catastrophe had made sunlight disappear for months. Temperatures had fallen to drastic levels. Without the sunlight, most of the flora and fauna in these parts had perished, while the animals were dying of starvation. It was only the pall of the dirty snow and the poisonous dust, even though to him it seemed death, that enigmatic abyss of darkness or silence, seemed a long way away; now was just the slow burn of ambivalence between the poisonous dust and smog.

As Indra entered the club from the rooftop, he heard the strains of old-time Bollywood film music. Amidst the murmur, the clinking of glasses and the dancing lights, he saw well-dressed people like him with deadpan faces. The crowd was full—men and women with half-filled glasses in their hands, couples engrossed in their rehearsed steps, while drinks and food were being served.

‘Ah, Indra, how long?’ asked a rather stout man, making an appearance all of a sudden. The man was much older than him, actually old enough to be his father, with a thick mustache and spectacles, wearing an expensive formal suit. He had a bulky body and a large face, which made his personality all the more imposing. ‘Staying over today?’ he asked. ‘Surely…’. He had not finished the sentence, but Indra nodded.

The man patted him on the back, and they were in the lounge at a corner table. As they sat, the man called a server, who seemed to know both of them, and ordered drinks for both.

‘Surely these are extraordinary times! First the swarm, the catastrophe, the starvation,’ and then he gave a flourish with his hands like the conductor of a classical concerto and said, ‘All’s well that ends well, the happy ending that you can have, the election. Finally, the government is in place, just like we are in the club, doing nothing actually. Must we say then that now is the Great Hibernation?’ and he winked at him like they were old pals who cracked jokes.

But the music was getting too loud, and their conversation drowned out, so he could not hear a thing except that the man said, ‘The war’s over, I say.’

He vacantly looked towards the crowd dancing, not able to find any meaning in the exercised moves. He saw a lady waving at him in the distance. She looked elegant in a blue gown wrapped around her waist like a lehenga, with her hair tied back. She was young and had a quiet prettiness about her rather than the stunning beauty he remembered of his wife, and now she was moving towards them.

‘How did you manage this far? I thought you would not make it, Indra,’ she exclaimed. Then under her breath, he heard her mutter about his companion warily, ‘Oh, this man’s all over the place.’ He understood then that this lady and the man also knew each another, but disliked each other intensely. The man’s smile was gone as he glanced at her. ‘Excuse me for a moment, Indra,’ the man said and immediately left. The lady took the man’s seat, and he garnered her name was Ira.

‘What was Stoker talking about?’ she asked, and he guessed she meant that man who had accompanied him previously.

‘Well, nothing, just about the war being over, and then he left, and you came,’ he said as though she was already familiar to him.

‘I know it would not make much sense now, but he has made a fortune in the war, and well, his money stinks. Of course, I need not lie. At the time of the war, I survived because of him, and even now, our contract has not ended. But it stinks, you know and I hate myself.’

She moved closer to him and then went on, ‘When you came back from the war, you could not remember anything, nor recognize anyone. If it had not been for her… I mean your wife, and for this, I should be grateful to her.’

So, it was that he had lost his mind after the war. Perhaps he had not fully gotten better after all, he thought resignedly.

Ira advanced her delicate hands towards him. ‘Let us move to Seven like old times. It’s quieter there,’ she almost whispered, and he felt he knew her. He didn’t know why he felt compelled to follow her. Her body, her fragrance—had he at one time…? No, he had never loved her; he knew that for sure. The heart can never lie, even if the memory is gone.

He left the club and followed Ira through what he thought were staff bunkers, with the oxygen generators, water purifiers, and stacks of wine and food. Men like shadows, with scalded hair, skin diseased, the kind who couldn’t, in their lifetime, afford one protective suit, even if they worked day and night all their lives. They kept this place going, and he saw their sad eyes, sensed their eyes on him, but it was strange that he had never noticed these people. To him, they all looked alike. And then even if men were cheap, he wondered where the power for running this place was coming from, how they had somehow managed that.

Seven seemed like an expensive executive suite at the motel. He noticed there was a large old-fashioned bed with silken sheets, a stack of books, a closet of expensive suits, and a mini wine cellar. From the windows, one could see the black sea rolling through the dark sky, and he closed the curtains. He thought he might have once been in such a place, injured and sick as Ira had said he was, and she had nursed his wounds and healed him, his wife. Was that it? Perhaps this was a place where a man and woman could begin anew after the war even though he was now alone.

Ira sat on the sofa at the bedside as he stood by the window. Without memory, language seemed extinct to him, even though Ira seemed never to be at a loss for speech. Perhaps it was some kind of nervousness about never forgetting anything that was about her.

‘Remember when we were young and the sun shone every day? We did not bother about that, of course. And in the spring, when we read together and had phones, we called each other and left messages. Now I can tell you that in a hundred years, we will wait just like that.’ He felt a terrible pain in his head that made him dizzy. He could never have loved her, that was not possible. But she went on. ‘And we read Romeo and Juliet. Then another day, we read Chandrasekhar and then Eurydice and Orpheus. We swam together that day into the sea, and you kept your word, but I came back. I was selfish, or just young and frightened, so I called the boats.’ Perhaps he had drowned himself to keep his word, he thought. Keeping his word had meant more to him then, maybe, for he was not a coward after all. ‘Did you ever hate me for that Indra?’ she asked suddenly. He had no answer for what she said made little sense in this world.

As she continued, her voice sounded slightly disturbed and less melancholic, ‘What is the use of living like this, Indra, surviving like an animal? Sometimes it gets so bad, and my lungs, the pain… to be able to bear it. I cannot wait any longer, not with the water thick with filth, the corpses, and the stench. It is the squalls of fire that were started by the bombing, and it may finally be many more months before the light comes. I’d prefer to die soon like the birds and the animals.’ He thought she wanted him to say something, like I cannot let you die. But it appeared too dramatic in this world—almost absurd and comical.

‘When the war began, I thought I must live,’ Ira was still saying. ‘What I did, only to live: sold everything, even my soul. What do women do to live during a war? But to think that now that it is over, I do not feel like waking up with this darkness and the smoke killing my lungs.’

He walked up to the sofa, where she lay in a posture halfway between sitting and lying down. He found a faint echo of the past in what she said. A woman struggles to keep her head above water during the most difficult time of the war, and when it’s all over, all of a sudden she gives it up. ‘The weather is going to be like this for days, Indra, they say.’ She got up and pulled aside the curtains as they sat around in silence. ‘If only for old time’s sake,’ she asked but he could not remember. The Steamer might have made him understand that just opening a door could lead him to the old world, but between that world and this stood the death of someone that he had not been able to prevent, and that had changed everything. They didn’t talk about his wife. How had she become one with the dying world? He wondered if he had carelessly let her die, if he somehow wanted it or worse was relieved by it. Was there a child between them that never came into the world, who was muffled by the mere threat of a catastrophe?

