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New memories are waiting for me, like forgotten coins in the pocket of an old coat. I feel them softly calling to me, as if all along they’d been hiding in my mind. Minds. Without the burden of a body and a brain, I see the vast landscape before me of the lives I’ve lead. The scars I gathered, the fleeting joys, and the things we call ‘mistakes’.

I follow where they lead me, and leave behind the only world where I’ve done something right.

•

I see a man who looks like me, on a beach in 2006 clothes, with a backpack, looking for clues left behind by his friend. He sees a ship and, frightened, he wishes it away.

•

I see a journalist with whiskers like my own, his youth and beauty hidden by the formless clothes and mandatory hat of his day, turning him grey and boring like all civilized young men his age.

He marvels at a wonder of modern ingenuity, a gleaming, graceful airship floating overhead, and imagines one day riding in the gondola beneath it. Soaring peacefully on the air, over the cities and meadows.

He’s dreamt of nothing since he first heard of these magnificent craft. No adventure held his imagination so enraptured as the thought of himself, rising from one of those comfortable chairs, striding amid the elegant and wealthy people of society, to the window. And looking down.

Seeing the world as God sees it. Seeing the farmers and the cattle, the factories and their industry, the traffic and the wilderness. Seeing young men like him looking up in wonder, as he looks up now.

When the ship begins to glow, he marvels at it, just for a moment, witnessing a wondrous miracle, before the sight of fire turns him cold.

The ship of dreams is burning, burning away his fantasies, his every ambition and he wishes, not to see it.

•

I see a boy, with a gold pelt and black rosettes, scrounging through the alleys of Nagasaki for discarded food. He’s lean and wiry, and so very afraid.

He’s afraid of being found by the police, of being brought back to the orphanage he ran away from, of the beatings he’ll receive if he’s returned there. He’s afraid of starving, of being killed or raped, and he’s afraid of the war.

He’s afraid of every roaring engine, afraid that it might be an American airplane, come to deliver another terrible bomb.

He’s right to be afraid, of course he is. He is starving. The orphanage is a place of torment. Boys like him in alleys like these are raped and the plane in the sky, too far for him to see or hear is here to kill him.

He sees the briefest, brightest flash of light and his fear flares, and he wishes, he wishes so hard, not to die.

And he doesn’t die. After the flash of light there is nothing. No incinerating pressure-wave, no surge of radiation, no fire and death. Not in this Nagasak, in this August of 1945.

He finds a bag of rice in the garbage, half-soaked and half-rotten, and picks through the grains to find the ones that look least sickly, carefully stuffing them in his pockets.

Sixty-one years later, halfway across a different version of the world, the nuclear blast he wished away turns a city into Blood.

•

My burned body dies, fully, in John’s arms. I was so distracted by the visions that confirmed, at last, what I’d so long feared. I caused the destruction in 2006. My fear and ignorance. If I’d known then, in those lives, what I know now, things would have been different. Isn’t that always the way of it? Of course, if I’d known then what I know now I wouldn’t have learned it then and I wouldn’t know it now.

I should have thought to leave, really, to slip into a different mind and body and world just as my heart gave its last bear. I never got to see my John again, and it should pain me to feel him disappearing from my fading mind. But pain is life, and I’m no longer alive.

Everything I’ve learned starts to dissolve as everything I’ve become dies on the bank of that lake. It’s the end of me, and as unfulfilling an ending as it is, there’s nothing to be done. The worlds will have to move on without me.

•

It’s December 30, 1999, I’m nineteen years old and I’m in bed with a man old enough to be my father. He’s unmarried, before you ask, just a big strapping wolf I met in a club. Exactly my type, so much like the man who found me when I was born.

His name was Muscle – the man who found me, I mean, nineteen years ago. A boar with a swagger and a taste for the finer things in life, my mother’s one-time ‘gentleman friend’, then drug dealer, then pimp.

Michel Kenna and his wife Daria, both Quebecois immigrants, took me in under the foster care program, later adopting me. They had far less of a challenge becoming my legal guardians than in other versions of my story, but in exchange I caused them a great deal more trouble in my adolescence.

I was a thief and a liar, a layabout who neglected his studies. I drank, I experimented with sex and drugs, I fought. And regretted nothing.

