

### [CORENTINE]

by James B Willard

[Corentine]

by James B Willard

Copyright 2011 James B Willard

Smashwords Edition
Chapter 0: Foreword

[Corentine]'s first incarnation (as the Origami Shadows website) was designed to illustrate an idea introduced in the narrative - that the mind can process seemingly unrelated, disorganized information into a general understanding of events that occurred in the story. The passages of the narrative were broken into small pieces, scattered across several hundred web pages, and presented in various formats - some were written with invisible text, some sections were hidden in image descriptors on pages, some sections of the stories were converted to binary or hexadecimal code, and so on. The site was designed as an expanding web of unmarked links; the page names were chosen to help reinforce or introduce ideas that the narrator was experiencing. I composed and published music (as Brokenkites) to accompany the reading of the material; track names matched up with page names in the site and were intended to expand the experience of the story by incorporating multiple types of media into the whole work. Some of those page ideas have been retained in the Supplemental Materials Section of the text.

Origami Shadows was a puzzle that the reader had to reassemble in order to see the complete picture, just as the characters in the work were attempting to recompile their own disparate ideas about what they remembered as the truth. I'd been fascinated with the idea that you could take a book, tear every page out of it, read the pages in any random order, and at the end, you'd still have a good understanding of what the book was about. While you may have a slightly different perception of the story than someone who read the work in its original format, I love the idea that your own perception and the blanks that your unique imagination fills in for you are what makes the story complete. Isn't every story unique from reader to reader based on how the individual imagines it to be and how their own perspective colors the work, filling out the details with the things that they've imagined as they play out the narrative in their mind?

However, the presentation of the story as a design concept precluded it from appealing to readers who were interested in the story but didn't want to be forced into both discovering and then reassembling the fragments of the narrative via web browser.

[Corentine] is the original story presented in a more congruous format while still retaining the elements introduced in its incarnation as a website. I hope that you, the reader, enjoy it. If you do, please tell a friend about it. Thanks for supporting independent writers, artists, and musicians.

\- j
What truths, darkly, driving like nails

into the box, with

signed fate, sealed and delivered;

Ah, what truths shall come, and pass!

Fortune, weary at her wheel, weaving wonders unseen

for times that fade on other planes,

whilst endlessly we toil,

scraping meaning from salted soil.

Unearthed! At last!

Old treasures sought, which rise again, to live. And

with each incarnation, her hands torn to the bone,

she must carry on,

so that the thread

may reach the loom.

### [CORENTINE]

by James B Willard

Beware the Night. Beware the light.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author.

Origami Shadows © 2006 by James B Willard

Corentine © 2011 by James B Willard

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law.

Recommended listening to accompany the reading of the material in this book is available by searching for BROKENKITES in your favorite digital music store.

Please visit http://hollowscene.com for more information.

### Once Upon A Time...

Open the Door. Step into the Light.

Though they'll try to mimic what we are, in the core of our souls, writing our very memories for us, they will never be able to replace the truth and the reality as it existed before they've tampered with it. They cannot write our histories for us, our very thoughts, feelings, emotions, and actions. There will be no questions. We'll always know the difference between the real and the imagined.

Attributed to a skeptic (In reaction to the initial press release issued by Synchro Systems about their Synchronicity Drive treatment tests)

Wir stehen immer gerade davor, der Rand zu fallen, ich denke, ihren Balanceakt beobachtend.

Sie hat Angst nicht, aber ich bin für uns beide erschrocken genug
...Origami
Chapter 01

You get all kinds of ideas in your head when you don't know what's going to happen next. You think you can save the day, right the wrongs, punish the evildoers, and you think that, if you're lucky, you'll be able to get the girl in the end.

When the elevator stopped, I stepped into a sterile room very similar to the one I'd left just a moment or two before. A reception desk was across from the elevator, and at it, a sharp looking woman dressed in black clothing sat. She was staring at me as soon as the doors opened, and she didn't break her gaze while I stepped out of the elevator, quickly sized the room up, made note of the pair of glass doors behind her that appeared to lead to two separate hallways, and returned my attention to her.

"Um," I started, unsure of what to say to her. "Hi."

Her neutral expression didn't change, but she adjusted her glasses slightly and briefly looked at something behind the facade of the desk. I assumed that there was a monitor of some sort embedded in the panel. I didn't have time to ponder what information she might be receiving, because she spoke.

"Welcome back, sir. We've been expecting you."

That really threw me off.

"You're kidding, right?" I asked. "You say that to everybody when you catch them breaking into your research complex don't you?"

She raised an eyebrow. I noticed her eye color, then: blue. It was a good color for her.

She avoided answering the question, though, probably because it was a stupid one. She typed something into a keypad on the desk and then returned her full attention to me, clearing her throat.

"We know who you're looking for. We have the answers that you're seeking."

Of course, you probably have some questions of your own that need answering.

It's hard to pinpoint when something like this really begins. When did my fate commence? Was it two weeks ago, or six months ago? A year ago, even? Did it all begin long before that, when I first met my wife (an unhappy woman that I've now divorced)? Did the avalanche of events begin when I was in high school as I scribed love letters and dubbed comp tapes for pretty girls in an effort to win their fickle affections, or even earlier, when I experienced my first kiss with the much older and more experienced babysitter behind the bleachers after a little league baseball game? I don't think I was more than ten years old, then. Does it go back to the day I was born, when my mother, eight months pregnant, ran a stop sign, which resulted in a car crash, which then led to an emergency procedure where the doctors had to induce labor so that they could save us both?

A person could get lost in trying to trace it all back, really. A person could wrap themselves up in a cocoon of remembering, analyzing every little detail, examining the minutiae of their life, digesting it, hoping to emerge on some bright spring day, triumphant and transformed, but still, I think they'd fail. It's all too big, it's expanded too far, and it's kind of like our flawed, human concept of the universe. We just don't have the psychological makeup to grasp the infinite number of possibilities that have expanded out of every little decision that each and every one of us has made throughout our lives, ever since the beginning of time.

So let's go back to about two weeks ago. A starting point as good as any other.

The phone had been ringing for a couple of minutes when I finally gave up on ignoring it, threw a couple of the towels into the bathtub, and made my way to the kitchen so that I could answer it.

"Hello?"

"Hey, you." It was Janine.

"Hi, JJ. What's up?"

"Nothing much. One of you guys called?" It sounded like she was eating a salad. Crunching noises made their way through the phone line, and I remember thinking that it was too early in the morning for a salad.

"I didn't, and Cor's not here. I thought she might be with you. Maybe she called you earlier this morning, before I woke up," I suggested.

"Guess so. You all right?" she asked.

"Ah, just a little plumbing problem here at the house, not a big deal. The floor's flooded in the bathroom. Downstairs neighbors are probably getting a free shower right about now. Why? Do I sound angry?"

"I can feel the waves of your irritation all the way over here," she answered. Janine had the unnerving ability to tune into the moods of whomever she was talking with. Sometimes, she was a surprisingly perceptive kid.

"Didn't she leave a message for you?" I asked.

"Nope." More crunching noises. "Just a missed call."

Corentine, the third party in question, was my girlfriend, who'd vanished that morning, though I didn't realize it at the time.

I used to kid Cor and Janine that they were like magnets for each other, opposite ends pulling themselves towards a common center point. That point ended up being in New York City, just after we were returning from our travels abroad, when we'd met Janine and quickly become friends.

"It's not like her to leave like this," I said. "Especially without waking me up, or at least leaving a note for me." My girlfriend was in the habit of leaving notes for me whenever she'd leave the house, because I was in the habit of worrying about her whenever she'd go out. She left notes for herself, sometimes, too, just to make sure that she remembered things that were important. As a result, we had quite a collection of sticky notes scattered throughout the apartment that we lived in.

"Well, hope for the best and plan for the worst! I hate to say things like that because they're overly cliché, but what can you do? You might have to make your own sandwich for lunch today, you know," she cracked. "I'm sure that she'll call or be home soon, though. I'll let you get back to your plumbing problem now." This was a joke that Janine liked to make at my expense, implying that I wouldn't be able to survive for long without someone present to take care of me. Janine's feminist leanings were a little extreme, at times, and she'd voiced her scornful opinion about Coren's daily sandwich making on several occasions.

Janine hung up without waiting for a response. Sometimes I had to remind myself that phone etiquette had died a long time ago, and even though she was mature for her age, there was still someone just past being a teenager trying to grow up and be a full-fledged adult in there. She sometimes forgot that growing up meant that you probably should say goodbye to end a phone conversation, or at least wait for a response from the other party on your last, somewhat strange and insulting, statement. I wanted to tell her, frequently, to stop rushing it, but I knew that she would figure it out just like I had, and probably like I had, once it was already too late.

Corentine and I filled the roles of big brother and big sister to her, I guess. That was cool. We really enjoyed Janine's company, and they'd get into (and out of) plenty of trouble together while I would wander around the city trying halfheartedly to shop out both of my novels and the one five song demo I recorded a few years back when I was going through my delusions of being a rock star phase. I knew that it didn't really matter if I signed up with a label or found a publisher. The settlement checks from the divorce were the one good thing that came out of my past and in periods when I worked, I even managed to save a significant amount of money up in various bond accounts and investment packages, but it helped to have the goal. On the subject of the investments, I got lucky a couple of times with some pretty big stock trades, pulled some things out of the market a few times before it tanked, bought low and sold high, and even made one or two pretty lucrative sports bets. The interest I was earning was enough to survive on, most months, once the initial lump settlement arrived. I worked because I was bored, or because I was hiding from the memories of the times before I'd moved to the city, or because I liked to punish myself with pointless low paying and degrading jobs with glass ceilings that no one working them seemed to be aware of but me. I learned to hate cubicles before that, even, but that was a long time ago when I was living somewhere else, when I was a very different person, a world away and a foreign life that was merely a precursor to my current state.

I walked back to the bathroom, determined to clean up the mess before it did any more damage to the house. I threw every towel, washcloth, and napkin I could gather into the pool in the middle of the floor. What I really needed was a shop vac. I wondered if any of my neighbors had one that they'd be willing to let me borrow for a couple of hours.

While I cleaned and some time passed, I started thinking about the different reasons Cor might have left and where she might have gone. It wasn't like her to leave without saying goodbye, and as I said to Janine, I expected some sort of note on the refrigerator or the bathroom mirror or something. I wondered if I had missed the note because I'd been distracted by the overflowing sink. I headed back into the kitchen to check.

Nothing out of the ordinary there. As I'd thought, she hadn't left a note. I even got down and looked beneath the refrigerator, in case it had fallen onto the floor and somehow gotten wedged beneath it.

"This is silly," I said to myself, standing up.

I picked up the phone and called Janine back.

It rang three times before she answered.

"Something told me that it would be you again," she said, her voice clearer than the last time that we talked. She must have finished eating that salad.

"Yeah, um," I hesitated, then committed. "Why do think she'd leave like that? It's bothering me – a lot more than it probably should, but something doesn't feel right. It's not like her at all to wander off somewhere like this, without waking me first, without calling at some point."

"It could be anything, really. Could be PMS, even. Maybe she doesn't want to be found!" She was kidding again, I knew, but something about the whole situation had me feeling uneasy, so that made it worse.

"I hope that's not the case. I was thinking how it's possible that she went back home or something. Maybe it happened too fast for her to say anything, to say goodbye. Maybe she remembered her past and she forgot her present. What's that called? A fugue state?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. Don't be a pessimist. She's probably out picking up some groceries or something. Have you tried walking down to the docks? You know how she loves to feed the gulls down there."

"I have a bad feeling, Janine."

"Stop being insecure. She loves you. You don't leave people without saying a word when you truly love them unless you plan on coming back."

"The docks sound good. Do you want to come with me?" I asked, hoping her uncanny abilities to run into people that she knew everywhere she went would come in handy.

"What about your plumbing problems?" she asked.

I shrugged.

"Unless you've got a shop vac at your place you can bring by, the towels are doing a pretty good job of soaking up the pond," I answered. "Maybe I can catch a couple of fish and keep them in the bathtub." I tried to be lighthearted, too.

"Sorry, no shop vac. A trip to the docks does sound like a nice diversion, though. I'm taking it easy today, anyway. I got a fat paycheck from a distrusting housewife when I gave her some incriminating photos this morning. Serves the guy right, though, pompous pig that he is," she told me, running a whole range of tones from happiness to disgust in a few short sentences.

I made a mental note not to get on Janine's bad side, or even on one of her friend's bad sides. She worked freelance as a private investigator, usually spying on people suspected of having affairs. Jealousy generated impressive paychecks.

"It's good to see that you're using your job skills for what's right and good, Janine," I said. "Give me 30 minutes to work on this a bit more, and I'll meet you at the corner."

"Sarcasm noted and ignored," she replied. "Don't forget to grab something to feed the gulls with."

"Okay, see you in a bit."

"Bye!" she exclaimed, sounding excited, and to my surprise, ending the conversation appropriately. As if she knew what I was thinking between our calls! My uneasy feeling faded a little.
"Do you ever wonder what happens to us when we die?"

Rolling over to face her in the dim light of early morning, I asked her what brought the subject up.

"I don't know. I was just wondering it. I was almost asleep when the thought came to me again: what happens when I die? That's what I was thinking about all day yesterday."

"That's a pretty heavy thing to be thinking about at four in the morning, don't you think? Is that what all strange girls do instead of counting sheep?" She knew that I was joking with her.

"Well, that. Moreover, we do complex physics equations when we're really stressed out in order to get our nerves settled. Who needs beer when you've got Schrödinger's cat playing cards in your head with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare?"

"Great, an opium induced tea party's just what you need. Go back to sleep!" I insisted, making one last valiant effort at avoiding a conversation pertaining to the afterlife, because I knew that a conversation like that would inevitably lead to a conversation about god, and that meant that further hopes for sleep were to be abandoned.

"I want to know!" she demanded, kicking her feet beneath the covers. I knew that she wouldn't drop the subject until I answered or at least played along with her for a while, so begrudgingly, I responded.

"I think that when you die then that's the end. That there's nothing left, and that whenever you feel like there might be something else out there, you're just tricking yourself into accepting that there is an end to everything, and no one wants to accept that the end really is final."

"Why do you think that so many people believe in god, then?" She asked, and I rolled my eyes. It was probably a good thing that the room was dark and she couldn't see me doing it.

"People need to believe in something, don't they? They have to find ways to look forward to the future, for whatever reason. They can't survive without having the hope that something better is going to come. It's one of the great mysteries that we think that way, isn't it?" I asked, shrugging my shoulders in the darkness. "What about you? What do you think happens when you die, since you brought it up?"

"Glad you asked," she said. I could feel her nodding her head, as if she were a genie granting a wish. "I think that there has to be something else out there after we die, that we have to go on somehow. I don't know if we retain our consciousness or identity, really, but I do think that part of us will go on. We all become ghosts, somehow, to someone."

"Like memories? Like people who will remember us? That's not the same," I countered, feeling drawn into the argument and a bit cheated by her answer.

"What of me will you remember when I'm gone from this place?" she asked.
Chapter 02

I wasn't as close to Janine as Coren was, so I felt the need to talk about anything and everything whenever a strange silent moment occurred between us. I wasn't used to hanging out with her on a one-to-one basis, and the distance between our ages only reminded me that I was getting older and more out of touch with what was going on in pop culture. Not that I really missed pop culture. However, I did hate feeling old.

We stopped at a posh little cafe on one of the streets near the docks. It was one of those kinds of places that tried to capture the feeling of a European bistro, but failed miserably because it was so obviously an effort on the part of the designers and employees to become some kind of hot go-to spot for the social elite who were 'in the know'. Nobody admired or fell for it except for the people admiring and falling for it, creating a little social circle of nobodies who all wanted to be somewhere else. Well, we were there, too, but we both liked coffee, and of course, as critics of the effort, precluded from the clique.

It was like a funeral, I thought, and everyone had arrived in his or her blackest blacks, whispering amongst themselves in hushed tones over muted, generic jazz. Strangely, they played language lesson tapes on a loop in the bathrooms, but I was never sure just how many people spent enough time in the bathrooms to learn anything.

Aimez-vous prendre un sandwich délicieux?

"Maybe they have good sandwiches," Janine said, tossing a sugar cube into her mouth. Sandwiches were a hot subject for Janine that day.

"I don't think you're supposed to eat those," I remarked, indicating the small dish of sugar cubes on the table she'd been picking at.

"Sandwiches? Haven't killed me yet," she said, looking around for a menu.

"Not what I meant," I said, lighting a cigarette.

"Anyway, I can't shake the feeling that this has something to do with her amnesia," I continued.

"I never thought about that. Was it something that came up often?" she asked, leaning back in her chair. She put her arms behind her head and squinted her left eye, looking up at the ceiling for some reason. We didn't talk about the problem with Janine very often. It was something that we kept to ourselves, not wanting to make things weird with our friends, who might not understand. Janine knew more than most about it, and I don't know how much of it was discussed when I wasn't around.

"Often enough. It was something she was even seeking treatment for," I said. "So maybe she had a breakthrough. Or maybe she had a relapse and forgot everything again, including us."

"I don't know about that," Janine said. "People don't just 'relapse', for no reason, into some weird memory state where they forget everything."

"Exactly. I don't think it's possible, either. And I've done some thinking on the subject."

"Hmm. Well, let's consider the fact that she obviously has some sort of past, somewhere. People aren't just blank slates that can be programmed to talk, walk, and interact with other people once they're adults. So she's definitely got a place to go back to if she's had a sudden breakthrough and remember everything, but I still don't think that she'd forget all of her 'new' memories if that happened."

"Hey, where'd you come up with that idea?" I asked her, leaning forward. "The blank slates thing, I mean. Because Cor and I talked about it once. Did she say something to you?"

"Um, no. I don't remember her mentioning it, anyway," she answered a little defensively. "I was just thinking that our memories are what make us who we are, you know? I was thinking that it's probably pretty rough when you don't know who you are, at least not for more than about six months at a time or whatever. That's when you met, right, about six months ago?"

"Something like that," I replied.

"About that."

"About what?"

"How you met. That's the part I don't really understand."

"What's not to understand?" I asked her, taking a sip of my coffee.

"You don't think that it's pretty weird that she just showed up in your house one day? With no memories of how she got there? In the bathtub of all places?"

I laughed.

"Of course I think that's weird. She said herself that she decided to take a bath, so that it would help her think."

"And that's not weird? If I woke up in a stranger's house without a clue as to how I got there or what my past was, I doubt that I'd decide to take a bath straight off," Janine rationalized. "What about the rest of it?"

"What about it? We started talking about things. We really hit it off. We spent some time together, I offered her my couch, and she never used it. Aren't you too young to be talking about this kind of thing?" I joked, feeling a little bit uncomfortable when confronted with the thought that Janine might think we'd rushed into things. People hook up with strangers all the time, don't they? At the time, once the initial strangeness of how Cor had arrived in the first place had worn off, I didn't mind her being there at all, and felt that we'd had a real connection from the start. Maybe I was just ready for it, but that's all it ever is, right?

"I'm 19. I'm not stupid."

"Anyway, things were awesome. As you know, we did some traveling together."

"Yeah, you talk about it all the time. She does, too." This with an eye roll.

"Those were great times," I said, reflecting. My mind started to wander. Janine interrupted my thoughts, though.

"Yeah, but what about now? You guys are awfully preoccupied with your travels. And you still haven't answered my question."

"Yes I did!" I insisted.

"Not really." Another sugar cube into her mouth, along with a bored look of resignation.

"What's with you?" I asked. "You're giving me the nth degree here. What about you? Got a boyfriend these days?" I checked my watch, changing the subject.

She made a strange face at me and resumed fidgeting with the sugar cubes.

"What, are you interested in the position?" She asked with a serious expression on her face.

I laughed.

"I'm gonna tell her that you asked," she warned, misinterpreting my query.

"Go ahead. She's probably curious about you, too." I went with it.

"Well, I don't," she stated. "I've been running around with this guy, David, but it's definitely not serious."

"Why not?"

"Life's not all about having boyfriends and girlfriends or being involved. At least," she paused, probably worried that she'd step on my toes about the fact that I was actually very involved in a relationship and very much in love. "At least not for me. Besides, I can't see the point of being in love."

"Does there have to be a point?" I asked her.

"Seems like there should be. It can't just be a series of good times leading to a series of horrible times. I mean, why bother? Everything ends badly."

"That's almost always true," I agreed. "But when you're in love, you realize that there are exceptions to every rule."

"Until it ends," she pointed out. "Badly."

"Anyways, little Nina, I was just wondering, no big deal. How about that sandwich?"

"I'll flag down a waiter," she said, waving her arm in the air.

I ignored the fact that she was being rude to the wait staff and considered her perspective. It was one that I understood quite well, but I was surprised that someone who wasn't even old enough to legally order beer would be so jaded. I wondered if something had burned her experience or if she was just exceptionally analytical of the whole process. Either way, it made me appreciate her more.

We ordered lunch and another round of coffees, and I asked Janine if she had any family in the city. I was making small talk again, avoiding the perpetual hum of dread in the back of my mind.

"No, not really. I'm not really close to anyone," she explained. "My parents, they're both dead. Well, my adopted parents. My real parents are strangers that I've never met. A couple of kids from school and I kind of formed a little group that looked out for each other for a while. We got emancipated, you know, so we could drop out, get jobs, that kind of thing."

I nodded. I'd heard of emancipation before and knew that Janine had left high school early to make a go at life on her own.

"I was running away from the foster home that I ended up in after Mom died. That was four years ago; I was only 15, but it was already getting hard to hide the fact that I was a lot more advanced intellectually than most of my peers." This, she stated without conceit, was just a matter of fact. "I've been kind of wandering around for the last year or two, though. Last year, I felt the urge to come up to the Big City. I was only a state away, running odd jobs, so I figured there'd be no shortage of lucrative opportunities doing even more odd jobs once I got here. I also was banking that no one would know me and that no one would care. This city is a crazy place where crazy things happen every day. Something as harmless and uninteresting as some random kid's past just gets washed away in the torrent of bad news and human interest tidbits and credit card bills, you know?"

I looked away from her, focusing on the floor. Believe me, kid, I know, I thought.

"Maybe it's fate that you became friends with us," I said, hoping to lighten the mood with what I considered a joke.

"Maybe it is," she said, not joking around at all. "Maybe I can help you find Cor today, and you guys can help me find whatever it is that I'm looking for tomorrow, or whatever it is that I've been missing for so long that I don't even know what it is... or where to begin looking for it."

Inside, we're all searching for something or someone. We're all looking for a connection; everyone's seeking a satisfying answer.

"Maybe it's going to be one of those days," she added, signaling her desire to end of the conversation right as the food arrived.

Maybe it would be.
"Or they would have burned you at the stake for witchcraft and heresy," I interrupted.

"They could have tried that, but you know where I'm going with this. Going far enough back in time, I can create a burning bush or generate a booming voice from the heavens; any number of so-called miracles would be possible. What ancient man would interpret as divine visitation is a mere gimmick, no more than a cheap parlor trick, to us."

"Great, so what you're really implying is that Jesus was a time traveler, and all of the rest of the Major Prophets throughout man's history were in on the scam, too."

"Anything's possible, but I doubt it. Maybe, though. Previous generations of man have used the name of god in association with concepts that extended beyond their scope of their current levels of knowledge, beyond their comprehension of theoretical application at the time. Look at any history book. You can plot out humanity's increasing distance from the traditional definition of god as sciences and technology has grown at exponential rates. And time travel, while the subject of much speculation, is still a long way off. Maybe god's really just whatever remains that is unknown. In my head, then, that means that god can exist inside of the mystery of whatever it is that happens to us when we die."

"As always, you make a good point supporting your case," I said to her, knowing that she would leave the conversation as the victorious party; she would not be convinced of any other ideas presented to her to the contrary of her statements and beliefs... at least not until an equally powerful concept introduced itself into her flow of logic. I didn't plan on changing anything about what she was saying, and didn't really even feel capable of compelling such a change in paradigm. It was entertaining and enjoyable to have someone to talk to things like that about without the risk of bruised egos and crumpled feelings.

"But I just can't buy into it," I added.

"You really can lie there and tell me that you think that everything you endure throughout your life, all of the good things and all of the bad things, come to a pointless ending? Or that there is an end point... your last breath, for example, and after that occurs, it's a big blank space filled with nothingness? That there's not one single thing that happens on the other side, nothing beyond us, beyond the here and now?" She questioned.

"Sure I can," I started, "if all you're saying is that there's an opposite for everything. If life's positive, then death's got to be negative. It's just words and labels. Look, all I'm really pointing out is this: if the grass isn't green, it's another color... because it has to be. We have to create a name for everything; we need to label each and every concept we've ever imagined. It must be called something - and the concept of an afterlife is just the same thing on a more complicated level. That's no grand design at work, no providence; death's just the way it is. Just because you die, it doesn't mean that something else happens to take the place of your life... outside of the fact that you return to the earth and all of your atoms are incorporated, eventually, into other life. I think it's the human condition to seek and find providence wherever there is a mystery, because we all want answers to everything that we wonder about; we want a happy ending and solution that seems appropriate and rewarding after we toil through this life, only to reach the end of it, toppling over the edge into nothingness."

"Pretty morbid of you."

"Pretty realistic, I'd say."

"Toppling over the edge into nothingness? It sounds morbid; gothic, even, at least to me," she laughed a little, pulling at a strand of her hair. "I think that you're misunderstanding my idea that there's something out there, that our basic energy goes on after the life that we're living now ceases. You're looking at what I'm saying from a biased and defiant standpoint. You're seeing it as a case for a definable god, when I'm just expressing that god can be anything bigger than we are, anything that can happen to us that is beyond our comprehension, even if that means that god is just the label that we place on events that continue to occur at a point after our deaths. All life that continues after our deaths is certainly something more powerful than we are."

"Of course!" I responded. "There are tons of things that are beyond us, beyond the here and the now, but do they really matter? This here and this now is all we really live in, isn't it? Once we're dead, the game is over, and there's no more 'us' to see what happens, no more 'us' for anything to matter to."

"But don't you see? I'm proof, you're proof, in the flesh, that there are things that extend beyond the here and now, and I know that the love that I feel for you, with everything inside of me, is not something that can be physically measured... it's both of those, if nothing else, that prove that there is always something more than what we are that exists outside of and beyond where we currently are." She put her arms around me, moved up closer to my face, and kissed me on my neck.

"The future loves you, you know. It's all of the here and now moments that end up creating us and what we've got when we get there."

"Even after I'm dead," I answered. What should I have said to her?

"Even after you're dead, and I'm dead, I know we'll go on, somehow." She kissed me again. And again.

I was silent for a moment. I could tell that she was thinking about the past that she'd lost, trying to remember things that were just beyond the grasp of her recollection, like figures in a fog, always elusive to her.

I said those words that came so easy when I was talking to her, but were rarely heard anywhere else in my life.

"I love you."

She sighed and smiled.

"You'll have to clear up the whole 'life after death' part for me, because I'm not sure where you're taking it. I didn't realize you were such a big fan of zombies," I added, attempting to lighten the mood a bit.

"Just promise me that you won't forget," she said.

"I never will," I promised.
Chapter 03

You might surprise yourself at the things that start to take form in your mind, at the scenarios you create when you let your doubt take over.

I slept a little on the first night, at least.

Scattered thoughts bounced around inside of my head as I restlessly tossed and turned in the bed; every little noise brought me back to alertness. I'd open my eyes, check the door hopefully, sigh with disappointment, check the clock, and repeat the steps.

The second morning came and went, and still she didn't return. I turned the house upside-down. I found letters that I'd forgotten years ago – just why had I saved some many old things? I couldn't remember half of the people that had sent them. I couldn't recall the last time that I'd spoken to those people, and I didn't care. I found copies of receipts for items that I didn't even own any more. I started throwing things into the trash, just to get them out of the way.

The second night, I searched through all of the trash for something that might point me in the right direction, just in case I'd missed it and thrown it out earlier. And I didn't sleep.

I called Janine.

She didn't answer.

I called her again.

"Corentine's not coming home," I said into Janine's machine as it dutifully recorded my message after the tone.

I smoked packs and packs of cigarettes, extinguishing them in the sink, in empty bottles, in glasses, in the toilet. I had more than a few drinks.

I stared into the mirror. I pulled at the circles beneath my eyes. I stood in the shower, as hot as it would run, and once the hot water ran out, I stayed in the shower. Hours passed. More time went by. I needed to shave, but I couldn't find a razor. In my frustration, I punched things. Walls. Doors. The mirror. It hurt.

I cried. It hurt.

I didn't know where to turn. I had no idea what I was even looking for, what to do, or why it was happening. The one thought kept echoing in my mind: She'd left me. I'd done something wrong. I'd offended her. She'd remembered her past and hated her present, and so she'd fled.

Then it hit me. She'd mentioned a doctor once, one that was supposed to be helping her out with her memory problems. Why hadn't I thought of that before? What was his name?

I grabbed a phone book and began searching. No names came to mind. Nothing seemed to ring any bells. No luck.

I decided, with a little bit of guilt, to sift through a bundle of documents that she kept in a desk drawer –

...But there weren't any. They were gone.

I started up her laptop, loading her address book. It was completely empty. I opened her email client: no accounts. No images, no documents, no files of any sort – nothing that would lead me to her.

I called Janine again.

"Janine, you aren't going to believe this," I said into the machine. "All of her personal info's been erased off of her laptop. I can't find the name of a single person she's made acquaintance with since she showed up here, anywhere in the apartment. Her papers are missing. It's as if someone came into the house and cleared her out of it. It's got to be something worse than what we thought it was. Call me back," I paused, looking around the apartment. I'd turned the place inside out. Everything was in disarray. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep until I figured out what had happened. Or who was behind her disappearance. Her abduction.

"Things are getting really weird for me over here," I finished, hanging up.
"I'm not worried about it all," she said. "I am who I am, the product of all of the choices and decisions that I've made, even if they aren't things that I can instantly recall. I think that when there's a blank spot in your mind where your past should be, your perspective changes. You are willing to make sacrifices like that, taking all the bad with the good, all the negative things that you'll probably hate about yourself, just to be able to have a story, a complete picture of yourself in your head. It's something that you never really focus on, your own self-image, this culmination of all of the events in your life, things you've said, things you've done. People you've known, influences, and so on. It's just always there. And with me, it's like have this personality and these likes and dislikes, but no past to reconcile them with, no history to connect myself to. I'm drifting, lost, and searching for the origin point. So no, I'm not worried about it; I welcome it. I want to remember it all."

"I see," I said to her, and I did understand. It just seemed like there were so many things that I could easily throw away in my own past, just trade them in for a big black empty space, so I wasn't really looking at any of it from her side of the fence. It seemed like amnesia would be a welcome and beneficial affliction when I was depressed about how everything had turned out in my life. A less than perfect childhood colored by a disinterested father and an absentee mother. A terribly wasted youth spent couch surfing, culminating in a doomed marriage with an emotionless, cold, and calculating addict. The loss of a child. But I pushed all of that to the side, psychologically, because no good was coming from dwelling on things that had come before while I was sitting in a swing in the park with her, watching her as she somehow defied all of my expectations, both for maintaining her balance despite gravity's pull, and for matters of the heart.
I checked the papers and was reminded of a company that she'd visited when looking for treatments for her memory loss. Synchro Systems had pioneered new therapy methods for memory regression and restoration, and had recently begun field trials on human volunteers for various methods of treating people who'd been injured in car accidents and as a result suffered from memory disorders. There had been an open call for new volunteers, so Cor had signed up for the first day they'd had available, making an appointment for a consultation to see if Synchro could help her.

There had been a series of deaths in one of the first trial runs, and a number of affected families had joined in a lawsuit against Synchro Systems for their loss. They'd made enough noise that the papers had latched on to the story and started covering it, and it wasn't long before the government got involved and started investigating the inner workings of the company, too. Something about ethics violations and the use of technologies and treatments that were not approved for use in humans.

Because of the publicity, finding the number for the Synchro Systems main office was pretty easy. Speaking to a real person, however, was a much more difficult task.

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With the federal investigation mandating that their research halt and all of the recent media attention, the company appeared to have shut down completely. I knew that massive layoffs of employees had recently occurred when the company shareholders bailed out and caused the recently publicly offered stock to tank, so I didn't rule out the possibility that one or more of the individuals that had lost a job or would be losing their job soon might be motivated to give me some information about what had happened inside of the company when she'd gone in for treatment. Maybe they'd be able to lead me in the right direction, if I could just get one of them on the line. Revenge was a motive that I assumed would work towards my cause in finding anyone who would assist me in the search; although I didn't really have anything financially to gain from what I discovered about Synchro, it was still conceivable that people might be attempting to strike a blow back to their former employers in any way possible. I was okay with being used like that, if that's what it took. There was always the chance that someone who actually cared about what was happening would be able to help me, too, but my cynicism told me otherwise.

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Automated phone systems were waiting for me on every number that I dialed. On most of the systems, I ended up looping back to a previous menu and hanging up after exhausting all of the possible choices and options. In the main office directory, I randomly started dialing extension numbers, hoping to ring through to a telephone with a real person on the other end. I remembered a movie that I'd watched once about that last man on earth, and in one scene, when he's losing his mind from loneliness; he's calling all these numbers, trying to find anyone that might be left, just hoping to connect with someone, to find another person to talk to. I wondered how he would cope with a situation like the one I was in, and how I'd cope with his, were our positions reversed.

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I stopped paying attention to what numbers I was dialing, falling into a repeating pattern of random button pressing, waiting, hearing the same response from a machine, and attempting again.

Then, to my surprise, a call finally went through. The phone clicked, connecting.

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"Department 809," a man answered. "Verification number, please."

I didn't know any verification numbers, of course, or even where to begin guessing at what they might be. The irony of the situation crossed my mind for a moment when I realized that I was once again to a point of having to randomly guess a sequence of numbers in order to achieve anything productive.

I hesitated.

"Verification number," the man repeated.

"Listen," I said. He didn't hang up, but he didn't respond, either. I assumed that he was listening.

"I'm trying to find someone who works for Synchro Systems – specifically someone who can tell me about some initial patient testing that might have gone wrong and the patients that might have been involved with such testing," I continued. He was still on the line, as far as I could tell.

"I know, I know, it sounds like every other call you've received for weeks, but I think something bad has happened to my girlfriend and I'm trying to find out if it could be the result of something that happened to her when she was possibly a volunteer patient during testing of a product or treatment called the Synchronicity Drive." I looked at the newspaper in my hand, saying the name that I'd highlighted in an investigative article released a few weeks before.

"The main telephone line for news queries is clearly posted in multiple locations online," the man responded. "You have the wrong extension."

"Wait!" I exclaimed. Once again, he didn't hang up.

"I'm not a reporter. I'm not really much of anything, just a guy trying to figure things out. I don't know what the Synchronicity Drive is, and I'm not trying to get new information in order to break into a journalism career or anything like that. I don't care what it is, even, I'm just trying to find Corentine," I offered, as a way of explanation.

"Wrong extension," the man repeated. Had I really ended up talking to another machine?