As Ira came close and embraced him, he felt her trembling and could hear the pounding of her heart. It made him feel that she was almost shaking like a tree in a tropical storm, but he felt paralyzed and remained unmoved. Maybe it was insomnia, but his head was throbbing and he felt a terrible pain. She felt the coldness of his body and withdrew. ‘You have not slept for days,’ she said, pained, as she opened a medicine cabinet beside the big bed and brought out a bottle of pills. She hesitated then, as if she wasn’t sure of giving it to him, that there was some thought passing her mind that was stopping her. But then she slowly slipped the bottle into his palms and he thought if she wanted him dead, he would accept it. He was always willing to obey, as though condemned to take orders. ‘I’m sorry’, he finally managed to say. He slept like a dead man, even a child in its womb; just a couple of colored pills and he couldn’t remember when she was gone.

When he woke, it was still dark. He heard footsteps as though a great many people were going down the unused stairs. He rushed out into a wide corridor and found the lifeless body of Ira being taken down in a glass box by the shadowy men who worked in the bunkers. It seemed she was asleep and would wake at any moment, except that she was now dressed in a red wedding dress.

His eyes met Stoker’s, who appeared behind these men. ‘She’s dead, Indra’, and there was a slight tremor to his voice, even though his eyes were cold looking ahead.

‘It is the weather,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Even the birds and the animals are drowning themselves in the murky sea, jumping off cliffs, or rushing into the fire. And for women, it is contagious, like an epidemic. They are killing themselves like in an epidemic,’ Stoker said vigorously, shaking his head.

She probably would not have died if he had not come. And again, he was seized by a pang of terrible guilt.

‘I will leave,’ he said.

‘Where, Indra?’

Stoker stood alone, even after everyone had gone. ‘This is the last post that has the remnants of our civilization: clean water, food and a bit of electricity. The land ends here. Everything else is gone. I am a man of science, Indra! I am not dependent on that woman. What’s she called? Ah! Yes, the naughty Lady Luck, for whose favor men clamor. I am a survivor. I have mastered the art of survival, for sure. You can stay here as long as you want; I can do that much for you, young fellow.’

Stoker’s stinking money, he thought, as Ira had said, but he always obeyed orders. He was born to follow them, but the women were not and could set themselves free. When he and Stoker went back to the club, the people were still dancing and laughing. ‘We have to keep it going, Indra, with this place with the lights, and all we have to do is maintain the pretenses, the fun, the dancing, the little games.’

But he thought that he should leave, though it was not by the path that the woman had chosen. He was neither fighting death like Stoker nor was he seduced by it. He desired supreme indifference, like a cruel God, perhaps. In an earlier world, this indifference would have made him an aristocrat. In this world, there was simply one word for it: insanity.

‘There is no place else to go, Son,’ Stoker said. ‘The city is emitting nothing but deathly radiation. Have you forgotten the swarm when we fled the city? Memory is an unpleasant thing, Indra. If I did not have that, I would be the happiest, I suppose; there would be no need for this awful show.’. But he had no memory, past, or future, or so he thought, and he wanted to say what Stoker thought was wrong, but he did not.

He did not know for how many days he had slept. He had lost track of time, but to him, it was the next day when he woke up. Again, he heard the frantic movement of heavy footsteps of too many people outside his suite. Ghostly wails crying from within the Steamer. He was seized by panic. He had an impulse to hide, to become invisible. Still, something drove him out, and he followed the crowd down the stairs. The suspense almost killed him till he came into the lounge. He saw Stoker’s body resting, waiting to be carried in a hearse. All the employees of the motel, indistinguishable in identical suits with their tired heads and starved bodies waited to follow the hearse in what would be a man’s last journey. Some grim, some sobbing it seemed they still waited to bow or nod to Stoker’s orders.

For the first time, it appeared to him he would burst into loud wild sobs. Then, as if on an impulse, he wanted to rush up the stairs but felt weak, so he took the elevator, and his eyes fell on the mirror. It was not him anymore; it was someone older. His eyes were sunk, his face was hollow, and his skin wrinkled. But it did not frighten him, and he took it in with a calm acceptance, like inviting dusk at the end of day. He did not know how long he was in his suite. In fact, he could not even remember how long he had stayed on the Steamer. But when he opened the window, the sky looked familiar, and there was a bit of light and warmth, and it felt like an evening in the old world.

He had forgotten the woman he loved, whom he thought to be his wife. In the future, the scientists would explain the swarm, the catastrophe, and the hibernation that would have nothing to do with him, Ira or Stoker but that didn’t matter. Outside, the narrow track to the beach was piled with bones of long rotten carcasses that had become as hard as rocks. He stumbled on them when he came close to the water, which was clear. The filth had drifted away somewhat.

I must be back, he thought, but he could not find any place or reason to go, so he stood there under the sky with a splash of red-orange, the water touching his feet.

She’s clear, crisp in my mind’s eye. Her eyes shine. Her hair falls loose. She’s achingly beautiful.

“It’s your turn, Daddy. Stop texting.” Sara is glaring at me from across the table, cross.

“Just a sec, sweetie. It’s Josh about a job for me.”

It was more than a second. I had priorities. I was stupid.

“Daddy?” She’s exasperated. She’s adorable. She’s…

For the first time in a long time, I can see Sara’s face, too. Clear, bright. Her eyes too big to be real, her hair like her mom’s, a tiny sharp chin. Little teeth in her smile.

“Alright, alright!” I free up a hand and reach for the dice…

The dice hit the board. My phone dings. It’s Yours! “Fuck YES!”

Sara stares at me. “Why are you cursing?”

Amina stares too, but she’s amused. “Good news?”

“You rolled a seven.” Sara is back at the board, counting spaces with her fingers. She squeals when her finger touches the seventh space. “Park Place, Daddy! You owe me eleven hundred dollars.”

It was adorable the way she said it.

“Eleven hundred dollars.” It doesn’t sound the same when I say it. I can’t match her pitch, her inflection, her enthusiasm, her glee. I can’t be her.

I don’t have much. I’ve been playing with half my brain, too focused on… “I’m gonna be in a big movie, Little Winner. A big scary movie…” I fork over the remainder of my money. “I’m gonna play the killer!”

“You’re not a killer, dad. You’re too nice.”

“Am I?” I reach into the take-out box next to Amina and pull out the last shrimp bao.

“That’s mine.” Amina reaches for it.

“Too bad.” I put it in my mouth. “I’m a killer, babe.”

Pulled over in front of Hotel Figueroa, lost in time.

Sara is on the couch, looking down at me. She’s wearing a nightgown? Did she own a nightgown? I can’t remember. We’re running lines for a stupid commercial.

“What’s in your wallet?”