I wasn’t evil, though. I didn’t think so, anyway. I guess evil people never do, when you think about it, but I never did anything I did out of cruelty. I didn’t steal money because I wanted people to be poorer, I just wanted to buy some booze or movie tickets.

I had girlfriends. It was the thing to do when you were a fine-figured, good-looking cat, and jaguars are still exotic in this day and age, even in the Bay.

The Kennas bought me a computer, hoping to encourage my studies, and their plan half worked. My thieving stopped, or at least diminished to negligible levels, and my grades even picked up a little.

I had discovered the wonderful world of the Web and all its opportunities. I discovered there were lonely, predatory men who hungered for pretty young things like me, and I discovered how much I loved their hunger.

It was innocent at first. I’d meet strangers for dinner, and flirt, and slyly complain about my financial dire straits, how I’d love this or that album or video game, or that there was some school event I couldn’t afford to go to.

My parents were used to me being out of the house late, but being so thoughtful and loving they let me sow my wild oats, assuming I was hanging out with friends. Not having dinner with strangers, or getting them to smuggle me into a bar, claiming me to be their ‘son’ or ‘nephew’, and maybe leaving me with a nice fat envelope to cheer me up and make me eager to see them again.

I knew what they wanted. I’d take the envelope and widen my eyes at the money inside – gee willikers! Forty bucks! I’m rich! – and leap into their arms and kiss their cheek, then pull back and feign a blush. Can you do that? Flush your ears? I was good.

It was curiosity and vanity more than greed that made me proceed past chaste, blushing kisses. As I said, I’d had girlfriends and obviously I’d been in a circle jerk or two, but I knew that none of those experiences were adequate preparation for what these men wanted.

His name was Rube, a coach for a high school two towns over. A pitbull with keen eyes and a seductive manner, more confident than any of the men I kept on a line. Rube knew I was playing him every bit as much as he played me, but he was certain I’d give in eventually.

That’s why I picked him to be my first. He’d try the hardest to impress me, to get me to come back for more. I don’t know if that counts as my victory or his, but I certainly did come back for more.

The greatest thrill was simply being at home, sitting at the table eating dinner with my folks, delighting them by actually engaging them in polite conversation, all the while feeling the ache of yesterday’s exertions, the bite marks under my shirt. Knowing that I sat there, playing the role of the troubled but rapidly reforming teenager, apple of his foster parents’ eye, with the taste of another man on his tongue and the prospect of being further defiled later that same night.

It was vanity, all of it. Seeing what I could get away with, seeing how badly I could make those men want me, until of course I went too far, and I came to school one day to find that a rumor had flashed through the halls.

My ‘friends’, as vain and self-involved as I was, were eager to turn on me, and at first I thought it playful ribbing. Then came ‘cocksucker’ and ‘bitch boy’, and four jocks waiting for me at the bike lockers after school.

I called my parents from a payphone, but only to let them know I’d be staying the night at a friend’s house. I’d earned enough of their trust by then to know they wouldn’t be calling my friend’s parents. My fingers quivered as I dialled the next number, one of my regular ‘dates’, a lion who liked to talk rough.

He was so gentle in his approach when we met online and I agreed to meet him. He said he’d never hurt me, and if he ever did I should call the cops on him. But he had his fantasies, and would I mind if he talked about them while we... hung out?

In a weird way it was exciting, even before I started having sex with him, but especially after. He’d talk about leaving bruises on me, choking me, giving me a black eye and a bloody nose. It’s sick, I know, but he was true to his word and never so much as squeezed me too hard. And I felt that he wanted me more than any of the others, even the coach who so impressed me with his prowess.

The coach, who’d likely pound the living shit out of the jocks that beat me up. I didn’t call him. I didn’t want revenge against those bullies, I just wanted it to not be a problem any more, to not deal with it.

When I arrived at the lion’s home, my bike protesting all the way, his first reaction was shock and I hated him for it. He was concerned about my injuries and I lashed out at him, telling him it was a mistake to go there, that I’d leave. He stopped me, trying to pull me into a hug. I wrestled free, sank to my knees before him, and he got the message.

I could have wished for no better medicine than that night in his bed. He caressed the bruises showing throuh my fur, kissed my black eye, licked the blood from my nose. He made me feel beautiful and important and meaningful. In gratitude I made him feel very, very good.