"Why didn't you disconnect the call?" I asked him, frustrated. "When you realized that I had the wrong extension? Please, if you have anything, a number, an address: something that can help me gather just a little more information about this company – besides the stuff that the media's circulating – I could really use your help."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, and then he did disconnect the call. The static pop of the line dropping was a terrible sound.

What was Department 809? I tried dialing the number again, wondering, trying multiple variations of 809 as an extension, but to no avail. It quickly became so frustrating that I started to lose focus, so I put down the phone and the papers and sat down on my bed, staring at the wall, trying to collect my thoughts.
"So, you don't remember much of anything?" I asked her one night, staring at the ceiling fan as it turned overhead. She pulled herself closer to me, putting her head into my armpit, smelling my skin.

"You smell good," she said.

"Good thing I took a shower today. I try to stay on top of that, you know," I responded, patting her on the butt. She moved even closer, throwing her leg over me, sighed, and closed her eyes.

I reached over and ran my fingers through her hair while she traced out some sort of messages on my chest: letters to the future or equations or doodles or love notes; I don't know. I never asked. We were quiet, dozing for a little while, relaxed and contented.

Chapter 04

My dream began just as my week had, except in my dream, I woke up in someone else's house. The flooding bathroom was in the same place as it was in my apartment, and she was standing in front of the mirror, calling to me.

"Wake up," she said, her voice almost musical, as if her singing could bring me awake. I climbed out of bed and tripped over some metal pieces, falling to the floor. I gave the metal pieces a more thorough look and realized that they were the remains of what looked like picture frames. The pieces were scattered all over the floor of the bedroom. I got back to my feet and carefully made my way into the bathroom, but she was no longer there.

"Hello?" I asked, peeking behind the shower curtain, expecting to see her there, washing her hair, or maybe just hiding like a little kid would, trying to frighten me. But she wasn't in the shower, either.

She was, strangely enough, on the other side of the mirror.

"I miss you," said she, holding her hand up to the glass.

I could see condensation forming around her hand on the surface of the mirror, which I was translating more into a type of window than anything else, since there was a wall behind me, towel hanging up, and there was a vast hallway behind her, leading off into the distance. I assumed that it was cold on her side of the mirror since there was condensation forming, but then I realized that the fog was on my own breath and that there was a frost pattern on my side of the mirror.

"I miss you," she repeated, holding her other hand up to the glass.

I started to speak, but the words would not come.

The phone was ringing. Was I asleep, so soon? What was the dream, fading around the edges at first, into nothingness? The bed was warm and the sheets were soft. It was dark outside; it must have been late. For a moment, I thought that she was beside me again. I thought that I could feel her hair spilling off of her pillow and into my mouth. I licked my lips and they tasted like her skin. The dream continued to fade. The phone continued to ring.

I reached over to the nightstand, knocking the phone onto the floor. I hadn't grown used to it being in the bedroom, where I'd moved it in the hopes that she would call. I didn't want to miss that call. It was hard to focus; my eyes weren't cooperating with me, my reflexes were all out of sync.

I retrieved the telephone from the floor, mumbling out an apology for all of the commotion.

"I have the information that you're looking for," a woman said to me.

"Information?" I asked. "Who is this?"

"You recently made a telephone call that connected you to Department number 809. Do you recall the inquiry that I'm speaking of?" she asked me.

"I do," I said.

"Listen to me. We are sending someone to meet with you."

"When?"

"Tonight."

"What kind of meeting is this? Where?"

"It's a meeting about something very important to you," she stated. "The kind of meeting you won't want to be late for, especially given your recent queries to the offices of Synchro Systems."

"How did you know about those?" I asked her, surprised. "Where do you fit into all of this?"

She ignored both questions.

"A gentleman will be waiting for you in the parking deck on the corner of Maple Avenue and Evergreen. He will signal you to enter the deck and speak to him once he has established that the situation is secure. Be outside of the parking deck in one hour. He will not wait."

She hung up. The line went dead. I placed the phone back on the receiver and the set everything back on the nightstand, considering what had just happened. I walked over to the window and looked out onto the street below. Raining and cold. Shit.

I called Janine, and she answered on the first ring.

"I need you to come with me. Synchro's arranged a meeting with someone for me."

"Now?"

"That's what she said," I answered. "Can you come with me?"

A pause.

"I need a few minutes to get ready. I'll pick you up in about 15," she answered.

"Thanks, Janine."

Why a parking deck?

What kind of meeting?

I grabbed a jacket and headed outside to wait.
We were somewhere in Mississippi when she asked me to pull over.

"For fresh air," she said. "And to look at the Milky Way."

At two in the morning on a two-lane highway in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Mississippi, I didn't even check the mirrors. It was an almost cloudless night; there were a few high floating stratus clouds near the moon, which was just over the horizon. It was rare that the air was as clear as it was on that night, even so far away from the cities, with all of their traffic and their factories and their light pollution. Cicadas and crickets sang a chorus into the night sky, frogs replied with equally triumphant voices, heralding a victory, however temporary, over humanity's developmental sprawl. I shut off the car, turned the radio off, and killed the lights.

We stood by the highway for what could have been hours, and no traffic passed us by. There was no one in the world but us. The sky was ours; luminescent bands of the galaxy's arms were thrown across the heavens like the crashing waves at night. The stars sparked at us, like signals, like codes, like when you've got your flashlight pointed out on the water at just the right angle. Occasionally, stars fell across the sky, streaking tails behind them with colors shifting through the entire spectrum: blue, green, yellow, orange, red.

"I remember this," she said, breathless. "This is something that's never changed, something I don't think I could ever forget."

"It's amazing," I agreed.

"It's more than amazing," she countered. "Someday we'll be out there, moving around limitlessly, exploring, discovering. Dreaming."
I checked my watch again, wondering when the research agent was going to arrive. I assumed that he wouldn't be driving and that he'd come out of the main entrance and signal me when he was ready to talk. I didn't ask the woman on the phone how he was going to arrive, or how he'd leave, or how he'd know what I looked like; I just did as he had instructed during the phone call earlier and waited at the corner just across the street. She hadn't told me not to bring anyone along, and Janine had been my ride, anyway, although I was making her stay outside of the parking deck. I was worried about her safety, regardless of her desire to accompany me into the structure, but it was too late to send her back alone.

If he showed up, he was going to be late. We'd arrived with time to spare, but had been waiting for almost an hour.

"Do you think we'll have to wait much longer?" Janine asked.

"No," I said. "It's too dangerous. I'm not standing around here all night, putting you in danger, and I'm sure as hell not doing so with the possibility of compromising the little bit of information that we've already obtained that may give us a lead in tracking her down just to get a little bit more. If he's not in the parking deck within the next ten minutes, we're leaving."

The suggestion that we could have been in danger seemed to resonate with her. Maybe it was foolish of me to bring her along, to allow her to come, without proper regard for her safety. We were dealing with people that we didn't know. I had no ideas what their true intentions were, but I felt that I had no choice but to trust the leads the informant had given me. In my rush to get things moving, I'd possible put Janine in harm's way. I kicked myself, making a mental note to be more cautious in the future.

Then, as if he knew that we were contemplating leaving, a man wearing a dark suit and a black fedora came out of the parking deck at the far entrance, looked directly at us, tipped his hat, and went back into the shadows of the building.

"Wait here, Janine," I ordered, and started across the street.

I walked into the dark entrance of the parking deck, hoping that wherever I met the research agent at inside would be better illuminated than the front gates, which were closed and locked. The admittance lights for both lanes of the entrance were a steady, menacing red, as if telling me to stop my search, as if they were warning me not to advance. I straddled and climbed over the lowered traffic arms, heading deeper into the building.

"Down here," a man beckoned to me from the recesses of a stairwell about 10 meters away. "On the lower level, away from the street." It was hard to make out any details of his demeanor. The brim of his hat obscured most of his face in darkness.

I trusted that his intentions were not malevolent and followed his lead down the stairs. If he wanted to hurt me, he'd probably had more than enough opportunity to do so. After all, he seemed to be working for someone who'd tracked me down and offered me a lead into the research trials Synchro had conducted earlier in the year.

He waited near the wall on the next floor down, a few meters away from the foot of the stairs.

"I don't have long," he began. "What do you want to know?"

"What can you tell me?" I questioned. The man stayed in the shadows, and had I not been meeting him for such a serious reason, I would have made a crack at him for copying every secret informant in every espionage movie I'd ever seen. But all jokes aside, there was no doubt in my mind, even then, that I would do anything within my power to find her, to save her, whether that meant I had to go down into the depths of a parking deck in the middle of the night for a secret meeting with a Synchro informant or travel from one end of the world and back.

"Please, sir, be more specific."

"About Synchro Systems, then, that's a good place to start. What are they hiding from everybody?"

"The files that my friends and I recovered after the investigative sweeps with pertinent information on Synchro were minimal, at best, but it appears that they were operating as an umbrella for a handful of research projects that the public never would have gone for," he began, looking nervously around the parking deck. "Something about psychology and computer analysis of the processes of memory, that's what the cover story was that they fed researchers like me. But it went a lot deeper than that. Most of the employees, of course, had no idea, and any investigating agencies were turned away or paid off, none the wiser about Synchro's construction of actual devices that could be used to alter the way that people were thinking. We're still not sure how it worked or how far along they made it into the project, but you should start by looking for former employees and other research agents with higher clearance levels that I've got." He handed me a slip of paper with a name and a number scribbled on it.

"I've been keeping tabs on this guy for about five months. He's local, so you should be able to track him down. He can probably send you higher up the company roster if you can figure out a way to coerce him. I doubt you'll need any inspiration in order to do that. It seems that Synchro's plans for your girlfriend involved the extraction of information from her memory for use in one of their research models."

"So you don't work for Synchro Systems, then?" I asked, seeking clarification.

"No, of course not. My company was contracted by Synchro to do specialized research in fields that are not relevant to what you're searching for and as a result had access to their data. However, when the federal investigations began and everything started falling apart, Synchro broke the contract that they'd arranged with us, and we all lost a lot of money in the fallout. The same thing happened to other private companies, so some of us have gotten together and are doing what we can do reveal what's really going on with Synchro Systems. We'll never get our investment back, thought I personally believe that there are secondary research fields that came out of Synchro that will prove to be quite lucrative in the future. Your case came to our attention, though, and most of us want to do what's right. Like I said, it's not about the money."

"You said that they were using Coren's memories for their research, that they were pulling them out of her brain. Could that be the reason that she had amnesia when we met? Did they erase her past, somehow?" I asked.

"I've apparently misinterpreted the function of their devices, since you're telling me that she had amnesia when you met her. That's new information to me, and I'll pass it along to the appropriate people. The files that I've got describe a woman with her attributes receiving treatment in one of their local offices about six months ago. The subject's name has been removed from the documentation, but I'd be willing to bet that the subject and your girlfriend are the same person."

I looked at the slip of paper that he'd handed me. The name on it, Dr. Evan Partain, seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place where I'd heard it before.

"Do I know this man?" I asked the researcher, folding the paper and slipping it into my pocket.

"It's possible that you've heard his name on the news, or read about him in the papers," he said. "He is the head of the department of research for Synchro Systems, and I suspect he's complicit in many of their umbrella operations. He's been interviewed several times; he always has the same company line about Synchro and what they've been researching and how the company is helping people build better lives. You know, the whole bit about taking control of your future that's on all of the ads. He was recently implicated in the involvement of several cases of inappropriately prescribed medications and questionable treatment methods resulting in psychological disorders that were intense, but apparently short-lived, in a number of patient's cases." He looked at me, waiting for me to ask another question.

"What you're telling me is interesting, but ultimately it's not useful to me because it's not helping me get any closer to her," I said, frustrated by his calm, detailed answer. "I want to know what they did to her, and why. I want to know if they abducted her from my house, if they drugged me so I'd sleep through it, and where she is now. I have to find her. This Partain guy, how can I know that he's not just going to give me the runaround, or that he'll even be available to meet me?"

He paused for a moment, adjusting his coat.

"I shouldn't have to remind you that you should look into your own medical history. I have information that you were seeing a therapist up until you met your girlfriend. Suddenly, you stopped. You were dealing with depression, feelings of abandonment, and an almost overwhelming sense of rejection in your life. This was the result of the loss of your child, as well as your divorce, I presume." He almost grinned at me, but seemed to catch himself.

"You were suicidal, weren't you?" He asked. "Synchro Systems also dealt with cases of severe depression – suggesting that your girlfriend might have also had those tendencies when she began her treatments."

I was becoming very angry. As far as I was concerned, he had no right to throw my past into my face like that mentioning the marriage. How had he discovered that? Who was I really dealing with?

I pushed him against the wall. I noticed that the paint, a dirty green the color of toothpaste residue, was peeling away, revealing the coarse surface of the concrete beneath it.

"Does Synchro have something to do with me?" I demanded, my nose almost touching his. "Are our cases somehow related?'

I could see the conflict of interest in his eyes. I hoped that he could see the desire to break something in mine. He blinked. I didn't.

"Talk to Dr. Partain," he answered, no longer self-assured. "Please, that's all I can tell you."

"What if he doesn't cooperate?" I asked him. I didn't relax my grip.

"He will cooperate with you, I'm sure of it," he replied, confidence returning to his voice. "Look, this building's not secure enough for me to stay here any longer. Someone will contact you later with more information. Will you please release me now?"

I let go of him, and he brushed his coat, flattening out the creases in it where I had been gripping the fabric.

"Your friend, Janine, is it? She's probably getting worried about you," he smiled at me with the same look of knowledge that had bothered me before. Just how much about my life and the lives of my friends did these people know? Why were they slipping me information in fragments, when it seemed that they would be able to locate and connect me with her just as easily?

"You're much more than just a research agent, aren't you?" I asked him.

"Research agent and other things. My employers allow me to handle all sorts of... situations," he responded.

"Your employers? You're referring to Synchro Systems, aren't you?"

"Don't make too many assumptions, friend."

"I don't appreciate your games," I said to him, turning to leave.

"Real life isn't a game. There are consequences for all of us."

That didn't explain much, either.
"What about fate?" I asked, flipping the headlights over to bright.

"You mean in relation to the existence of God?" She asked. "Of course you do," she added, answering her own question.

We were somewhere in Texas. At night, when there was nothing but the road and it went on for miles and miles and miles, where times and distances were measured in conversations and bathroom breaks.

"Well, I've thought about it, too, and I guess it does kind of present a dilemma," she continued.

"A major one," I agreed. "I mean, what's to say that my entire life's not fated and set out, even if I don't know what's going to happen next, you can theoretically tell me all of it, everything that happens, by traveling into the future, right?"

"Theoretically, I could do that."

"So what decisions, actions, and events in my life are really under my control? What if something bad happened and you came back and told me about it? Shouldn't I be able to stop it?"

"I guess that really boils down to an ethical question on the part of the person with the knowledge of the future, doesn't it?" She said. "Sure, I could know in advance of some certain events in your life, but even if I told you about them, would you really be able to change them? Would you believe me? Just keep in mind that your future is someone else's past, and from their standpoint, it's set in stone."

"Let's consider it on a level beyond that of just one individual, then. What if you could stop a war? Where is the ethical line drawn? Causing a change in the timeline like that would affect countless lives. Wouldn't it be worth trying? If we can't change the future, then why are we here?" I asked her.

"I don't really know. But Here is where we are, now," she said, sighing. She traced her fingers on the glass edge of the window as if she was playing the piano or typing. "I wouldn't want someone to come from the future and stop this from happening, even if it was in the name of stopping a war. I don't care about everyone else; I only want this."

But what if I was the one who was going to die? Could I stop a future from happening by removing us from the equation?

Considering it on a level that was more local, one that concerned me, that's where I had the real issues. I should have been able to drive the car into a telephone pole and kill us both. That decision should have been in my hands, a decision that I'd always be able to make. I wanted to believe that I was a master of my own fate, and according to her, it was my own decision, though I'd already made it given someone else's perspective farther down the time line. Nothing about my potential impact with a solid object on the side of the road conflicted with the future history of the world. If she were a time traveler from my future, I could have killed her then, and she'd still be born on the same schedule, still fatefully decide to visit the past that I existed in, still meet me, and so on.

It just didn't seem right. I looked at her as she stared out of the window contentedly, arm waving up and down in the wind, and I smiled, but she didn't see me.

Another idea came to mind. If there somehow was a time machine at my disposal, I could travel back into time and warn myself about ever getting married in the first place, saving myself a lot of personal anguish and psychological issues. Or I could have saved the baby, if for some reason I had decided to get married anyway. I thought about it and then realized that all of those events would have to occur in order for me to end up where I was that night, driving along that empty road through Texas. Then I realized why I was having an issue with it: changes could be made, I was sure of it, since we only had the perspective from whatever decisions that we'd made and events in our lives, it merely seemed that there was only one path. It seemed like I couldn't do anything about all of the bad things in my past from my current standpoint since I existed in that particular present.

If I changed things, my other self wouldn't know any better, but would go on believing that things were unchangeable and that life had followed only one path. Perhaps someone else had met a strange girl with some memory problems in the bathtub or at the front door of a different apartment, and the self that I had saved from all of the bad things would never be the wiser. Would it be morally wrong to deny a past version of myself the richness and joy of my present love in order to prevent them from experiencing, to spare them, even, the agony of love lost? Who would I be changing? Would my own memories change, or would I become a like a specter, a wandering star, haunting a present that I no longer belonged to with the dark light of what never was to be weighing down upon me?

I drove on for a little while longer, considering the possibility that I had already made every decision that I would ever make, and I just had to wait for time to play out so that I could live through them, or even die because of them, living in the illusion of free will, deluding myself into thinking that anything was a real choice. I think that there was some religion that appropriately addressed that very issue. Generally speaking, though, religion never really was for me and I couldn't swallow and digest such a massively vague concept, anyway. On the other hand, it just didn't make sense that we'd exist solely to move along the timeline. There had to be something more!

If only I could completely, unquestioningly accept that everything was random, that the universe was chaotic, that there was no real point in anything, and that everything was the result of an evolving dynamic towards entropy, manifested through constantly tipping balances of order and chaos! If I could know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that a final balance would be achieved in the end, somehow, that the universe would exist as nothing more than heat energy, and perhaps after that, a true zero state. But there was always the possibility that something unknown would happen, even after that. Nothing is possible, because Everything is.

All of those concepts took place on a scale so vast that it didn't matter where humanity fit into the picture, much less one individual human life: my own. That was all fine with me, since it was too big of an issue to really tackle at all, too vast to wrap my head around and think about where words would even make sense, since there was absolutely no way that I'd ever be able to grasp the concept of the life span of an entire universe, from beginning to end. Where did I fit into this? Could my actions, however small, change my own future, and therefore alter the future of the universe? How far would the ripples extend?
Chapter 05

Janine's boyfriend, David, sipped at his pint of beer, keeping an eye on the back door for us.

"Do you think that this guy will show up?" He asked.

"I'm starting to notice a theme here," Janine quipped.

"We've had pretty good luck, so far," I said. I hoped that our good luck would continue. It seemed like we had a lot of leads that only led us to other leads, and everyone that we spoke to was passing us on towards someone else. With each pass, we gained a little bit more information that was useful to us, though, so I wasn't about to start complaining.

David seemed nervous, and understandably so. She'd told him that I had to meet a potential investor in a shadowy business venture and that I just needed someone to play lookout, in case the potential investor decided to bring along some less than friendly additional guests. He told her not to tell me his name, for some reason, though I already knew it. I even knew what his address was, what kind of car he drove, how old he was, and a handful of other information that I'd picked up listening to Janine talk over the weeks, but I played along and pretended I didn't know anything about him, even telling him that I thought it was the best for both of us that he remained anonymous. I guess that he didn't really know how well Janine and I knew each other and how we'd planned all this out hours ago. At least one part, about the meeting being important, was the truth.

Partain wasn't due to arrive for another 10 or 15 minutes, so I lit another cigarette.

"Just make sure that you turn the camera on," I reminded Janine, nodding towards her mp3 player. I was glad that they had decided to put cameras in those things.

"Got it," she said. "Up the sleeve, arm over the back of the booth."

She wore a baggy jacket with loose sleeves into the bar that day. To a casual observer, it would only appear that she had her arm around her boyfriend while they shared a drink.

I hoped that no one would notice them at all, though.

"Have you checked the battery charge? Do you have enough available memory?" I asked her, worried that something would go wrong. I wanted to get as much reviewable information as possible from the meeting with the doctor, especially if he had relevant information that would help me find Coren.

"Stop worrying. It's ready to go," Janine reassured me. David smirked. I considered pouring my drink onto his lap.

"Okay, then," I sighed, putting my cigarette out and wiping my sweaty palms on my pants. "I'll go ahead and go up to the bar. He should be here any minute, so make sure you're ready. But don't be too obvious, guys."

"We've got it, man," Hip Dave said. I must have growled.

Janine winked at me as I left the booth and made my way to the bar.

I sat down and ordered a pint, checking the door for Partain. Nothing seemed unusual, and no one had entered the bar in the past few moments. The bartender quickly brought my drink to me, and I started sipping on it.

"I heard a pretty good joke the other day," he said, leaning on the counter top. "Want to hear it?"

I shrugged.

"Okay," I answered, not really feeling up to being an audience, but not wanting to brush the guy off, either.

"All right. Here goes," he said. "What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean?"

I waited for the inevitable.

"A good start!" He exclaimed, laughing at himself as he delivered the answer. I smiled courteously.

"That's a pretty good one," I said.

"What's a mathematician's favorite dessert?" He asked, continuing.

I rolled my eyes. Was this guy serious? I hoped that he wouldn't keep talking for so long that Partain would stop in, notice, and skip the meeting. I checked the door again.

The bartender didn't really wait for me to guess the answer, anyway.

"Pi!" This time he revealed the answer gleefully, as he was delighted by his own wit. His amusement at himself was much more humorous to me than his stupid jokes, and I chuckled a little bit at my own internal jokes, which were at his expense. I took a long draw from the glass of beer.

"Okay, okay," he continued. "One more and I'll stop."

I was ignoring him already.
Some dolphins broke the waves, leaping out of the water close to the shore.

"Hey, check that out! Dolphins!" I said, pointing towards the sea.

"Dolphins?" She asked, looking out past the sand and over the breaking waves.

"You know, like porpoises. They're sea mammals, quite intelligent. I read somewhere that they're learning how to use computers to talk to us."

"I don't know what that means. I've never heard of them before. They look like really big fish!" she said.

I thought that it was weird that she'd claim to have never heard of dolphins, but I kept in mind that she might have forgotten them, too. Usually when she heard a name or saw an animal, she recognized it, so this deviation from the precedent seemed exceptionally strange.

Sometimes that happened, though. We ran into things that she'd never heard of or experienced, like coffee. And now, dolphins. While it was different from anything I'd ever had to deal with before, it didn't really matter to me. Once she'd seen them, experienced them for the second first time, she'd always be able to remember what they were.

"I went swimming with some dolphins, once, at this water park," I told her. "It was really cool; you could tell that they were talking to you by the way that they looked at you and in the way that it seemed like they expected you to answer them. Like you were the stupid one for not being able to answer them back."

"I think a lot of animals are much more intelligent than we think that we are, or at least capable of high levels of intelligence. We might have to give them a little coaching and a lot of patience, though," she said.

"In the future, do you think that we'll do something good with all of our technology? Maybe modify the animals so that they're smarter?"

"I don't see why we couldn't. Aren't there already computers that can help the deaf to hear and sensors that can help the blind to see? Maybe cats and dogs won't really be pets so much anymore as they will become true companions. They could carry on conversations with you and flat out demand that you take them for a walk when they've got to go to the bathroom," she laughed. "It seems like we're not so far off from a future where that's happening, anyway."

"Ask any cat owner," I said," and they'll probably tell you that it's already the case. I had a cat when I was in college; the stupid thing had a bad habit of relieving himself on people that he didn't like. Maybe he wasn't so stupid, though, because it turned out that I didn't really like most of the people he peed on, either. He was probably trying to tell me something and save me the time."

"Cats are strange animals, that's for sure."

It was growing dark, so someone switched the strings of party lights on all around us, and suddenly the balcony was a lot more festive looking that it had been before. Caught up in the excitement of the moment, she grabbed my arm and started for the door.

"Let's go," she said, her enthusiasm contagious. I followed her out into the streets, where we purchased some masks with skulls on them from a local vendor.

Even though we wore long masks of death, we celebrated living and loving long into the latest hours of night.
"Slowly," the bartender continued, delivering the next punch line. "Very slowly. So that they never know what's happened to them. Then they're dead, and it's too late for anyone to ask any questions. Kind of like boiling a frog." He smiled at me, waiting for me to laugh at the joke. I didn't understand it, but I guess that I'd missed the first part.

"I don't get it," I told him.

"Eh," he paused, wiping the counter top where the condensation from glasses had collected. "Jokes like that aren't for everyone. Want another drink? You went through that first one pretty quickly."

I looked down, surprised at myself. I really had finished off the pint a lot more quickly that I thought.

"Sure."

"Coming right up," he said, happy to make another sale. "You meeting someone?" he asked.

"If they actually show up, I am."

"They usually show up," he told me. As if he knew the kind of person I was waiting on.

I glanced over my shoulder at Janine and David. David looked away, quickly. Too obvious. She smiled, bounced in her seat a little, and gave me a thumbs up. Too obvious.

And too late.

Partain sat down on the bar stool beside me.

"I'm only meeting you because I owed a favor to the wrong person," he stated, before I'd even sized him up. "You should advise your friends in the booth over there to turn off the camera. I don't have to tell you anything, and I don't want to be recorded."

That threw me off. I wasn't expecting Partain to be so... on top of things. I quickly scanned over him, hoping to gather some information about him from his appearance, but there was nothing remarkable about him at first glance. Expensive glasses, a crisply starched white shirt, dark slacks. He looked like he might have skipped a day between shaves, but his hair looked like he'd just had it cut and styled. He wore a black tie, loosely, and he didn't have on a coat. He glared at me impatiently, making direct eye contact with me, challenging me to deny his demand.

I turned towards Janine. Her arm was over the back of the booth, pointed in our general direction, just as we'd planned. Good girl. David nodded towards us, and she turned to look at me. I made a motion for her to stop filming by waving my hand in a cutting motion in front of my throat, and she raised an eyebrow: Are you sure? I nodded an affirmative response. She pulled her arm, along with the media recorder, back into the booth.

"She follows orders, at least," Partain commented.

"It's a weird situation. None of us really know what's going on," I offered, defensively. "She doesn't want anyone to get hurt."

"You? Or me?" He asked.

"Anyone," I answered.

"Why do you need to talk to me?" Partain asked me while flagging down the bartender.

"I'm looking for some information about Synchro Systems. Not just the company, though; I need information about a possible patient, or," I hesitated, swallowing the lump in my throat. "Possible test subjects," I finished.

The bartender arrived, breaking the conversation.

"I see your friend showed up. What can I get for you?" he asked Partain. I hoped that the bartender wouldn't try his comedy routine with us again.

"Something darkly, in a glass."

"One sec," the bartender said, strolling off.

At least we liked the same kind of beer.

"Why should I tell you anything, friend?" Partain asked me. "I've already told everything I know to the interviewers, the papers, the police, and the courts. You can look it up in the public archives if you're interested."

"I was kind of hoping that you'd have a particular kind of information that those people wouldn't be asking about," I said.

The bartender dropped off Partain's beer without saying a word, apparently noticing that we didn't want to be disturbed.

"What's your story?" He asked, changing direction.

I sighed, feeling the heavy weight of having to explain something that didn't make any sense to someone who hadn't lived through it weighing down on my shoulders and on my mind.

"Not too long ago, I woke up, and my girlfriend was missing. I didn't suspect it at the time, but it appears that a person or people working for Synchro Systems abducted her from my home, or she left in fear of them arriving, and in a really big hurry. Somehow, I slept through it all, possibly because I'd been drugged. What makes it weirder is that all of her personal documents and files were removed from the house, too."

Abduction explained why the hot water was still running in the sink when I woke up, since she always brushed her teeth with the hot water on. I hadn't even thought to check for the presence of her toothbrush at the time, though, as I was primarily focused on cleaning the water up off of the floor before the tenants below us noticed a leak, though I'm sure that even by then, it was too late. The flood in the bathroom didn't really matter too much a week later, when someone had broken into the place and turned it inside out while I was out with Janine searching for her.

I mentioned that unknown individuals had ransacked my home when I'd been out and he didn't even react.

"Someone knows that I'm looking for her," I said. "And I don't think that they want me to be able to find her."

"Someone wants you to find her, it seems, otherwise you wouldn't be here in this bar, and I wouldn't have been... coerced into showing up," Partain said, clenching his teeth together as he balled his hands into fists. Then he relaxed again, as if something upsetting had crossed his mind but he'd been able to block it out. He took a long drink from his pint.

"Coerced you? What happened?" I asked.

"It's none of your concern, stranger," he said, turning to look at me again. He stood up and stepped away from the bar. "However, this is ridiculous. Good luck finding your friend."

I wasn't sure how to respond to that. He hadn't given me any answers!

"Partain, wait!" I protested, standing up.

He didn't reply as he walked out of the front doors of the bar and into the blurry world outside.

I turned and looked at Janine and David, shrugging. They both came over and met me at the bar.

"What did you find out?" Janine asked, her face a mixture of concern and anticipation.

"Nothing," I said. "Nothing useful at all."
She took my hand in hers, as she often did, a gesture that I'd grown to find comfort in. It seemed right, the way that our hands fit together, the ways that we fit together; it seemed like the day wasn't complete if we didn't hold hands for a minute or two. I guess that probably sounds strange or unusual, pathetic even, but if you've ever been in the same position, you know what I'm talking about.

"There's another one!" she said, pointing at the sky.

I didn't see it because I was looking at the way that the wind was blowing just a few strands of hair at a time across her face. I noticed that the sun had lightened her hair a lot in some places so that she had blonde streaks running through it. We'd spent a lot of time outdoors when we were in Europe, and she rarely wore a head covering of any type, although handkerchiefs were popular at the time. Some of her hairs went into her mouth as she spoke, and she removed them with precise fingers.

She took her hand back after a moment and leaned back across the hood of the car. She put her hands together and looked over at me.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Nothing, really. Just making sure of you," she answered.

"You get five points, then. It should be less, but I'm feeling generous," I said. "That was too easy."

"It wasn't all that easy!" She protested.

"Are you kidding? I caught the reference right off," I replied.

"Not everyone reads Milne, you know."

"Everyone should."
Chapter 06

The phone was ringing. Had I fallen asleep again? What was the dream, fading around the edges at first, into nothingness? The bed was warm, the sheets soft. It was dark outside; it must have grown late. For a moment, I thought that Coren was beside me again. I thought that I could feel her hair spilling off of her pillow and into my mouth. The phone continued to ring.

I reached over to the nightstand, taking the phone off of the receiver, hoping that the caller had given up. It was hard to focus; my eyes weren't cooperating with me, my reflexes were all out of sync.

"Hello?" I muttered, still groggy.

"I have more information for you," the woman said to me.

"More information?" I asked. "Is this Department 809?"

She didn't answer my question, but I thought that I could hear clicking in the background, something that sounded like typing.

"Listen to me. We are sending someone else to meet with you."

"When?" I sighed.

"Tonight."

"Why are you being so mysterious? Where will we meet this time?"

"A gentleman will arrive for you momentarily. You are to enter the car when it arrives, but be inconspicuous about it, if you can. He will arrive at your residence and allow you to enter the vehicle but will he not wait, so be ready."

She hung up. The line went dead. I placed the phone back on the receiver and considered what had just happened. The conversation, how the caller was already becoming familiar to me, how she already assumed that I would trust her and do what she demanded. I walked over to the window and looked out onto the street below. Raining and cold. Every day.

I grabbed a jacket and headed outside to wait.

The car was already in front of the building when I opened the front door. I ran towards it, dodging puddles and checking for traffic as I crossed the street. The passenger door was unlocked, so I got into the car.

I didn't wait for him to say anything, taking first initiative at starting our conversation.

"What the hell is going on? Where the hell is Corentine? Why the hell do you have me bouncing from place to place, all over this city, just to pick up a little crumb of information here and another bit there, when none of it's really informative to me at all? I met up with Partain, you know, and while he gave me some interesting things to think about, why should I believe that he's telling me the truth? Why should I believe any of you?"

I'd been making a list.

"I will answer all of your questions to the best of my ability. Would you prefer that I do so in the order in which you asked them?" The informant calmly pressed the cigarette lighter down, and then turned the radio off.

"Please," I answered, trying to relax. I reached for my own cigarettes, but I'd misplaced them somewhere.

"Excellent. Here, have one of mine," he said, and then he lit two cigarettes at once, passing one over to me. How did he know that mine were missing?

"First, there are a lot of things that I can't tell you. You're too much of a liability to the people that I work for if you go public with the information." I didn't ask for much of an explanation on that, since I had so many other questions that I felt were more important and in need of answers. The people that he worked for could keep their secrets as long as they told me where I could find Cor. I understood that they were serious enough, given the great lengths that they'd gone to towards remaining anonymous.

"Feel free to provide inquiries whenever clarification is required."

I noted to myself that his excessively clinical approach to our conversation might be useful to me; if I decided to make a play to squeeze more information out of him, I knew that he probably wanted to remain as detached as possible, so it might be easier to throw him off by expressing an emotional reaction to his statements. Low blow, maybe, or cheap trick, but I didn't care how I manipulated the answers from him, as long as I got what I wanted. My concerns were clouding my objectivity, though, and I didn't realize my own limits, much less give thoughtful consideration towards the limits of the strange man who didn't want to be known and worked for a shadowy group of people who would only meet me in the strangest places, on their terms and on their time tables.

I nodded, waiting for him to continue.

"You're going to want to meet up with Evan Partain again, I'd venture," he stated. "Especially after you've had a day or two to think about this." He reached into his pocket and removed a small brown paper bag, folded up around a square object and taped closed. My first thought was that it was a Christmas present – all that it lacked was a bow on top; a very small box wrapped as I'd wrapped my own gifts, year after year. He handled the package with care, perhaps even with some sort of reverence. I looked out of the windows, checking to see if there were any people walking the streets outside of the car, and if so, if they were exceedingly interested in what we were doing.

I remembered how my ex-wife had scored some opium, so long ago, towards the part when things were getting really bad. I remembered how we had started searching outside of ourselves and far away from our hearts for things that would numb us, hoping that anything would be the salve that would ease the ache of love falling from its course. I remembered feeling paranoid then, too, in her car, as she removed a small plastic bag with a square block inside of it. She handled that small gift with her own form of reverence, though her awe was misguided, and her respect for things had diminished to a point that it seemed at times to hardly remain at all.

"What's in the package?" I asked, returning my attention to the informant, this nameless man in the car sent by the anonymous woman on the telephone just a few moments ago. He didn't respond.