“Sillier, Daddy.” She’s laughing.

I can’t make out her face, a mess of smiles, eyes, and skin descends into a panic-inducing swirl. She’s gone. It’s gone.

Sillier, Daddy.

The memory slips entirely. I’m alone in the car. Smashmouth on the radio, Rockstar. I turn it off, hit my vape, but it doesn’t settle me.

The App dings. Its pink splash brightens the inside of my Kia. “Jayson” needs a ride. Black. Smiling guy. Photo on a beach. “Ugh.” Beach photo people never tip. Lower my window to vent the vape-smoke but take one more hit to get me through the ride. The city mellows. The brake-light sea up Figueroa from the arena is fine now. It’ll take me eight minutes to go three thousand feet to The Bloc where Jayson is waiting. I give it a moment, maybe get reassigned something in the other direction. Nope. Okay.

Ugh. No. I know him. He’s an asshole. Arrogant prick.

“Danny?” Jayson recognizes me, changes course and gets in the front seat. “I thought it might be you from your pic, but damn, man!” He jams his hand across the center console. His smile threatens to envelop me. I take his hand, dreading the bro-hug that’s going to follow. “How you been?”

“Alright, I guess.” ‘Jayson is Jayson Means. Years since I’ve seen him in person. Twenty maybe? But recently he’s everywhere on TV. Movies. “Not like you, man.” Fuck him. He’s king right now. Everywhere.

“Oooh…” he leans back in the seat, throws his hands behind the headrest and clasps them. He takes up all the space in the car. “I had myself a rough patch, though, believe me.” He turns to me. I pull into traffic. He’s going to Silver Lake. A house up above The Red Lion. The App wants me to take Hill to 2^nd. Makes sense. Twenty-two minutes. Too long. I won’t survive that long in a car with him. “After Master Class, I couldn’t buy a fucking role.” He chuckles. “Not like you, man. You just…” he makes a sound like a rocket, lifts his hand in a slow arc.

“Worked out great.” I haven’t done shit in the last eight years. “I got some stuff on the horizon, though.”

I see him look me up and down. “Good to hear. You deserve it.  I loved Venice Station. Lasted what? Like five years?” He barks a laugh and claps — “Network, too — some fucking residuals, man.”

He’s waiting for a response. I shrug. My last check was for $396.42. I smile for him. “Yeah.”

He sighs. “Tough when that shit ends, though. I had a rough patch myself. Got far down. Burned through all my Master Class money thinking thing’s’d pick up again, you know?”

“Yeah?” I know all too well. After Venice Station, a couple B movies, a few starrings, and then a collection of day-play five-and-unders until… nothing. Stupid fucking business.

Hill Street’s wide open. Time to destination drops by six minutes.

“Danny man,” I can feel him looking at me. “I worked at Gold’s Gym, got my personal trainer license. People used to recognize me, ask me to say my line when they did good.” He chuckles. “Reeee-dicyoulusssss.” Like he said on the show. “Three years ago I was on Cameo for twenty dollars a pop. It was saaaad…”

“Not anymore, though.” He’s everywhere.

“Nah,” he chuckles again. “Not anymore. Things are good.”

The tunnel under Bunker Hill makes things loud. He doesn’t try to talk over it. He was bad. Before. He was a bad actor — no depth, just looks and a schtick. Nothing going on underneath. Embarrassed me to be on the show with him. I was a lot better than him. Fuck this business.

But he’s good now. Impossibly good. “Been watching Manchester Square.”

He looks at me. “Yeah?”

“It’s good.”

“You think?”

“You’re good. Really good.” Brake lights at Glendale and Beverly.

“Thanks, man.” He’s looking me over again, weird expression. Thinking about something. Then: “You want to join me for a beer or two at the Lion? I haven’t talked with someone from the before-times in years, right.” He waits a moment. “I’m buying.” That smile again.

It’s 9:30. I need money but I’m suddenly tired. I shouldn’t. Shouldn’t drink. It’s a chance to talk myself onto Manchester. He’s a lead. He’s got pull. “Yeah.” I smile. “That’d be good.” I tap, “Last Ride.”

The Red Lion is a cop bar. Two of them recognize Jayson when we come in.

“Reeeeee-dickyoulussss!” One of them shouts. The other one laughs.

Another recognizes me. “You used to be Danny Ruiz!”

I hate it here. “Still am.”

They want a photo. “Manchester Square, man.” The older cop confides when the picture is done. “You ain’t fair to the LAPD on that show, you know. Makes it hard to respect you when you don’t respect us, my man.”

Jayson nods gravely. “I’ll bring it up with the writers.”

I’m drinking again. Oh well. It was a short sobriety. The beer loosens me, clears me like weed just doesn’t do. “Can I ask you something?”

Jayson’s looking over my shoulder at the cops. They’re loud, boisterous and menacing. “Yeah, what do you want to know?”

“Back in Master Class,” I hold my beer up to the light, then finish it off. “You were…”

“I was an asshole, man.” He shakes his head. Rueful. “Especially to you. Part of why I wanted to do this.” He leans in. “I owe you an apology.”

“For what?” Could be a hundred things. He treated me like shit.

“I knew how you felt about Katy, man. I knew but I…” he laughs, embarrassed. “You were better than me, man. I was scared of you so I always tried to put you down, keep you there, you know. I was a scared kid and you were better than me.” He shrugs elaborately. “I never felt good about any of it and I’ve wanted to say this to you for years.”

I don’t remember Katy. Who the hell was Katy? “It’s cool man.” The apology is nice. Unexpected. Maybe now he’ll get me on Manchester. “You were good, though.” It’s a lie.

“Bullshit, man. I sucked and you know it.”

“Yeah, no. We all sucked.”  He sucked more than the rest of us. “We were kids.” I tip my empty bottle at him. “But you are now. Good.”

“I am?” He’s being modest.

“Fuck you, Jayson, you know you are.”

He shrugs. Big smile. “Yeah. I got a lot better.”

“How? I mean, it’s like you got depth or something. I freaking believe you on screen and talking with you I just…”

He chuckles, disarming. Charming. “I learned some stuff, some good stuff. Things that changed me. Changed my life.” His smile changes. He leans in. Conspiratorial. “Gave me a leg up.”

Scientologist. It’s clear now. His big secret. His new success. “Wow!”

“What happened to you, then?” He leans back again, eyes the cops for a moment then back at me. “You were good and then you just…”

“This stupid town, man. After Venice Station, I was primed, you know? Ready. Then Josh talks me into doing some stupid trashy slasher shit that’s supposed to be the next Scream and it bombs, then he talks me into Stellar Ship and that bombs and I start to get the reputation, you know?” I’ve told this so many times. It’s sing-songy now, rote. “Josh tells me I’m poison because he made bad calls, then he drops me.” I sigh, wry smile. “Things are looking up, though. I got some things that might pop. Been writing. Some AD gigs, building my portfolio so I can direct TV, you know.” Don’t push too hard. “Love a chance to get back in front, though.”