Before I stole his credit card and sneaked out in the middle of the night. I biked back home, packed a bag, left a note and quietly booked a plane ticket over the phone with my stolen plastic. I sent one last e-mail before wiping my computer, to an English gentleman I’d been chatting with for some months.

He was waiting for me at Heathrow Airport when my plane landed. A portly mule, a far cry from the handsome younger photos he’d sent me, but I went home with him all the same.

I gave him what he needed, but I felt an unease growing. After a few days he clearly became less comfortable having me in his house, hidden from his neighbors’ prying eyes. I could sense it, and I redoubled my efforts to impress him, and it worked. But I could feel him get used to me, take me for granted, and a rage grew within me until I had to get out.

I wasn’t special to him any more. I felt dirty and worthless, so I ran away from that, too. I hitch-hiked, making a few truckers’ dreams come true, and this became my life.

I didn’t resent it. It was an adventure, and I learned to stay ahead of the melancholy. In Europe I was old enough for the bars, and I was driven. I never went without a bed to sleep in, and happily repaid the men who sheltered me for their generosity. Never staying, always working.

And so at the end of the century I found myself in Paris, in bed with a man whose English I could barely understand, but whose desires were all too easy to read for a young man of my experience.

I can’t sleep. I don’t know why; I should be exhausted, but something gnaws at me. I think about sneaking under the sheets to wake Jean with a pleasant surprise, but I already went down on him twice tonight and I know I’d just be pushing my luck.

I think about sneaking out, wise enough by now not to steal more than a little whenever I take my leave from a generous host. I’ve come close enoug to real trouble not to take that risk any more; I can’t count on every cop being open to my particular kind of bribe.

Before you think I live in a world where everybody’s fortysomething and queer, I’ll have you know it’s a matter of constant vigilance. Constantly reading the people around me, strutting my stuff in the bars. Carefully spending my precious, hard-earned money on clothes, laundromats, lockers, beauty parlors. Making myself seem new and exotic and special, making them see me just how I so desperately want to feel.

I’m not tired of it. I’m not disillusioned, and I’m not yet fearful of my advancing age, of the fact that there are boys younger than I am, making plays for the same men whose attention I crave. I’m never more than a day older than yesterday, and I live my life from weekend to weekend.

So why can’t I sleep? Jean thinks I’m special, at least for now. An easy American boy, so besotten with his European charm and manner, and just the right blend of innocence and scintillating experience in bed. Or in the shower. Or on the floor under his table when he sits down for coffee.

I feel something approaching. Something unfamiliar but expected. I feel, in a way I can’t describe even to myself, that I can be more than I am. It’s not like the words my parents said to me, it’s not the self-recrimination I suffer in unguarded moments, from which I flee into the arms or between the thighs of any man who reminds me, however subconsciously, of Muscle.

If anything, the thought is peaceful. I feel as if it’s something I’ve earned, as if I’ve done something good and deserve something more.

I have no memories of my other lives. Only that vague sensation, that keeps me from sleeping, and makes me risk sliding under the covers one more time, risking Jean’s annoyance just to distract myself for an hour.

•

I needn’t have worried about Jean being displeased with my eagerness. He’s so much like the coach was back home, proud of his body and my evident desire for him. Some might call him smug; I call it confidence. It’s a quality I appreciate.

The next morning he awakes before I do, and as I stretch the sleep from my body in his sunlit studio apartment he comes in the door from a morning run with a bag of fresh croissants and a tent in his shorts. I happily help myself to both, but neither are quite fulfilling. Maybe it’s already time to move on.

No, that’s not it. That’s not it at all. I don’t feel unfulfilled. The diversion of bringing a man to ecstasy is still the thrill it always has been, but it doesn’t fill the gap inside me because the gap isn’t there any more. I help Jean dress for work, straightening his tie and zipping up his pants with a teasing fondle that’s more habit than true desire and, left alone in his apartment, I feel none of my usual anxiety. I don’t feel abandoned or alone. I feel no urge to dive into some fresh excess just to avoid thinking about what I am.

I know what I am. I’m a smart, healthy nineteen-year-old who made some really shitty decisions and ran away too easily, who threw himself from bed to bed so he could feel like he mattered. I’m worth more than that. So much more.