He began unwrapping the brown paper, revealing a small metal box. He discarded the wrapping onto the floor of the car and removed the top of the box by sliding it open. I leaned closer to him to get a better look inside of the box as he shook an object out into his hand. He closed his fist around the object and cleared his throat.

"This object is like a sign post," he began. "It points you in a direction that might help you find your way, though the answers you're seeking won't ever come to you easily."

A signpost? He was correct, though. I was absolutely, undeniably lost.

"You're looking for solutions to problems you'll never understand; you'll find answers to questions you'll never even think to ask. The important thing for you to remember is that you must find your own way. The individuals who have provided this object to you insist that our assistance to you remains limited to this final meeting, along with the information that you've previously been provided," He paused, reaching for his cigarette, which had burned halfway down to the filter in the time that he had been opening the package.

I didn't speak.

"You asked what's going on," he resumed. "You're searching for your missing girlfriend, a woman named Corentine. I can confirm that Synchro Systems does have a hand in her disappearance," he stopped again, looking out of the window, watching the rain run down the glass. "They also have a hand in her appearance."

"Her appearance?" I interrupted. My stomach turned over.

"When she arrived without explanation in your apartment's bathtub. Where do you think that she came from? How do you think that she got there? She doesn't remember, that's true. Why haven't you ever considered that you can't recall the evening before, either?"

I thought about it for a moment. It was a day like any other, except that it was the day before things began to change in my life. Something like the last day of a prison term. What about the night before? What did I do on the night before she arrived?

"I... I... can't remember the night before. I can't remember the week, or even the month before, either, really, but what does that even mean? Life's a blur sometimes. Life's boring and cyclic, and before I met her, life wasn't even worth living. There wasn't a single unique thing about my life worth talking about. So what? People forget their days all the time."

He smiled.

"I suppose that you now believe you've found a reason to live," he said, lighting another cigarette. He exhaled slowly, savoring it, appearing to enjoy each second of it.

"I have a reason for being here, but I'm not sure how this is helping."

Cor's entire past seemed like it was blank. We knew that it existed, that it had to exist, that the memories were locked in her head somewhere, buried down deep in the dark of her brain, and that they'd come up from time to time for air, taking a breath of life, and she'd speak them out loud or write them down, holding them close to her like prizes won by children. And they were her own victories, for how hard she fought to regain each and every one of them. A daily struggle.

I realized that my own lapse of memory was something totally different, though. I compared it to her amnesia as a point of reference only – because her amnesia was something that I had come to understand in a way. In her case, everything was lost, therefore only gain was possible. In mine, I didn't even know what I'd forgotten. I assumed that it was nothing important. Or better yet, things that I wanted to forget, things from the past I'd been trying to walk away from.

"We've asked you to meet us in different places, always at the last minute, as you know, and that reason should be obvious to you. I will not waste time explaining that. The questions that I've asked you and that you've asked yourself – those are the most important pieces of information that I can give to you, though you may never understand or appreciate them. In addition, I can give you this," He reached over and handed the object to me, closing my fist around it, but kept his hand on mine. His hand was cold to the touch. I wanted to pull away, to inspect the smooth round object in my clenched fist, but I kept my hand in place and didn't break eye contact with him.

"A second meeting with Partain. He still has connections within the company that may be useful to you. He can also explain the object that you hold in your fist."

He relaxed his grip and I pulled my hand away. Instead of looking at the object, though, I pushed it into my jacket pocket.

"Are you going to look at it?" he asked me, sounding somewhat surprised.

"Eventually," I answered, reaching for the door latch.

"Goodbye, then. You will not hear from us again."

"I'm not really sure that I believe that, yet," I said. "But like everything else, I'll have to take your word for it."

I opened the door and exited the car, stepping out onto the sidewalk, followed by a cloud of smoke that had been filling the car. He started the car and almost immediately began to pull out into the street. I watched him go, reaching into my pocket and withdrawing the round device, skeptical.
"I think that most of the major events that occur in life work on a level that is beyond one person's ability to change them. It's like the tides."

"So what's the point of anything if you can't make a difference in the end? If it's all going to happen in a set order, because if you're from a point forward from where we exist, from all of this," I made a sweeping motion with my hand, gesturing towards the darkness outside of the car, "then all of this is just a history lesson."

"All of this," she said, mimicking my gesture, "is exactly what the point of everything is!"

"The here and the now, you mean."

"Wherever that might be."

"It sounds like a cop out to me. It seems like we should be able to change things, that there isn't just one way that things can go. Time shouldn't be one string of events leading to another, unchangeable, while we just ride along with it."

"Don't forget that you're applying your own personal, human conceptualizations to a universal set of events. Just because something seems like it should be one way or another according to our human perspective of things doesn't mean that the universe operates that way."

"It's true. We tend to do that, don't we? One of these days we're going to wipe ourselves out because we think the entire universe revolves around ourselves," I said.

"Well, it hasn't happened yet, and until it does, you're all that matters," she replied, rolling her window down as she did. The warm, fresh air mixed with the recycled air-conditioned air inside of the car, and I imagined a miniature thunderstorm brewing inside the car with us.

She held her arm out of the window and made a kind of music with the wind as it blew across her hand.

"That's true, what you said, in a way," she said, pulling her arm back into the car a few moments later. "But you can't look at things from any other individual's standpoint, since you are who you are. You know what I'm trying to say?"

"Well, yeah, but I think you've missed the point that I was trying to make," I told her.

"You can only be you, you can only exist from all of the decisions that led up to where you're at today, because otherwise you'd be a different person, and then you'd not be able to have the same perspective on everything that you have today," she elaborated.

It made sense, but still didn't resolve the whole theoretical issue of a future time traveler changing events for someone else – or even more specifically, a future version of myself coming along and giving me advance warning of some situation in my life that was about to happen so that I could avoid it. It wouldn't change anything for the future version of me, but it would change the present version of me... altering my own destiny. Things could be changed, couldn't they? I could change myself, if I could travel in time, couldn't I?

When I asked her that, she shrugged her shoulders.

"Why not?" she asked. "There are a lot of mysteries out there, a lot of unknowns. From where the hypothetical time traveler from the future originated from, sure, this has all happened and is set in stone. However, from your vantage point or my vantage point it's all an open future; if you look at it THAT way, that's how it is. If you look at it THIS way, then that's how it is." She was done with the conversation, which had looped back over, folded over and again, like origami. It had become feedback.
Chapter 07

It was easy enough to convince Partain to come along with me. He recognized me as soon as I cornered him inside of the convenience store.

"You again," he said, backing up a little. He ran out of space, bumping into the magazine racks behind him. He seemed a little drunk; he was somewhat disoriented.

"Again. We've got some important things to talk about, Partain," I began. "I can't have you leaving like you did the last time, either." I pulled my coat to the side, revealing the holstered pistol on my hip to him. He checked the handgun, and then looked back up into my eyes, his own eyes wide with disbelief. I glared at him.

"It's real," I warned.

"We can't exactly talk about things in here," he pointed out. "I'm not exactly in the right frame of mind for this."

"You're right," I agreed. "Good thing the bar's a short walk away. Let's go."

He hesitated a moment, possibly evaluating how serious I was about bringing him along with me. Before he could challenge me, I grabbed his arm.

"I don't have anything to lose," I said, gripping his arm as hard as I could, my intention not only to let him know exactly how serious I was, but also to leave a bruise.

He didn't answer, but started moving towards the door.

"I'm expecting you to make a break for it, or to yell for help," I told him as I removed the pistol from its holster. I pushed the barrel of the gun into his back with one hand and grabbed his shoulder with the other, leaning in close to his ear. I noted that gray hairs were taking over his head.

"Know that I'll kill you."

He stiffened in response to my threat, but kept moving. I holstered the weapon while we left the store, nodding to the clerk.

"You know where it is," I said, indicating the bar.

"Just beneath the surface," he cryptically replied, looking over his shoulder at me. "Just far enough that you can't quite reach it."

I shoved him once for good measure, but didn't dwell on his strange statement for very long. I wondered, briefly, how much he'd had to drink. I was also concerned that a passerby might figure out what was going on and call the police.

"You know that they made us go through with the treatment, too," he said. "They don't want us to tell anyone. They didn't want their secrets getting out into the wild."

"What I think is that you'll probably tell me anything that you think I want to hear just to get this gun off of your back, Partain. Keep moving."

We walked the rest of the way to the bar in silence.

Once we arrived, I didn't waste any time in getting to the point. I pulled the device that the man in the car had given to me out of my pocket and placed it onto the table in front of us.

Partain seemed surprised.

"I haven't seen one of those in a while," he said.

"What is it, exactly?" I questioned.

"It's a first stage prototype. One of the first series that functioned within the required parameters for further advancement. One of the first series of stable units," he paused. "I think. It's kind of hazy to me. As I said, they treated us, too. Said we signed up for it in our contracts, some clause buried beneath the paragraphs and pages that nobody ever really read," He drifted for a moment, lost in thought, then continued. "If I remember correctly, each of these units has a unique user assigned to it. There are records of the patient's treatments and procedures coded into the drive inside of this unit."

A waitress came by the table, and we ordered drinks, quietly.

"But we canceled that series," he added.

"Why? What happened?" I asked him.

"I forget. Something went wrong. People starting suffering from memory loss. Amnesia."

A chill went down my spine. Could this device be the key that I'd been seeking?

"What caused the memory loss, really, especially if the initial devices were stable? Did something set it off?" I asked.

"It's a side effect that occurred when a violent on unexpected shift would occur," he responded.

"An unexpected shift? What are you talking about?" I started to wonder more about Cor's mental stability than about how she'd entered the house, been taken from the house, or how we'd get her memories back, but only for a moment, because he interrupted my own wandering thoughts by continuing on.

"You're not going to like this," he said, chuckling to himself.

"I already don't like this, Partain." Where was he finding humor in this situation?

"We were working on cognitive and memory theories, experimenting with technology that we didn't really understand. We wondered if memories are hardwired into the brain or if they are mere chemical arrangements, like beads on a string... ones that can be altered and rearranged as one might see fit, or deleted completely." Partain drifted off, thinking of something, or maybe he just didn't care anymore. Maybe there were too many chemicals saturating his system; his mind soaking in a Synchro Systems induced stupor from which he never wanted to return. I wondered when he'd been exposed to one of the banned treatments and how effective it would be. I wondered if it was more or less effective than the treatment he'd used on Coren.

Our drinks arrived, and I swirled the ice in my glass around in circles. Suddenly, Partain continued, as if he'd never paused at all.

"I remember things so clearly, sometimes. Other times I remember things that don't make any sense, faces, strange names, and buildings. It's all random, jumbled, and it's hard to predict when a new memory is going to surface and what it will mean. And how I'll understand it."

"So you're saying that the treatment's not permanent," I suggested. Maybe there was hope.

"Yes. No. I mean, I remember this: That we'd basically concluded that the final result of memory manipulations was only semi-permanent, and that the original memories were fixed, like a movie, and that you could move them around in the brain as much as you wanted but you couldn't change anything: the brain would recompile the information in its original order, with time – since everything that had happened previously, through all of that time, had brought you to your present point, and the brain has to make sense of that. There seems to be a system of elimination at work in the mind, where false memories are rejected and purged from memory as they are processed. The human mind is incredible and it never stops working, compiling information, and solving riddles. At least until you distract it. Or unplug it. So we agreed to the treatment ourselves under the illusion that we actually had a choice in the matter, in the event that further testimony would be required in the fallout after the company's further collapse this week. It's not supposed to be permanent, though it's starting to feel that way to me now. But hey, what can we really know for sure?" He had creases in the dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn't slept in days. He seemed to focus on something far away again, and I wondered where he was going when his eyes glazed over like that.

"What happens if the brain can't figure out which series of events is the correct one?" I asked.

"Like yours?" He asked, turning to face me, looking me in the eye again.

"Very funny, Partain. Except I've never been through one of your procedures," I retorted, thrown off. I set my glass down. I looked away.

"Are you sure?"

There was a long pause. He was trying to trick me. I didn't even know if he was telling the truth about his own experience or if it was just a ruse to throw me off the right track. He was still a company man, after all. Maybe I was getting too close.

"So what is this, really?" I asked, indicating the device. I rolled it around in my hand, looking at the winding hands and dials inside of it. It really resembled clockwork, except that it seemed too small to be functional and it was in the shape of a sphere, like a marble, instead of a disc, like a watch.

"I mean, what did Synchro really do to those people, and how is it that you even had subjects to experiment on at all, and how did you convince them to implant this inside of their bodies, and what else should I know that you're not telling me about?" I stopped for a breath. I figured it was a reasonable enough series of questions considering I was the party member with the gun. It would have been unfortunate for him if I actually had to use it.

"Think of the device as having a personality of its own. The AI programs inside of it develop and mature as they age and they exhibit inclinations and directions of modifications that best adapt to the user's individual memory experience. Remember, the device in your hand is only a first-stage unit, a prototype, and was rendered obsolete and unfit due to the transcription errors. The final procedure series, the one we treated ourselves with just this week, relied on almost undetectable nanite swarms composed of mostly organic bases. They were designed to be eliminated from the body, naturally, once the treatment had effectively taken place: usually within just a couple of hours." He pointed to the bathrooms. "We wanted a much less invasive approach, and of course, an approach which facilitated deniability. You piss them out once they've done their work, and since they're mostly organic, you can't stop them, even with an electromagnetic pulse, so they're much less vulnerable to destruction than anything we produced initially. We'd effectively militarized it."

He seemed excited about his research, and at the same time, a bit too knowledgeable, considering he'd supposedly had his mind blanked out of pertinent classified information.

"You have an awfully good memory for someone who underwent the treatment," I observed. "I'd really hate it if you were lying to me about any of this."

"What reason do I have to lie anymore? Anything useful, like how to engineer the nanites, is just a blank spot in my head," he retorted. "If you don't believe me, shoot me. Or order me another drink. Alcohol accelerates the process, and I'm ready to forget you, friend."
We were drinking in a corner booth of the Rat and Parrot pub, somewhere in the outlying suburbs of London, spending one of our last nights in the city without a real plan of action, going wherever the roads and evening would take us.

She sipped a pint of beer and I ran my hands over the marred wooden surface of the tabletop, names and locations etched into the grain of the wood over countless nights by both drunken travelers and bored locals.

Earlier that day, we'd taken a train to Dover, where we'd had out photo taken with the notorious white cliffs rising in the distance behind us. On the train, she slept, head in my lap, while I read a magazine. Every now and then, I'd look out of the window for more of the same fields and boroughs, at the time a little eager to return to London, but also a little content to sit still, idle, enjoying the moment for what it was.

"There's foam on your lip," I said to her, taking a draw from my own pint.

"It's good beer," she responded, wiping her mouth on the back of her sleeve with a comical gesture, passing her entire forearm over her face. I think by that point she was more than a little drunk. If she didn't mind, neither did I.

"What are we going to do tonight?" I asked, setting my glass down on the table and reaching over to pick up my cigarette.

"We're going to quit smoking, I hope," she said, scorning.

I laughed.

"After that, I mean."

"I don't know. Hang out. Make out. Take a tour of Putney."

"All excellent suggestions, lover."

"Thanks! That's why I made them," she said, winking at me. We walked around a lot, in every city that we went to, and it was nice because we never ran out of things to talk about and we never got bored on our excursions. She always had an interesting observation about things or sometimes she'd find an obscure point to debate; just as often, we wouldn't speak at all, content in each other's company. Good silence and the ability to pull it off, that's something that really counts in the end.

Another round of drinks came, followed by conversational rambling and good silence. After the bar had its last call, we stumbled out into the street, holding each other up, a scene from countless movies that I'd seen playing out in real life, right before my eyes as I lived it. Everything seemed like a dream, blurry through my drunkenness. We wandered down the road for a while, eventually coming to rest at a waiting bench near a bus stop. We sat.

"You know," I said to her, "that getting drunk with you and being drunk around you, it's totally different than all those times that I always got drunk before."

"In a good way or a bad way?" she asked, huddling up against me. It was a little windy on that street, and as was the usual in London, everything was wet, which made it seem a little chillier than it really was.

"A good way, a good way," I reassured her. "It's a way that's totally without the pervasive sense of trying to hide from something, to escape, that came hand in hand with all the other times, back home," I said, referring to the days before she showed up. The night before she arrived, even, when I'd tried to drown it all out, numbing everything that might painfully break through. I went on.

"It's really nice, and I know that I'm being redundant when I tell you that, because I tell you how I love you and how perfect things are all of the time, but I feel like I'm just not expressing it on a level like I'm feeling it, because words just aren't the right way to really fully express those feelings."

"I know what you mean," she said, squeezing me. I could feel her fingers gripping my side through the heavy wool overcoat I was wearing. Our breath formed a small cloud of fog around us as we sat. "Even if we never figure out how I got here, or where I came from, or what my lost memories are, I've still got so many things to express to you that aren't easily conveyed through words."

"Words are all we've got for now, huh?" I asked, knowing that she'd agree: We had so much more.
I ordered another drink.

"So someone who went through the process, especially early on, would they be like a kid, still growing up?" I found the idea hard to get my head around.

"They'd be much more stable than a teenager. Don't be silly!" He cracked his knuckles with his thumbs one at a time. They popped so loudly that the bartender looked at us, possibly thinking we were being impatient for the next round.

"You're not really answering that one, though. What kind of behavior changes could a person expect?"

"Well, you might want to talk to some of the research assistants, since they're the ones who spent the most time around the subjects immediately after the treatments. The other doctors and I just compiled information and came up with new theories and approaches. As I said, I've already forgotten a lot of the details. I know that we came up with a technology that was new and that worked... and maybe worked too well." He winked at me. Partain was a lot stranger to me today than the first time I'd met him, when he seemed so composed and in control of the situation.

"And you remember all of this about your time at Synchro, but not enough about the rest of your research to tell me how to fix Cor once I find her, or, at the very least, where she might be," I was still dubious, and it was taking a lot for me to digest the possibility that his words were truth. I needed a new approach if I wanted to find out more relevant leads in my search.

"If there's anything else you'd like to ask, or if you plan on killing me, now is the time to do it," he said, sliding his empty glass away from him and cutting the meeting short. I looked in the direction of the bartender, who wasn't paying any attention to us, and then put Synchro's device back into my jacket pocket.

"Otherwise, I'll continue drinking, now that you've started me on that course for the day," he continued. "You don't mind picking up the tab for me, do you? I'm sure that you can understand that I'm a little low on cash right now, having been recently unemployed and all."

I ignored his sarcasm and placed two twenties on the table.

"That should cover it," I said, placing my hand on his shoulder. "Thanks for the information, doc. I've got to get going, anyway. But humor me for another minute."

He raised an eyebrow but didn't comment.

"What do you think, Dr. Partain?" I asked him. "What happens next? Where do I go from here? Am I searching for nothing? Is she gone for good?"

"You're too fucked up," he said to me. "All this time I've been telling myself it's all a dream, a nightmare, even, and that I'll wake up soon. All this time I've been telling myself that I've lost my grip on reality and that I've slipped into a delusional world that my mind had been creating for me as I've been strapped into a chair in the middle of a padded room somewhere. But there really is a stranger confronting me in a bar, threatening me with a gun while buying me drinks," he laughed after this.

Although he was raising his voice, the few people in the bar still seemed to be ignoring us.

"But I've also learned that what everyone sees as face value is just like the gloss coat on the surface of truth. And the truth is that people see what they want to see and find what they want to find. Reality is just a matter of perspective, friend. The treatments have made me unsure of most everything, but that's the one thing I'm still positive about."

Partain was really losing it. He must have taken the treatment more recently that he'd implied, maybe even right before I found him at the convenience store.

I left him in the booth, mumbling something about a man named Descartes.
She kicked sand up into the air as she put her feet down, stopping her motion abruptly. A quizzical look made its way across her face.

"Why'd you stop swinging?" I asked, twisting the chains of the swing that I was sitting on around and around, waiting to make myself dizzy when they spun around, unwinding. I was staring at the ground around us where cigarette butts were littered across the grass and the sand. I thought that it was kind of funny that there were so many cigarettes in a park where kids were playing. I wondered if it was the kids that were smoking or if the parents were doing so, or if no one really ever went to the park anymore except young couples who had fallen in love.

"I just remembered something," she said, staring off into space. "I remember swinging, like this, at a park, and my dad was pushing me so that I could get higher up into the air. The way my stomach dropped just now, that feeling of free-fall, it just triggered the whole thing!"

She was getting excited, and I was happy to see that she had remembered something, even sometime seemingly inconsequential about her past. I was glad that she had a real history; she had real memories, although they were all locked up somewhere and unavailable to her.

"That's great news!" I exclaimed. I was busy lifting my feet and spiraling around as the swing unwound itself.

"You're going to make yourself sick, stupid," she advised, finally turning to look at me, giggling.

"Guess that means I'll need a kiss to get better," I replied, trying to focus on her as I spun around, but she was gone again, a blur. I tried again on the next pass.

How many dreams do we surpass when we fly?

"Or a knuckle sandwich," she said, holding up her fist. Another thing about her was that she loved to employ silly clichés, and would even go so far as to set up a conversational situation just for a reason to use one. She made a good game of it, and it seemed that I had just fallen victim to one of her setups. I didn't mind.

"Or a knuckle sandwich," I echoed, putting my feet down on the ground. "I feel dizzy!"

"I wonder why memories come back to me so randomly," she said, resuming swinging. "The mind works so strangely."

"Do you think that if you feel other sensations, or see other sights, that it might trigger more memories?" I asked, already feeling that the question had been answered, but curious about what her thoughts were on the subject.

"I don't know. Maybe. The smell of burning toast and newspapers at the deli around the corner, the texture and smell of a warm towel after washing my face in the morning, the feeling in my stomach as I drop for just a second in the arc of a swing, and even the sound that a bus makes as its air brakes release pressure when it stops to pick me up... all of those things have triggered random memories for me – even if the memories weren't nearly as relevant to what was happening as the one I just had. Like the time that you dropped a knife into the kitchen sink and it reminded me of a ghost story that I'd heard once, when I must have been a teenager. Sometimes it's with songs, too. I'll remember an entire song, a little slice of an afternoon in the middle of the wintertime, or the way a story kept me from sleeping one night, all because of the seemingly unimportant and coincidental like the sound of a knife falling against the metal basin of a kitchen sink," she paused for a moment.

"There are people out there that will tell you that memories are all just random chemical coding stored in the nerves inside of your brain and that false memories can be fabricated just as easily as real ones, as long as you know what you're doing. I've asked them," she said.

"Scary thought," I responded, considering that the people she'd asked might be the kind of people that would do something like that, given the right equipment and a willing subject. Once upon a time, I chose to believe that there was something out there, something beyond what was easily explainable. Today, that something meant that a strange girl had become a part of my life and her story was a little beyond what was rational, what was logical, what seemed to be truth... and I caught myself overanalyzing it all, something I tended to do that had broken apart trust in the relationships that came before her, something I had learned to do as an unwilling defensive mechanism as a result of, most recently, the divorce. I trusted her, for whatever reason, and in doing so, I accepted her mysteries as and strange, hidden past as part of the deal.

"I've asked a man to try to help me recall things, you know," she said, standing up, stepping away from the swing. I stayed put, no longer preoccupied with twisting the creaking chains.

"Did it work?" I asked, assuming that they'd followed through.

"He wouldn't do it. He said he might be able to if we were to sign all sorts of releases and contract out with a private lab somewhere outside of the local jurisdiction, because there's some kind of investigation starting up about certain types of procedures his company has been trying out. He said it's not really in the news yet, but that it's about to be. Anyway, he feels that even if we were to make the effort, there's too large a margin of error and that it could potentially do more harm than good, permanently erasing parts of more than just my memory, crossing over into my personality and identity itself."

"A risk you shouldn't take," I finished for her.

"A risk that he's not willing to take, at least not yet. We've only been talking for a few weeks; he's been giving me more time to recover the memories on my own."

"Well, I for one am glad that you're taking more time to remember things instead of going with such an invasive approach. I really enjoy it when you're around and would hate it if you wiped your mind clean and forgot all about me, too!" I said, watching her as she walked around, circling a park bench.

She smiled and kept orbiting.

"What's his name, anyway?" I asked, out of curiosity.

"Partain. Dr. Evan Partain," she said.
Chapter 08

"There's a trucker's rest stop off the highway about 20 kilometers from here, but I think that it closes at dark. Maybe we can get a ride from a freight driver there or from someone who's parked their car there for the night."

We couldn't take her car because she'd let her boyfriend borrow it for the week to go see his parents, who lived a few states away.

"Janine," I said. "Can't we just buy a map?"

She opened her eyes and sourly glared at me.

"I've been following you around all day. In addition, don't get me wrong – I don't mind! But I'm trying to remember how to get to this specific truck stop, because there's a very specific diner next door, and last time I checked, it wasn't listed on any map."

"Why does one truck stop or diner matter over any other when we'll probably pass five others on the way?" I asked, not following her logic.

"Just trust me on this one. I've hitched rides out of this particular one before, and I know that it's much safer there, where the people can be trusted," she responded as if she were stating the obvious. "And they've got great grilled cheese sandwiches," she added.

"Even though we're going in the opposite direction than we need to be?"

"The trail isn't going to get much colder than it already has, so just relax. We'll find her."

I didn't believe that at all, not for a moment, but Janine was too helpful to me to let her walk away because I couldn't restrain myself from mouthing off to her about how idiotic this detour was. So I stopped arguing and let her think about where it was that we were to next.

"The facility that Partain worked out of was north of here, on the outside of the city perimeter, but we'll only be able to reach it from certain access roads since the main roads leading to it have all been closed off. If I can talk to the right people, they'll be able to tell me everything that we need to know about every route, even if none of it's on the map. People off the grid know about places that are off the grid," she informed me. "After that, we can take a cab, even, hitch a ride, buy a tank, whatever."

I hoped that we wouldn't need a tank.

We made it to the rest stop a few hours later, where we found that the diner next door was still open and was relatively empty.

"Aren't you hungry?" Janine asked, heading straight for the door. "I'm starving!"

I followed her into the diner, where we sat down at a booth against the wall, in the corner, away from any foot traffic that could possibly have arrived at such a late hour. She ordered some pancakes, a grilled cheese, and two slices of apple pie, and I ordered a cup of coffee. The waitress seemed disinterested in us, bored even, and that was encouraging. At least we didn't appear to be lunatics on a delusional quest, which was how I was starting to feel.

The food came quickly, and since I'd already finished the first cup, I ordered another.

"Long night ahead of you?" The waitress asked through a mouth full of chewing gum, filling my cup up.

"I expect that it will be," I answered.

Once she'd left the table, I brought the abduction up again.

"Why would someone abduct her?" I wondered out loud.

"Maybe someone needs her for something, for some sort of plan."

"Well, they obviously know more than she does, if that's the case. If they know who she is and think that her memories can be recovered, does that mean they're going to do more tests on her? Does it mean they're going to conduct more experimental treatments that might hurt her? We need to find them and put a stop to it before they can do any more damage to her than they've already done."

"Maybe she doesn't want us to find her."

"If someone knows how to unlock her memories," I said, a chill passing through me as I thought of the possibly terrible methods that the hypothetical doctors we were discussing might have had at their easy disposal for extracting information from subjects with memory problems. "Then they can make her forget all about us."

When I said us, I really meant me.

The waitress dropped off the food, along with a fresh cup of coffee for both of us. She raised an eyebrow when she realized that Janine planned on eating everything that we'd ordered.

"Here you go," she said, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Thanks," I answered, and she walked back into the kitchen.

Janine took a sip of water and looked right at me.

"Are you really willing to go wherever you have to so that you can do something about this?" She asked in a serious tone that was unusual for her.

"Of course I am."

"There's no question, then, no doubt in my mind that I am willing to do the same thing for both of you. You guys are about the only family that I've got."

"Thanks. This is all too big for me to really understand," I said, putting my face into my hands. Normally, I wasn't spending the day dealing with things like kidnapping, brainwashing, and corporate espionage. I didn't even know where to begin figuring out the scattered trail of clues filling up the space all around me, or whose information was legitimate, or where I could find my heart. The most in depth decision that I'd made in weeks had centered on which digital merchant I wanted to shop my music out to, what royalty rates they'd be able to provide to me, and how long it would take to propagate through their retail outlets. All of those types of decisions were already a world away from me and growing more distant every minute.

"All things that really matter are," Janine said, reaching for my cigarettes.

"You really shouldn't smoke," I said, allowing the subject of the conversation to shift. Changing the subject was another bad habit of mine, I suppose; I tended to do it whenever I felt uncomfortable or felt I was getting too deeply involved in things that showed emotional weakness or vulnerability on my part.

Inside, I felt on the verge of breaking down and crying like a baby, right there in the middle of some weird diner outside of the city; I felt like screaming and tearing out hair, doing the whole biblical weeping and gnashing of teeth in a pile of ash, just to indicate the deep levels of my torment. Inside, I felt like an explosion was occurring, and I was applying all of the force that I could muster within me to hold it in, to contain it, to keep it from breaking out, making me lose my grip completely. It was much easier to stay on the lighter side of things conversationally, and as long as Janine would let me remain there, things would be fine. Contained. Controlled.

Corentine was the only person I'd ever know that I felt completely at ease with opening up to, and that connection happened almost instantly. And she was gone without a trace.

"Technically, I shouldn't be doing a lot of the things that I do, you know," she said, lighting the cigarette, then passing it to me. She reached into the pack and pulled out another one. "But I'm not like anyone else that you know, am I? Smoking is hardly breaking the rules compared to the other ways that we're defying what's 'supposed' to be 'right'," she accented the words with her hands, making sign language quotation marks before lighting the second cigarette. "You're avoiding talking about this already, I know, and I want you to know that I noticed."

"Guess I'm still in shock or something," I offered.

The waitress returned, dropping off the check.

"I'll pay this," Janine offered, and I shrugged.

"If you want," I said, looking out the window.

She grabbed the check and got her wallet out, then walked up to the counter. I wasn't paying that much attention to her, but when she still hadn't returned to the table after a few moments, I looked towards the counter to make sure everything was okay. It would be completely unacceptable for someone else to vanish on me, I thought.

She was talking to a man at the counter, and he was pointing in the direction of another man working under the hood of a RV in the parking lot. She shook the first man's hand, and then returned to the table.

"Ready to go?" She asked.

"Yeah, let's get moving," I said. "It's not getting any earlier."

I left a tip on the table and finished my coffee off in a gulp, and then we left the diner. Janine yawned and stretched as we stepped into the parking lot.

"I'm so sleepy," she informed me. "That coffee didn't seem to work at all!"

I thought about how I could use a nap myself, but I doubted that I'd be able to sleep anytime soon. It was getting chilly outside, and the sky was overcast, clouds obscuring the rising moon. The iodine lights in the parking lot clicked and buzzed and the sound of cars on the nearby highway were a dull drone, filling the background with ambient noise.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard sirens. I stopped for a moment, looking up at the sky, taking a deep breath of the cool night air.

Janine hailed the man standing at the mobile home, and he returned her wave, so she started briskly walking towards him.
Paris had its moments. The French were generally amicable, but I'm sure that her impressive command of their language helped us out a lot. I'd heard stories of less prepared tourists who were stranded in a city full of people who understood English but refused to speak it, strictly on principle.

The city smelled like a thousand years of humanity, the same as all of the other old cities scattered across Europe did to one degree or another. I guess that being in love and abroad makes things seem a little better, though; the dust and soot take on a charm of their own when they're part of a place's personality, no longer mere negligence or disrepair on the part of the city's inhabitants.

Paris was a city undoubtedly filled with waste, dust, and soot, but it was also a city filled with the smells of green hay, candle wax, and melting butter. Dark, dusty library basements were overflowing with the records of generations already forgotten. Steam rose on cobblestone pathways like the ghosts of famous expatriates. It was one of those places you loved to visit, but you'd never want to live there; the veneer would have worn a little too thin in places and the perfection rested a little bit too far across the line: on the fairy tale side of things. But that's what made it perfect, that morning as I watched the city come alive from our balcony, as she alternated between chewing her nails with utmost concentration and dropping halves of strawberries into her glass of champagne, curious about the bubbles that appeared from nowhere around each sinking piece of fruit.

I turned to follow Janine in the direction of the RV. She had already arrived and was speaking to the man who she had called to from across the parking lot. He wore a red checked flannel shirt that looked like he hadn't washed it in years, and his modern-looking glasses slid down his nose as he explained to Janine that his engine had overheated and that it looked like he was stranded in the parking lot for the night.

Janine raised an eyebrow, looked under the hood, and immediately commenced tinkering with the workings of the engine. The man and I both peered over her shoulder, trying to see what she was doing.

"You're in my light," she said, and we moved out of the way. "Can you pass me a screwdriver?"

"Hold on for a sec," the man said, walking over to a small red toolbox, where he evidently was keeping a screwdriver. He passed her the tool, and few moments later, she closed the hood of the RV.

"Try to start it," she ordered, smugly sticking her hands into her pockets after wiping them off on her pants. He hopped into the driver's seat and turned the ignition switch. The engine started on the first try.

"Very impressive mechanical work going on there! Now it runs so quietly!" The man said to her, ignoring me completely. "What's your name?"

"A little trick I picked up once when I was dating a mechanic," she replied with a nonchalant expression. "The name's Janine." She shook his hand. He lingered, holding her hand just a little bit longer than he probably should have.

"I appreciate the help," he answered, still looking at her. "I'm totally useless when it comes to the mechanics of things, so you just saved me a call to the tow service and a high probability of getting scammed by a shop somewhere. My name's Hunter."

Hunter wore glasses, the kind that looked expensive and hip, made of brushed ultra-light alloy. They were the kind of spectacles you'd find in fashion magazines from exotic foreign countries that you'd never been to and couldn't pronounce the names of. Interestingly, the glasses were in direct contrast with the rest of his disheveled style, in fact, with his appearance as a whole, as if they were the one monument to a life of prosperity amidst the ruins of a man now on the road. He was unkempt, and I compared his style with that of a typical eight year old; it seemed that he had made an effort to coordinate an outfit, but he'd failed miserably at matching things up. His shirt was buttoned incorrectly, wrinkled, and smelled slightly like mildew. One of his shoes was untied. His socks didn't match.

It was intentional, of course, I'm sure of it, though he'd deny that if you were to ever ask him about it. It was all part of some statement he was probably making in defiance against whatever life he'd lived before. He was probably some rich kid trying to be a bohemian.

Was it wrong of me to make such an assumption about him based merely on my first cursory impression? It seemed like he wanted people to look at him and think he was stupid, disorganized, and carefree. There was something about the way he looked at us, though, that made me think that there was a lot more going on in his head than he was letting on.

Despite all of those seemingly unattractive qualities, he seemed like a good person. I had one of those feelings that you get, you know, when you click with someone straight off the bat. Not quite the same as it was with Cor, how could it be? But not altogether different, either. Could we trust him? Was I wrong?

"Where are you heading, Hunter?" I asked.

"Well, I'm kind of just driving around, but I planned on going out west once I checked out the town. Almost made it, too, until I started having this problem with the truck overheating. You know, see the sights of America before I settle down, before I start a life somewhere."