“I do know.” He laughs, looks up and raises two fingers. I don’t turn around. “That’s awful, man. You deserved better. You were great on Venice Station.”

“I was a surfer-cop who solved beach crime.”

He smiles. “A good surfer-cop, though.”

More beer arrives.

“Let me see about getting you some time on Manchester, Danny — get you straight to producers for something recurring — we got a Latino neighbor coming up. They all love me there. I’ve got real pull.”

“You don’t have to,” but he has to. “That’d be amazing.” Hope. Fuck. Scientology. Oh well. Might be worth it. “Do you need me to go with you to get…” I’m so stupid. “Never mind.”

Jayson’s amused. He’s leering at me. “You think I’m a Scientologist.” He laughs. “I ain’t a fucking Scientologist, Danny.”

“You’re not?” I blurt it. I shouldn’t drink.

“You’re safe.” He lifts his beer. He’s still amused. Thank god.

“Then how’d you get so good? Whose class?”

He chuckles like he’s got a secret. “No class, man.”

“Then how?”

He shakes his head. “Can’t tell you.” He leans in, intimate. Whispers: “Not supposed to tell no-one.”

We drink. Talk about other things. What happened to so-and-so, do you remember how hot so-and-so was, did you actually fuck so-and-so in the costume trailer. Can’t stop thinking about how he got good.

It gets late. The cops filter out. “Don’t think about driving home, buddy,” one of them says to Jayson. “That’d be reeeee-dickyoulusss!” It gets laughs.

Jayson looks at me, then him. “Don’t worry, man, I got a Lyft.”

In the car, Jayson blocks the ignition with his hand. “Maybe we should sit a while.”

“Yeah.” We listen to music, talk more. I’m feeling alright. I’m actually liking Jayson. Still arrogant, but not a dick anymore. “So really, how’d you get so good? What’s the secret?”

He squints at me like he’s remembering something. “You’re married, right?”

“Was.” I don’t feel the whole weight like I normally do. I smile. Feels good to talk about it. “She left me.” He tenses. “Relax, it was years ago. I wasn’t my best self, you know? Things had gone bad. I don’t blame her.”

“That sucks, man.” He looks concerned, sympathetic. “Did you two have any kids?”

Fuck me. “Yeah.” Then: “No.” Then before I can stop it: “Not anymore.” It’s out. This wasn’t the plan. My eyes burn. My throat closes.

He bites his lip, his face creases like he’s screwed something up. “Dammit. I’m sorry, man. Sara, right? I totally forgot — she died? I wasn’t…”

I wave him off. Shake my head. The sadness won’t stop. Beer-loosened emotional sphincters give way. Grief. Ugh. Fuck. Sara. Sara. Jayson’s hand is on me. The warmth. I choke a little.

He pulls me close. “It’s cool, man. I got you.”

He’s strong, comforting. I give in to his hug. I’m crying a little. “Sorry.” I sit up, reach behind me for the tissues in the back seat and set about cleaning myself up.

I forgot about Sara.

“You knew about Amina? About Sara?”

He nods. “Yeah. I knew.” He sounds so sad. “Didn’t know what happened, though.”

“Who told you?”

He shrugs. “I don’t even know, man. Word got out. Danny’s got family, right?” He shakes his head. His sympathy is going to drown me. “I can’t even imagine how awful that must’ve been.”

“You don’t even know…” It’s a whisper. The blue glow from the dash blurs and Jayson’s hand is on my shoulder again. “No.” I clear my throat but it ends in a cough. “FUCK!” Hand to face, hard. Control. I breathe in. Got it. Good. “I’m fine, man. Most of the time.” He’s looking at me, eyeballs round with concern. “Some of the time.” I pull my vape up from the map-holder. “You mind?”

He doesn’t. Deep in. My psyche uncreases just a little bit. “It ruined me, man. I’m just done, you know? My career was already tanked by then anyways, so…” I shrug, because I don’t have the words. “People are supposed to get on with things, but I… I’m not. I can’t. I got nothing now. No family, no daughter, no career. I drive and smoke. I just want to go back, you know? Go back. Go back to when she was here, when I had Amina, back to when I had work. All of it. Go back.” I’m whining, nearly crying. “Jesus.” Another hit. It doesn’t help. “All night every night, all day every day, I stare at the goddamned ceiling and try to remember things. Things we did. Times we had.” I don’t know what I’m doing. I shouldn’t be saying all this.

Beer, weed, and kindness fuck me up every time.

Jayson isn’t saying anything. He’s looking at me. His expression is weird, conflicted. “What?”

He nods, just a little movement, like he’s made a decision.

“What?”

“You really want that, don’t you? To go back? One more game of Monopoly, eating bao with your wife and kid?”

Monopoly. Bao. Happiness. The wish is strong, rises like hope in my gut. Head shake, slow, with the wonder of imagined happiness. “Groundhog Day my ass right fucking then because I’m done here.” I turn to face Jayson square. “I wake up every day and wonder why I haven’t killed myself. I should. I should just do it.” I hold his eyes. “Stupid question.” I’m tired now. I want to go home. I reach for the ignition, then freeze. “How the fuck did you know about that?”

He shrugs, looks guilty.

“What?”

He sighs, deep. He’s still looking me in the eye. It’s uncomfortable. “You wanted to know what happened, how I got good. Can I tell you something? Like in confidence?”

“I couldn’t give less of a shit about your Artists Way journey right now, Jayson.”

“It’s related, man. I could help you. Just listen. It’s not anything you’ve heard before, I guarantee that. I can change your life. I know things. I’m not supposed to tell you, but I’m big now. There’s nothing they can do to me and after how I treated you on set, I feel like I owe you this.” He leans forward, close to me, intimate. His voice is a whisper. “You said you wanted to be in 2014? I can help make that happen.”

His insanity, his narcissism — they’re slaps. I face forward, hands on the wheel. “Fuck you. Get out of my car.”

“Listen.” I lean away, my head pressed against the window, yearning. “Three years ago, man, I was low. Low low. I had nobody. I was months behind in rent and the pandemic was just starting. It was bad.” He sighs. “I was sitting on my bed, holding my Glock and thinking hard about what came next when there was a knock on my door and this girl…” He shakes his head like what he’s about to say is crazy. “She came in and told me I had a choice. She offered me a different way and I took it and… it’s everything, man. It’s my secret — it’s my superpower, and it can help you, too.”

“You said you weren’t a Scientologist, man, get out of my car.”

“This ain’t about fucking Scientology.” He seems genuinely offended. “This isn’t anything like that. This is magic. You know how I knew about Sara? Amina? Monopoly and Bao? I was there, man. I saw it through my own goddamn eyes. That girl? She made me a patch-worker. I protect the integrity of the time-stream, man. I fix the past and it’s got real side-benefits that can help you.”