I’m used to acting on impulse, on emotion. To feel this firm resolve within me is a new and giddy sensation. It feels silly to smile at something so serious and significant, but I’m young, so I can be silly. I dance, naked, in Jean’s apartment, and clean the place up for him. Not, this time, as a dutiful houseboy earning his keep, but simply as an appreciative guest. That’s how my parents tried to raise me, after all.

•

Time moves quickly when you have a goal. Without the burden of youthful impatience, the waiting and working is easy to manage, the worrying easy to control.

New Year’s Eve comes, and yes, I do sleep with Jean, and a friend of his, and a thirtysomething stranger he picked up at one of the New Year’s parties. I’m still who I am, after all.

But on January 4, Y2K, when the American consulate in Paris opens to the public again, I’m sitting in the waiting room with my expired passport to identify myself as an undocumented immigrant and runaway and begin the process of repatriation.

I know I won’t go to jail, but fines and community service might be on the horizon. I can handle that. My parents, of course, died during my absence and while I’m entitled to an inheritance, it doesn’t amount to much. Just enough to keep me out of a half-way house. Even in death, the Kennas did their best to take care of me.

And so I go through the rigmarole. Leaving a note on Jean’s computer that expresses my gratitude and my hope that he’ll remember me fondly, and a photo of me sucking his cock just to drive that point home, I take what little I own to Charles-de-Gaulle airport and fly back to the States on a government-funded ticket.

I dutifully identify myself when I arrive and wait in the security office of Newark Airport until a social worker is available to see me, who gives me paperwork and admonishments and a few sly looks that, just a few weeks ago, I would have put to my advantage.

There’s something so profoundly relieving to honesty, isn’t there? Knowing that all the inconvenience you suffer is not only tolerable but insignificant compared to the relief of a clear conscience. Of course, I have the advantage that my honesty doesn’t hurt anyone, it only inconvenience me, but still. You’ve got to start somewhere.

My parents’ savings are cleared. I rent a cheap motel room on the outskirts of the city, I walk the streets until I get a minimum wage job flipping burgers. The judge issues a ruling and I start to pay my fines, with even a little of my weekly check left over to start saving.

At twenty-one I have an apartment and take out a student loan, finishing my high school diploma and enrolling in economics night school at the community college. At twenty-four I apply for a job at the county registrar’s office and get the job. I decide to drop out of night school for a year to manage the stress better. I start dating a girl called Lisa, but we’re not a good fit for each other. I date a guy called Jim and we break up, too. The office is downsized, I take a lower-paying job as a bank clerk, where the hours are more reasonable so I can go back to night school. I graduate at twenty-six and apply for an accounting position, which I don’t get.

Two more paragraphs and I’ll be dead. That’s how little happens in this life of mine. I don’t make very stupid decisions, I’m sensible, driven by confidence and maturity I never learned and certainly didn’t earn.

Until one day in 2006 when I wake up screaming. I don’t know what I dreamed, but I feel a flood of emotion coursing through me. I’m confused and angry and afraid, so deeply afraid, and I don’t know why. Something terrible didn’t happen, and I feel, for the first time since Paris: an irrational compulsion.

I pull on some pants and a shirt, stuff my wallet and keys in my jacket pocket, get into my sensible Toyota and drive. South, then west. No GPS, not even a glance at the road signs, I just drive. The sun rises and my phone starts to ring; no doubt the office asking where I am. I ignore it. It’s unimportant. Like everything in my life since I suddenly felt whole and started doing the right thing all the time. Utterly, profoundly unimportant.

I stop for coffee and a piss in a gas station. It seems familiar, and when I get to my car I turn back, around the corner of the squat little building. I remember there being a camera pointing at the men’s room door, but when I turn the corner it isn’t there. No evidence that it ever existed. For the briefest instant the thought flashes through my mind that they still have about three years to install it before I’ll need it, and then the thought is gone.

I drive into the city without even looking at the greeting sign, and look around with concern.

It’s all still here. This place should be, should be... Not here. Something terrible should have happened here, but it didn’t. Unimportant people live unimportant lives just like mine, where nothing important ever happens.

•

Is that so bad? Does a life have to be important to be meaningful?