Well, at least he seemed to fit into the mold of what I'd expected of him by my precursory assumptions about him: probably not knowing how to add coolant to the radiator, probably ignorant about how to change the oil. I wondered if he'd ever even looked under the hood.

"I owe you one," he said. "Can I give you two a lift somewhere?"

"Actually," Janine answered, "my friend and I need a ride to a place that's about an hour outside of the city. Think you can help us out with that?"

"Don't see why that would be a big problem," he said, opening the passenger door of the RV and gesturing for us to climb on board. "Guess taking a cab outside of the city would be a pretty expensive fare, huh? Why else would you want to get a lift out there, right?"

"It's actually kind of complicated," I answered, a little put off. I turned to Janine. "If it's a problem, we can find someone else to help us."

"It's not a problem, man," he said to me. "If you're ready, I'm ready! Just point me in the right direction."

"We appreciate it," I said to him, kicking at a piece of broken glass on the asphalt and looking back into the diner, which was as empty as ever.

"You guys don't mind pitching in for a little gas, do you?" Hunter asked us. "This beast of a ride may be comfy, but she only gets about seven miles to the gallon." Although he had posed it as a question, I think that it was more of a friendly way of telling us that it was an expected contribution. There was a glimmer in his eye that made me a little curious, but I dismissed it.

"Not a problem," I replied. "It's good to see you've got reclining chairs in here," I said, yawning. I was much more tired than I had realized and the coffee from earlier hadn't done a bit of good.

"You can find your way around in here," he stated, indicating the entire cabin of the RV. "Make yourself at home. Sure you guys want to head out tonight?"

Janine looked at her watch.

"It's pretty late already," she observed. "But we shouldn't call it a night yet. Besides, I bet you're pretty eager to make your way back towards the city once you drop us off."

"Cool," he said, smiling at her. "I'm gonna take a bathroom break, then, before we hit the road. There are drinks in the fridge if you want something," he offered.

"Do you think we can trust this guy?" I asked quietly asked Janine once Hunter had walked out of earshot and was closer to the diner.

She checked her watch again.

"It's getting late. It will take us at least an hour to get to Partain's facility. We could call a cab, but it's probably going to take more than an hour for one to get out here, then another hour or more to get to the location. A ride's a ride, and we've got one now. Or would you rather wait until tomorrow, when the trail might be colder than it already is?" Sarcasm, maybe, but she made a good point.

"We don't know him, though. And he might think we're crazy if we tell him the truth."

"So don't tell him anything, stupid!" She shoved me playfully. "Relax. It's just a ride. I'm sure that a night watchman will be at the labs and can let us check the surveillance tapes to see if Cor's passed through there. Maybe we'll run into someone that's seen her, which would make things a lot easier for us for sure."

"If she's been out to the labs in the first place, anyway," I said. We were grasping at straws, and I knew it. "She might have gone somewhere else – someplace that we'll never be able to find her at."
"Walk some more?" I asked, stretching out a little.

"Let's," she said, standing.

We walked around the neighborhoods for a while in the early hours of morning before returning to our room at a little bed and breakfast. The hotel owner was behind the counter working on a crossword when we made our way through the front door towards the stairs that led up to our room. She nodded at us with a knowing wink and returned her attention to the crossword puzzle. I'm sure that she had plenty of experience with drunken American couples stumbling in at all hours, and she'd found that it was best to just ignore them, for the most part, until they'd moved on.

Shortly thereafter, we climbed into bed together, shivering from the chill in the sheets. With chattering teeth, she expressed what I interpreted at the time as the first signs of becoming bored with me.

"I'd like to get a job once we get back home," she said, shaking.

"Are you drunk?" I asked, not believing that she was serious.

"A little, but sober enough. I need to pull more weight with things. You can't just hang around with me while we wander around town every day for the rest of our lives, you know. I need a job, something to help with stuff around the house, at least. You know, I'd like to be the one to pay for our dinner sometimes," she said, and I could tell by the tone of her voice that she really was serious.

"No. I mean, I don't know," I answered her, defiance already creeping into my voice. "I've got plenty of money left from the divorce settlement; it should get us through a pretty good stretch of time. If anything useful came out of that relationship, it's the cash."

She kicked her feet a little, as was her habit when she first climbed into bed, something she did when she was excited or trying to stay warm. It was just another one of those things that you always notice but don't really pay a whole lot of attention to until the weirdest times, when they either annoy you or seem inappropriate. This time, it was both. I didn't want her to leave if she didn't have to. In my mind, we didn't have to stay in the apartment forever; there were countless cities we could explore together. The idea of getting a job and settling down seemed to be a threat to the magic, so of course I was opposed to it!

"It's not really about the money, though," she informed me.

"What's it about?" I asked, suddenly feeling very doubtful of my own ability to control the next few minutes. I felt a lump rising in my throat, worry that she needed the space to get away from me, that she was bored with me or that I had outlived my usefulness to her, or worse, that she'd concluded that she didn't love me anymore. When you're caught up in moments like that, the logic of the situation is completely overridden by the emotional entanglements you have with the other person. I was getting scared. I'd been down the road of doubt and instability before and the only place it ended was when one party reached a point of being too broken to carry on any farther.

"It's about the fact that you went from being completely independent, answering to no one but yourself. Now you're at the other end of the spectrum, all because of the one day that I knocked on your door. The one day that I chose your specific door, and I changed everything in your life. It's about how you never asked for any of this, and one day I was just there, needing help, and how, in a few short months, you're traveling all over the world with some stranger who has amnesia about everything in her life up to the point that she met you," she spoke quickly. She'd obviously been thinking about it for a while.

"It's about how you've never said no, how you've never been unkind about things, how you've never gotten frustrated or annoyed with me and all of my weird stories and problems. You've been nothing but perfect, and I can't help but feel like it's all a house of cards, about to be blown away, leaving me lost without you," she was crying as she spoke, and I felt a little sick and nervous, all sorts of emotions triggering a conflict of physical reactions within me. I didn't move.

"Lost without you is something that I can't take," she continued. "Not now, and I don't know why that is or how it came to be that way, but I just couldn't go on. I want to give you space so I don't suffocate you, so I don't drown you in all of me."

"I've had a few lessons in drowning, but this isn't one of them," I replied. It was, as usual, a light-hearted response to a serious topic, but I knew that she'd understand. She always did.
Chapter 09

"Have you seen anything weird behind us?" Janine asked.

"Anything weird?" Hunter repeated the question.

"Guess not," she decided.

"What do you think that you saw?" I asked, pulling the blinds apart in the back window of the RV so that I could get a better view out onto the road behind us.

"Nothing, I'm just being paranoid I guess," she said.

"Paranoia's a good thing after a day like the one we're having," I reminded her.

"I probably just need a nap."

I nodded, reclining the oversized and comfortable swiveling chair.

"That's a good idea. Hunter, can you wake me up in 15 or 20 minutes?"

"No problem, man. No problem."

When I slept, I dreamed, and while I wouldn't go so far as to call the dream a nightmare, it definitely was frightening. I wasn't sure about its basis in reality, but I knew that my mind was reflecting on the past few months, and more specifically, the events of the past few days.

It was continuation of an old dream.

I couldn't find my voice, and I was trying to warn Cor about a sudden, menacing darkness moving towards her from the far end of the corridor behind her. It was right behind her, like a vast shadow, except that it was more substantial than any shadow; it was almost as if the distance and imagery behind her was being erased with each moment that passed.

She didn't notice the panicked look on my face; she just kept smiling at me, doodling little neon designs with her finger on the glass. I started pointing frantically to the approaching blackness behind her, but she didn't respond. She didn't react to me at all.

As it came closer to her, it took on the shape of what appeared to be a giant angel or demon, wings spreading out of the blackness and taking shape, and then whatever it was took on the more recognizable dimensions of a man. A man with wings: that's an angel, right? When the eyes of the creature opened, they were the color of fire, and I finally cried out, punching at the mirror as hard as I could. The glass broke into thousands of pieces and fell away. Blood dripped from my hand to the bathroom floor, quickly forming a puddle much like the one that was caused by the overflowing sink in the apartment, back on Day One.

There was no wall behind the bathroom mirror; instead, there was a long tunnel. It reminded me of a ventilation shaft, like the kind that you see in movies where the lead character has to make his way through it in order to avoid being detected and captured by security. Or monsters. For some reason, it seemed like a good idea to climb into the ventilation shaft that was behind the mirror. I took the towel off of its hanger on the wall behind me and wrapped it around my bleeding hand, mindlessly twisting it around and around in my fist so that I could stop the bleeding. I concentrated on seeing something in the shaft in front of me besides an inky darkness. I climbed in, breaking the faucet off of the sink, ignoring it as it crumbled away into nothingness, part of a forgotten scene.

After a few moments of crawling through the shaft, I saw a light, so I kept on in the only direction available to me. Turning around at that point would have been more difficult than pressing on. I reached the end of the shaft a little while later, and while I was aware that time had passed, everything so far had passed by me like a blur. I had the strange thought that my dream was causing time itself to become skewed.

I emerged into an empty room where the walls were painted white and perfectly matched the ceiling and the floor. It was as if I had entered into a large cube, where any side could serve as the floor or the ceiling should the room be rotated. I'm not sure why that idea occurred to me, either, but it seemed to be important. I knew that I was there to meet someone but I wasn't sure why I was the only person there if that was the case.

I felt something brush against my ankle, so I looked down, finding a skinny orange cat beside me, looking up at me with wide eyes.

"Do not be afraid," it said to me, and I remembered hearing those words somewhere else before, but I couldn't recall where.

"I'm not," I answered with total conviction. I had no questions whatsoever about why a cat would be speaking to me in English.

"It's a fact," the cat began, "that there are three fearless types that exist. The first is a warrior. The second, a fool." The cat paused, licking a paw.

I noticed that the walls were fading away around us, and that we were in the middle of the sea, floating on the surface as if we were on a raft. The waves lapped up against the sides of the now invisible cube.

"The third, my friend," and he paused again, I think mostly for effect, because it was a dream like that. "The third type of person who has no fear is a professional thief, as he plans his crime meticulously and knows that he will never be apprehended. That is, as long as he never makes a mistake."

I tried to speak, but could not.

"Who's making a mistake?" the cat asked me. "Who's never made a mistake?"

I woke up when my face hit the floor of the RV. Random objects were flying all around me and all I could really focus on was the way that the carpet looked. I heard Janine repeating the word "concentrate" under her breath and I tried to get a handle on what was happening all around me. I was still groggy from sleeping so heavily, but I forgot about the dream shortly after that, instead focusing on the more immediate and pressing matters at hand.

I looked up and saw Janine leaning against the cabin wall, one hand helping her to balance as the RV rocked around, bucking as if it were trying to throw us out of it, the other hand pressed against her head. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be doing a pretty good job concentrating on whatever it was that she was trying to focus on, because she didn't react at all to the swiveling captain's chair that kept banging into her leg in rhythm with the vehicle's chaotic motions.

Hunter, safely buckled into the driver's seat, was wrestling with the steering wheel, craning his head to check the mirrors. He wasn't doing as good of a job watching the road ahead of us as he was watching whatever it was that was behind us, obviously, which had led to my fall from the reclining chair in the first place. I'm not sure how I slept through the chaos leading up to that moment, but I remember thinking that it was already becoming a bad habit that I needed to break: sleeping through disaster after disaster. While it seemed to be keeping me alive, it was also keeping me dangerously misinformed about what was going on.

"What's going on?" I yelled across the RV.

"You're not going to believe it until you see it!" Hunter exclaimed, still concentrating most of his attention on the mysterious events transpiring behind us.

"TREE!" I yelled back at him, watching the road ahead of us, since he was doing a piss-poor job of it. He swerved the truck, hard, setting it into another wave of bounces and rocking while new items were dislodged from wherever he'd had them stowed away. At least none of the stuff getting trashed from all of his terrible driving was ours, since we left in such a hurry and so impulsively that we didn't pack anything to bring with us. It was a good thing that we didn't have any pets on board, too. I always had thoughts like that in the weirdest moments.

"This damned rig is too damned slow!" Hunter yelled in frustration, punching the steering wheel.

Unsure of what I could do that would be helpful, I made my way towards the front of the truck, climbing over the various shifting piles of bouncing and rattling junk, ultimately landing in the copilot's chair beside Hunter.

"Watch out!" he yelled at me, reaching over with his right arm, trying to grab something that I hadn't noticed before, but it was too late. A laptop computer bounced out of the seat at about the same time as I landed in it, and because he was trying to catch it, he jerked the steering wheel too hard, causing the computer to fly into the door beside me. Over all the rest of the noise, I heard a loud crack, and then the laptop tumbled towards to the floorboard at my feet.

"Damn it," he said, putting both hands back on the steering wheel.

I didn't say anything, wondering why the laptop was just sitting in the chair in the first place, and why it hadn't fallen to the floor before I decided to occupy the chair. It didn't matter; I knew that we'd figure out a way to repair it if it was broken, which was probably all that Hunter was concerned about anyway. Never mind that his vehicle, more expensive than a small house, was being trashed by his terrible driving while we fled from something behind us that I still hadn't seen. Never mind that I was still confused about what was going on, while Janine stood behind us, chanting, concentrating. I figured that I would be most useful as a spotter and copilot for Hunter by moving up to the front seat, since he seemed to be having issues focusing on the road ahead of us.

"Don't wrap us around any phone poles, okay?" I asked him, trying to grab the seat belt.

Before he had a chance to respond, he hit the brakes a little too late as we entered a turn, and a series of billboard support beams came into view just as we were falling off of the road onto the outside shoulder, skidding the sides of the RV against a guardrail. I looked out of the window beside me and saw sparks and piece of both the truck and the guardrail breaking off and flying into the air behind us.

"There's a ledge!" I informed him. "A ledge!"

We inched closer towards the precipice, the guardrail becoming weaker and weaker. At least we were noticeably slowing down as the friction from our extended grinding on the metal rail created drag. I looked into the mirror, trying to see what was behind us, just in time to see bright flashes of light. I heard the gunshots a split second later, as I realized that there was a car pursuing us.

"Shit!" I exclaimed, startled.

"Exactly," Hunter answered. I turned to face him.

"They're shooting at us AND driving without their headlights?" I asked.

His glasses had started to fall off of his nose. He pushed them back up to a more reasonable position.

"Seems like the long and the short of it," he said, biting his lip.

"This is insane."

He didn't respond to that for a second, concentrating on navigating through another turn.

"You guys have some explaining to do, man. People are chasing you with guns! You like felons or something?" he asked, jerking the wheel hard to the left to get us around the turn.

"We must be," I said to myself as Janine continued chanting.

"How long is she going to keep trying to pray us out of here?" he asked.

My question followed immediately after his.

"Who the hell is shooting at us?"

"Shutting up would be more useful than praying, because whatever it is she's doing back there isn't helping us at all," he continued. He spared a moment of his attention to give me an incredulous look. "Turn around and see if we've lost 'em," he said, swerving to avoid another guardrail as we went around another turn.

"Things are about to get really choppy," he advised.

I instinctively ducked down when another series of gunshots rang out, although, judging by their inaccuracy, the most immediate danger seemed to be Hunter's driving. I turned towards Janine, making sure that she was okay. She had stopped chanting/praying/mumbling, but she still had her eyes closed. She gripped the seat so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. There was a loud bang followed by the entire truck tilting to the right. Everything seemed to move in slow motion after that.

"We just lost a tire!" Hunter informed us.

I started to ask if it was because the people behind us had shot it, but then decided that it didn't really matter what the reason was, just that something bad was going to happen because of it.

Everything continued to tilt. Cargo doors flew open, spilling clothing, boxes of food, cans of soup, circuit boards, and other strange paraphernalia out into the cabin of the RV.

"Hold on," Hunter said, as if we needed to be told to do so.

Then we fell off of the road. We were tossed around inside of the cabin as if a gigantic, angry child had taken hold of the RV and given it a mighty shake, and then thrown it to the side. Hours later, everything stopped moving.

"Janine?" I called out, smelling smoke. "Hunter?'

Janine mumbled something in response.

"I think something is on fire in here," I said, dislodging my leg from underneath the seat it had somehow gotten stuck beneath.

"There's a fire extinguisher inside of one of the pantries," Hunter told me.

I opened one eye, examining the pantries, noting the fire extinguisher lying on the floor beside me. I realized that my head was throbbing.

"There WAS a fire extinguisher inside of the pantry," I said, "until it smashed into my head."

"Knock some sense into you," Janine muttered. I wasn't sure if she intended it as a question or as an observation. At least she was okay.

"Dude, can you pass it up to me?" Hunter asked. "Just in case there really is a fire, you know. It might be important to put it out."

I grabbed the base of the extinguisher and shoved it towards the front of the truck, where Hunter's voice was coming from.
We were sitting beside each other at a corner cafe beneath our hotel room, a parade of faces streaming by around us, the sounds of commerce rising up in the hours before noon. This was Rome as we'd like to remember it, summertime, coffee and fresh juice for breakfast, with things like croissants and cheeses and fruit salads spread out on the table before us. The cobblestone streets were still wet from a brief thunderstorm the night before, but the humidity wasn't so bad that the museums were an appealing escape. We'd visited all of them twice, anyway.

She still had makeup on from the night before; mascara was streaked down her cheeks, leaving black marks where she'd been crying about something that had made her happy, some moment when there fireworks and light show made her recall something poignant and then it was the moon and stars, and maybe it had a little bit to do with the wine, which culminated in an emotional peak, some moment that I was both excited and frightened to share with her, another in the many that have permanently etched themselves into my memories. Most of her amber colored eye shadow had been rubbed away through sleep; sleep that, the night before, I had hoped would never arrive at the end of a day that I never wanted to end, as my leg fell off the side of the bed, a bed too small for any couple not in the mood for sharing with each other, but: we were far from that couple. We were incapable of being that couple in those days of Paris and Rome and London and St. Petersburg.

She was looking at her nails, as she often did, and I knew that she wanted to bite them, even though she'd already chewed them down to the quick. We were young and traveling abroad and she was nervous about something, and I loved her more than I could vocalize.

"Time's treated this city well," she said, and I lit a cigarette, spinning the metal lighter around in my hand a few times, partially because I liked the way that it felt and partially for the effect.

I stared out into the streets around us, remembering the Eiffel Tower, where just days before we'd climbed all the way to the top, stopping at the different observation decks for photos. My legs were tired and I blamed them when my knees buckled on the uppermost level, when really all that I was hiding was an irrational fear of falling. We're always falling, you know, she'd said to me. Life's a series of rises and falls, of crests and peaks, but that's all philosophical stuff; it's all in your head, simple figurative images to describe complicated relationships and situations. When you're really faced with the potential for free fall, no matter how irrational it may be, something stupid happens, like your knees buckling and you end up making an embarrassing drop that you hope people will interpret as awe, as wonder, that you've been taken with the beauty of the city around you.

Of course, she knew the truth, right as it happened. She could always tell when I was covering something up and what was going on inside of my head, especially when it really mattered, insisting that the connection we had was more than just the shared link we'd discovered, that first day, which seemed so far away then, back in the apartment. I wasn't sure then, at the beginning, and I never really could be, but you have to trust people sometimes, and she'd never given me a reason not to trust her completely. If I didn't take a chance with my heart, then what was the point?

"Do you like Rome?" I asked her, gesturing towards the street outside and the rest of the old city.

"It's much warmer than home, here," she said, and I knew that she wasn't referring to the temperature. "Wherever you're at is warm, anyway. The coffee's not bad, either."

"You can feel that there's a history here, you know?" I asked. "I mean to say that this city is old, a lot older than New York or any other city back in the states."

"It's a lot better than Paris was, too," she said. "Paris is such a beautiful city, but it's so hard to deal with the French! They're too caught up with being... French! Rome's is like the perfect city, it's got a lot of history, but it's also got a lot of life to it, a certain vitality that's missing in a lot of towns. A good city for being in love. Paris was like being trapped in an old movie. Everything was mothballed and preserved, like it was trying to remain in the modernist era or something."

"I'll drink to that," I said, raising my glass of orange juice. She tapped her glass against mine, and then turned the bottom up, draining it empty. She belched loudly enough that a nearby waiter stopped cleaning a table for a moment and looked at her, raising a bemused eyebrow.

"Seven," I rated her.

"Only seven? That was at least an eight," she argued.

"Five or six, probably. You get a point or two for location and cuteness," I shot back.

"Psh," she said, dismissing my generous rating.

The waiter resumed wiping off tables.

"But the French!" she resumed her rant. "The French, they had their heyday competing with Spain's little bullfighting thing, back at the turn of the 20th century, right? It's like they never got over it, like they can fool everyone into thinking that they're still the most romantic country on earth and that Paris is like some fairy tale magical place where all loves blossom and grow!"

"They drink a lot of wine there," I pointed out. "They've all got a permanent buzz going on. I think they live longer than everyone else, too."

"God knows you'd have to get drunk every day if you had to live there," she answered, reaching for my glass of juice. "Are you going to finish that?"

"It's all yours," I said. She'd already started drinking it, anyway.

"Want to go see the Vatican today?" she asked.

"Jesus Christ, superstar," I answered, finishing my cappuccino.
Chapter 10

We gathered in a circle around the little kitchenette table inside of the RV as the tiny, overworked ventilation fan in the roof dutifully assisted the removal of smoke from the air. We'd opened the doors, and most of the windows were broken, so the smoke was clearing out quickly. Despite all of the damage sustained during the road race that led us to the bottom of the ravine, the microwave oven and gas range inside were still functional enough for everyone to heat some food up.

Hunter attempted to crank the RV's motor so that we could run the air conditioner and cycle the air faster, but we'd ruined something inside of the engine for good when we crashed. The motor wouldn't even turn over.

"Once the batteries die and the natural gas tank runs out, we're out of power for good," Hunter told us, arriving back at the table with a concerned look in his eyes. "We're going to need a tow truck to get this rig out of here, anyway, and it's so late we should probably just camp out until the morning."

"I was going to say," Janine interjected, "that we're already pretty close to the main gates of the research center, at least according to where we marked it on the map." She looked at me for confirmation. "We could probably walk there in the morning after taking a little nap here while we wait for the sun to come up. I see that you've got some sleeping bags already out of storage," she added, pointing to the bundled bags that had shaken loose during our crash.

We moved outside of the partially overturned vehicle, setting up a little camping area nearby.

"Curiouser and curiouser," Hunter said, in an effort to bring some humor to the situation. I appreciated his reference to Alice's trip deeper and deeper into Wonderland on the other side of the looking glass. Though we'd only known each other for a few short hours, I already felt at ease around him; I felt that I could trust him. There was some warmth to his character that wasn't present in a lot of people that you meet in your day-to-day life. He was the kind of person that everyone looked at and instantly felt comfortable with, the kind of person you'd tell your deepest and darkest secrets to and they'd never get mentioned to anyone else, even though he'd probably heard it all before from the guy or girl before you. He seemed like someone who would be surprised be very little.

Regardless, I didn't plan on telling him too many secrets of mine, especially not as I sat in the woods behind the wreckage of an RV while the world outside of us faded into and out of reality. My fading world was a strange place to live in, but nothing appeared different than it had a week ago, or a month ago, it was just that my head and my heart were trying to solve problems that thought I'd never be able to overcome.

I was finding only a few answers to the questions that I had, and I'd only brought misfortune into the lives of the people who became involved with me. The world outside of our little sphere faded more, and I sank deeper into my own reflections, poking a stick into the ground.

We all sat silently for a few moments, warming our hands with the fire we'd built in the middle of our area. Something nagged at my thoughts, and I was waiting for it to surface. It seemed like something basic was missing that I needed to ask, but I felt like I kept forgetting it before I had a chance to speak up. Then it struck me.

"Why don't any of us have cell phones? We could just call a cab to come pick us up instead of camping out in the woods like this."

They looked at each other briefly, and then turned to me simultaneously.

"My phone broke in the RV crash," Janine stated.

"I haven't owned one in a pretty long time," Hunter said. "Hate to get tied down with a bunch of extra technology that I don't really need, you know?"

I thought that was a little strange, but I was tired, so I dismissed my sense of paranoia.

"But where's my phone? I always have it with me... except now. I can't remember what I did with it."

"Maybe you just set it down somewhere or lost it in the wreck," Janine hypothesized.

"No, I don't think so. I don't think that I've had it for a while now." I tried to remember the last time I'd used my mobile phone to call someone, but I couldn't recall a single time. I felt conflicted because I knew that I owned and paid the bill for the phone, but the only phone calls I could remember making had been on a landline at the house. The memory lapse wasn't just over the past week or so, though... I couldn't recall EVER making a phone call with a cellular. That just didn't make sense.

How could I forget having ever used something as common as a mobile phone?

"Maybe the fire extinguisher did more damage to your head than you'd like to admit. Want me to try to round up some aspirin?" Hunter said, glancing back over to Janine. I was definitely starting to become more paranoid, but I didn't want to let them know that I felt like something strange was going on between them. What was the deal with all of the shared glances they were having with each other?

I felt guilty for suspecting that Janine might be hiding something from me regarding the cell phone.

What else had I forgotten?

Feedback loops keep building up with each cycle, amplifying more and more with each reiteration, until at last they become deafeningly loud. My thoughts were doing that, and I needed a silencer for them, a way to break their circular flow. I knew I wouldn't work anything out if I kept dwelling on things that only provided me with inconclusive ideas that made me feel like I needed to question my own sanity and how much I would be able to trust myself.

I felt like I was being too analytical to be genuinely insane. In the rock/paper/scissors argument inside of my head, being slightly neurotic canceled out being genuinely certifiable. But was that just another sign of mental instability?

To answer: I couldn't trust myself anymore, not completely, since I couldn't work out why I'd forgotten a few things. Flawed logic or not, I would have to trust that Janine (most importantly) and Hunter (without a motive for misleading me) were sane, rational, and there to help me. Therefore, I decided to stop questioning inconsistencies in their behavior while I focused on working out my own mental glitches.

"We'll make some more progress in the morning when there's better light out," Hunter stated. "I'm going to get some shut-eye. You should do the same; you're both looking a little worse for the wear. Don't worry about the RV. Someday, I'll buy another one... or maybe I won't. This one was a piece of crap in the first place."

"You're right," I agreed. "My head does kind of hurt. I haven't slept regularly in weeks. It's probably just nerves or something. The phone's probably at the house next to the bed or something."

Janine nodded dismissively.

"I'm really tired, too!" She exclaimed, sounding more eager than I would have expected her to. Maybe she was just ready to curl up in the sleeping bag, since it was getting cold out there. "Let's get some rest."

"See you in a few hours, then," Hunter concurred, reaching for a rolled up sleeping bag.

I followed suit, still trying to work out what didn't seem to add up with my memories. I remembered what Partain had implied back in the bar, but kept the thought at arm's length. I didn't want to get sucked into an even more paranoid thought process and start doubting my own sanity. If Partain had been telling the truth and I'd somehow undergone one of Synchro's treatment processes, then everything was up in the air. Everything. If that was the case, then there was nothing in the world I could believe in any more.

I looked over to Janine and Hunter, who appeared to have fallen asleep already. The fire had died down considerably. I'd been thinking for longer than I realized, but I still couldn't explain the unshakeable feeling that something definitely wasn't right – something even more strange than the reasons that had led us to the bottom of a ravine in the woods, camping out in the middle of the night, waiting to make an early morning visit to an illegal research facility.

I worried for a little while longer. At some point, I finally fell asleep.
I was trying to paint the angel again when she walked into to the room. The canvas always ended up being too contradictory for its own good, so I'd always end up dragging it into the shower to scrub the acrylic off. Whenever the need to create something meaningfully symbolic would arise, I'd do it all over again. It was always this angel showing up, this angel I'd inevitably end up trying to wash down the drain.

I tended to take on projects, and once every month or so I'd get interested in something new, and the month that she'd arrived was the one in which I had decided that I was going to learn how to paint. Plans of painting thousands of masterpieces filled my head; I dreamed of gallery showings where demand for my work exceeded my ability to supply, providing limitless funding for future endeavors. I had a desire for the approval of interesting and intelligent women; I wanted former friends and my current peers to look me up and envy me. I kept trying to paint this angel as a female with wide eyes similar to that of the anime style. She had broad, pointed wings and short hair with jagged cuts on the edges. I was getting frustrated as I felt that I was coming to the close of another failed attempt at painting this character when she walked into the room. She passed me, heading for the balcony, where she sat down.

She was eating a celery stick and her hair was up in a sideways ponytail, meaning she was in a hurry at some point or that she didn't care too much about it at another. She was talking on the telephone while she was chewing and I couldn't hear a word that she was saying. I'd go deaf when I'd been thinking too hard, setting the volume of the world all the way down to zero so I could focus my thoughts.

Her toes were curled under her feet and her knees were drawn up to her breasts. She was sitting on the balcony, leaning back in a green plastic patio chair, staring out at whatever the kind of things were that she'd see in the sky at night. I leaned to the left a little, just in time to catch her scratching her head just above her right ear. Her nail polish was chipped, but the nails were painted the color of Arizona mesas at dusk. The color of fading anger or a blow to the head, the dark red that comes after a bright flash of white. I touched my face, near my eyebrow, sore but not yet bruised.

Simple words always lead to terrible impacts.

I wondered what would happen to us, to those days, to the world. I wondered if she really would ever become just another series of words to me and if I'd be even less to her. If she'd ever become one of those stories that gave me the scars to prove its truth. If she could ever be less, and if my heart would explode for loving her more. I wondered if she'd be the one who made me say those rarely final words: I'll never love again.

Why would I?

She came back into the room, just as I was giving up for the night.

"Why do you keep washing it off?" She asked, referring to the fact that I kept taking the canvas to the shower. I'd even taken it out onto the sidewalk and washed it off with a garden hose a couple of times. "Why not just get a new canvas? You put more effort into erasing the stupid thing that you do into painting it. You must hate that angel more than you love her."

I sighed.

"I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the image, really, but it keeps coming up. I think that it wants to be created; I think that she wants to be seen. At least that's what I want with the angel, I guess," I continued, spinning myself in circles on one of the barstools I kept in the living room. I made myself feel a little bit dizzy.

She was standing at the bookshelf, so she selected a disc from her collection and loaded it into the player.

As the bluesy ragtime narrative began, I scratched my head.

"It's weird that you like this so much," I said.

"Why? It makes me happy. That's what music is supposed to do," she answered, stepping closer to me and placing her hands on my shoulders.

"It's alright, I suppose, just not my favorite," I said, relaxing as she began to work at the knots of tension in my shoulders. It seemed like I'd never get away from those knots in the muscles of my back.

"You're trying too hard," she said. "You should just let the painting create itself. Let you hands wander."

"It's easier said than done."

"I know. Sometimes you just have to put the brush down and realize that you're not meant to paint anything at all, at least not today. Sometimes you try to be a painter when you should really be doing the dishes or grocery shopping... or dancing with your girlfriend."

The song changed to a more upbeat number, as if she'd cued it, but I think her conversational timing had more to do with the fact that she knew the order of the tracks on the disc.

"They call this guy the Champion for a reason," she said, stepping back. She began a small dance move. "Because he's the best. Some of his songs are sad, some are happy, but the man knew exactly how to let the music just write itself, wandering all around. He let the music lead him."

I had to admit that the song's progression was making me feel a little bit better. She spun me around on the barstool.

"Kiss me," she demanded, and I complied. She raked her teeth across my lower lip. "Let's dance."

I stood up, took her left hand into mine, and placed my free hand on her hip. We began dancing our own version of the waltz, since I didn't really know how to dance in the first place. I'd never taken dance lesson and spent as much time holding the walls up at any function that I'd ever been to that required dancing as I did exhibiting my less than stellar moves. I'm not even sure that the way we were dancing would even be considered an acceptable form of any type, as I stepped on her toes every couple of steps. I lost count with the music, concentrating more on staring at her than maintaining proper cadence. She didn't seem to mind, so I didn't either. We continued for a while without speaking, until a slow song came on, and then we just stood there, holding each other, rocking in time to the music.

"Do you think we can stay like this forever?" she asked.

"I hope so," I answered.

"I never want to go home, you know," she said, holding me a little tighter. "Whatever it is that I forgot, whoever it may be that I've left behind, however it is that things were... they couldn't be like this."

I didn't say anything. I just listened to her, trying not to dwell on the implications, the likelihood, that there really was someone that she had left behind, someone who might possibly love her as much as I did. Someone who would come looking for her someday.

"Nothing, anywhere, could be like this, except for you and me, right now."

"Then don't ever leave," I suggested. "We can stay here or we can run away somewhere together. We can get away from today, climb in a time machine, and go back to a simpler time than now," I said, fantasizing out loud. It seemed like a good idea.

"This is the perfect time. Right now," she stopped moving and leaned back, looking up into my face and smiling. "Right now," she said.

And inside, I knew that it was.

Inside, I knew that she was right.
Chapter 11

I stood up, stretching my stiff limbs, and yawned. I watched the fog on my breath and immediately I felt colder as I moved away from what was left of the fire. It was still dark out; it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the sky as I looked up through the trees above me. I recalled the countless times before that we had done the same thing together, under very different circumstances.

I searched for firewood through a small clump of trees, selecting some substantial branches and limbs that had fallen to the ground. I gathered them into a pile so that I could scoop them all up and carry them back all at once. That made it easier to search around for other branches, since I was unencumbered by all the bulky sticks we'd need if we wanted a fire before we headed out.

I felt a little sick, and then, without warning, I vomited. I keeled down onto the ground, retching up the remains of the microwave dinner I'd eaten just a few hours ago. It was a good thing Hunter hadn't had much to eat; otherwise, it would have been wasted all over the forest floor. I worried about the reality of our situation. The Synchro Systems research lab we were looking for was supposed to be near a mountain trail that was over 3000 kilometers long. If she had chosen to vanish into the wilderness, we'd never be able to find her. I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and made my way back over to the meager pile of firewood and kindling that I had collected, hoping for her safe return.

After a few more moments of searching, I returned to the fire pit. The others appeared to be sleeping fitfully, so I added some of the branches to the flames, watching them smolder for a few moments while the water evaporated off of them.

The absurdity of the entire journey was becoming overwhelming as I recalled the events of the past week. If I had forgotten something as simple as using a telephone, I rationalized, then it had to be a possibility that I had also forgotten other critical elements that would have made the answers to my questions easy and apparent. Following that train of thought, I did begin to question my own sanity, debating the legitimacy of my perspective in the situation at hand. Maybe I didn't know what was going on any more because I was crazy. Maybe she'd left me and I'd blocked it out, not wanting to go through it all over again, and my ridiculous quest was the final sign, physically manifested, of my psychological break. It has to be a possibility, I said to myself. I can't rule anything out.

I looked over at Janine, still sleeping silently on the ground across from me, and then checked Hunter, who was snoring quietly. It was too cold out there for there to be a lot of insect noise in the woods, unlike what you'd hear in the summertime, when a wall of organic sound would surround you, singing in your ears like nature's lullaby, whispering you back to sleep if you woke too soon. Instead, there was a peaceful and strange silence, broken only by the sounds that we made at our temporary camp in the ravine's bottom. The fire crackled. Hunter snored. Janine rolled over in her bag.