“Seriously, get the fuck out of my car before I hurt you.”

He doesn’t hear me. He’s ranting, relentless. “I’m not supposed to tell anybody, man, but I think I’ve got to tell you because I owe you that much for how much a dick I was.” I’ve got my head pressed so hard against the window it hurts. I close my eyes. I see spots. The door. I reach across myself. Open it. Stumble out. “Danny, man!” He’s coming after me. “Wait!”

My right foot catches on the lip. I stumble, catch myself, then sit on the pavement. “Leave me alone, man, just leave me alone.”

“I’m telling you real shit. She hooked me up. I work for Time now.” He’s kneeling next to me, leaning close above my ear. His voice burns. “I fix holes in the past — lost memories. I go back in time and fill in the goddamned blanks — it’s how I got so good man. I don’t have to wonder what it’s like being other people. I don’t have to play the truth of imaginary situations. I’ve been other people. I’ve been you, man.” His hand on my shoulder. “Several times.”

“Stop.” It’s a whisper. “Please just stop.”

He won’t. He’s smiling, maniacal. “I rolled the seven that landed you on Park Place where Sara had three houses. I ate the last shrimp dumpling that Amina wanted. I felt that, man. I have been a thousand people in a thousand different lives now and so can you. I can talk to that girl again, man. I can hook you up and maybe you can go back, live that moment, too.” He’s leaning over me again. Tender eyes. Intensity. “Very least you’ll get to be other people, too, help your career, maybe help you in general.”

“You’re fucking insane.” But he’s not. He’s sane. I had rolled a seven. I had eaten the last shrimp dumpling. Amina had wanted it.

He shakes his head slowly. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, man, so you can’t tell anyone, either, okay? Next time I see the girl, I’ll talk to her for you, though. I promise.”

I look up at him. His face is open. He’s earnest, honest. “You go back in time…”

“Yeah. Not like some movie sci-fi shit, though. One moment I’m me now and the next moment I’m Sally Archer in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2017 trying to decide which canned soup to buy at Dollar General and wondering if I should leave my husband, and then I’m back to being me.”

“Man…” It’s insane. What if it’s real?

“I swear it’s true.” He looks so earnest. “We’re the people who keep time from getting fucked up. Sometimes things don’t get stored right — things happen but then they get erased so they both happen and didn’t happen at the same time and that can really fuck things up. We go back and re-live the lost moments.  That’s why I’ve been you, man. You keep erasing things.”

It’s not real. I stand up. “You’re such an asshole, Jayson.”

He stays where he was. I watch him watch me drive away. He looks scared. I can’t shake the feeling.

Morning. I think. Light anyways. The vertical blinds in my bedroom are useless. My head hurts. My back, too. Last night’s memories filter in. Slowly. I rolled a seven.

“Fuck.” It’s a whisper, raspy, forced through phlegm. I screwed up my chance for a recurring on Manchester. I feel sick.

Toast, peanut butter, coffee. Consider my day. Drive, I guess. Amina wanted the bao. I should have let her have it. Maybe if I’d let her have it, I’d…

Fuck I’m hungry.

My apartment is gone. I’m…

The Gas’n’Save looks bright and cheery inside. 

I’m being painted over, hidden.

I’m Jimmy Dammaker. 

It’s winter-bright, sun-shiny. I’m in Akron, Ohio. It’s four days before my ex-wife’s birthday. She’s a bitch who took my kids. I need twenty-five dollars in the next few hours or it’s going to be a rough fucking night. 

It’s not me. It’s Jimmy. I’m Jimmy.

The shelves inside are colorful, filled with friendly food. I’ve got four dollars and seventeen cents, but I need that. More. It’s cold. I’m sweating. Not good. The Indian who owns the station kicked me off the property this morning, but he’s not here now. Just the girl.

I walk up slow-like. Casual. I’m beside the door. The wind picks up, blows my coat open. It’s cold as a motherfucker, but my hands, my back, my face feel shiny. 

There’s an older guy getting out of his car, fat and weak. Polo shirt under his coat, khaki pants. The kind who carries cash. “Hey man! Hey, you got a sec, man?”

He won’t look at me.

“I’m a fucking vet, man. You’re gonna walk right past me like you don’t see me? I served for you, asshole.” I didn’t, but I’m mad now anyways. Fuck this guy. I’m jonesing. Hard. “Give me some money, you pussy.”

The girl inside is wide-eyed scared, hand on her phone. The guy in the polo shirt slows. “You need to leave.” He won’t even look at me.

“Give me twenty bucks, then.”

His step stutters. “Here.” He pulls his hand from his pocket, holds out a five. “Go.”

My hand is halfway to my mouth. Jimmy Dammaker is still in me, memories that feel like mine but aren’t. A house with a big lawn, fist-holes in a wall, a twelve-foot python named Sofie. Sadness that feels like anger. He’s slipping away, but he leaves a sheen of himself behind in me.

My toast reaches my lips. I bite instinctively, but I have no saliva. The bread sits in my mouth unlubricated and unpleasant. I spit it into the trash.

I pulled Jayson’s number from the app. His phone rings a bunch before it’s answered. “Who’s calling, please?”

It’s not Jayson. Maybe an assistant. “This is Danny. Ruiz. Can I talk to Jayson?”

“What’s your relationship with Jayson?” The guy on the phone sounds too old to be an assistant. Professional. Suspicious.

“We’re friends, man. We were drinking last night. Can I talk with him?”

The voice changes. Harder. “You were with Mr. Means last night? At his house?”

“No man, at the Red Lion. What the hell?” My head is pounding. I’m starting to feel sick.

“Mr. Ruiz, my name is Detective Rafael Luna, LAPD. Would it be alright if I sent someone over to talk with you?”

Jayson is dead. Beaten to death in his home. They ask me about baseball bats, whether we fought. I tell them the truth. When they leave: “We might have more questions, so please keep yourself available.”

After the door closes, I vomit into the sink, spare sausage from last night, bile, water. It burns.

I collapse on a chair, put my head in my hands.

A knock. Solid, confident, a set of three raps. Moments later, three more. I should get it, but I can’t move my hands, my head. “Just a minute.” I pinch my cheek hard. The pain brings me out.

“Sorry, I was in the bathroom.” It’s a woman I don’t know. “Who are you?”

She’s in her thirties, maybe my age exactly. A little heavy but wearing it well. Her hair is thick, teased and messy, reminds me of Jennifer Finch from L7 back in the day. Clean jeans, a black tee, black Chuck Taylor’s. Pretty but scary. “Hi Danny,” she says. She smiles, but it doesn’t touch the rest of her face. “Can I come in?” She pushes past me. “Thank you.”

I stay at the door, watch her scan my living room. It’s been a long time since anyone who wasn’t me has seen it. I imagine what she sees and blanch. “Sorry. Who are you?”

“My name’s Darby.” She turns to face me. She smiles again, then motions me to the couch. “Have a seat, Danny.” She sits on the far side, angles herself to look at me. “I was a friend of Jayson’s. We need to talk.”

I can’t sit down. I stay standing, arms crossed, between her and the door. “You know about… It was you, wasn’t it? The girl who talked to him, told him about Time and whatever. What did you do to him? He didn’t do anything, man. He was trying to help me.”

She laughs, for real. It’s at me. “Danny. there wasn’t anything me or anyone else could do to keep Jayson from dying once he broke the rules.” She widens her eyes at me, like I should understand. “He told you. He shouldn’t have done that.”

“But none of this is real.” I don’t even believe myself anymore. “Was it? Is it? It wasn’t. That’s stupid.”

“Okay.” She stares up at me, dead-faced.

It deflates me. “Fuck.”

She glances at her watch. “Jayson broke the rules and was sent to patch a death. You are now a patch-worker because it was either that or kill you because Jayson was an idiot and told you.” She widens her eyes, leans forward. “Rules.”

She lays it out. Just like Jayson.  “You’re gonna fix Time, Danny.”

It’s heady. Patching is re-creating a forgotten moment, a piece of time. It takes a while for the past to solidify. Most moments are strong, sticky, built to last, but others don’t set right. Others get erased.  She gives me an example: “Imagine you buy blueberries at the store and pay six bucks — if that moment disappears from Time, then you ate blueberries that you didn’t buy, someone else might buy blueberries that don’t exist and the shopkeeper is six bucks short while you have six extra you already spent. We go back and relive that moment, make sure it sticks.” 

“I don’t…” It’s a lot.  My head hurts.

“Don’t get lost in the whys and wherefores, Danny.” She wrinkles her nose, shakes her head. “More things on heaven and earth and all that. Just know you’re saving the world.” She shrugs. “If those paradoxes make it to the present, Time’s fucked. We’re all fucked. We keep that from happening.”

As she leaves, I ask my only question. “What rules? What are the rules?” I don’t want to die like Jayson.

“Fight Club, Danny.” Darby smiles as she stands up to go. “The rules are Fight Club rules.”

Donnie Gleason. It’s 2016. Richmond, Indiana. I’m wide. Tall, too. My skin beads with sweat. My hair is hot on my head. It’s hot. Can’t believe I still live here. You ain’t leaving, Donnie. Too fucking scared. I tighten inside, shameful. Speedway has twenty-five pumps, but the one I chose is out of regular. I scan the lot, consider getting back in the car to move to a different island, but it seems like too much. It’s too hot. The Purina factory is making the whole town smell like dog food again. Seattle doesn’t smell like this. How the fuck would I know. 

I slap the button for premium. It’s twenty cents more.

“Fuck.” Nobody’s listening. Nobody cares.

Patches come randomly, no warning. I’m here, signaling left, third in line for the turn and then suddenly I’m Jaden Preble helping my sister buy a dress for her eighth-grade prom and I’m mad she hasn’t even said thank-you even though I could have spent the day playing Call of Duty. Then I’m back but I don’t remember where I am or what I was doing and everybody gets pissed at me while I puzzle it out.

She should have thanked him, though.

Patching. Inconvenient, but not awful. Sometimes good. I feel what they feel. I’ve been thrilled about finding twenty bucks when I was Emmett Combs, a bricklayer in Evanston, Illinois in 2015. I’ve felt schadenfreude as Connor Fields in Klamath Falls when Caden Brooks got busted for vaping in the bathroom. I’ve felt the sadness of Alberto Mendez of Massapequa when his favorite pair of socks were too worn to keep.

There are downsides, too. Something happens to me there, it happens to me.

Eric Bledsoe. Truckee. 2018. Driving, barely thinking, thinking. Not thinking.

“Not…” words are weird. Sounds. Mindblowing. Moving air makes music. Moving air.      “Blah blah blah blah” means something but it’s just air.

Laughing now. Can’t help it. It’s snowing a little, still September. Weird. Brake lights in front of me. I feel lazy. Moving slow, foot from gas to brake.

Not going to make it. No panic. No worry. Just is. I turn the wheel, slide onto the shoulder, then over the shoulder… over the shoulder sounds… more sounds.

The car bumps, then we’re riding a bucking bronco, up down up up up up down down. Stop.

“We’re okay!” I tell myself. I’m the only one listening. My nose hurts.

I had a bloody nose after that one. Back and neck sore for a week. Jayson died like that, being someone else when they got killed. He was trying to help. Wanted to give me my career back, give me a chance to see Sara again. I think about Jayson a lot. Beaten to death. A bat, maybe something else. Found in his living room, wearing boxer-briefs and a robe. The robe didn’t have any blood on the outside, no blood anywhere but on his body. Reddit’s got a sub now, r/meansmurder. People think he was killed elsewhere.

Not elsewhere. Elsewhen. Sent to patch a death.

Most patches are small. Moments in time easily forgotten — choices made doing laundry, whether to buy tomatoes.  People worry. People care. People are scared. People have joy. Patching is making it harder to judge people.

Then there are erasures, moments people remember into oblivion. People like me. We are memory destroyers.

Paula Robinson. The Anasazi Steakhouse is fancy. Caleb’s choice. He’s across from me, eyes down, intent on his rib-eye. He cuts it carefully, fork in his left hand, backside up, tines in the meat. His manners are so good. He’s refined. People would never know if they saw him at work or driving on the freeway in his beat up ancient green Tundra.

“This is nice.” I feel myself flush. I sound simple. “I’ve never been here before.”

Caleb looks up. He’s chewing, but it’s subtle, quiet. His eyes are bright. His face, he has a look. Everything about him is slightly wrong — his nose is too large, crooked, too. His eyes too deep. His goatee isn’t full, his cheeks are hollow but the whole thing together looks… good. He’s like a younger Sam Elliot. He smiles. “Couldn’t think of another place where I could take you and people wouldn’t think I was too cheap for my date.”

I’ve been here as Paula three times already. Something must’ve happened to Caleb. She must really miss him. Erasures like hers and mine are always tragic nostalgia.

Every time I fade, splash down inside a mind somewhere else in time, I hope it’s mine — that moment where I rolled a seven. Some other moment of joy with Amina, with Sara. I drill down on memories daily, forcing moment-by-moment replays until the faces dissolve and the moments drown in murkiness and I’m not even sure it happened at all.

If they’re sending patchworkers, they’re not sending me.

But Jayson was right. While I’m patching I am them. I feel them, think them, know them. It’s real. I don’t have to play at imaginary truths anymore.