It was all too real, though! I wasn't imagining it.

I wasn't charismatic enough, no matter what, to convince Janine to come along with me if it was a ghost chase, especially after everything we'd talked about over the past few weeks. She came along with me because something really was going on that wasn't easily explained. Removing Janine from the equation didn't change the fact that Hunter believed me and had extended an offer to help find Coren at the Synchro labs. I didn't think it was possible that we could all be suffering from the same delusion; the odds in favor of that had to be astronomically high. But how could I forget something as obvious as a cell phone?

Bad thoughts drifted down from the treetops as the dawn slowly crept in on us, interrupting my hopeful reflection on the progress I'd made in at least discovering what had happened to her and where she might have headed to if she wasn't kidnapped. Everything was pointing us in the direction of the labs nearby.

I realized that I had been drawing spirals in the dirt, circles within circles, strange whirling designs and patterns carved out of nothingness as I focused on connecting the dots of information that Partain had given with the fragments the informants and research agents had filled me in on. I was trying to add all of that to the information I'd figured out in my own research into Synchro, and then add all of that to what she'd said to me in our time together about her own treatments for memory loss.

I looked back to Janine, still sleeping soundly in the grass, curled up in a ball.

"I guess we should start putting it all on the table," Hunter said, to my surprise, sitting up and stretching.

"What makes you think that we haven't already?" I asked him, raising my voice a little. Janine stirred but didn't wake up.

"It's not that I don't trust you guys, but you've gotta keep in mind the circumstances in which we met. They're, uh, a little questionable," he said as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He put his glasses on and looked at me, continuing. "A couple of hours ago, we were in a car chase. Somebody was shooting us. I need to know why they were chasing you. Or why they were chasing her. Or if you have no idea, then I need to know that as well. Because they could have been chasing after me, man." Hunter was a morning person, I guess, because it seemed like he had a lot to talk about right after he woke up, especially opening up with a loaded statement like that. I didn't say anything, waiting.

"I know you guys are trying to rescue your girl from this place down the road that's done some things to her head, and you apparently can't go to the cops about it because the company's somehow in league with them, and that's cool. But I just met you guys last night and I already feel like I've been sucked into this thing in a way I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with!" There was a twinkle in his eyes as he said it, like he was almost to the point of crying, and I wasn't sure if he was upset or overjoyed, but perhaps it was a bit of both, though I couldn't begin to imagine why he'd be either.

"What are the odds that they'd be chasing after you guys instead of after me, I wonder," he said, almost to himself. I looked at his hand and saw that he was clacking some dice against each other nervously. He pulled out a granola bar from his jacket pocket, opened it, and ate it as if he was afraid it would be the last meal he'd ever get a chance to eat.

He sighed. It was a heavy sigh that seemed to say that he had a story that he'd told to others before but they hadn't believed him, or perhaps he'd scared someone off because of the reasons people might be chasing after him. Maybe he'd lost someone, too, or someone had left him, worried that he'd end up hurting them with whatever secrets he kept to himself. I was really just projecting my own doubts, fears, and problems onto him. I had no idea about him, really. For all I knew, he was a serial killer and he'd chop us into small parts and leave us scattered around the forest floor.

"How about you go first, Hunter," I said. "You know a little about us and what we're doing, but we don't know anything about you at all. Why would someone be chasing after you... and shooting at you?"

"I'll need one of those cigarettes, probably," he said to me, putting the dice back into his pocket. "And no interruptions once I start." He looked over to Janine, making sure that she was still asleep.

"Once upon a time," he started, "I shopped the world by catalog and shopping mall for all sorts of useless crap that I thought would make my life more interesting, more entertaining, and more impressive to anyone who came along and inspected it, but I never really thought about how everyone else was doing the exact same thing as I was, and no one was taking their head out of their ass for long enough to notice anyone else's collections of absolutely useless junk – except for those few occasions you'd notice that someone had something that you didn't have and that you envied. It was a repeating cycle of economic roulette, and before I realized it, I'd amassed a tremendous collection of useless junk and the debt to go along with it. It surrounded me in all of my rooms, but I'd never enjoyed any of it. I worked in a concrete block and every now and then, I wondered what the real world outside looked like; it seemed like I hadn't seen the sky in my entire life.

"I thought about the way we embrace retail therapy for a long, long time. I'd get depressed about the status of the economy, or worry that a new tax would make my mortgage would go up a few bucks a month, or get stressed out if I made a late payment on a credit card, which I did, causing my rate to go up a couple of percentage points. I was becoming anxious over thoughts about America's place in the global society, worrying about how a lot of people out there didn't like us. I'd complain about the path that our leaders were taking us on, just like everyone else did, following the herd, staying distracted. Every day, I'd drive to work, listening to the news and talk radio stations while the announcers spread strongly biased opinions like a blanket over the air and throughout the city, never saying anything unless it was something incendiary. I felt like everything I was exposed to was intended to cause a reaction, and all of that frustration and anger was pooling up with no good outlet until it was ready to boil over. I considered rioting and petitioning, just like everyone else, but kept following the unspoken orders just like everyone else. At the end of the day, before I popped a pill to help me sleep, I couldn't say why any of it was significant to me. Why does any of that shit matter, you know, man? We're all angry, and we're all scared to speak to each other, these days. I started to feel manipulated, like a puppet. I started to feel like a disposable number, unable to shake those feelings of insignificance.

"And I felt like that every day. I'd wake up and be a cog in the machine for more hours than I should have after slamming a couple of cups of coffee. I'd spend as much time in the car as I did sleeping, and the highlight of my day was prime time television. Sure man, I had great dental and medical, but I had to use them all the time because I was so unhealthy. I was always making myself sick, probably because I was getting so bored and unhappy with living. I needed a change. I needed to know why I felt so compelled to be a part of all of the nothingness, day in and day out."

I could see that Hunter had been chewing through those thoughts for long enough to digest them, and I remembered a time when I would dwell on things just like what he was saying, but since a reason to change had come along for me - Corentine - none of those kinds of issues had mattered much to me anymore. Maybe being in love was like wearing a thick pair of glasses, making everything fuzzy, distorted, and prone to making you feel butterflies in your stomach. You run into a lot of walls, but you don't really mind because it's kind of funny. Maybe being in love had been a barrier for me, blocking me from the reality that Hunter had been living in, insulating me from it, minimizing my exposure and irritation with it.

"So instead of rioting against all of it, I bought into the system," he continued. "I invested heavily in stocks, bonds, and savings accounts. I lied to card companies about my income so they'd grant me generous lines of credit. I became more and more focused on finding the exploitable holes in the financial network. I'd never considered using my knowledge about computers and security systems to hack teller machine systems or break into banks until then, but suddenly, even that made sense, seemed logical, and no longer seemed like I would be doing something wrong. It all seemed like victimless crime, and I started honing my skills so that I'd never get caught.

"I dismissed the programming I'd been fed since I was a kid about honor and legality. I cleared out a few ATMs to see if I could get away with it. I took regular cash advances from the cards that I never intended on paying back. When my market investments made some gains, which were really just a lucky break, I pulled everything out. I hadn't made a house payment in months."

...So he wasn't as honorable and we might have thought he was when he'd offered us the ride the night before. I put myself into his place. If I had the same set of skills at my disposal as he seemed to have when I was at my worst point, I'm sure that I would have done the same thing. I probably would have ripped off an ATM just so I could go blow the cash gambling or at a strip club. I wasn't the model for morality, I knew it, and I was glad that he was there to help us. It didn't matter what anyone's moral standing was about the system, did it? We had to do whatever we could to save Cor, and as far as I was concerned, if Hunter could help us get there, or even get us inside of the Synchro labs somehow, I didn't care what his motivations were. The rules were different than they'd ever been before.

He continued his explanation about why he was on the road.

"I was learning when to walk away, maybe. I bought the RV and I started out on the road. Last night, I met you guys and I felt like I'd discovered a couple of people who had a reason for being out here, traveling with a purpose. I didn't really believe you guys at first, what with the whole corporate abduction thing and all, and I'm still not convinced that we're not all insane, but it's exactly what I've been looking for – a reason that's legit in a world full of bullshit."

He waited, then, long enough for me to realize that he expected a response, though I was quite focused on what he had been saying and kind of wandering off mentally in directions that spun off from his monologue.

"But now you want out," I restated, reminding him that he'd told me he was leaving us just a few moments ago.

"I don't know what I want; I'm mixed up and tired, just like you guys. I'm being emotional and it's a bad combination. Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I like you guys, but don't keep me around if I'm just pissing you all of with my curiosity and confusion. If somebody's after me for the things I've done, you could be in danger, though, so if you guys want to head out without me, I understand."

"We survived an RV wreck last night," I said. "I think danger follows us. I'd like it if you stayed with us. I feel like we're going to need some help to get through this, especially if I ever want to see my girlfriend again."

He held out his hand and I took it into mine, shaking it.

"I've felt like everyone and everything that I know has been really superficial and shallow before, just like you have," I said. "It comes and goes in phases, though, and I've been distracted for a little while now by my own strange problems."

I realized that I had stopped feeling the way he did when she'd come into my life, because it was almost as if a new substance and sense of reality had been applied to everything that I knew, and everything that I saw was suddenly full of more depth and texture; like a deep gloss coat had been applied to a fine grain of wood, when the sunlight strikes the surface in such a way that it looks golden, when previously there had only been press-board and plastic.

Janine stirred and sat up, rubbing her eyes.

"Getting the low down?" she asked, yawning and stretching.

"Working on it," I answered. "Do you need a recap?"

"Oh, no. I've heard it all already." She scratched her side, and then stood up, stretching again. I wondered when she'd had a chance to talk to him. "Getting in a car chase doesn't seem all that crazy when you're hanging out with people who are dealing with brainwashing, corporate espionage, and potential goons from the past who aim to collect on outstanding debts," She laughed.

I wished I could have some of her mirth.

"We have to figure out what we're going to do about transportation," I changed the subject. I wasn't in the mood for any more heady topics in which we shared our pasts with each other. "The RV is pretty much useless to us. I doubt that we can tip it back off of the incline that it's on to get it off of that tree, and even if we could, it looks like we broke an axle when we fell into the ravine."

Hunter chuckled.

"She's pretty busted up, all right," he said. "But we made it all the way down here in one piece, so she did all right."

"I'm sure that we'll be able to call a cab and a tow truck from the Synchro labs once we get there," Janine stated.

"Except that they don't know we're coming and probably don't want us there in the first place," I reminded her. "Best case scenario is that we can get in under the guise of being reporters or something, do some snooping around, and maybe find someone willing to help us out. After that, we're going to have to be pretty sneaky and inventive."

Hunter looked at me as if I was stupid.

"What?" I asked.

"Seriously?"

"Better suggestions, then?" I asked.

"Why don't we pay someone to give us the information?" he suggested.

"We can't just bribe someone to talk!" Janine insisted.

"Well, just so you guys know where I stand, I think that asking them is the easiest answer. If that fails, we can fall back to your plan of sneaking in."

"I can't commit to the direct approach in this case, Hunter," I argued. "Think about it. If you were Synchro Systems, would you implicate yourself to the three of us? Of course not! You'd call security and have us escorted off of the premises."

"Then how do you plan on sneaking in and finding the right person to talk to?" He rebutted.

"Force?" I suggested.

"Things are getting out of control if you're planning on resorting to violence, dude," he said, throwing another branch onto the fire.

"Things were out of control long before that option even presented itself," I said.

I thought about his recommendation, and he had a point, but if Synchro knew something about what had happened to Cor and had information or her medical history on file, it might implicate them in having a hand in what caused her amnesia and, more recently, her disappearance. They wouldn't claim to know anything if we asked them through the proper channels, I was sure of it. They'd stick to denying everything, just like they had done when I'd called them so many times before. That's how companies like that work, isn't it? Deny everything, sending all inquiries to the lawyers? It was happening already on a much bigger scale with all of the press and the federal investigations going on. I had no weight at all compared to the kind of leverage the bigger entities could muster and I knew that they were under absolutely no obligation to assist a stranger and two of his friends who walked up to the front desk requesting potentially classified and sensitive information about possible former (or continuing) test subjects. I looked at Hunter and Janine. We all needed a shower after sleeping in the woods for a few hours and hanging out so close to fires, both in the truck and on the ground. By the time that we got there, we'd all be even more disheveled, since we'd probably have to trek a couple of kilometers through the woods to get to the gates of the Synchro complex.

I shook my head.

"It won't work. They won't talk, I'm sure of it," I stated. "We have to find a way to get someone on the inside to talk to us once we're there. Someone's got to be willing to give us the info that we need to find her; someone's bound to know where to look and can quickly find the answers for us. I'm still open to your ideas if you can come up with something more effective," I added.

"What if we make things worse if the wrong person finds out that we're looking for her?" Janine asked, moving closer to the fire.

"What do you mean? They obviously know we're looking for her!" I said, nodding towards the wrecked RV.

"Unless those guys chasing us were after me," Hunter added.

"What I mean is that if Synchro's trying to cover something up, like information relevant to her file, and the wrong person finds out that we're looking snooping into their information, they might make it even harder for us to get to what we're looking for – or maybe they'll erase the data altogether," she replied.

"But if she's one of the test subjects, like Partain suggested to me in the bar, then why would they get rid of her files just because we were asking some questions about her? Surely they'd expect her to interact with people outside of the company once she was done with whatever tests or treatments that they put her through," I argued.

"That's assuming that she wasn't a volunteer," Hunter said.

"We're not really sure what she was, just that she was seeking treatment for her memory loss."

"All that you know is what you experienced with her," Janine said. "She can't remember what happened before then, either, and from what you've told us, her life leading up to when she met you is kind of a blank space that she only recalls fragments of."

"Who would willingly subject themselves to complete memory erasure?" I asked, not believing that it was possible for her to do it. "She wasn't like that. She didn't work that way. She wanted to remember her past, not forget it!"

"Well, Partain claims to have undergone the procedure as well, but arguing about it won't help us get any closer to her," Janine said, sounding resigned. "I hope that they let us use the phone to make those phone calls, at least."

"Anyway, we could steal a car if we had to," Hunter suggested. "I mean, if we can't turn up anything at the labs."

I was a bit surprised to hear the suggestion come from Hunter considering how much he seemed to want to stay off of the radar. Stealing a car would be a quick way to get caught and go to jail, for not only the theft of the vehicle, but also for whatever other crimes he may have been wanted for. A run-in with the law would be a bad way to break his hiatus from society. However, we didn't have a reliable way to get back to the city once we were done at Synchro. The police would only be an issue if they actually caught us.

"At least it would give you guys a way to get back home," he added. It seemed we were on the same page.

I conceded, not wanting to continue debating the point unless we actually had to because the labs turned out to be a dead end. Hunter kicked the side of the RV halfheartedly.

"Sounds good to me!" Janine stretched one final time, stopping to wipe her nose on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. 'The highway's a few kilometers from here," she directed, pointing to her left. "The road up above us should lead to the entrance of the labs, which shouldn't be too far from where we're at now, since we were almost there when we got knocked off of the road."

I hoped that things at the complex would be okay; I was praying to anyone or anything that would listen to me and perhaps had the power to help us, not expecting an answer, and wasn't surprised when no answer arrived.

I always hated camping as a kid, and our slumber party in the woods only reminded me of that. I remembered all the times I spent in the backyard, at campgrounds, or in random woodsy areas on camping trips with my family or friends when I was younger. I had a renewed appreciation for all things electric, for central heating and air, for microwave ovens, and for showers with unlimited supplies of hot water. The one night was all that it took, really. Though I could appreciate all of those things even more, I also begin to see a new side to the world that I had previously been ignoring; I guess that's what happens when you turn off all the lights and get away from the noise of the city, once you're surrounded by the big emptiness of nature with some friends, huddled around a campfire. Hunter might have been on the right track, after all, even if that track wasn't the one for me.

"Wish I'd brought some marshmallows for breakfast," Hunter quipped.

We all chuckled politely and began gathering our things.

"Did you ever camp out as a kid?" Janine asked us, and I scoffed. "What?" She asked.

"I was just thinking about how much I hated camping when I was a kid, that's all. So I thought it was pretty funny that you'd ask about it. Sure you're not a mind reader, kiddo?"

"Are you sure that you weren't reading my mind first, and that's why you were thinking about it?" she asked.

"I wish one of you guys was a psychic," Hunter threw in. "That way you could tell us what the best candidate for a car donation is." He was really sold on the idea of stealing a car. Maybe once you start stealing things, you can't stop.

It wasn't long before we were on our way again, hiking up a slight grade towards the theoretical location of the research facility. It was still cold, but we stayed warm due to our rapid pace through the forest. We came upon a road that was unpaved and rough, but had been used enough that most of the foliage had been cleared away, replaced with gravel, mud, and tire gouges.

"Whatever traffic this road might have had," Hunter began, "it must have been carrying some pretty heavy stuff. Look at those tread marks!"

"Tanks?" Janine asked.

"Doubt that," I said. "What kind of company would need tanks at their research department?"

"What kind of company would hide their unlisted research center on an access road at the base of a mountain in the middle of nowhere?" Hunter countered.

I thought about that. He had a point, but I seriously doubted we'd run into any tanks out there. I only had one clip for the pistol that I was carrying, and the 40 caliber rounds that were in it wouldn't have the stopping power required to protect us in the event of an encounter with a tank. Or a large car, for that matter.

"Synchro Systems is up to a little more than even we've suspected," Janine observed.

Hunter nodded, stepping under a low hanging branch.

We arrived at the end of the access road a short while later. The road ended in a small clearing, about three times as wide as the road had been. There was a gate in front of us, and after that, a large, empty concrete lot. A two storied, mostly glass building was at the far end of the paved yard, and a couple of smaller buildings made of brick were beside it on each side.

Hunter walked up to the gate.

"It looks like this fence runs the perimeter of the complex," he said, pointing to the coiled razor wires at the top of the fence. "The bad news is that there's razor wire up there. Worse news than that is that the whole damn thing appears to be electrified."

I noticed a small sign next to the access gate that served as a warning about the danger. Whoever put the fence up really didn't want people wandering into the complex, but they didn't seem very concerned about warning trespassers about the consequences of going in, either.

"We shouldn't be here," Janine said, concerned. "We could get into a lot of trouble for going in there."

"Well, I think that's probably the building we want to get into," I nodded towards the glass building. "We've just got to figure out a way to get to the door."

"There's no key card swipe on the access box for this gate," Hunter pointed out. "Just a manual keypad. I can try to guess the combination." He began punching in numbers.

"I have a bad feeling about this whole place," Janine reiterated.

He ignored her, continuing his attempt to unlock the manual gate lock. I walked beside the fence to where it entered into the heavier woods beside us.

"This can't be the only entrance to the complex," I said. "How far around do you think that this fence goes?"

"Too far to walk around before we get kicked out of here," Janine said. "You can't even see the other side of the complex from here. There's just that wall of trees behind the buildings. We don't know how far the fence goes back into the woods, either."

"Maybe there's no fence on the other side," Hunter suggested. "Maybe there's not even any electricity in it."

"I'm not going to grab it just to find out," Janine grew wide-eyed, stepping back. "That's just stupid."

I looked back over at Hunter. I didn't intend to grab the fence, either. It was possible that the fence ended somewhere in the woods beside us, but I doubted it. Why bother putting a fence up in the first place, if someone could just walk around it?

"Security seems pretty relaxed," Hunter said. "This place looks like a ghost town."

It was true. There were no vehicles in the lot, no security patrols had arrived to tell us to leave the area, and there didn't appear to be any human activity going on around any of the buildings at all.

"We must be at the wrong place," Janine decided.

'"We're not at the wrong place," Hunter argued with her. "This is the only place out here!"

"Don't be a jerk," she said to him, scowling. "You don't know me well enough to act like that."

"That's exactly why I can act like that, kid. If you forgot, I'm the one who gave you a ride out here and destroyed my ride all in the name of finding his missing girlfriend, so I'd be careful who you're calling a jerk!" Hunter exclaimed. "Now that we're here, let's do this. Otherwise, why'd we even bother?"

I looked back to her. She looked like she was about to cry. I felt uncomfortable with Hunter bringing up his doubts about things, but I knew that they were legitimate. I felt guilty about what had happened to his RV, but we needed to get into that building somehow, and the two of them fighting wasn't going to make that happen.

"We don't have all day," I said, changing the subject. "You might want to hurry up and get to work on that." I pointed at the keypad to reiterate my request. Hunter continued to examine the pad, randomly hitting numbers in the hopes he'd get lucky and find the right combination.

"Try entering code number 809," I suggested.

To our surprise, the red status light switched over to green, and we heard the lock click open.

Hunter let out a low whistle.

"That's a pretty good guess, dude."

"Psychic one," Janine said, slugging me in the arm.

I pushed open the gate, and it made a loud creaking sound that echoed out across the laboratory yards.

"Hopefully they don't have any security dogs around here," I said, looking around.

"And hopefully the guards are still asleep," Janine added.

We stayed in the shadows to be sure that no one would see us, if anyone were indeed around us in the first place. All signs pointed to the facility being completely unmanned, but that didn't mean that the security or stationed employees weren't around - they just weren't in our corner of the complex.

Janine coughed a little and then wiped her nose.

"I think that I'm catching a cold," she said, sniffling. She buttoned the top button of the wool military-style coat she'd picked out of Hunter's things the night before. The coat was more than a few sizes too big for her and made her look like a little kid wearing her father's clothes.

And so we moved across the long stretches of concrete and asphalt, the sound of our footsteps echoing off of the seemingly lifeless buildings that made up the unlisted Synchro Systems research facility. The closest building seemed like the best place to start, and I mentioned as much to Hunter and Janine. They agreed, so we walked up to the front doors.

I couldn't see inside of the building because of the reflective tint on the glass of the windows, but the automatic door sensors didn't trigger, and the doors wouldn't open even though we all tried to pull them apart.

"Now what?" Janine asked me.

"Next building, I guess," I said, reaching for my cigarettes.

"They're all going to be locked, you know," she said to me. I looked at Hunter and he shrugged.

"Won't know until we try. Like I said, man, we didn't come all this way for nothing."

"I still think we're at the wrong place," Janine said. "Look around. There aren't any Synchro logo signs up anywhere."

I ignored her and started walking towards a smaller building to our left.

I was surprised to see a rotating door in the entranceway of the second building when we arrived at it. The windows weren't tinted, either, and all of the lights inside were on. We paused for a moment, evaluating the structure.

"Looks like somebody's home," I observed, leaning up against the glass so that I could get a better view of the small lobby area on the other side of the revolving door. A reception desk was in the middle of the room. Behind that was a set of metal doors that looked like they belonged to an elevator, but I couldn't understand why anyone would put an elevator in a building that was only two stories tall. It seemed like a lot of effort to make the second story handicap accessible, if that was the case, since it was a private facility and it would have been cheaper to move whatever was upstairs to the first floor, I thought. There were two ficus trees in the room, one on each side of the reception desk, and they both seemed to be in good health. The placed looked clean, as if it had been occupied recently. "Even if no one's attending the desk," I added.

Hunter leaned up against the glass, too.

"Yep. Nice elevator."

Janine raised an eyebrow, stepping back.

"This building isn't tall enough for an elevator, is it?" She asked.

"That's kind of what I was thinking," I said. "Unless the people that work here are really lazy."

"There's the possibility that the elevator goes down instead of up," Hunter suggested.

"Underground research elevator, of all things," I said to myself, and to the others: "Shall we see if we can talk to someone inside?"

"After you, man," Hunter said.

"Are you sure that you want to do this?" Janine asked me, grabbing my arm.

I pulled away from her.

"What's wrong with you, Janine?" I snapped. "Scared someone's going to tell us to leave? Better that than running away right when we're finally making some sort of progress! Better to go to jail than to not know anything at all!"

"Sometimes," she said quietly, looking at the ground.

"You're acting weird. Maybe you should wait out here. It will only take a minute or two," I said.

"Fine," she said, crossing her arms and scowling.

I entered the building and Hunter followed me.

The air inside of the building had a clean smell, as if it had been scrubbed and ionized and filtered relentlessly; it was a smell like the one you'd notice after a heavy rainstorm mixed with the antiseptic, medical odor of a hospital.

I walked to the reception desk, looking for a buzzer that would ring an attendant, if one were actually present. I didn't see a buzzer, but upon further inspection of the desk, I could see an array of monitors displaying security feeds from outside of the building as well as one that was looking down on us. I checked over my shoulder quickly but couldn't locate the camera, which must have been small given that the walls over the doors behind the desk were completely featureless.

"It's spooky quiet in here," Hunter commented. He was examining the ficus tree on the right side of the desk, and appeared to be trying to determine if it was a real tree or a very convincing fake.

I turned to check on Janine, momentarily concerned that she had wandered off to someplace else in the complex, but she was still outside of the building, shifting around, watching us through the glass. I gestured for her to come in, but she gave me an "as-if" look in response.

I turned back around, checking the doors for an access panel. I thought we'd be able to find a key card in the reception desk to open them and at least find out if they went upstairs or, as Hunter suspected, downstairs.

"There's no switch for the doors," I noted.

"You're right, but there's a call box right here, behind the desk," he replied.

I moved around to where he was standing, paused for a moment, and then looked at him. I'd somehow overlooked the call box on my first examination of the desk.

"So who do think it calls?" I asked.

"Only one way to find out," he answered, picking up the receiver. He waited, I waited, and outside, Janine waited, watching us with curiosity.

Nothing happened.

"Did anyone answer?" I asked.

He didn't look at me, studying the monitors instead.

"Nope," he replied.

"I think we should try another building," I began, but was interrupted by the sound of the metal doors behind me opening. I turned around quickly and took a step backwards, running into the desk. I expected the missing receptionist to exit from the doors, but I was mistaken. No one came out, though it did appear to be an elevator.

"On second thought," I said.

Janine entered the building through the revolving doors, then, asking how we had managed to open the elevator doors.

"Actually, they opened on their own," Hunter told her.

"That's not creepy or ominous," she quipped. "So who's waiting for us on the other end of the elevator?"

"Good question," I answered her, feeling a bit like someone was playing with us.

I stepped into the elevator, though, deciding that it was too late to turn back. I checked the control box inside; there was only one button available. There were no markings indicating whether the elevator went up or down, though, so I still wasn't sure who was going to win the debate about the direction it would travel in.

"Are you guys coming?" I asked them, waiting on them to get into the elevator with me.

They looked at each other and then Janine took a step in my direction, but Hunter grabbed her arm, holding her back.

"Is that really the best idea?" He questioned. "We don't really know where it's going, if there's anyone there, or how illegal this really is getting, even, considering that we're technically trespassing already. We've yet to see anyone who works here."

Janine made a funny face.

"We're already committed, Hunter, you said so yourself. You can't push us along this far then suddenly get cold feet," she reasoned. "Someone should take the elevator, anyway. It's not like it's going to be some trap or something. That creepy and ominous thing was just a joke. You guys know I've got a weird sense of humor, and regardless, I still think we're at the wrong place. It doesn't say anything about Synchro Systems anywhere in the complex!"

"Whatever guys," I said, annoyed with them. "Wait here. I'll be back in a couple of minutes." I pushed the button.

The doors closed.

And that was the last time that I saw Janine or Hunter.
There's the percussive sound of heavy rain on the roof and the windows. The rubber-meets-glass sound of windshield wipers while we're watching them, holding hands while the windows get foggy. She breathes near my ear, warm, humid. Her head, resting on my shoulder. She smells like lavender and tea leaves, like a new book. But then again, we're young; we're stupid thirsty blank pages, so it makes a little sense.

The dashboard is cracked and distorted from too many summers of baking in the sun. The black vinyl is peeling away from the door liners, the seats are patched with duct tape, there's rust on the metalwork. The radio is an original, an analog monster, push button presets ready to jar the needle across the unevenly illuminated dial.

"I love you," she says. "I love you more than anything or anyone on this earth," as she stares at the wiper blades... tock tock, screep. Tock tock, screep.

I don't move. I don't respond. I don't even breathe.

"But I can't wait any longer for you," she pauses, swallows. I hear her tongue touch her lips.

"I'm getting out of this place. I'm leaving."

Tock tock, screep. Tock tock, screep.

I blink. Twice. Without a word, I take my hand from hers. I want to throw up and die, choking on my vomit and bile. I want to curl up into a ball and vanish. I want to put my fist through all of the brittle plastic and dirty glass and pockmarked metal, so I can feel the bones breaking the skin tearing away. I want to kiss her on the mouth. I want to feel her sweaty hands raking their way across my back, drawing blood, hurting me. Just one last time. It's all so fucked up. I know that I should let her go, so I close my eyes, and I focus:

Tock tock, screep. Tock tock, screep.

"I hope you understand," she says, and I don't. Then again, we're young. We're stupid thirsty blank pages, so it makes a little sense.
Chapter 12

I must have traveled down at least three or four floors, given the amount of time it took for the elevator to stop. I was a little surprised that there were that many sub-levels in such a small building, but being so far underground meant that the ground floor might misrepresent the total size of the building. Maybe all of the buildings in the entire facility were connected underground and the ground level buildings were strictly administrative and storage areas, constructed for appearance.

It didn't matter. I intended to make a quick scan over wherever the elevator ended up stopping at, check some things out, see if there were signs that anyone was there (even though all signs pointed to that not being the case, as far as we'd seen). After that, I planned on returning back to the upper level and letting Janine and Hunter know what I'd discovered, then see what they thought was the best course of action from there.

You get all kinds of ideas in your head, anyway, when you don't know what's going to happen next.

I imagined everything would go smoothly. The worst-case scenario that I came up with involved an aggressive security guard or two escorting us off of the property with a stern warning forbidding us from ever returning. I also considered the possibility that Janine and Hunter would agree to return downstairs with me after I informed them of the hypothetical vast wealth of information that I'd discovered on whatever sub-level of the small building that I ended up on. Of course, I thought all of that on the ride down, before the doors opened.

Then the elevator stopped. I pushed all of my ideas to the side.

The doors opened.

In front of me was a sterile room very similar to the one I'd left just a moment or two before. A reception desk was across from the elevator, and at it, a sharp looking woman dressed in black clothing sat. I noticed that she was staring at me as soon as the doors opened, and she didn't break her gaze as I stepped out of the elevator, quickly sized the room up, made note of the pair of glass doors behind her that appeared to lead to two separate hallways, and returned my attention to her.

"Um," I started, unsure of what to say to her. "Hi."

Her neutral expression didn't change, but she adjusted her glasses slightly and briefly looked at something behind the facade of the desk. I assumed that there were monitors of some sort embedded in the panel, as had been the case in the desk upstairs. I didn't have time to ponder what information she might be receiving, because she spoke.

"Welcome back, sir. We've been expecting you."

That really threw me off.

"You're kidding, right?" I asked. "You say that to everybody when you catch them breaking into your research complex don't you?"

She raised an eyebrow. I noticed her eye color, then: blue. It was a good color for her.

She avoided answering the question, probably because it was a stupid one. She typed something into a keypad on the desk and then returned her full attention to me, clearing her throat.

"We know who you're looking for. We have the answers."

My heart leaped into my throat and I felt dizzy and nervous. I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. Blood pressure rising, anticipation. Anxiety.

"You're going to have to trust us, though," she added. Her initial statement seemed direct enough, like she already knew what I was there for, but I also realized that it was just vague enough that it could have been some weird psychology thing, trying to get me to say what I was doing there without actually coming out and asking me.

"What do you mean by 'us'?" I asked, concerned about her referral to herself and unnamed others.

"Synchro Systems, of course. This is a main research facility, as you aware."

"I've had a few doubts. My friends upstairs..." I began, but she interrupted me.

"We are taking care of them," she stated, firmly. She stood up. She was almost as tall as me, easily approaching six feet, not counting the heels that she was wearing. I couldn't detect any malice in her tone, though, so I didn't worry about what she meant when she said that they were "taking care of" Janine and Hunter.

She walked around the desk and approached me.

"Will you come with me?" She asked. "Please," she added as an afterthought.

I remembered what Janine had said about being committed already. I didn't come as far as I had for nothing. All of the late nights, the strange meetings, the weird trails that I'd followed: they all led up to whatever answers the woman dressed in all black was about to provide. She gestured towards the glass doors on the left side of the room.

"What's behind those other doors?" I asked her, not expecting an answer.

"More rooms. A hallway that ends in the same place as the one we're about to take," she said, still gesturing towards the door on the left. "Would you prefer to take the hallway on the right?"

"Actually," I said, "I don't care. I want to know what Synchro's level of involvement in my life has been over the past year. I want to know where my girlfriend is, if you people took her, or if you even know where she is. I want you to tell me how to find her."

"Shall we?" She asked again, her expression still neutral.

"I'm following you," I said, getting the door for her.

We walked to the other end of the hallway, which was about 100 meters long, passing a set of doors on each side about every 10 meters. The hallway ended at another glass door. A larger room was on the other side of the door; inside of it were arrays of monitors, strange, vintage looking dials, keyboards inlayed into expansive workspaces, and most notably, a large glass observatory window. I couldn't see what the observatory window looked out upon from the hallway.

"What's your name?" I asked her.

She paused, looking at me with the strangest expression, as if she couldn't decide how to answer the question. It only lasted a moment, and then it was back to the same neutrality.

"Here's our door," she said, instead of answering. She opened the door immediately behind her instead of the glass door that led to the observatory and controls room. We stepped into a small office. Inside, it was set up quite similarly to a physician's exam room. The kinds of things you'd find inside of an exam room were in there, anyway, and it appeared that there were medical supplies of some sort behind the translucent cabinet doors inside of the room.

"Have a seat," she said, nodding her head towards the exam bench.

"I'll stand," I answered.

"Suit yourself."

"Really. What's going on? I didn't come all this way just for a checkup."

She almost cracked a smile when I said that. I figured that I had a chance to break through her conversational wall, so I went with it.

"What's so funny about that?" I asked.

"You're here to check up on something, aren't you? Or someone?"

I thought about it for a moment.
"You don't talk about it much, do you?" she asked as we sat on the train from Paris to London. We were already underground; the fluctuations in air pressure made our ears pop as we sped beneath the English Channel.

"About what?" I asked, assuming that she was wondering about my former marriage.

"About the times before. About when you were married to Victoria."

Assumption correct.

"Not much to say. We got married, we got divorced, I moved north."

"Did you love her?"

"I don't know," I answered, honestly.

"How can you not know? I hope that you never say that about me!" she replied, and exaggerated look of worry and shock on her face.

"I can assure you that I will never wonder if I loved you or not, and I hope that we never reach a point in which I'd have to question it."

"Then how can you be sure about someone that you were married to? Because I want to know how those kinds of things happen... because maybe they happened to me, too."

"Sometimes more factors come into play than just love," I said. "I think that you and I are pretty lucky to have found each other."

"We are," she agreed, resting her head on my shoulder.