“You want back in.” Josh sounds skeptical.

We haven’t talked in four years.  Last time we did he told me my only options were reality. Screw that. If my career was going to end, it wasn’t going to be sitting across the desk from whoever-the-fuck replaced Donald Trump on Celebrity Apprentice or whatever.

“I’m ready. I’ve spent real time focusing on craft. I’ll impress you, man. I’ll impress everybody.”

He tells me I don’t need to impress him. He wants a new headshot. “You haven’t updated your webpage.”

“I’ll have it all by Tuesday.” Hang up. Lean back, close my eyes. Another moment with Sara. I focus, remember it hard.

The concrete path to our front door in South Pasadena. Amina is on the porch. She’s radiant, watching us. I’m holding Sara’s hand. The sun is hot. She’s looking up at me. She’s smiling. “The baby muskrat!” She says. She’s telling me about Wonder Pets.

I can hear her voice. It’s everything. Her face blurs, the house, the path, the heat, the voice, they fray, degrade into swirled flashes of colors.

Somebody will get to patch that. Probably not me.

Headshots and web-service are expensive, but Venice Station residuals check came in yesterday. $433.89. Bigger than expected. If I don’t pay rent I can swing it.

“You booked it, man!” Josh.

The call woke me from a sound sleep. “I did? That’s great!” I don’t know which part he’s talking about. I’ve sent in tapes for more than a dozen in the last few weeks. “Which one?”

“The recurring, man! Sunset Emergency!”

“Really?” I smile. Channeled Dr. Ahmet Pour for that one. I was Ahmet for three minutes while he sat on the toilet and thought about calling his wife. We didn’t. There was too much to talk about and not enough time. We both knew he wasn’t calling because he was afraid. “That’s awesome.” My superpower. Jayson. “Thanks, man.” I didn’t used to thank Josh. Didn’t used to thank anybody, I guess, but people need to hear it.

Off the phone. Jayson was right. Don’t even have to rehearse. Shit’s just there.

Jayson.  “Thanks, man.” I touch my heart, bring my fingers to my lips, and then raise them to the sky.

“You’re doing it on purpose.” Darby showed up at my door unannounced. We’re sitting on the couch. “You’ve got to stop.”

She’s intense. I want to meet her eyes, but I look at my coffee instead. “I’m not…”

“You want to see them again, I get it, but it’s not going to happen.” She sets her water bottle on the table. It lands firmly, with a clack against the glass that startles me. “We don’t patch ourselves.”

“Why not?” My voice betrays my panic.

“It just doesn’t happen, Danny.” She sounds sympathetic, sad, like I’m a child. “You have to stop.”

I shake my head. I’m not going to answer. She waits. I wait longer.

She gets up, lifts her bottle from the table. “I’m serious, Danny. You need to stop. You’re creating work for other people and it’s never going to get you what you want.”

I don’t look up.

“Daddy?” Sara just got her uniforms, ugly gray polos, blue polyester pants. She’s standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the setting sun behind her from the open patio doors. There’s jasmine in the air…

She stands to leave but pauses at the open door. “I’m serious, man. This is serious.”

Sara does a spin. “I’m modelling!” She spins again.

“Gorgeous, Little Winner!” It’s ugly, but she’s amazing. I’m smiling. Happy.

When I look up, Darby’s gone.

In line at Lassen’s, basket full of fruit and meat. People look at me as I shop. They recognize me. The girl staring from the cross-aisle by the coffee, the guy by the meat counter.

I hear my name. I smile, pretend not to have overheard. It’s been years. Decades. They know me. Sunset Emergency is big. My character’s arc is airing currently. There’ve been interviews — “Phoenix from the ashes” sort of things.

“Hey man.” Guy behind me. I turn around, smile.

“What’s up?”

He points to the front of the store. “Register’s open.”

Still awake. Still in bed. Sheets are too warm. Blanket’s too much. I feel damp.

Amina is standing beside the bed, pulling off her shirt to put on her nightgown. She’s telling me about something that happened at Sara’s daycare, something about what another parent said or did. I’m not really listening, watching her breasts, waiting for her to take off her pants.

“Mom?” The door bursts open. Sara’s there, all smiles until she sees Amina clutching her shirt to her chest. Her eyes go wide. “Were you having sex?”

Again.

Amina is standing beside the bed, pulling off her shirt…

The image is blurring. Amina’s skin, face, hair, muddling into blotches. Her voice slips, becoming simple unspoken words in my brain. She’s being erased. She’ll need a patch.

Jayson lied. It won’t ever be me.

Bestia. Josh’s choice. “We gotta celebrate!” He just bought a new condo in the old Parker Paints building. He’s high on the Arts District and wants to share it.

Bestia’s fine. Good food. The agency’s picking up the tab with the Marvel money I’m about to bring in. We’re sitting by the big windows in front, visible from the street for obvious reasons. People aren’t staring, but I still feel eyes while I eat flatbread and tapenade.

“Danny?”

She’s standing beside me, snuck up without me noticing. She was always quiet. She’s dressed well, but I recognize the loose long dress that cinches at the waist. She bought it when we were still together. It’s frayed at the hem, a little faded. The tailored black cardigan hides it. She’s lost weight. Her hair is swept back into a loose knot. There’s gray in it.

I don’t know what to say. I stare until the discomfort of silence overrides surprise, overrides the ache she brings. “Amina… hi.” I gesture across the table. “You remember Josh.”

“Hi Josh.” She smiles. It’s hollow. Her cheeks are hollow. She’s hollow. She’s a gutted version of herself, a taxidermy like me. To me: “How’ve you been?”

I shrug. I ache. I’m hollow, too. I’m sorry. You left me. She’s dead. I’m dead. “Okay, I guess. Career’s picking up again which is cool, but…” another shrug. “How are you?”

“I’m…” She shrugs. Her eyes turn hard, the look she had after Sara whenever she looked at me. I wilt. “I’m surviving.” She turns, looks back at someone or something. “I just saw you over here and didn’t want to leave without at least saying hi.”

I stand. “Hey, maybe we…”

She shakes her head, smiles again. Sad. Still hollow. “No, Danny. I don’t think I hate you anymore but this is all I can handle, okay?”

Maybe before I might’ve forced the issue. Not anymore. Too much of other people’s pain in me to prioritize my own anymore. Sitting down again, watching her walk up Traction with another woman. They look back, but I can’t tell if it’s at me or the restaurant. Josh is speaking, saying something. Enthusiastic.

She still thinks I let Sara die. I want to die.

Sara. She’s standing in vomit outside my bedroom door. I’m etching it into my mind. Every moment, every color, sound. Erasing.

“I threw up.” Her voice is soft. She’s holding her head. She’s so small. She’s sad. “My head really hurts.” Then: “I’m sorry I made a mess.” She’s clear, then she’s not. For moments I see her face as it was, but then it degrades, disappears. Needing a patch.