"I thought that I loved her when I married her, of course. Things were kind of crazy back then. I was prone to making decisions based more on the feeling in the moment than considering the reality of situations. Victoria was an addict and I thought that I could save her, or change her. People don't change, though."

She waited for me to continue.

"We had a baby, a little girl. We named her..." I paused. "She died."

She made a little gasping sound and reached over, placing her hand on my heart.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For a long time, I blamed her for that. It affected everything that I did, and most significantly, it was the final blow that tore our relationship apart. What little relationship we actually had, as I discovered through the course of the divorce."

"What do you mean?"

"When the baby died, there was an investigation. Victoria was at the center of it..." I paused. Changing approaches, I continued. "I just thought that I knew her, and it turns out that all I knew was the character that she was acting out for me, that she was living a lie whenever I was around her and that I never really knew her at all. She was who I wanted her to be, or who she thought that I wanted her to be, but she had this dark side that I never really saw in the beginning. All of that came later on, once the anger began, once the pretense was lost, as soon as she didn't care what happened anymore."

"What do you mean when you say that she was the character that you wanted her to be?" She asked, understandably wanting me to clear it up for her.
"I don't even know you," I said to her, still preparing to have to fight her to leave. Everything courteous and correct went out of the window for me. I had never been involved in a physical altercation with a woman before in my life, but I'd also never been cornered in the basement examination room of an international research facility with a stranger preparing to inject me with something that she said was going to put me to sleep.

"That's true. But really, it's just sleep," she said, raising her eyebrow again. "And besides, you're already committed. You didn't come all this way for nothing, did you?"

Fuck it, I thought. She was right.

What was the point if I didn't try every option that presented itself? I had to find her. I didn't want to live without her.

I held out my arm.

The woman in black nodded her head, stepped towards me, and carefully took me arm into her hand. I noticed that her fingers were very soft. My skin felt cool when she touched me. I wondered if she had done this before with anyone else. I felt the prick of the needle in my skin.

Eyes: blue.

And then:

Black.
We booked a flight back from London to Atlanta, with plans to make a road trip up the eastern coast, returning to home in a rental car, taking our time by becoming tourists in our own country.

"There could be others like you," I suggested, ripping into the bag of salted peanuts, scattering them across both of us and onto the floor.

The flight attendant gave us a disapproving look, I waved to her, and I started to pick up the peanuts.

"Your girlfriend's getting mad at you," she replied, nodding towards the attendant. It was an inside joke that we shared with each other: we'd refer to third parties as our girlfriends or our boyfriends, kind of making fun of the third party and kind of making fun of ourselves. It was a way of stating to each other that we were both comfortable with each other, that we weren't afraid of being silly, and that we weren't particularly worried or jealous of the attention that both of us sometimes got from other people... even if the current attention we were the subject of was that of the scornful flight attendant.

I was still picking up the peanuts when I continued.

"What I'm trying to say is this: If you were a test subject, we could look your doctors up again and get them to give you another one of their treatments. They could reverse any procedures they might have tried on you. If they've got the technology to rearrange people's memories, then it only stands to reason that they've got the technology to make backups – in case they screw something up in the operation."

"If someone screwed up, why would they reveal themselves to us? What's in it for them? If they're covering their tracks, even now, it's going to get progressively harder to find them, and even if we do manage to track someone down who worked for Synchro, they won't be able to access their equipment anymore. The government's shut them down during all of the investigations," she replied. "Most days I don't think that you even want me to remember who I used to be."

"I can't deny that," I said, mulling it over a bit. I was done picking up the peanuts, so I started lining them up in rows of five on the tray in front of me.

'The chances that anyone from Synchro doing anything to help anyone out at this point are astronomically against us. I'm already very lucky that I ended up meeting you and that you are the wonderful person that you are."

"Thanks," I said, growing warm in my cheeks. Things like that made me feel kind of shy.

"More than one in a million. One in billions upon billions, probably," she said, opening her own package of peanuts with much more grace than I had. She dumped a couple into her hand and tossed them into her mouth.

"What did you say your doctor's name was?" I asked, worried that she'd think that I hadn't been paying attention. It wasn't something we talked about very often, though. As she said, most of the time I wanted her just as she was; I constantly worried that she'd leave me if she remembered her old life. "We could start by trying to find him."

"Funny," she said, tilting her head to the side. "His name won't come to me right now. You know, it's on the tip of my tongue. I'll remember in a second."

Was this lapse related to her greater disorder, or just one of those moments that happen to us all, when you can't seem to recall information on demand for whatever reason? I wondered if all the answers might be related to slips like that.

I reached over and took her hand again, squeezing it.

"I love you," I said.

"I love you, too. What brought that on?"

"Just thinking it."

The sun set over a broader horizon than we were accustomed to, and above, the stars came out, clearer than they'd ever been.

The wings rocked, and home we flew, memories and moments all bundled up in a pressurized cell, miles above the world, the oceans below.

I didn't realize that I'd fallen asleep until she tugged on my sleeve a little while later, staring in amazement through the window at the billowing clouds below us.

"It's beautiful! And you can see the ocean, so far below us!" she said, pressing her face against the glass. I looked past her and noticed that the wings were still moving, ever so slightly, and it made me feel a little nervous, even though I knew that things like that were totally normal. When I was a kid and I was on an airplane, I'd pretend that the heavy turbulence was just the wings of the plane flapping like a bird, getting us to wherever it was that we were traveling to a lot faster. I'd seen too many newsreels since then of plane crashes, and even though it defied logic, I felt a sinking in my stomach at times that was caused by a deep-seated, suppressed fear. I remembered having the same feeling at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, when my knees involuntarily buckled beneath me and I fell to the walkway, reaching instinctively for the rails so that I wouldn't fall off.

Aren't we all afraid when it is time to soar?

"Very humbling!" she added, putting her hands under her chin.

Her hair was pulled into pigtails on each side, so I kissed her on the back of the neck and then leaned back in my chair. All of the peanuts had fallen off of the tray onto the floor and underneath my seat. Her pigtails triggered a memory of the first days after she'd arrived, and I closed my eyes again.

### ...Shadows
Chapter 13

White.

The ceiling, maybe? Where am I?

I'm not sure.

It's not uncomfortable. A bed?

No.

Been here before?

I don't think so.

Get up. Lying down.

Searching for something? What was it?

Or who?

It was a person.

She.

Headache.

It's almost cold in here. Not quite, though. I shiver.

I check myself. All clothes intact. Where are my shoes?

How did I get here?

A couch. Whose couch?

The room is nice, anyway. Nicer than home.

Where is home?

I should remember things like this.

A hangover?

I don't think so.

It's different from that. More... natural. My head hates me. I need a drink. A glass of water is on the table beside the couch.

Mine?

I drink it. All.

Wait. I should have smelled it first. Something's not right.

I shouldn't be HERE. I should be... where?

Thinking for a moment.

Underground?

Not dead, though.

The basement?

The water tastes good. Is there more of it? Sadly, no.

What time is it? I check my watch.

Good idea!

My watch is not working. The battery is dead. Why?

My headache is subsiding, though. Quickly.

Strange.

What's going on here?

I collect my thoughts and look at the room around me. It appears to be a study of some sort, traditional. Someone's home, even, though that person must be much wealthier than I am. A small library of leather-bound books is neatly organized on the shelves that compose most of the wall across from the couch where I awakened. Trinkets and other antique looking figurines are tastefully arranged on different shelves. There is an old phonograph player in the room. I wonder if it works.

I recall the lab. I recall allowing the woman in black to inject me with something. I'm not sure how I arrived here. I'm not sure if I'm still at the Synchro Systems research center or if I've been relocated, as the woman suggested would be the case. I wonder what kind of examination the mysterious doctors have conducted on me, but only briefly. I notice the glass wall overlooking the valley below us.

Somehow, I'm higher up the mountain. I walk over to the windows, checking to see if I can get my bearings. It seems that I'm too far away to see the city, and I can't find the labs in my initial scan of the landscape around me, though I do make note of the beauty and serenity of the world outside of this room. I feel calm, and wonder if I'm in a relaxed state because of whatever it is that she injected me with.

With an unusual amount of clarity, I realize that things are completely out of my control, and I accept it without hesitation. I must be under the influence of whatever the drugs were, I decide, since something like that would usually provoke a stronger reaction of some sort, at least, in me. It's not surprising to me, though, that I've been given a tranquilizer. For a moment, I'm most interested in why I allowed someone I don't know to inject me in the first place. How long did I sleep for?

I return my attention to the room around me, searching for something to drink. I finished the glass of water that was on the small table beside the couch before I'd really come to. Someone had to have placed it there. Where are they now?

I decide to examine the book collection, but I don't get that far, because an older man enters the room and introduces himself... kind of. He's tall and thin, but still formidable for his age, and he looks like he is in excellent shape. I note to myself that I've made a habit of sizing everyone up as soon as I see them, realizing that I've only recently started doing it.

"I give you my sincerest apologies for not being present when you woke up. I live here," he says to me, extending a wrinkled hand in my direction. I take his hand into mine, out of habit, and shake it. "My name is Mr. Yamamoto, and the people close to me sometimes call me Daisuke. You can call me whichever is most suitable to you." He smiles at me and releases his grip.

"Where are we?" I ask him, turning back towards the windows.

"Beautiful view, isn't it?" He asks as a way of answering. I nod my head, agreeing wordlessly. "Let's take a walk through the winter garden," he suggests, sliding the window open and stepping out onto the small walkway that is on the outside of the house.

I follow him out of the window, and he closes it behind me. It's cold out here, but I realize that the walkway leads to a set of stairs, and beneath us is a walled garden area, and my curiosity about the house overrides the sensation of the cold. There is a fountain in the yard. There are wooden benches and large, smooth stones scattered around the place. The stones must have been brought on site at great expense, for they are huge and obviously not naturally occurring on the mountain.

"The wind won't be so bad once we make it down the stairs," Daisuke says to me, already taking a few steps down. "It will feel warmer there."

I follow him down the stairs, and then we began to walk along the pebbled pathways that weave through the garden. He points out various plants to me, stating why they are unique and the reasons that they thrive in the winter months, but I ignore most of what he is saying. I'm still very relaxed, but I'm not interested in plants or gardening, especially when none of the questions on my growing list are being answered.

After a few more moments of the garden tour, he stops talking, and we walk along, silently. A few more moments pass before I break the silence by asking him why they've brought me here.

"Mr. Yamamoto," I say.

He stops walking, and turns to me, placing both of his hands on my arms, sighing.

"Why am I here? Synchro didn't bring me here without a reason. Was I getting too close to figuring something out about the company, and now they're not sure what to do with me? Where are my friends?"

"Let's go back inside and have some tea while we discuss this matter," he says to me, smiling a half-smile that makes me suspect that he could be avoiding the answer on purpose. I can't attribute all of his behavior to mere quirkiness, not when things have been the way that they are for the past week or so. What good is it going to do for him to keep procrastinating talking about it? Synchro's done some pretty strange stuff, and some of it might be blurring the line when it comes to ethics, but I don't think that they're going to kill me at some old man's house up in the mountains.

We walk towards the house, again, arriving a moment later at a door on ground level. He opens it and steps inside, and I follow him back into the house. The door creaks when we close it, as if it's both very old and unaccustomed to regular use.

"I should grease the hinges on that door," Yamamoto says to me, walking towards a raised bar that sits like an island in the center of the room. In the center of the island, there is a teapot, and there are two cups placed on small plates beside it. There is also a bowl with a bunch of bananas in it beside the teapots, and I raise my eyebrows in surprise, but don't comment.

"Would you like some tea?" He asks me, pouring a cup. Steam rises from the surface of the liquid, so I know that someone else has just been in the room to set the beverage out for us. I am still thirsty, so I accept. It's been a long time since I've had tea, anyway. He pours a second cup, walks back over to me with it, and places it in my hands.

"Here you are," he says. "Let's sit by the fire and talk, now."

I follow him over to the fireplace on the back wall of the room, and then we sit in two high-backed armchairs that look like antiques. If they're as old as they appear to be, then I imagine that no one's ever used them and that there are no cats in the house.

There are a lot of books on the shelves of this room, too, and I briefly wonder if he's read all of them or if they're just there for show. I make note of the numerous ball-clocks placed throughout the room, wondering if Daisuke himself is the collector of all of the ephemera or if someone else living in the house is responsible for the wonderful relics. There is a statue of an elephant in the corner of the room - black, appearing to be made of ceramic or porcelain, and a chessboard balances on its uplifted trunk. The pieces are arranged around the board as if someone is in the middle of a game. More clues pointing to multiple residents of the house. God knows that it's big enough in here and would probably be a lonely place to live in all by oneself.

The fire is warm, and I welcome the warmth after walking around outside in the cold, shielded from the wind by the walls though we were.

"Would you like a banana?" He asks me before he sits down, examining the bowl of fruit on the table. He selects a ripe-looking fruit from the bunch and offers it to me.

"No, thanks," I lie to him. It's been even longer since I've seen a banana.

"This might be your last chance to have a banana, ever. At least, a real banana," he says, and I know that he's right. Whoever he is, he's obviously got a lot of money. "And these are from a completely Race-5-fungus free crop. The hybrids just don't taste the same, I'm afraid, and I'd rather not have them at all then bother with something so mediocre." He places the banana back into the bowl, shrugging his shoulders, and then he sits down in the chair across from me. "When you're my age, you have little patience for mediocrity."

"Did you try to kill me?" I ask him, point blank. He laughs.

"When?" He pauses long enough to make me wonder. "I could have, while you were sleeping, or any number of times since then, had I wished it. But no, I made no attempt on your life, and was not responsible for the decision that led to the occasions in which you were endangered."

I think about what he's just said.

"So you know who's responsible for all of the things that I've been dealing with this week?"

"It's been going on for longer than that, I'm afraid," he says, leaning forward.

"What? Longer than that? How much longer than that?" I ask him, setting my teacup down on the floor beside my chair. I don't want him to notice that my hands are shaking, but it's probably already too late. I fear that he's about to tell me things that will shatter my perception of what my life has been lately, and after the past few weeks, I'm willing to believe that such a revelation is possible.

"Will you agree to be silent while I tell you some things that you will probably find very challenging to believe?"

"I have a lot of questions," I reply, not agreeing yet.

"You are a man of many questions. Have you considered why you always question everything? Regardless, you have been wondering who I am, and who I work for, I am sure," he states, and he is correct.

"Yes."

"Most excellent. Primarily, there are events transpiring which have unfortunately required my party's involvement, though we previously had no desire or willingness to have a direct hand in your situation. That stated, you have been a particularly interesting detail to us. Especially notable is your search to find the location of your missing girlfriend. Tell me, what do you think it is that has caused her such distress in her life? Why do you think it is that she left you... vanished, even, as if into thin air?" He smiles at me with a sympathetic look and takes a sip of his tea.

I shiver, but I don't answer him. He's turned the tables around on me, now, hitting me where I am most sensitive, and we both know it. I feel like my stomach's falling towards the floor beneath me.

"There are people who thought that the best solution for the problem that you've presented is violence, but you've been surprisingly lucky at avoiding the situations they arranged which could have ended badly for you. We have since revised our approach. After all, you're here now, aren't you? Safe and sound?"

I don't know what he's getting at, but I suspect he'll get around to it.

"Keep talking," I prod him.

"Tsk, tsk," he chides me. "Politeness. Manners."

I can't believe I'm being scolded for being rude in a situation like this, but I let it go.

"As I was explaining to you, the initial attempt on your life was a failure," he says. "Originally, people were sent to remove you from the equation long before you started this futile adventure of yours, but your first stroke of luck occurred when you were not in your apartment at the time that they searched it for any information about what you might know about the company."

He pauses for a moment, looking at the fire. His voice is remarkably good-natured, but there is an ominous undercurrent starting to show through, and I shift in my chair.

"You probably didn't notice that they'd removed all of the evidence of her existence there, anyway. Our people do a good job at erasing things. Unfortunately, the team assigned to you was careless with its equipment, and the explosives designed to destroy your home did not detonate. They had to be removed at a later date, of course, since no evidence could remain once you started uncovering things about the company's research."

"Explosives?" I ask, incredulous. This can't be the truth.

"If you were to return to your apartment now, you'd find that it is completely bare. We are erasing your life, now. The company doesn't like liabilities. We know when someone is more useful to us alive than dead, though, and that's the only thing that saved you, in the end. Keep breathing," he notices that I have grown wide-eyed. "Remember that the decision to let you live won out in the end. You are valuable."

He stares at me. His eyes are cold and completely devoid of emotion. Is he waiting on a bigger reaction from me? What does he expect me to do? Run? To where?

"What about the guys in the car behind us? Back when we crashed the RV. Were they your people, too?" I ask him.

"They were contracted labor. A non-issue," he answers. Easy for him to say.

"What do you want from me?"

He doesn't answer for a moment, but he continues to stare at me, as if he's looking right through me.

"I see that your tea's gotten cold. Perhaps you would like a spot of coffee?" He asks, strangely. I put my hands over my face and sigh. This is hard to accept, and he's telling me all sorts of things that I don't even want to believe. The fact is that I do believe him. I don't think that he's lying to me, or that he has any reason to. Nothing makes sense, except that somebody's been trying to kill me, and my search really did endanger Janine, much more than I thought it had.

He snaps his fingers.

"Pay attention to me," he demands. I return my attention to him, as he orders, and he loosens his tie.

"Most people would agree that you are insane," he informs me. "To convince your friend Janine that your cause is worthwhile is one thing, but involving the man who calls himself Hunter was quite an accomplishment. He needed a place to belong to, didn't he?"

Once again, I choose not to answer. I'm sure he has more information about my friends than I do, anyway, and I suspect that this is some sort of shell game, distracting me from the truth. I glare at him.

"Speaking of little patience," he trails off. Is he mocking me?

"In any event, we wondered: who would believe you? If you were to tell them the truth about what you'd discovered, I mean. You're... chance encounters... with former employees of the company, particularly leading up to your meetings with Dr. Evan Partain - they provided much more information to you than you may realize. Information that was never leaked to the press, no matter how much they tried to pry their fingers into the Pandora's Box that the company had been transformed into once successful research had commenced," he pauses for a moment, as if considering how much information he's willing to give to me. It's as if he's second-guessing himself and the information that he's been provided about my case. He doesn't seem to notice that I caught him with a doubtful look in his eye for just that moment, and he continues. "But you know all of that already; I know that you know it.

"However, were you aware that more recent experiments using Synchronicity Drive technology appeared to be moving towards a consistent and stable, predictable result? There has even been some discussion as to administering the drug orally, most likely in the form of a single dose capsule," he says, excitement causing his eyes to glimmer. He can hardly disguise his joy at whatever successes he's lauding to me, no matter how much he's projecting a cool, callous exterior. It's in such contrast to the challenging, blank stare that he was giving me just moments ago that I wonder if perhaps he is the crazy one in the room, or if perhaps we're all mad.

"You're getting ahead of yourself, here, Yamamoto," I say to him, running my hand through my hair. "The Synchronicity Drive was real? There really were experiments on people having to do with memory manipulation?"

"You doubted the truth that had been revealed to you?" He asks me, and then waits.

"I had no reason to believe what anyone was telling me was truthful," I answer him, defending myself. "The only real facts that I have are that she's missing, and everything I've done to track her down has led me to you."

"But you've never doubted that those facts themselves might be deceptions?"

"She was there. Now she's gone. Everything else is up in the air, maybe, and all of this memory manipulation stuff that your company is doing seems to be connected to the reason that she's vanished, though I can't exactly put together how that is yet. I suspect that Synchro's responsible for her amnesia in the first place, and that maybe she's out to get revenge on the company for screwing up and erasing her past. It doesn't explain why she hasn't called, but it makes the most sense to me. Am I wrong?"

He shrugs his shoulders.

I wait for him to answer, anyway.

A few moments pass, and he closes his eyes. I keep waiting, wondering about that coffee, wondering if he's even directly connected with Synchro Systems, and if so, how deep that connection runs. I wonder if he's really just a very wealthy old man who somehow found out about my situation, and if this is all just a game to him. I wonder who else lives in the house, and I think about the possibilities. I wonder where Janine and Hunter are, and I wonder if they're doing anything to try to track me down. I wonder if they're even safe.

Without opening his eyes, Daisuke speaks.

"Have you considered it a possibility, as well, that you might have been one of our patients, and that your memory has been tampered with? That an error lies in your own mind's arrangement of events, and that error has created a tidal wave of questions that you can't answer?"

I imagine how a tidal wave of memories and questions would look, sucking up parts of my past, pulling the water away from the shore as the wave rises, higher and higher, far out at sea. The coast is destroyed by everything pulled away from it just moments before. Everything comes falling into place. In the case of a tidal wave, anyway, and that's not happening for me.

Nothing is falling into place, really. I've considered what he's asking me, of course; just as I've considered the possibility that I truly am insane. Less than a day ago, I decided that I couldn't trust myself anymore, since I was suffering from mild memory loss that was apparently selective. Could that really be a symptom of something much worse in my mind? I've heard that crazy people never think that they're insane, and that's how I should be able to gauge my own sanity.

But what if Yamamoto is right? What if it's not insanity or neurosis, but instead that I've been dosed with one of Synchro's formulas without my knowledge (or recollection, at least)? The sleeping medicine was too recent, wasn't it?

He asks me another series of questions.

"In a society like ours, do you really think that it's possible for someone to have no past at all? Do you really think that your girlfriend can just appear in your home one day, completely fail to recall a single personal detail about her life prior to you, and despite all reasonable efforts and even exhaustive searching, fail to uncover a single shred of evidence that her own past even exists? There are records for everyone and everything. Why didn't you ever question that? No one is invisible anymore," he opens his eyes and looks at me. I see what I interpret to be sadness there, but I do not know why the emotion is able to leak through the wall of his face, momentary lapse though it is.

He continues. "That probably contributed to the information leaks that led to the federal investigations of Synchro, anyway, though the work goes on even while injunctions are filed and inquiries are conducted."

Is he sad because his company is folding up beneath him? Or is he sad because there's something wrong with me, and I'm just too close to the problem to see it? Is he sad because there is nowhere else that we can hide?

"But you already said that your people are good at what they do. That you're erasing my own life, even as I sit here with you," I counter. "With money like yours, and it does appear that you've got a pretty fair share of it by the way things look around here, why isn't it possible for you to erase what you consider to be a mistake? She might have been a mistake, and then my friends and I got involved, just like you said, and we found out too much for whatever reason, and now we're on the list of messes you have to clean up since you're trying to salvage your company before the government shuts you down. If we spread our information into the proper outlets, it only speeds up the investigation process, halting your research."

"We want to help people," he says, defending the research.

"I want you to help me," I insist.

"You're here, aren't you?"

"Why do you talk in circles like that?" I ask him, growing more and more exasperated by his and everyone else's endless avoidance. Did I take a dose? Is he trying to trick me? Does he know where she is?

"What's her name?" He asks me, finishing the last drops of his tea. He turns the cup over so that it is upside down on the saucer and leans forward, placing it on the floor beside him.

"What?" I ask.

"Your girlfriend. Her name. What is it?"

Breath: in.

Breath: out.

I can't remember. Wait. It's right there, so why can't I remember?

"I... I..." I stammer. I tilt my head to the side, as if trying to dislodge the memory of her name.

"Is it so hard to believe, now?" he asks me. It isn't so hard to believe now. It hasn't been so hard to believe since things stopped making sense. Nevertheless, that doesn't provide an explanation for everything that I do remember. Where did all of the times that I'll never forget really come from? The best and then the worst times of my life, once she was gone - are they all just tricks of my mind brought on by clever machination inside of my head? How could I forget her name? I've forgotten other things, haven't I?

He sighs.

"Did she ever have a name?" He asks. "Admit that it's possible that she never even existed," he says, as if he's demanding a confessional for a crime that I've never committed before he passes judgment on me and then murders me in cold blood.

"But," I say. "Janine. Janine knew her. Janine knows. You're tricking me. You dosed me with the Synchro medicine, didn't you? The woman back at the labs gave me a shot of your treatment, or the dose was in the water that I drank when I woke up!"

"You might be correct," he replies. "You might be mistaken. Janine might not know what you're talking about. Janine might be working for us."

"This is completely insane. What kind of experiment are you doing with her? Am I a part of it? Just another test subject, tested to see what happens when you manipulate every variable to the point that not even the truth makes sense anymore? You made me forget her name! This is all part of it, just to see if the treatment really works!" I stand up and take a step, closing the gap between us by half. I lean forward, and I'm yelling into his face. "Tell. Me. The. Truth."

"The truth is subjective. Always. You can decide the truth for yourself, anyway."

I shake my head. "How can I do that? You have all of the information, here."

"You have enough information to decide," he says, placing his hands on his knees. He stands up, and we are face to face. "We want to help you. So decide."

"I can't," I answer him honestly, because so much has been thrown into the situation so rapidly, and I haven't had time to sort it all out. There are too many fragments, too many pieces of information rushing in all at once, and there has never been enough time to sort it all out in an order that makes any sense since all of this started. I don't recall ever using a cell phone, either, I realize. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist. The same logic could apply to a missing person, and her name, and that was much easier to swallow than accepting that it was all a trick of my mind.

"You came to us for treatment after your divorce. You wanted to kill yourself. You said that you had no desire to live anymore after what happened with your wife and your child. I don't have to go back into the details of that. You know that it's true, I can see it in your eyes."

What he sees in my eyes is not my acceptance that I ever went to Synchro for any sort of treatment, but instead a resigned admittance that my own past was so easily placed into the hands of the people at the company that this man is involved with. This evil, manipulative man with the calmest demeanor I've ever encountered, using a bad situation to throw me off and further confuse me about what's really going on. Manipulation and distraction.

Is Janine working for them? Is that why she pushed so hard towards heading to the labs after the RV crash? Is that the best explanation for the inconsistencies in her behavior, and for that matter, the stranger that we'd been traveling with, Hunter: was he somehow involved? Paranoia, again. It's too complicated to be the truth. I can't accept that so much work and design has gone into one treatment, one case, especially my own. I'm not that important, even as a test subject. Then again, Yamamoto's associates apparently did try to kill me at least twice.

"Part of the treatment process is that your mind heals itself in the most appropriate way possible, creating a false memory set that allows you to recover to the fullest extent. It's a very complicated process," he continues, "that would take a long time to explain, but the basic principle is that the memories of your girlfriend are not real. They never happened. Your mind, with the assistance of our nanite swarms, created those memories to bring you back from a perilous edge of desolation and sadness. Unfortunately, the investigations began shortly after your treatment. When inconsistencies in your memory started to show up, the reality of your situation began to filter through, causing a conflict inside of your head as your mind began to doubt itself. Resources in the company were diverted in other directions, and the slip went unnoticed, since monitoring of subjects was reduced due to necessary layoffs. Fortunately for you, the treatment was successful and you were no longer suicidal when this happened. You signed a contract allowing the company to intercede for the sake of improving the process, and so agents were placed into key points of your life in order to bring you back here while making you think that it was your own choice to come. We had to recover you, at least for long enough to find out where the procedural error occurred, so that won't happen with someone else resulting in a less stable transition."

No, I think. He's lying to me. You don't just imagine all of the things that I remember, so vividly, so real. You don't just make up another person. Your friends don't meet them and grow to love them, just as you do, and care about them enough to quit their jobs and spend days searching for them when they go missing. Even if I'm crazy, which might really be possible, she's real, and she's missing, and I have to find her.

Yamamoto is working for Synchro, obviously, and he's trying to throw me off the trail. But why? Why such an elaborate story? And why would they try to kill me just hours ago if they had truly wanted to help me by preventing me from killing myself? Arguing with him about his own inconsistencies will prove to be futile, I think, so I remain silent. Had their original intentions been to save me, and when the treatment went bad, they decided to dispose of me, but then had I somehow proven to be a good source of information to them about how the whole process works? Yes, it's possible, then, that I'd even seen a doctor there, before. There were a lot of blank days from my past that won't ever come back. That's what happens when you don't stop drinking for weeks, and there was a point in time when that wasn't something out of the ordinary for me.

Now I'm thinking as Yamamoto wants me to, and I'm thinking that he's telling some version of the truth. He's made me question my own steadfastness and doubt my reality, taking the supporting beams from beneath me. I turn and step away from him and the fireplace.

"You're lying to me, Yamamoto," I say, clenching my fists. "I don't know why, but I can't believe that you're telling me the truth. If you've really got access to Synchro's treatment, then prove it."

"Prove it?" He asks, holding out his hands. "And how? All that you've witnessed so far isn't proof enough?"

"No," I answer. "It isn't. I want to take the treatment. If you can program your robots to alter things inside of my head, you can program them to repair the damage that they've caused. If you're telling the truth, if I've already taken one of your treatments, then the nanites can detect what's been altered in my brain and change it back."

He laughs at this. "Excellent logic leap, but you do not truly understand the process. Once a person has been treated, the change cannot be undone. Secondary treatment has always yielded critical failure in test subjects. We've never even attempted a secondary treatment on a human, because almost 100 percent of our lab animals died as a result of brain hemorrhaging once the secondary dose was initiated."

It can't be. It can't be immutable. And that's only if I've ever been dosed in the first place.

"Assuming that I've even been dosed," I say.

"It will kill you."

"I wanted to die, anyway. What difference does it make?"

"It makes a difference because now you've regained a will to carry on."

I don't, however, want to argue the semantics of how wanting to live came at the cost of the truth. Possibly, because I still think that he is lying to me. We all live a lie, every day, I suppose, somehow. If the love that I've experienced wasn't real, then what's the point?

"If I've never been dosed, though," I hypothesize out loud, "and the nanites can be adjusted to figure out why I'm having trouble remembering things, they should be able to repair whatever connections have been severed, and then I'll be able recall her name and everything else that I seem to have forgotten. Then I can find her again."

He shakes his head at me. "She is always going to elude you."

"I want to take the treatment," I tell him. I've decided. It doesn't matter if I've been dosed before or not.

I'll take my chances. If I have been dosed, I want the fake memories erased. If that procedure fails, then I don't want to live, anyway. If I've never been treated and Yamamoto is lying to me, I realize that I'm still taking a big leap of faith by trusting him to administer the treatment, considering that this alternative makes him one of The Bad Guys. If I've never been treated, though, and something really is wrong with me, because my head's definitely not on straight anymore, I need to get better; I need clarity of thought and missing memories to return so that I can figure out what happened to... her. The girl without a name.

"That is your choice to make," Yamamoto says to me. I think that I can detect a certain resignation in his voice, but maybe I'm wrong. "You're probably thinking that this is still part of your treatment, or worse, part of an experiment, but you are terribly mistaken. Nonetheless, you still have free will. We will not prevent you from administering a treatment, should you decide that it is what is best for you. You've already signed liability waivers, anyway, though you can't recall doing so."

"Show them to me," I demand, looking for a reason to believe that what he's telling me is the truth. If he can provide the papers, then I might change my mind.

"I do not currently have access to those files," he replies, drily. "But they do exist. Federal committees have tied up a lot of secure data, lately, and a freeze on inter-company data transfer was enacted to try to prevent research."

"But the research goes on," I finish for him. "Despite something as simple as a liability waiver being locked up in the workings of a bureaucratic investigation, the research goes on." I can never believe his words, I think to myself. At least it's one thing out of all of this that I know to be the truth. I ask myself why I'm going to trust him to provide the treatment, still hoping for a way out of this.

Either way, my life is fucked. That's why I'm going to follow through with it.

"I want the treatment. Right now. Can you do it here?" I ask.

"Yes," he answers. "There is a station upstairs where you can administer the treatment on yourself. I will show you how it the basic controls work. You will only need to push a button, though, because the rest of the process is automated once we've calibrated for your system."

We leave the room together, and I follow him up the stairs. The rest of the rooms, at least the parts that I can see, are decorated in a similar fashion to the two rooms that I've already been in. Bookshelves, couches, armchairs. The room that we enter upstairs, however, seems completely out of place in the house.

While most of the house seems eccentric, random, and slightly organic, this room is almost empty except for a patient's bench and an array of consoles lined up against the sidewall. There is a large window on the opposite side of the room, and it takes up most of the wall space, as if it were cut into the side of the house at a date after the original construction. The room is overlooking the gardens outside and the valley below the house. I notice that it is growing dark outside. Is it night, already?

The room appears to be sterile; all surfaces that aren't made of metal seem to be painted white. It looks very clean in here, and once again I notice a sanitized, ozone smell in the air in the room. Yamamoto, pointing to a control panel, speaks to me.

"That key is the one that will activate treatment. That's the only thing you'll need to worry about. You'll notice that it detaches from the face of the console, so that you can recline in this chair and initiate the treatment from a more comfortable position."

I nod.

"Should I just sit in the chair?" I ask him.

"That's fine," he says, opening a drawer. He removes some wires from the drawer and begins plugging them into different ports on the face of the console, checking a monitor for readouts and status. "I need to run initial diagnostic scans on you, though. It shouldn't take long." He flips some switches, and then adjusts some dials.

I don't say anything, watching him.

A few minutes later, he seems satisfied with the adjustments that he has made on the machine, and he walks to the other side of the room. To my surprise, there is a recessed panel in the wall that I hadn't noticed when we walked into the room, assuming that it was merely a cover plate for a fuse box or something similar. Yamamoto extends a lighted arm from the recession once he slides the panel to the side, and then extends it over to the chair where I am sitting.

"What's this?" I ask, thinking about dentists.

"This arm unit communicates with the console on that wall and contains the nanite injection. It also serves as processor support for communication with the swarms while they are actively deployed and relays biometric information about you to the monitoring area. While the whole process is automated, we will still be monitoring and recording the entire process for later analysis." He attaches some sensors to my temples, and I try to relax.

I don't think I'll easily be able to understand what's about to happen.

It dawns on me that I might be doing exactly what he wants, though. Maybe they needed someone to volunteer to be the first test subject for a double treatment, and he really was telling me the truth. Maybe everything was so elaborately set into motion so that I'd willingly step into the experiment. No. It's too late to start second-guessing myself, again.

"That should take care of it," he says, returning to the console and examining the display. "I am setting the treatment to adjust errors in your memory, as you've requested, commencing at about... one year ago." He hits a key a couple of times, and then types something into the keypad. I try to see what the readout says, but it's too far away.

I reflect on the past few weeks, and then over the past year, and then think about my life.

I shake my head at myself. What am I doing here? How did everything go so fast, developing faster than I could keep track of it, snowballing downhill into the avalanche that landed me here, in this room, in this moment, trusting my life to a strange old man that I already know I can't afford to trust? What will he do if I back out, now? Will following through with this really help me find her, even if it's successful?

"I have to get an IV setup from a different office," Daisuke says to me, turning around, leaning in to put his hand on my shoulder. "The process can take a little while. I'll be back in a moment, and then we can commence."

He leaves the room, pausing at the door before he exits.

"You can still decide to believe me. You don't have to do this," he says. "Your experience was successful enough that you can go on, even start over, somewhere else. You have learned to love again."