“No worries, Little Winner.” I step over the puddle. The smell is acrid, awful. Bile. Vomit usually makes me want to vomit, but hers doesn’t. It’s just a mess to clean. Weirdly undisgusting. “You want some Tylenol?” It’s the moment before the worst moment of my life. If they won’t give me this, they won’t give me anything.

“Yes, please.”

That vomit stayed for days.

“Just over there,” Cassidy gestures at the hill across Sunset. She’s twenty-four, been in LA for two years and now she’s Daimeon to my Ghost Rider. She’s pointing at her apartment. “I might move, though.” She shrugs, twirls her drink. “I want to stay in the neighborhood but my apartment is…” She makes a face. Some fans are pissed she’s a girl. Incels and losers.

We’re good together, on screen. She’s okay but together, chemistry. “It’s a good area.” I don’t know what else to say. It’s true. Echo Park is nice.

Daddy? I threw up. I take a breath.

“Are you liking Beachwood?” The show is coming together nicely.

“Only been there four months, but so far it’s fine…” On set, I get to be Johnny Blaze more than I have to be Danny Ruiz. It’s a relief, being someone else consistently. Not one-offs. Even Ronnie Suarez on Sunset Emergency wasn’t as all-encompassing.

But at the end of the day, I still go home.

Cassidy’s eyes move off me, up. Something behind me. “Hey Danny.”

Darby. She’s not alone, standing with a tall lanky Black guy who reads gay. I shift on my stool. “Hi.”

“I’m Darby,” Darby puts her hand out to Cassidy. “I’m a friend of Danny’s.” She points to her companion. “This is Alex. Alex, Danny and…” She cocks her head in Cassidy’s direction.

“Cassidy.” Cassidy tells her. “It’s nice to meet you!” She looks around as if trying to find a pair of stools to pull up to our counter at the window. “There’re no…”

Darby shakes her head. “No worries, we can’t stay. Can I steal Danny for a sec?”

Outside. Alex has stayed with Cassidy. I can see them talking. Laughing. “You brought muscle this time.”

“Alex is not muscle, Danny. Alex is just a friend like us.” She shifts herself, putting her body between me and the window where Alex and Cassidy sit. “You’ve got to stop, Danny. I told you it was serious. Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.”

“You’re telling me to stop remembering my daughter. You shouldn’t fuck with things you cannot understand.”

“I’m just the messenger. I’m trying to save your life. Erasures like yours, they endanger Time and they won’t have any compunctions about stopping you permanently if need be.” She leans in. “If you keep at it, you’ll end up on a death patch, just like Jayson.” She looks honestly concerned. “Please.” Then: “You’ve built a good life, Danny. Love what you have, look forward not back okay?”

I look past her at Cassidy. A good life. Daddy? Maybe. In some ways. It’s not enough. It will never be enough. I nod, let go the breath I didn’t know I’d held. “Yeah. Alright.”

It’s later. We’re still at the bar across from Cassidy’s. Lights are bright. Noises loud. My cheeks are warm. Cassidy is laughing.

“Can I ask you something?” She leans forward. “Something serious?”

“Sure.”

“It might be rude.” She shakes a finger at me. “I don’t like being rude, but I really want to know.”

“Ask. I won’t be offended, I promise.”

“Okaaayyy.” She sits up straight. “I was watching Master Class and a little of Venice Station…”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“We’re working together. I wanted to see.” She sighs. “Anyways, I was watching and… I work with you and you’re like… you’re amazing now but then you…”

“I wasn’t very good.” I chuckle. I wasn’t very good. Jayson’s words. “I know.”

“What happened? How did you get so good?”

“I just…” I shrug. “I learned some stuff, you know.”

“You took classes?” She squints at me. “Playhouse West or something? Studio 5? It’s just… I’m not very good.”

“Cassidy, you’re good.” It’s a little bit of a lie. She’s cute and she’s got charisma but she’s not good. I lift my beer to my lips to hide my shame. She could be good.

“Bullshit. I’m cute. I won’t be cute forever and I want to be good. I want to have staying power. How’d you do it?”

Staying power. I’ve got staying power now. I’m big again. I’ve got the nice place, the career. Daddy? I couldn’t care less. It’s your turn! Cassidy is watching me, waiting. I can give her what she wants. Patching made me a better actor. A better person, maybe. It didn’t give me what I wanted. Maybe it will for her. Maybe she’ll be happy. “You really want to know?” Daddy?

“Seriously, Danny!” She pushes my leg.

“It’s a big dark secret, Cass.” I raise my eyebrows, take a sip. “Life and death.” Park Place, Daddy!

“Tell me!” Eleven hundred dollars!

I sip my beer. It tastes good. The evening light is perfect. I’ll miss this. “I really shouldn’t, but okay…”

I have two of Sara’s uniform shirts left in my closet. I take one. It’s very small. I raise it to my face, but it only smells like soap. I bring it with me to the couch.

A hit from my vape. I wait in silence.

Fight Club Rules. “Anytime now.” I wait. Nothing.

Until.

He’s not coming. “Daddy!”

I’m not me. I’m her.

My head. The noise.

Oh god.

The door opens and he’s there. I can’t look up at him. At me. “I threw up.”  He doesn’t look mad. “My head really hurts.” I look around. The vomit. The mess. I feel bad. “I’m sorry I made a mess.”

“No worries, Little Winner.” He’s smiling. He looks tired. He’s got no shirt. His hair is messy. “You want some Tylenol?” He looks around. “I’ll get this cleaned up later.”

 He takes my hand. I can barely see it. Things are dark now, blurry. “Daddy?”

“What’s up, Winner?”

“My eyes are weird.” My head hurts. A lot lot lot.

He chuckles. It relaxes me. He’s not worried. “Let’s see. Headache? Barfing? Weird eyes?” He lifts me onto the couch and sits down next to me. He’s warm. He’s comfortable. Daddy. “Sounds like you’ve got a migraine, Winner.” He leans forward, looks me in the face. “I used to get them, too. They suck.”

I laugh. It hurts. It’s hard to see. I… more vomit. Dad sees it coming. Catches it with a popcorn bowl.

I’m soooo tired. My eyes.

My head…

It hurts… “Daddy?” It hurts so much. “Where’s mommy?”

“She’s in Houston, remember? Work. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

I want her to be here. I want to see her. My head hurts so much. “I’m scared.”

“Don’t be, Winner. It’s just a migraine.”

I can barely hear him. Through a tube, a long long way away. It’s so dark.

Am I dying?

It’s not a migraine, Little Winner. It’s an aneurysm. I’m so sorry.

It’s dark.

I love you so much.

A long time. Our hearts beat.

I’m so sorry.

Then slow. Beat again. Once.

We’re together. In silence.