"No," I say. I sigh, resigning from the argument. "She's real. You're going to help me find her by helping me remember her. Everything begins here." Am I delusional? Things seem clearer to me now than they have in a very long time.

He lingers for a second longer, and then closes the door behind him.

I immediately get out of the chair and move over to the control console, giving it a quick exam. The first place that I check is the display he last adjusted, setting the system to repair from a year ago. I don't really know what the display readouts mean, there are so many abbreviations on the screen, but I do see the number 366, and I tab over to the field that it's in using the keypad. I erase the number.

I'm assuming that it's the amount of days for the nanites to go back through in my memories. Do they base it on sleep cycles? Should I readjust for a longer period or a shorter one? I'm sure that Yamamoto will be back shortly, but I hesitate.

I check the other fields. I don't want to mess things up too much. I'm not trying to fry my brain on purpose. I just want to make sure that the treatment is effective, and that Yamamoto's not trying to erase important things about Synchro Systems that I've learned, or even trying to erase my memories of her altogether.

He opens the door, and I jump, startled.

"What are you doing?" he asks, looking at me, and then checking the console.

"Just thought I'd take a look and then get the remote," I say, explaining myself, hoping that he doesn't realize that I've tampered with the settings. I detach the activation key from the console. It's kind of like a car key remote. A single button is in the middle of the small black box.

I return to the chair, and Daisuke sets up the IV drip.

"This might sting," he says, sticking the needle into a vein in my arm. It stings. He reaches into the extended mechanical arm that is beside the chair and removes a formidable looking needle.

"This is the treatment. If the activation button is not triggered, they will break down within a few hours and become inoperable. They will not be detectable in your system by this time tomorrow," he says, explaining things to me. "If you change your mind, nothing will happen."

"But if I don't change my mind, then all I have to do is pushing this button?" I ask him, clarifying. "And then the little machines will fix me?"

"Your decision to do this will kill you, in all likelihood," he answers.

"It's the old debate, though," I state. "Will it kill me? Will it heal me? That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, they say."

"Your humor is a poor cover for your fear."

He's right. I'm scared. But I don't know what else to do.

"This is it," I say. "Stick me." I clench my teeth.

He injects the needle into a split port on the IV setup. I don't feel a thing. Nothing changes. Are Synchro's machines already making their way into my brain, probing around? How long should I wait before activating them?

"I am going to leave the room. I strongly suggest that you reconsider this. The treatment takes a few moments to permeate your nervous system, at which point activation can occur successfully. I will be monitoring the process remotely, along with a small team of physicians and scientists. Should something go wrong, we will be here immediately."

I wonder about the small team of people that I've neither heard nor seen since I'd been in the house. Though there was no evidence of their existence, surely they were there. They had their own lives, their own experiences, their own memories. My lack of perception didn't change that from being truth. This only supports that she really does exist, that I'm not out of line in my disbelief of Yamamoto, and that Synchro's treatment might really help me if I'm having problems recalling things about my past.

"See you in a little while, Daisuke," I say, closing my eyes, leaning back into the chair.

He leaves the room, this time without hesitating. He doesn't say a word.

My palms are sweating.

I try to relax.

It's grown dark outside, and when I open my eyes, I can even see a few stars through the glass wall.

No more hesitating.

I push the button and close my eyes.

Breath: out.

Breath: in.

Then it hits me.

I open my eyes, but all I can see is blackness. The blackness, and darkness, forever, I think. I am a wandering star. This fate is reserved for me. It occurs to me that I never entered a second string of numbers to replace the ones that I'd deleted, but the thought passes quickly. I do not care.

Blackness and darkness.

How much time has passed?

I try to move, but my limbs do not respond.

Everywhere, warmth.

There is a light, then, in the center of my field of vision.

I focus my eyes.

I go towards the light.

[End of Narrative]

### Supplemental Materials

or
Chapter 14

Additional contextually relevant materials have been collected pertaining to the narrative and are as follows:

### 2nds.

Do we ever get another chance to make our lives happen?

Do you think we'll meet again, someday, once it doesn't hurt anymore?

Have things gone too far? Has redemption escaped us?

Is it really too late?

Il tempo sta esaurendosi.

...I don't know.

### 6 feet.

Tell the people that you love how much they mean to you;

Soon all will be waste. Soon Time will have her wish,

Bringing us all home

For a final kiss, and then: Sleep well, children.

### 299792458.

Her entire past seemed like a blank. We knew that it existed, that the memories were in her head, and they'd come up from time to time for air, taking a breath of life, and she'd speak them out loud, or write them down, holding them close to her like prizes. They were, for how hard she fought to regain them. A daily struggle.

I realized that my recent lapse of memory was something very different from that, though. I compared it to her amnesia as a point of reference only - because her amnesia was something that I had come to understand in a way. In her case, everything was lost, therefore only gain was possible. In mine, I didn't even know what I'd forgotten - except for a few things: the last time I'd used a cellular telephone, for example. That's but one small wave in a vast ocean of memory; nonetheless, it is a wave that I should have recalled.

### Abuse.

The Enemy will consume you:

Regret, Remorse, Second Thoughts, and thirds.

Slowly at first, then rampant, voracious;

Take a sip from the cup,

Ease in, easy. Easy, but not as easy as you thought -

To remember Truth.

Dirty fingernails, bruised, misguided knees.

Dark circles like puddles underneath your eyes.

Something underneath the bed, whispering...

shh

shh

LISTEN! (what you wanted to hear)

You can't remember it!

Dirty sheets, sweating skin

Dirty sheets clinging to scents and wrinkles.

You know things about last night;

You know things that you want to forget.

Losing touch with other thoughts

You once swore never to release.

How we hide ourselves!

### Age.

And so you should fall like a butterfly with burning wings.

Here is the orchestration, notice as the music swells,

A little wave here, a minute crest there,

Then culmination, the peak, nothing near a tidal wave, but worth mentioning to others,

Once, before you crash into the currents below.

Your life is a movie.

Your voice is a soundtrack; your movements are the score.

To the cadence of years roaring past, make your peace.

To the rhythm of your heart as it weakens.

With each step, you breathe.

With each injection, fire is diminished for a moment, but not for a moment more.

And so you should fall like a butterfly with burning wings.

### Balancing Act.

We're always just on the brink of falling over the edge, I think, watching her balancing act.

She's not afraid, but I am afraid enough for us both.

### Bandage.

There's no such thing as making it all better.

So she said:

sadness,

it's so very close to

madness.

which,

twisted, she admitted,

was inherently like

love.

Ah, bittersweet memories, you're damaged goods at discount prices, and spring is in the air again.

One of those moments when you're riding the line between deciding on one thing that could change these situations forever, or another, in which everything will continue as it always has, inevitably curving in a slow spiral downwards. And you choose the latter, of course, because you know that the former always leads to the other, and that no one's ever gonna save you now.

### Base.

What details

do we find

when we search every crevice

every corner

each crack, each nook

when we read every page

of every book?

What details

do we discover

beneath the lines

the sheets we've slept under

a thousand times?

What things we'd never known before?

What secret path?

What hidden door?

What is in store for us?

### Brink.

Euthenica® Tablets Ref 86-900-AX Euthenica / Synchronicity Drive Project Report # 4,865 (e)

INTERNAL USE ONLY ARCHIVAL DEPT

Alpha Stage research is complete.

I must have traveled down at least three or four floors, given the length of the trip in the elevator. I was a little surprised that there were that many sub-levels in the small building, but being so far underground also meant that the ground floor might misrepresent the total size of the building. Maybe all of the buildings in the entire facility were connected underground, and the ground level areas were strictly administrative and storage areas.

It didn't matter. I intended to make a quick scan over wherever the elevator ended up stopping at, checking some things out, maybe seeing if anyone was even there (although all signs had pointed to that not being the case, so far as I'd seen). After that, I planned on returning back upstairs and letting Janine and Hunter know whatever I'd discovered, and seeing what they thought about doing from there. You get all kinds of ideas in your head, anyway, when you don't know what's about to happen.

I imagined all of that would go smoothly, and the worst case scenario that I came up with involved an aggressive security guard or two escorting us off of the property with a stern warning to never return. I also considered the possibility that Janine and Hunter would agree to return downstairs with me after I informed them of the vast wealth of information that I'd discovered on whatever sub-level of the small building that I ended up on. Of course, I thought of all of that on the ride down, before the doors opened.

Then the elevator stopped. I pushed all of my ideas to the side.

The doors opened.

### Cauterized.

When they leave, you want to cut it off completely, and cleanly, and cauterize the wounds, so that the healing process can begin. With medicines, and social events, and time, it should become just another set of scars.

struggle

Have a hard time letting it go, do you? Have a hard time forgetting all of these things on your lists; have a harder time remembering the things that you thought you'd never forget? How to love, how to live, how to lie...

### Charlie.

What can I say, now? It's all the same.

Sleep comes, and sleep goes. Things may rotate; things may look different in the afternoon than they did in the morning; Always at night, when they seem to be something else completely. But they never change, not really.

Everything seems important, and maybe it is, sometimes. Flip it over and it changes, the dynamic of it all, the way the currents touch it, and it's upside down and backwards and it's useless. Same object, different perspective.

Sometimes, you don't ask for him, but Charlie the Ghost will come, and he's there in those most vivid and lucid moments when you're failing to sleep; reminding you: how years ago the afternoons were long and you could conquer galaxies in an hour. When once, you investigated the closets, searched for doorways into other worlds, other times, any other place besides the boring turn of hours in the day. Waited for fireflies, made lanterns with them, watched them, in some innocent but sickening way, as they faded and died.

Everything dies, Charlie tells you, so don't act as if you've risen above the cycle. Don't act as if it's forever. It isn't. If luck permits, it may become one of the memories, some twenty years later, the ones that keep you from sleeping. Otherwise, it's all gone, forgotten... in that, at least, we are all forgiven.

### Comfortable Touch.

It's the only thing that's real, I think. Because love is such a sacrifice in itself. Because love is giving up oneself to the will and whim of another.

### Code 020.

STATUS REPORT: PING #59477 SUBJECT 70617468

CODE 020: CRITICAL ERROR: ADVISE SUBJECT RETRIEVAL NECESSARY FOR FURTHER ANALYSIS

CODE 020: CRITICAL ERROR: PROBABILITY OF LATENT CRITICAL PROCESSING EXCEPTION 0.36%

ANALYST NOTES: UNAVAILABLE

SECONDARY NOTATION:

I stepped into the elevator, though, deciding that it was too late to turn back. I checked the control box inside; there was only one button available. There were no markings indicating whether the elevator went up or down, though, so I still wasn't sure if it would take us upstairs or into some basement somewhere.

"Are you guys coming?" I asked them, waiting on them to get into the elevator with me.

They looked at each other, and then Janine took a step in my direction, but Hunter grabbed her arm, holding her back.

"Is that really a good idea?" He questioned. "We don't know where it's going, or if there's anyone there, or how illegal this really is getting, even, considering that we're kind of trespassing already, using fake ID cards to get past the gates, and have yet to see anyone who works here."

Janine made a funny face. "We're already committed, Hunter," she reasoned. "Somebody should take the elevator, anyway. It's not as if it's going to be some trap or something. That creepy and ominous thing that I said was just a joke. I have a weird sense of humor. Besides, like I've been saying all along, I really think we're at the wrong place."

"Whatever, guys. Wait here," I said, pushing the button. "I'll be back in a couple of minutes."

The doors closed. That was the last time that I saw Janine or Hunter.

### Commit.

Committed to another ancient treasure, another ancient box. You've seen your share of those vines entangled, embracing, strangling the rotting wood that conceals immeasurable wealth, or so you say. I never found much use for stolen gold, anyway. So, sinking like a ship, you hold a desperate cry out in the direction of heaven, hoping that the gods will notice you; some long lost myths in the shadows by your side.

Don't wait up for me.

Don't worry, I won't.

### Connection.

She wore a barrette, metal, in her hair, it was in the shape of an infinity sign, and she had on those nerdy glasses this time. Bottle blonde, just like they almost always are, with the darker roots growing out and the hair cut short, of course, smoking her cigarettes like a professional would, someone in a commercial. They're all the same, small frames, nice curves. Unlikely to gain weight as they age. Her arm sleeved with tattoos of something foreign but oh-so-colorful, complete with the high water 501s and the army-navy Red Cross bag that served as a purse. White tank top over black bra, she probably had her nipples pierced and she probably put out on the third date. That is, if she wasn't preoccupied with her notebook as she scribbled little memos to posterity and crappy poetry about being dissed in a relationship and lyrics for her band that never-will-be. They're all the same, anyway, and they're always cold, so they turn the heater up in September and they steal hoodies from boys and they name their cars with names that change depending on the time of day, and the mood.

### Cup.

I loved the way that she laughed, with no reservation, no awkwardness, without fear that she might laugh embarrassingly or stupidly. She laughed freely, something I had taught myself not to do a long time before then as a means of keeping a low profile. Laughter, to me, was a reason to be self-conscious, at least until she came along.

### Curiosity #1.

I am the blazing fire of resentment, a needle scraping across the grooves, a strong wind pulling a kite with a frayed string.

Before we arrived here, we smoked opium together. Hardly romantic, she sat on the toilet and I leaned against the bathroom wall and you could hardly hear the bubbling of the cheap plastic water pipe through all the noise of the party as we burned our coveted score away.

That's the end of it, she tells me, places the pipe down in the bathtub, and reaches for her cigarettes. Outside, thunder, and the building shakes a little. I stare at my reflection in the mirror. I investigate my teeth. My mouth is dry, I can still taste the alkaloids, and I feel like I have tar underneath my fingernails. It appears as if the flowers on the wallpaper are spiraling around in circles, but I know that it's all imagination, running reckless.

I need to talk to you... later. I need to tell you something, she says, between indulgent drags off a menthol cigarette that crackles as it burns to the filter. And I push her words to the side, like so many stupid magazines that I can wait to read later, all piling up and cluttering the waiting room tables in my mind, because, you know, everything is cool. Everything feels good. So I kiss her, and she bites my lip, and I taste a little bit of blood, and she mumbles an apology. It doesn't matter, she doesn't hurt me.

It won't be long before we're somewhere else, a universe away from here, but for now, I'm content to trace lines with my fingertips across the curves of her skin while all the seemingly forgettable music hooks itself irrevocably into the back catalogues of my brain, where it will wait, like a snare, to tear at my heels whenever I try to run.

### Curiosity #2.

There are sirens, somewhere. Far away from here. Closer, the dim callings of the trains as the rails hum and sigh into darkness. Closer still, the sound of the highway people, bleary-eyed, north to south, south to north, all lost somewhere between painted lines. All heading home, or leaving home, or without a home. These are the sounds of a city that dreams as it's raining outside in the night.

What were you dreaming about? She asks me, concern in her voice sounding alien after this gulf of years that we've spent growing apart together. It must have been pretty bad, she yawns, stretching her arms toward the ceiling, palms upward. She counts something, then, on her hands, using her thumb for the first digit, and I realize that she's doing so in binary. Whatever it is, it's lost, and she continues. You destroyed something, she says.

There was a ghost, I tell her, and though there's no such thing, I shiver.

No, not anymore, she replies, and she seems sad and resigned as she rolls over and faces the wall. She begins writing something with her finger on the paint in the dark, and I leave the bed so that I can look out of the window.

Outside, the world seems a little emptier, and over my shoulder, I hear her sigh.

### Curiosity #3.

Today, we're burning the past in a commandeered 55-gallon garbage can. We're burning all of the heretics of our yesterdays at the stake; we're giving all the mementos of heartbreak that we've ever known a true trial by fire - without a jury. There's smoke and it's everywhere, and tomorrow morning you will smell it in our clothes and hair. We're declaring war on all of the lies and broken promises that anyone ever made to us, foolishly committed to paper.

She's crying as she throws the photographs into the flames. One trembling handful followed by another, and another. I pause and I debate the consequence of our actions, each irrevocable motion forever banishing both the good things and the bad. With time, even the memories will blur. I hear the rose-filled vodka bottle crack at the bottom if the furnace, imagining the glass as it begins to glow. Into the fire, the novel I never finished. Into the fire, pages and pages of alternate histories, of better tomorrows for both of us, of the imaginary people who become trapped inside of everyone's heads. Today, they die. Today, we are free.

She pauses for a moment, and I watch as she lights a cigarette. She takes a long drag, half closing her left eye while raising her right eyebrow, and with her eyes she is asking me what, or who, or when I will destroy next. So as the glowing ashes rise, drifting on the temperature flows, I pick up notebooks, illegibly scribed with music. I pick up scrapbooks, overflowing with magazine clippings and articles. I pick up so many letters from lovers who walked out in the morning but still haven't returned. I pick up bloody knives and smashed toy cars and casings of bullets and broken microchips. All rise, please move towards the fire.

In the end, there's nothing that can be saved.

Now, she steps closer and kisses me. Her lower lip is warm, her nose is cold. Her hands are on my chest, fingers spread out as if to grab me, to stop me, or perhaps to push me away. In a motion, she turns, and she wraps her arms around me, and she's standing behind me. Like a little kid, she's peeking at the fire: curious. Afraid. And here we remain, together, forever, observing the warm glowing corpses of our pasts.

### Curvature.

curvature. the sphere of the earth, tilting away beneath our feet.

### Disbelief.

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01110111 01110010 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000 11100010 10000000 10010011 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101001 01101110 01100100 00100001 00100000 01000010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01001001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01110100 01110010 01111001 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110010 01100101 01101101 01100101 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100101 01100011 01101001 01100110 01101001 01100011 00100000 01110100 01110010 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110000 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101100 01100001 01110011 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100101 01100011 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### Distraction.

WOULD YOU...

Press inquiries that only you and the ghost would know the answers to?

Is there a limit to common knowledge, to that knowledge which is attainable through conversations, songs, and writings?

A limit to detail that outside observers will retain?

Is there truly anything that only you and the ghost can know, some small detail that you both will remember, something that no one else can attest to as truth or untruth, as fact or fiction?

And how does one test the ceiling of said limitations whilst retaining conversation with aforementioned ghost?

Isn't it proven, time and again, throughout history, that something too good to be true inevitably is, that nothing comes without cost (material, tangible, or otherwise), and that wishes really don't come true?

And do you invite the ghost inside, and embrace it, and love it anyway, or follow the ghost to where ever it resides, dedicating everything, sacrificing everything - just to prove that there's something more in the world, the universe, besides the various (and mundane) processes of the life cycle?

I suppose that there is no right answer, and that one must simply walk to the edge of the world, and peer off into the blackness and darkness of forever, and take a step - quite possibly, or better yet, most likely, to fall and to perish. But there is still the chance, no matter how infinitesimal, that one will do anything but plunge into the depths and lose life, and if such a thing exists, the soul; that one will fly, or metamorphose, or begin again, and that all of the theories and hypotheses and previously set examples will be proven wrong...

Or maybe it's better stated that there must be the chance that one will simply not fall...

### Door.

0-a

She was always one for testing the limits of what she'd been told, you know. Pushing the envelope or crossing the line, but not anything in a daring or romanticized way, if that's the kind of thing that you're thinking. Always with an inclination more towards social self-destruction, financial ruin, or bodily harm, a blind eye turned towards caution and prudence, always riding the proverbial razor's edge one fraction of an ounce of pressure away from rending the artery hopelessly and irrevocably useless for the sustenance of life. That's not a complete sentence, is it? I don't care.

0-b

For example, she's got this scar on her hand, these interlocking curves that form all these perfect 75 cent circles, like the rings of a tree, kind of, and they're from when she was just a kid and she had to touch the glowing orange eye of knowledge on the stove top because she didn't believe mom or pop when they told her that it was HOT, that it would BURN, and that burns always HURT. She's also the type that never cries, at least as far as I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of her, you know, so I doubt that even then she reacted in a way that revealed weakness... a real tough-girl type, you've met someone like her before, I'm sure.

1

Mom and Pop, before they moved on, they told the story a little differently than she does, of course. I guess all parents have them, these stories of a loveable but stupid and disobedient little kid2, screaming at the top of its lungs as it runs through the house with an extended finger or hand or arm, lamenting the gods for placing such curiosity in their thirsty little heads, all the while with tears and snot flowing freely from all available facial orifices, blind faith in motion that usually concludes with a more dramatic meeting of said child with a previously unnoticed and also quite inconsiderately placed chair, door, or wall.

2

Well, that's just how she is, you know? So I was kind of surprised when she started listening to everyone's advice one day on matters of the heart served in conjunction with a waste pile of really bad ideas, and even more surprised when she totally flaked out on this guy that she was really into, and I was really, REALLY surprised when she stopped answering the phone when he called because he was, after all, potential for a REALLY REALLY bad mindfuck. Really. And that's probably why he was perfect for her, and also the reason she'd let him get away, with her new resolution to follow instead of lead and to let everyone else make her decisions for her.

Time passes like a dream. We reach for the sky, we seem surprised when our hands return, empty. But what of all the breath that we've just captured and let slip between our fingers? How many lives have shared that air?

3

I'm learning to be more like the other lemmings, she tells me. I'm learning to be safe and predictable and boring and mundane and encapsulated, because that's a million times easier than the kind of thing that scars your hand, or worse, your heart, for life, and it's the kind of loss I'm willing to take and the kind of medicine that I'm learning to swallow without gagging. this conversation evolves as I smoke an emerald green Cloversmoke, an American cigarette the color of money, so fancy and fashionable, in an unkempt roadside cafe near Toulouse, France.

4

At least I didn't fuck him, she sighs as she says this, and she looks kind of regretful and sad, and I put my hand onto hers. Is it any wonder that the words for Heart and Hurt are so similar?

every moment is an open door

### Doubt.

Because it spreads throughout your life.

Because it consumes you, in the end; in the end, malignant versions of yourself have destroyed far too much to allow for sustained survival.

Because you become terminally ill with it. Upon analysis, you find that the core is hollow. That the life is a shell.

The body is a vessel, and when the vessel is broken, there is nothing.

A big, awfully blank

NOTHING.

The conversion of cells, the mutation, proving evolution on a cellular level.

The wirings of the brain much like that of the television (have you ever seen it when you turn the power off?), residual electricity surges and points in the center, a bright beacon of light through the tunnel.

### Dream.

I open empty hands and smile, A broken dream.

Can you remember who you wanted to be when you grew up?

### Drift.

Someday, when we are old and gray fools

when we're waiting to die,

what we've done, what we're thinking,

we'll wonder: was living worth the lies?

All of our heartaches, all of the scars

worn, bandaged, hidden - we are the weary war-torn.

For us: the darkness, forever.

We are like the lifeless stars.

The sun rises; we drift.

### Drink.

Will the fever break?

I don't know

Should we take him to the hospital?

I'd rather not

What if it gets worse?

What if it gets better?

### Earache.

We're in the car together and we're not quite lost, but we're far from found. The heater is turned up to 4, we're driving aimlessly along the coast waiting for the engine to warm up the air, we're talking in hushed tones and whispers and we're murmuring a stream of thought, half spoken and a quarter implied, and a quarter lost.

She's telling me a story of how she breaks into houses as a demonstration of her free will and I'm thinking that I've been here before, a long time ago. My ear canals ache. The wind on the beach in the springtime will cut right through you, a servant of the ocean, so cold, so dark and deep. I focus on the dotted lines, playing ping-pong with the car as if I'm drunk.

I feel sick to my stomach. She doesn't taste the same as she used to taste. I concentrate on the feeling of sand between my toes inside of my socks and I'm trying to count the grains and the fibers and the cigarette in my hand is about to fall on the floor. I'll search for it, blindly, find it by heat alone, smelling the smoldering carpet.

She's telling me a story of ghosts and gods and graveyards, and I'm laughing on the inside - but not a healthy laughter filled with joy or one of carelessness, instead: the laughter of the malignant, filled with irony and a taste like bile, or corrosion. I feel a growing sense of distrust in this woman as my earaches subside, but I reach for her hands anyway, and she takes mine into hers as if she were eager for the contact. I ask her to marry me, again, because it's all a part of this destructive chain of events we always pull from within ourselves, and I see no reason to change the script, no matter how much or how little the stage has been rearranged. Again, she declines, reminding me to keep my eyes on the road.

We're our own little symphony of fucked up reactions to each other.

I take aim for the ditch, the phone poles; I take aim for the tractor-trailer's headlights in the opposite lane. I take aim for anything substantial and immediately deadly, anything to bounce out of the scratch in the record, anything to release the pause button of this same endless cut-scene.

I change my mind, steady the wheel, and I drive on.

WHY SHOULD I QUESTION THIS

"It's so loud in here sometimes. Sometimes Nothing is all that you can hear."

### Echo.

It all starts with the extended eye contact. Then, next thing you know, they're pouring you another glass out of the second, no, the third bottle of wine, and they're dragging you into the bathroom, and stripping you down, and they're throwing you in the shower and scrubbing you with expensive soaps and pads with hard to pronounce French names.

Have you been sick before? Are you sick now?

How many times have you done this?

So the shower ends, they believe that they've made you clean again, they believe that they've washed the stench of living off of you, they believe that you don't still reek of all of the alcohol you've imbibed. They believe, so they move to kiss you, but it's blurry now, the lights are so bright, and if it happens, you can't remember.

If anything has changed, you've failed to notice, because, after all, this is the vessel that you reside in and these are the battle scars to prove that you've lived. That you've loved, that you've lied, that you've bent hearts and have had yours bruised. That it all fades into memory, and to a point that you can't remember a name with the face, or a situation with a date, or what their feet looked like.

Then, one day, you're waking up, the sun is in your eyes, you take note that it's always going to be that way, be it bathroom lights or stadium lights or some life-giving star that you've taken for granted; you'll always have the glare blinding you, the tears to blur your vision, the drowsiness of sleep resting upon those lids. That day is the day that it all suddenly matters; for you've planted no garden, no flowers, you've written no novel. You've stockpiled so little for the winter, and much less for posterity, it's already growing late in the day.

You can still smell the alcohol in your hangover, it's there, written on your eyelids and inside the echoes in your memory - you can taste it in your throat; it's telling you that no matter what you did, you can't be right, that no matter how you've changed, you haven't changed enough. That you never will.

But today is a new day! The songs will be played again (perhaps, with courage), the stars, tonight, they will shine brighter than they have before, these things that are so like anchors to you - you will drag them painfully in, breaking the skin in the process, or you will unapologetically heave them overboard, leaving them behind, forever, lost into the abyss.

So I question: are you in? Or, even now, are you making an escape overboard?

### Edge.

".gnissim yletelpmoc secalp emos ni dna ,detnemgarf dna derettacs dna delbmuj s'noitamrofni ehT .rehtie wonk t'nseod ehS ?ot emac ehs etunim eht taht yrt t'ndid ew kniht uoY Whfg yvxr jung V fnvq jura V gbyq lbh nobhg gur wvtfnj chmmyr, naq ubj ab bar pbhyq chg vg gbtrgure nal zber va nal fbeg bs ernfbanoyr nzbhag bs gvzr, fvapr gur oyrnpu unq snqrq gbb znal yvarf sebz gur vzntr."

### Elevation.

How many dreams do we surpass when we fly?

### Endless.

The possibilities are endless.

What would you like to experience?

A moment as someone else?

### Eulogy.

WE WILL MISS YOU

WHEN YOU ARE GONE: VOLUME ONE

A TRIBUTE TO THOSE THINGS THAT WE ALL HAVE LOST IN OUR YEARS

AND THERE ARE STILL THOSE THINGS THAT WE HAVE YET TO LOSE

"Tänk om han inte är samarbetsvillig?" frågade jag honom. Jag ville inte släppa greppet om honom.

"Tro mig, han kommer att samarbeta med dig. Jag är säker på det" svarade han, med en ton av självsäkerhet i sin röst. "Byggnaden är inte säker nog för mig längre. Någon kommer kontakta dig senare med mer information. Kan du vara så snäll och låta mig gå nu?"

Jag släppte honom och han borstade sin jacka genom att platta ut delarna av jackan som tidigare rynklats till av mitt hårda grepp.

"Din vän, Janine, va? Hon oroar sig säkert för dig nu" sade han och flinade mot mig med samma blicks om hade skrämt mig tidigare. Hur mycket vet de här människorna egentligen om m9itt liv? Varför gav de mig information i bitar när det verkade så enkelt för de att hitta och binda mig till henne?

"Du är mer än en undersökningsanalyst va?" frågade jag.

"Det är en passande titel för situationer som mina arbetsgivare låter mig hantera," svarade han.

"Dina arbetsgivare? Du menar Synchro Systems eller?"

"Gör inte för många antaganden nu vännen."

"Jag uppskattar och gillar inte dina spel," sade jag honom, och vände mig för att lämna.

"Verkligheten är inte ett spel. Det finns alltid konsekvenser för alla inblandade."

Det förklarade inte speciellt mycket, heller.

### Euthenica.

You're talking about putting it into pill form?

That's the most likely avenue the company is going to go for, I'd say.

But the nanites won't be active.

We've already solved that problem. They activate once they've been ingested. Theoretically, at least. We're still working on some kinks in the process.

Kinks?

Well, you know. Currently, only about 60% of the nanites are activating as they should. The results are pretty predictable: Memory alteration's not occurring as it should.

Fragments, again?

The same problem we had with the injected version trials.

And your team is sure that the issue lies with the microprocessors and it's not something with how the mind is hard wired? My people had some pretty strong evidence that the actual physical alignment of molecules wasn't everything required for the memories to be retained.

You're talking about the unknown element.

I'm talking about something like a soul.

We can't even get into that. The results that we've achieved so far have been phenomenal, and they're pretty conclusive that it's all taking place on a physical level. We just haven't isolated the proper chemical coding yet. Full swarm activation ought to take care of that problem, since we'll be yielding exponentially higher results.

We're running out of... blank slates.

There's no shortage of fresh minds out there. There are desperate people out there who will try anything. But beyond that, it's nothing a little monetary compensation won't fix.

Have you thought of what you'd like to call it yet?

A lot of that is going to depend on if the FDA forces us to pair up with a pharmaceutical company. But I do have some ideas. Most of the team agrees on the name 'Euthenica' for the pill form of the product.

The higher ups will never go for it. I'm sure they want it to somehow tie into the Synchronicity Drive line. Besides, it's too close to 'euthanasia'.

Our client base and target market ought to be educated enough for that not to bother them.

How smart is a lab rat?

Ha. Anyway, I'll send the reports over by the end of the day. Let me know if your team comes up with anything new this afternoon.

Things are going slower now that we're being investigated, but I'll be in touch. Thanks for lunch.

Your turn, next time.

### Evidence.

Johnny watched her play with her cigarette and wait for someone to offer a light, and he had that smug look on his face when she touched his hand with both of hers as he offered. Predictable, predictable. He watched her as she sipped her Shiraz and he asked her if she liked Port, and of course, she did, and when he asked her she kind of half smiled at him, so he told her all the bands she listened to while he picked the polish off his nails. He reached into his pocket and he pulled out a tranquilizer when she wasn't looking and he slipped it into his mouth after toying with it for a bit, and he washed it down with spit so she wouldn't notice anything but a somewhat nervous gulp, one that she would attribute to some sort of magnetism or affliction similar to sweaty palms. Johnny checked his watch and he sang the same songs in his head that he always had as he waited for the half hour to slide by, and it slid by, the hands of his watch almost fluid they were so real, and he debated telling her about her favorite movies and her favorite books and about everything else that she didn't know that he knew that she'd take to a deserted island if she had to go, but instead he settled on her Spanish. When her phone rang, he left, heading for the car in the parking deck, knowing (or at least hoping) that the closed doors meant encapsulation and isolation from the tiresome redundancy of them all.

They're all the same, anyway, and they're no better than the walking dead; too deaf, too dumb, and too blind to realize that they've been finished forever, since long before they had ever even begun.

### Expand.

Expansion

I was young once,

Alive.

Believed in love,

Believed in life.

October sunsets,

The winter streets.

The Christmas lights in

The willow tree.

The house behind us,

The basement stairs.

We agreed to marry there.

### Fallow.

What is it like to recall your life like a dream? Some things, too real, some things, too good to be true?

How much can be taken as fact?

How much should be taken on faith?

The darkest days have yet to unfold.

57 68 61 74 20 69 73 20 69 74 20 6c 69 6b 65 20 74 6f 20 72 65 63 61 6c 6c 20 79 6f 75 72 20 6c 69 66 65 20 6c 69 6b 65 20 61 20 64 72 65 61 6d 3f 20 53 6f 6d 65 20 74 68 69 6e 67 73 2c 20 74 6f 6f 20 72 65 61 6c 2c 20 73 6f 6d 65 20 74 68 69 6e 67 73 2c 20 74 6f 6f 20 67 6f 6f 64 20 74 6f 20 62 65 20 74 72 75 65 3f 0d 0a 0d 0a 48 6f 77 20 6d 75 63 68 20 63 61 6e 20 62 65 20 74 61 6b 65 6e 20 61 73 20 66 61 63 74 3f 0d 0a 0d 0a 48 6f 77 20 6d 75 63 68 20 73 68 6f 75 6c 64 20 62 65 20 74 61 6b 65 6e 20 6f 6e 20 66 61 69 74 68 3f 0d 0a 0d 0a 20 0d 0a 0d 0a 54 68 65 20 64 61 72 6b 65 73 74 20 64 61 79 73 20 68 61 76 65 20 79 65 74 20 74 6f 20 75 6e 66 6f 6c 64 2e

### Flash.

THE NUANCES OF MY HOME

Fig. 1: The sudden flame or intense heat produced by a bomb or other explosive device.

"I don't remember how I ended up in your bathtub, actually. It's as if that's all that's ever been, except that I know better. I feel that there was much more to my life before that. And obviously there was, I mean, I didn't just suddenly start to exist in the middle of a bubble bath, and I obviously crave cigarettes for a reason! I just don't remember why, or how it came to be that I was in your house," She paused, swinging her feet a little bit, heels banging against the cabinet door beneath her. "I remember really weird things. For example, I feel that the disorientation I'm experiencing is to be expected, as if it's nothing out of the ordinary: normal. But at the same time, it feels as if I've just woken up out of a very lucid dream. My other memories, the few I can recall, at least, are fading fast, replaced by new ones that don't make any sense, and then the new ones are changed out for even newer ones. It's like my brain's stuck in overdrive, trying to recover a lot of lost information at once, and it's really confused about where to file and store it all."

Then, the lights in the house dimmed for a moment. I could hear the pitch of the central air conditioning unit winding up. Noises like that you only notice when they change, or when they start or stop altogether; they're part of the background music of everyday life. The refrigerator, old beast that she was, clicked and chugged, sputtering out a few cubes of ice into the freezer box, capable of only a small percentage of her previous levels of production in her old age.

She distracted me from my observations of the nuances of my home by executing a fall from the counter top then, unconscious. I barely caught her, only just in time to slow her fall, right before her head hit the floor.

FLASH! What happens when the sky falls?

### Fn05.

there was something there that I found that I hadn't held before, but alone on a hard and musty single occupancy bed, in a room much like a prison, we create these types of theologies. we want that religion, the one they built the towering cathedrals for, we want to be a part of something more than a mere fingerprint thrown stray from the hand of the creator, we demand to be creased, and broken, and tested by fire and by division. we do this so that we know what we are missing later when we look behind us; we do this so that the pain of life can escape the miring in our souls.

### Fog.

Mother

... And so the prince and the princess lived happily ever after, and the dragons were all banished from their kingdom, forever.

Daughter

Mommy? Are there such things as ghosts?

Mother

Of course not, honey! They're just in scary stories.

Daughter

Like the ones that grandpa tells us on Halloween?

Mother

Yes, exactly.

Daughter

What about monsters? Are they real?

Mother

No, there's no such thing as monsters, either.

Daughter

... But sometimes I hear noises. In the basement.

Mother

The noises in the basement? Those are just the furnace, or maybe the pipes. There's nothing down there to worry about!

Daughter

Are you sure?

Mother

Of course I'm sure. I'm also sure that it's time for you to go to sleep. Goodnight, honey. I love you.

Daughter

I love you, too, mama.

(Mother exits, turning off the light, hesitating at the door for a moment. She does not close the door all the way.)

(Some time has passed. The mother is in the kitchen, reading a newspaper, when the daughter enters, carrying a doll under her arm.)

Daughter

Mommy, there's a monster in the basement. I can hear it.

Mother

Don't be silly. There's no monster in the basement.

Daughter

But it's scratching on the floors!

Mother

Okay. I'll go down there and tell the monster to stop making so much noise and leave so that you can sleep.

Daughter

Be careful, mommy.

Mother

I'll be as careful as can be!

(Mother exits to the basement while the daughter waits. Time passes. More time passes. The child shifts, worried, slowly moving towards the door leading to the basement.)

Daughter

Mommy?

(The daughter opens the door to the basement, and gathering her courage, makes her way down the stairs into the basement. It is empty.)

Daughter

Mommy?

...Mommy?

Where are you?

(There is no answer)

### Follow.

Six months ago, we agreed to meet here, should we ever become Lost, should we ever desire to be Found.

[ x ]

Where is she now?

To get to heaven, you must first pass through hell.

### Footnote #1.

I don't remember writing this. I found the torn page beneath the stove in the kitchen one day as I was searching for wherever it was that the mouse was coming into the apartment from. Penned in my handwriting, it defied reasonable explanation, yet there it was.

A page that shouldn't exist.

### Footnote #4.

There's blood on the walls and it's getting worse every day. I'm starting to wonder if it's not just the moths and the mice that are dying as a result of my carefully placed traps. I'm starting to wonder if something larger has been injured and is watching from the shadows, or from the closet, or from underneath the bed. Waiting for me to leave, for me to drop my guard, or for me to fall asleep on the couch. Every so often, the air's a little too stale, a little too dead to be innocuous, and there's a little more blood on the walls.

Maybe I'm dead, this is hell, and I'm only just now starting to realize what's happened. Maybe you're not even real anymore. Maybe I imagined you all along.

I've been trying to stop the moths and the mice for weeks now. They persist. I lie motionless on the floor for hours and listen to them in the walls as they do the things that mice and moths do. I have holes in my sweaters and holes in the drywall behind the kitchen sink. I smell their shit in the carpet. Last week, the scars on my left arm once again became apparent. Yesterday, it was raining when I thought I saw you through the window, calling to me. Black water ran down your cheeks like tears. A trick of the light? After a moment, you were nothing... gone.

What are these perpetual context clues and why can't I decipher them?

I remember what it felt like to put my face against your naked belly and the smell of your skin. I remember counting all of the fine hairs just below your navel as you ran your fingers across my head, you sang songs without words to me, and I mumbled forgettable things to our unborn child. How I put my hands over the pages of the book you were reading and you reached for the glass of water on the bedside table. I remember what the condensation looked like, the way it made a ring on the polished wood and how it ran down your wrist. Broken pieces of ceramic on concrete: the way the ice cubes sounded as you spit them back into the glass. How your fingers were cold when you placed them on my eyelids and told me to sleep.

Was life ever real? I would like to think that it was, that it is, that you are, but something bigger than that kind of life is lurking in the crevices of my home and it's almost audible: no, no no. The blood on the walls is real, when all I have left of you is the memory of experience that in it remains suspect. What have I captured? Or perhaps, more appropriately, what is it that has captured me?

### Footnote #6.

We are Islands

She laughs.

I tell her that I love her, too.

She tells me to be serious.

"It's not going to come true, now, anyway, because I told you what I wished for."

So what you're saying is that we're doomed to fail. Cursed until the end of time, I say.

"Do you believe in Fate?" she responds, holding her hands up, palms facing outward. "Can you feel me?"

### Freedom.

Johnny climbs behind the wheel, pops another trank, and starts the car. He hits the windshield wipers to clear the dew off the windshield and he turns off the radio. He fumbles in his pocket for a lighter and there's a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

Johnny clicks on the headlights and stares at the wall of the parking deck and he grips the steering wheel with both hands, now, and he presses his face into the steering wheel and he half-scream-half-growls with his mouth closed and he waits. He sighs. He closes his eyes. And he remembers.

### Games.

Have you compromised too many of The Good Things in favor of stability?

"What a fun game!" I exclaim

As my arm is twisted to the point

of breaking. No more faking it,

Tomorrow, all of the lies will be true.

Likewise, the love of you

Will be tested again, and again.

With this bottle, I drink to my sins.

Fear, Dismissal, Fear again.

Let's get together.

Roll the dice, just one more time,

Spin the chamber, and let the steel

Give us a kiss,

Goodnight.

It stops, empty again. Again

I wait for tomorrow,

Another day to try again.

### Hands.

Do you sleep easily at night? When stars rest blinking behind a blanket of clouds, like your head, your hair, drifting across your pillow, spilling across the sheets. These patterns, of which we all dream. Do you dream of yourself? Those days when your focus on things was so concise that, like a razor, you could cut to the core of all that passion and extract, hold in your hand, even, things that others only imagined to exist.

Did you discover something, somewhere, in all of your searching, which frightened you? Here the bones remain, all heavy with doubt and fear, scored by a life of cowardice and hesitations.

Her wishes were to remain by the sea.

### Have We Met.

So there are these boxes on the bookshelf, and when I'm searching, I began taking them down. What did I put in these boxes? Why did I seal it with tape when I closed them up?

The most recent one isn't taped closed, so I open it, sitting in the middle of the floor. It contains letters that I've never sent to people. I remember filling up the other boxes, now, and sealing them when they could hold no more. I remember when I started making the boxes in the first place; back when I realized that the letters that I was mailing weren't being read. When I realized that the recipients of the mail didn't care enough to respond. I remembered that the first box had letters in it that I'd sent, but had been returned, back when I first began collecting the letters.

I still had to write them, though. You have to say things, not just sometimes, all times. You have to take the thoughts out of the ether, pulling them down from the sky like clouds or satellites or stars, examining them, and then apply them to the paper. Even when nobody's listening. The papers, the ink, they're there to help you get it all out.

I miss you

I love you

Don't go away

Don't come back

I hate you

I can't remember what your face looks like

You know how it is. Stages, relationships, friends, lovers, enemies. I wrote letters, some like lyrics, some like songs, and some like long run-on sentences that didn't make sense. Short and long letters, and folded them, sealed the envelopes, and then I placed them inside of these boxes.

Would you read them if I sent them your way? Would the things that I had to say to you a year ago, two minutes ago, would those things even matter to you? People, how I miss you, you lost parts of my past.

RETURN TO SENDER

The easiest and best way to avoid rejection is to not extend oneself at all. There is loss in this sacrifice, I know, reminded as I am sorting through the more recent past, all organized into tiny paper packets inside of a red cardboard box. But there is something not lost, as well, and that something, at times, seems much more valuable to me. I am too afraid that it will hurt again, even still, and so the risk is avoided by the creation of these mailboxes.

You don't remember how many times that I've tried. You don't know how many ways I've told you that I loved you. You can't see the millions of characters all calling your name, or the hours that have died in your honor. And all of those hours are kept in a box.

I look to the fireplace. I should destroy these. Some other time, that's what they are. Some other time that is lost.

I don't, though. I can't. It would be like destroying part of me, cutting it out of my soul, feeding it to the flames. Your flames consumed me enough. I am not strong enough for trying this again.

### Heaven.

There is a darkness. Can you feel it?

Omnipresence of

Something, some force.

The hands, reaching up from the sides of the bed

When you're half-sleeping, like a skeleton aching to be free of its skin

Pulling you down,

Down,

Down.

Sometimes, you might fight it, and

Awaken,

Gasping and full of fear.

Sometimes, you cannot resist it, and

Your resentment grows

In the darkest corners of your soul.

### Hell.

All roads lead towards it, and are paved with good intentions.

### Home.

They say that it's where the heart is,

but everything I've ever loved is behind some other door.

All of these decorations

All of these ornamentations

All of these distractions

We box them up, four walls, top them off with a ceiling,

There's no place like it.

### Illum.

Er war unser Taxifahrer an diesem Tag. Ständig fing er an den merkwürdigsten Zeitpunkten Gespräche mit wildfremden Menschen an.

Ich rauchte eine Zigarette und beobachtete, wie die Bäume an uns vorbeizogen, während ich ihre Hand hielt, als sie ihren Kopf auf meine Schulter legte.

"Wo soll es hingehen? Da ich der schnellste Taxifahrer dieser Hemisphäre bin, kann ich euch für einen kleinen Zuschlag schneller ans Ziel bringen" sagte er. Dann stellte er sich vor: "Ich heiße übrigens Thomas, und ihr beiden scheint etwas anders als meine üblichen Kunden zu sein."

"Anders?" er schluckte den Köder. Ich schnippte meine Asche aus der gesprungenen Scheibe. Wenigstens ließ Thomas uns rauchen. Heutzutage erlauben das nur noch die wenigsten Taxis.

"Nun, zuallererst seid ihr verliebt, was an sich schon ungewöhnlich genug ist. Aber da ist noch etwas anderes. Besonders bei dir." Er zeigte im Rückspiegel auf sie, wobei er die Glasfläche leicht berührte und den Spiegel drehte, sodass ich sein Gesicht nicht mehr so gut sehen konnte.

"Ich habe ein Angebot für dich", fuhr er fort. "Ich werde dir beweisen, dass ich der schnellste Taxifahrer bin, den du jemals hattest, und wenn du unzufrieden bist, wenn wir ankommen, wo auch immer du hinwillst, ist die Fahrt umsonst. Wenn du allerdings zufrieden bist, bezahlst du das Doppelte. Haben wir einen Deal?"

### ILY.

So, sitting on a balcony in Paris, I asked her to marry me for the first time, not really expecting an answer, not really surprised or disappointed or sad when she said no. I knew inside myself that there'd be other opportunities for all of that, and that it was merely a token representation that paled in comparison to the true nature of my ties with her.

143

143

143

143

143

143

143

143

### Imagination.

I don't think that falling in love with someone really qualifies as a special power. Anybody can do that.

### Index 4.

She looks down at me, placing her hand on top of my head.

"The thing is, as every parent learns,

that the child will never be as disappointing to the parents as the parents will be to the child."

I don't really understand.

### Life.

Has Life Gotten Boring?

Have you compromised too many of The Good Things in favor of stability?

Do you miss the days of reckless abandon where consequences were irrelevant?

Has your love life taken a turn for the mundane, and you'd like to recapture something mad, passionate, and extraordinary?

Perhaps you, like many others, have found life to be little more than an endless series of repeated motions. Spending hours every day in traffic only for the great reward of an entire day lost to the cardboard and cheap carpet of a cubicle environment can wear anyone down, especially when days blur into weeks, and weeks blur into years, and at the end of the road, you have nothing to show for all of your efforts. Many people find themselves wondering:

Where did all the time go?

Are you one of these people?

It doesn't have to be this way!

We can help you gain back all of those feelings and experiences that you thought you'd given up or lost forever!

gniroB nettoG efiL saH?

ytilibats fo rovaf ni sgnihT dooG ehT fo ynam oot desimorpmoc uoy evaH?

tnavelerri erew secneuqesnoc erehw nodnaba sselkcer fo syad eht ssim uoy oD?

yranidroartxe dna ,etanoissap ,dam gnihtemos erutpacer ot ekil d'uoy dna ,enadnum eht rof nrut a nekat efil evol ruoy saH?

noitamrofnI eroM

.yawyna ,ecived eht desu ylerar I .moordeb eht fo tuo enohpelet eht gnipeek fo tniop a ti edam I ecnis ,ti rewsna ot nehctik eht sdrawot yaw ym edam I ,gnitsised fo ngis tuohtiw gnir ot deunitnoc ti nehW .ti derongi I ,lausu sa dna ,gnar enohp ehT

.tey ffo gniog erew enon tub ,daeh ym fo edisni pu gnigrahc erew slleb mralA ?reilrae pu nekow I t'ndah yhW .xelpmoc tnemtrapa eht yb dedivorp retaw toh fo ylppus sseldne ylgnimees eht tsuahxe ot hguone gnol rof gninnur neeb dah ti taht dezilaer dna retaw eht ffo nrut ot revo dehcaer ,roolf moorhtab ym emoceb dah taht ssyba eht otni teprac deggolretaw eht hguorht deppets I

.roolf eht ni elddup elbadimrof ytterp a etaerc ot hguone gnol rof os gniod neeb dah yltnerappa dna moorhtab eht ni knis eht fo egde eht revo gninnur saw retaw eht taht saw gninrom taht pu ekow I nehw deciton I taht gniht tsrif ehT

### Lightlessness.

Is there truly a darkness in our souls, or just a lack of lightness?

### Listen.

Half the world's asleep

It can burn, or it can freeze.

You're here w/ me

At least in part: A memory.

Where the bed's still warm

Revolutions come, the conquered gone

So the world can sleep,

Cradled in the frozen deep.

In the winter cold we are

Sleeping all the days away.

Not all things bought are also sold

...listen!

I don't hear anything.

shh

hlysnan

I still can't hear it.

How can't you? It's everywhere!

### Memo.

Weak at the knees

What do they intend to do to me?

If I wait another year, and

Fall hostage to my fears:

I may not be able to see you

In the dark, ever again,

I need

A hand to guide me

I need

Something to fill this emptiness

I wanted

Something that could only begin

When I slept.

But with you, and of you,

I dream.

Trying to save you;

This could kill me.

With a blank stare, paper thin, and

Just as pale,

I could search forever.

or you,

You could save me from myself.

### Mist.

01001110 01101111 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101110 01110011 01110000 01101001 01110010 01100001 01100011 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 00100000 01110011 01101101 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01101110 01100011 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100001

How many years have passed?

Echoes penetrate the cavernous recesses of doubt. They fly silently by night with this inquiry, waiting, watching, growing restless. Somewhere on a sandy shore, beneath Autumn's trees and a cooling wind, these echoes take root, thrive, and blossom, fed by teardrops. The song they sing, a moan of the lost.

A Lapse Of Memory

01011001 01101111 01110101 00100111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101010 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01101001 01101101 01100001 01100111 01101001 01101110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00101110

### Mortals.

And summer sun with striking reminders of a cold country where rain would soak us to the core:

And so we are:

Following the beaten paths of the author before us, the father who resides in heaven (or, perhaps, and in a blasphemous and conspiring tone, hell), the savior who is covered with the ink stains of a propaganda machine, the holy spirits (ahem, with the addition of liquors and brandies to taste):

You wanted to kiss me then? I wonder, hard set to bite the left corner of the lower lip out of concentration and slash or determination, you wanted to put your mouth on mine, press lips, seal ourselves into a moment that alone could stand forever or compared to many others, go unnoticed?

It was our choice, I tell myself, to walk the paths that placed us here again. We're chipping at the concrete wall between our homes, some south-of-urban Shakespearean tragedy in the making; but isn't this our choice?

As if our souls were bound by the pen, or the knife, or perhaps worse, the electronic mail or the keyboard. Like shackles on our ankles it holds our attention span for one more day, hoping for a new movement, hoping this will be the day that we find courage or a bashful secret or both, and wishing that today the past would go away for good and we could touch, breathe, sweat, cry, and fuck without this bittersweet remorse.

Perhaps today is that other day, and a new day, washed by torrents of sky weeping, the water and the life pour together, and you and me... I daresay we may connect these points again.

We are mortals, bound.

### Moth.

I wrote it so you'd look, and you did.

So you'd have a reason to hate, to love, to doubt, to assume, to believe, to disbelieve, to carry a grudge, to forgive, to approach, and to recede.

And you did.

Maybe it's the truth. Maybe it's a lie. Maybe it's a trap, you've fallen into it, now you think you know why it's all so circular, and maybe you're right.

It's what you expect, isn't it, to read? About monuments falling, or being constructed, or being destroyed. About a moment or two that you didn't want to forget or that you can't get out of your head. Or both.

Because nothing ever changes, and everything is always the same. You make a decision and wish that you'd made the other. An option is given and you second-guess your judgment, always looking over the fence for a better answer.

For the yin, the yang. The black, the white. The waking, the sleeping. The living, the dead. The gods, the devils. The day, the night.

We've lost the borders, the gray scale, the drowsy, the comatose, the imps and the pixies, the twilight and the dawn. They're all somewhere, lost in neverland, because you always wanted it to be one extreme or the other.

But nothing matters, extreme or otherwise, in the end. Because it's just what you wanted to see it as, to read it as, to look into it as; it's how you considered yourself5, after all, sitting on the fence, and had nothing to do with any other factors but your own success and maladies, your own afflictions and triumphs, your own scar tissue that you nurse from within.

We live in fear of death, so fascinating nonetheless, and in doing so we forget to live. A death in the past, or the future, and an urge to examine it in all of its facets, creating a death in the present. Leaving the dead to rot in the streets because we're too afraid to scrape them up and we're too preoccupied to dig them a fitting grave. That way, everyone can see them, and they can watch the various stages of decay from inside their homes, warm, dry. Pretty smelling. That way, we never have to let them go, because everyone expects, you expect, we all know that it must be there tomorrow, and when the system is predictable, there's no reason to stop believing, there's no motivation to doubt what you've always thought was truth.

So keep reading, because I will give you a reason to hate, to love, to doubt, to assume, to believe, to disbelieve, to carry a grudge, to forgive, to approach, and to recede.

And you will.

### Nephilim.

those who cause others to fall

You find yourself doing stupid things like waiting. You tell yourself that if you wait long enough, that the lyrics will come, or that there'll be a letter, or that someone you're forgetting about will return to remind you of what it is that you lost.

Be cautious where you tread,

Be 'ware of careless thoughts inside your head

### Notes.

"It's been years and years," I said, and I'm not sure why I said that, since it had really only been hours.

"Everything is relative, remember? Years are like seconds if you're looking at things from above."

She told me that, and drew a heart on the glass with her fingertips. The strange thing about the heart was that is glowed brightly, like a red neon light, but even brighter than that, really.

I wondered which the greater price to pay was: not being able to forget, or not being able to remember. Both ways left you feeling a little lost, with a little part of you broken that you couldn't repair, for one reason or another.

### Nurture.

nurture nature nurture nature

Your energy

Channel it into

Me

What is expected? What has occurred?

You wrote that you'd be the best to me that you could be

forever and ever, so maybe that's what you're up to.

Maybe the best that you can be is not being at all,

and that's why you stopped responding, months ago.

Things change, they grow.

Inside of us,

or sometimes,

outside of us.

There are times when we weed them out.

Sometimes other people

weed them out for us,

no matter what desire is buried,

how deeply rooted;

the past is fertile when it lies in our hearts.

I cried for you.

I should have told you why, then,

but I was afraid.

Now, I'm not afraid. And

I know, it's never too late, though

sometimes,

it is too far.

The gulf is wide, the chasm deep, and

I can only reach half of the way across it,

towards you.

### Panegyric.

the smell of warm pavement

steam rising

rain

clouds

humidity,

sand in my ears.

the warmth of sunburned skin

hair across your face

long drives through the swamp

swarms of mosquitoes around the lights

hotel room doors

blue plastic cups

cheap wine, cigarette ashes

carbonation

bloodshot saltwater eyes,

sticky skin.

kisses and afternoon showers at the docks down on the beach

splinters

9.2736184954957037525164160739902

also see: Encomiastic

### Phantoms.

01. Det er noe som gjemmer seg i veggen, og det venter til du nesten sover før det starter å klore seg vei ut. (There's something hiding in the walls, and it's going to wait until you're almost asleep before it starts scratching to get out.)

02. Når du slår av lyset, kommer de ut fra under sengen og venter på at du skal sette føttene dine på gulvet så de kan ta fra deg sjelen din. La derfor lyset stå på. (When you turn out the lights, they come out from under the bed and wait for you to put your feet on the floor, so they can take your soul away from you. So leave the lights on.)

03. Det er noe i kjelleren. (There's something in the basement.)

REF: CHARLIE THE GHOST

04. Når strømmen går, er det mest sannsynlig ikke i kjelleren mer. Når stearinlysene slukkes er det mest sannsynlig bak deg. (When the power goes out, it's probably not in the basement anymore. When the candles go out, it's probably behind you.)

05. Når du leker med Ouija-brettet lar du de komme inn. (When you play with the Ouija board, you're letting them in.)

06. I blant er de mellom putene i sofaen. De strekker seg etter lommene dine når du er distrahert og drar ut tingene dine, siden de prøver å stjele livet ditt fra deg, - bit for bit. (Sometimes, they're in between the cushions of the couch. They reach into your pockets when you're distracted and pull things out of them, because they are trying to steal your life away, bit by bit.)

07. De ser på deg mens du sover. (They watch you sleep.)

REF: THE PEEPING MAN

08. Katter, hunder og beiber kan se de gå rundt i rommet med deg. Spesielt katter. (Cats, dogs, and babies can see them walking around the room with you. Especially cats.)

09. De samler seg i luften, i skyene rundt deg, og der venter de. De flokker seg til hjørnene hvor det er mørkt, hvor nattelyset ikke rekker, i skyggen ved sengekanten, og der venter de. (They gather in the sky, in the clouds above you, and they wait. They congregate in the corners, where it's dark, where the night-light doesn't quite reach, in the shadows of the bedposts, and they wait.)

10. Lydene du hører er ikke huset som rører seg, rørene som knitrer eller temperaturforskjellene som får glasset til å sprekke \- de kommer inn gjennom veggene, og i blant drar de. De samler flere av sine egne til tilbakekomsten. (The noises you hear aren't the house settling, or the pipes, or the temperature difference making the glass pop - they're coming through the walls, and sometimes they are leaving. To gather more of their kind for the return trip.)

... Infensus Phasmatis.

### Prophecy.

On this day, many futures will change.

It's weird how things happen.

You wake up and you stumble out of bed. You almost fall over as you're overstepping the clutter of clothing from another drunken night that litters the pathway leading towards the toilet. You're standing in front of the mirror rubbing the crud out of your eyes when you notice a beautiful, naked woman sitting in your bathtub, smoking a cigarette, buried up to her chin in bubbles. One of her arms is dangling over the side of the basin as the cigarette slowly burns its way towards her fingertips. She's painted her nails black, but the paint has been chipped away. You notice that she has very slender fingers, and that she holds her cigarette like an actor, or a hand model. Her eyes are closed, and you're thinking that maybe she is sleeping, or that maybe she is dead, or maybe she isn't even there at all and you're still asleep and dreaming. It happened like that to me.

I stopped, startled, and even let out a little gasp of surprise.

"What the fuck?" I asked. Intelligent question, I know.

"I was wondering the same," she replied, without opening her eyes.

A moment passed, during which I stared at her while she didn't move at all, so reached for and grabbed a towel, and then brutishly thrust it in her general direction. The initial absurdity of the situation diminished in return for a more general sense of awkwardness. I couldn't remember who she was or how she arrived there, even if my life depended on it. But there I was, rudely gawking at her, and there she was, taking a bath and smoking a cigarette. She still hadn't opened her eyes.

### Read.

Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Los Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss

With time, everything changes.

Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss TELL ME SOMETHING Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss Memory Loss

### Ripple.

I reached over and ran my fingers through her hair while she traced out some sort of messages on my chest: letters to the future or equations or doodles or love notes; I don't know. I never asked. We were quiet, dozing for a little while, relaxed and contented.

Love, be a light

unto my path.

For the night is dark,

and unending.

There are skies there, like waves in the ocean, and we can soar through them. We are the ships; love blows us along.

### Sad.

The confines of this crib strengthen, all around. All around.

When dreams go to the floor, land, and crack apart,

thunder is created.

Chipped dreams, collecting in the shadows of footprints,

the shadows of bodies, where they once slept in bliss.

"Promise me that you won't forget," she said.

"I never will," I promised.

### Screen.

Me - So, what did you wish for?

Her - I can't tell you. You know that if you tell what it is, your wish won't come true.

(She brushes a stray strand of hair from her face)

### Sector C.

EXCERPT AS FOLLOWS

Legal:

In light of recent federal investigation of Synchro Systems and its associates, all contact information for the company has been removed from this website.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.

Synchro Systems is leading humanity boldly into the future with upcoming developments in the fields of medicine and technology!

"We could just walk up to the front desk, tell them your story, and ask them to help you out," he said.

"Do you think that will work?" Janine asked him.

"Do you think that it's any less likely to work than sneaking in, snooping around, and hoping to steal some information that might be relevant to your case? Synchro Systems is a big company shuffling a lot of information around in light of the recent federal inquiries. I'd say that you'd be more likely to get help if you just asked for it than if you tried to be deceptive about it."

### Shard.

I like your breasts, when you lie on your back, arched, and you stretch your arms above your head. It's nice how you bite your lower lip when I'm close, your tongue when I'm closer, your upper lip when I'm there. And you open your eyes. Don't fall over, or I will put on my shoes.

I can't remember

a

sliver

### Shift.

I find tomorrow, and

I twist the knife again.

"Oh yes," I say. "This time I will win."

Without drowsy passions, what do we have?

A bitter taste, perhaps the times we waste...

What do we have, now, my love?

bad news.

### Sliver.

she asked me to stay. all beneficial things come with a price, don't they? you take all the positive things and all the negative things, and sometimes you actually do a little better than break even. sometimes, they Fit right next to you. sometimes you leave because it's not uncomfortable at all, rather, it's disturbing that you want to stay, because you've forgotten what that feels like and don't want to deal with the ramifications of what that means. you leave because it's too soon, but you're older now, and you're scared, even though you know better. don't be afraid, you tell yourself, and you wish you had a cigarette for a second - any distraction; you pull them closer, you kiss them softly, and you shiver a bit. you realize that you're synchronizing. doesn't make sense? does it have to? it never does.

it's always explosive.

it always feels good.

everybody always runs.

### Soil.

A rock,

sharp edges, rough-cut

tearing at cutting at your feet,

there is great gnashing of teeth.

Now, thrown into the lake, skim

surface, sinking, swimming down:

as rocks tend to do.

Through time, tender touch,

pushed under current,

streams, streambeds.

Rock, resting, polished on the shore,

shaped egg of the earth;

an epoch of careful design.

Into the soil beneath our feet. Will you follow?

In the face of unending sunlight, we wilt.

### Struggle.

Living, Loving, and Lies.

Though you'll wonder the inevitable "what if", the most likely ending is that one day the stupid things will happen.

The lyrics will come, the letters will arrive, the memories will surface and start whispering suggestive things in your ears: things you thought, for so long, that you wanted to hear.

With enough concentration and sweat, through some misguided force of will, you'll create the reality that you thought you were chasing after, the one that you thought would never materialize.

You'll take a step back, after a moment, a couple of conversations, and one or two stiff inhalations of the cold January air (making your nose run).

You'll say to yourself something along the lines of "That's it?", and feeling rather ripped off, you'll end up sighing and you'll say something like "I'm glad that's over."

Then you just won't know what to do.

You'll be some big, boring, lifeless blank space, wandering like a lost child, muttering the details like an old man, trying to discover what you thought was so important about loving, living, and lies in the first place.

### Suspense.

Her - Why do you wanna know so badly, anyway?

Me - I dunno, I just do. So are you gonna tell me?

Her - (Leaning forward, kissing me on the corner of my mouth) You don't know when to stop, do you?

### Taped to a Mirror.

One day, you'll wake up, and I'll be gone.

It might take a while for you to notice.

A week.

A month.

A year, even.

But you'll notice, eventually, and by then, all that will be left might be the expression on your face as you wonder what happened. As you discover that you're screaming at the walls.

And you'll come looking for me in all of the same old places, and you won't find anything.

No clues, no nothing.

Because I will have sold it all. Given it all away. Thrown it in the trash. Taken a little bit of it with me.

Then it won't matter so much, anymore, these debates as to sincerity, and truth. Collections. Trophies. Inner-wisdom; wrongdoings gone unpunished. What you feel that you've got to prove.

What you feel that I've got left to prove to you.

There just won't be anything left of me by then. No, nothing much at all.

They say that if you break a mirror, you'll have seven years of bad luck.

### Temps.

I can speak to you normally now.

I can remember what it was like in the time before you came.

I don't remember the first time that we kissed.

What was it like?

Water

Air

Earth

Fire

All are temporary.

### There.

First, there was the power surge, then The Apparitions.

A few blown light bulbs, one notable, over the kitchen sink.

The circuit breaker tripping, a loud snapping over to the off position and there was the whining down of the heater and the refrigerator fans and the sound of the computer monitor blinking out.

Darkness, a moment of blindness while the eyes adjusted,

and then

The Apparitions.

August 08, 19xx

I am afraid.

The basement downstairs - that's where they crawled up from, creaking their way up the 14 steps to the top, towards the bent linoleum of the floor, those same stairs you used to fall down when you were a toddler, and adventurous. Or rather, the ones that you hesitantly made your way down into, down towards the basement-crickets, brown and spiked, towards the unfinished walls of sheet rock and smelling like fresh cement and condensation. Remember? The rail was loose at the bottom, and it would come free from the mount because you held it for too long, and too often, before making the final steps onto the hard carpet of the floor.

### Thirst.

I say unto her:

I should broadcast myself into a million bubbles of carbonation

and then

maybe

you will drink me up

and happiness will arrive

she says unto me:

perhaps

drinking you

carbonation and all

would solve no dilemma, would alleviate only the symptoms

...the sky could fall on us.

I would follow her unto the ends of the earth, if she were to ask it of me.

### Three Women.

She's three different women to me, I find myself thinking:

The woman before me

The woman I am in love with

The woman who knows it's falling to pieces

### To Have and To Hold.

9.2736184954957037525164160739902

We'll always have a pistol to each other's heads, won't we?

I'm writing her name in the condensation on the table as the thought arrives. My mind wanders to some place about 3000 miles from the Avenue because my company is disinterested. She asks another question, I begin another answer, neither of us really pays that much attention while the traffic lights change and it rains a few miles south of here. This is twenty-six, this is twenty-seven. This is every second, minute, hour, and day we've wasted aiming for the not-happy-just-appeased.

Pull the plug.

But I never do. I never do.

I don't think that I can.

### Trust.

Five bonus points, then.

It should be less, but I'm feeling generous.

That was too easy.

It wasn't easy!

Are you kidding? We all caught the reference.

Not everyone reads Milne, you know.

Everyone should.

### Visceral.

There is a certain coarseness to my thoughts as I evaluate my situation; they are like the stubble on my cheeks after skipping a day of shaving, and I can't find a razor.

### What If.

(Nonsense words).

What was I thinking. Running. Avoiding.

There are two examples shaking my hand and illustrating that I am mistaken, and still I tried to rely on the once-interpreted-as-intuition-but-now-doubted-thing.

Stupid me.

Stupid silly tragic and used to be romantic some may say me.

No hyphens but no hyperventilation either.

Comma comma and (more nonsense words).

I'm tired of working. At and for everything. It used to be easy.

No not apathy not being broken not anything, not nothing either.

She isn't coming home, but she likes to tease me.

She isn't coming at all, but she likes me to try.

Or so it seems. Not hearing anything.

Playing old music for old songs and old memories as therapy, except you're working.

And nothing's working.

There's a new blank, a new empty, a new void, a new hurt, and new loss, but girl:

You forgot about me. You forgot about me.

No more music, so no more singing.

Keep the (nonsense words). Sell the memories if they give it back to me.

!!! And?

This is the mud. This is the mud I'm crawling through.

Didn't say good-bye, just that you want a love and that you're not so hollow.

And maybe just maybe it isn't a big deal that you slipped away.

Or unknown.

Or had a heart failure.

Or couldn't break out of the salvaged mentality.

Or just wanted to love me, but you got tired of waiting.

Any number of things that it could be.

Reverts to something inside, it does, and to best solve the problem is to best create a new one:

The catch, the rub indeed.

Not apathy, I mean, but not nothing, either, not Nothing at all.

Cigarettes and caffeine.

(Nonsense motions).

Tired, so tired. Can't count anymore, can't remember, except that once it was easy.

Too far away, too foot-to-the-gas-to-the-sound-of-the-road.

All of a sudden, 90, 95, and you've graduated to a speeding ticket.

And to someone old inside.

Beware the wall.

### Wish.

Me - Sure it will. So... tell me. (I reach into my pocket for a cigarette, only to discover that they're soaked.) Damn it.

Her - (A smile) No. And you shouldn't smoke, anyway. It makes you smell funny. It's killing me.

Me - The suspense is killing me.

### Wreckage.

and so your mouth would water,

and your hands would wander,

and you'd kick your feet and shiver.

I'd find you curled up in a ball all around me,

jumping in your sleep,

or awake,

watching me dream.

It surges in the head with pulse, so like smashing clenched fist into unpainted and unyielding concrete walls; nearly as bloody. Tunnel vision, les depassement du temps, and then nothing: No one left to listen to the rending sound of metal and fragments of glass scattering across the asphalt.

There it is, There.

Somewhere riding the circle of sight, just outside of the fading red lines.

There it is again!

It surges, moves for life, menacing and hungry, no substance to speak of but somehow a worthwhile venture, somehow worthy of talking it to sleep. Put it to sleep so that it stays in place, gets away from the rivers of antifreeze and gasoline, stands clear of transmission fluid and motor oil. Not to mention the crimson mark, stretching across a hundred yards of highway.

Go talk to the graves, it's summer and the nights are shorter, so the sunlight can banish the voices in time to bring an end. It's winter, and the nights are long, and they'll come searching, now. They'll cradle ears and whisper as they close their teeth around the neck and turn the wheel downwards. Go talk to the graves, their truth is not far from the prime, and there they will wait like spiders...

Casting nets around the candle flames.

[End of Supplemental Materials Section]
Section 4: Beware the Night

### Stranger, Beware The Night

Stranger, Beware the night:

It stalks the curves of her hips

Persistent, unending.

A lover. A killer.

Her shapes rise and fall;

Circadia balances her love

With her hatred.

Her heart is a knife,

Her soul is ice.

Beware the night:

Where careless kisses drift

Down, Down, deeper.

Petals of ash, the blossoms

Of a caress you give with

Fleeting regard for safety.

She will consume you and

You will surrender to her,

Hopelessly.