•

I stop the car, earning angry honks from the traffic around me. I double-park in front of Atelier 1417, where I’ve never been before. I walk under the arch and expect a hipster raccoon to glare at me disapprovingly, but there’s nobody at the reception desk. I walk down the corridor to the studio at the end, and whatever I expect, I don’t find it. There are sculptures there, yes, but they’re the wrong ones. They’re simple and uncomplicated and speak of nothing.

•

As I leave, a mink in a green skirt and a thick winter jacket passes me, clutching the coffee she just went to buy. I watch her go into the studio that shouldn’t be hers, and hear only silence.

Of course life has to be important to be meaningful. I don’t mean that you have to be a president or a doctor or a soldier; you can be a clerk like me and go to night school. But you can’t just go through the motions, working through the script of your life, putting one foot in front of the other without ever doing something that matters, something that enriches you or fucks you up badly enough that you stand a chance ot learning something.

That’s what I haven’t done. One night in Paris I had wisdom and grace thrust upon me, undeserved, unearned, unimportant, and since then I’ve been coasting on it. It’s just the kind of thing you wish for after a painful lesson: if I knew then what I know now...

I should have stayed in Paris, on my back in strangers’ beds, and charged through misery and depravity until I had enough and learned what I was worth. Or until someone got too rough with me and banged me up against the headboard once too often, falling asleep on top of me and waking up next to a near-dead comatose party-boy. Either way. At least it would have been a real life with real consequences, not this. This script.

Something bothers me, and I walk back down the corridor, to that studio that drew my attention, where the mink in the green skirt took her coffee. “Miss?” I ask, knocking on the doorframe, and look inside.

It’s empty. Not just the mink is absent, but so are the sculptures, the walls are all exposed and from one blink to the next, they’re unpainted.

I stagger back as the glass in the windows becomes so transparent it vanishes, feeling the wind on my face. I turn and run – fear. I haven’t felt it in so long. I’ve missed it.

It aches and tears at me but I’m elated at feeling it again. The building dissolves around me like a sandcastle in the tide, and I run.

Fear makes you run.

It makes you run so, so fast.

I make it out of the building and onto an empty street. My car’s waiting for me but it looks thin, like it’s made of dried rice-paper, like touching it would make it crumble. The sun is smeared across the sky as if someone sprayed water over a still-wet painting.

I have to get out of here. This meaningless world is being swept away and my meaningless life with it, but that isn’t fair. I’m not being childish, here: it’s not right, I know it, we deserve better.

We?

My car doesn’t crumble when I touch it. It grows firmer, in fact, more solid, more real and when I climb in an turn the engine it roars with purpose and carries me out of the melting, fading city with far more power than a sensible Toyota should have.

There’s one road, unmarked, asphalt streaking through a chaotic countryside like a splash of black ink spilled on a map. Out my windows I see flashes of landscapes. Rows of corn, jungle trees with vines and snakes, monstrous factories billowing black, oily smoke. Other worlds, all fading, all as meaningless as mine.

Then there’s wheat, and a half-naked teenager in a loincloth runs out. A cheetah, like me – no, he is me. I looked like that when I left home, scared and young and beautiful. He sees me and doesn’t understand any more than I do, but when I lean over and swing the passenger door open he climbs in beside me.

Fearfully, he speaks a language I don’t understand, clutching at his seat and looking wide-eyed out the windows, where corn gives way to cobbled city streets, then mountains, then far below a roiling river. I take his hand and squeeze. He understands.

As we race along the bridge a horse overtakes us, its rider dressed in a smart red uniform with knee-high boots. Behind him, clutching his waist, is a boy of no more than ten in Trouver Némo pyjamas. Cheetahs, too, both of them.

And they’re not alone. I see dozens of me running along the road, hundreds. Thousands. All fleeing from their collapsing worlds – no, not fleeing.

Running.

Then comes the wave. A breath across a mad world, the swipe of a cosmit Etch-A-Sketch. Everything that was false and meaningless is just smoothed away with the sound of a wave, and sudeenly the road is water.

The car plunges into the waves; salt water rushes in through the open windows and I’m floating. The car’s gone and so is the loin-clothed teenaged me. I reach out to find his hand, my fingers sink into muddy sea-sand. The water’s shallow. I calm down and bring my feet up under me, and stand.

Cool, green-blue water laps at my ankles. It stretches to the horizon and gulls wheel overhead. One of them shits right next to me, a thick little cloud of white and brown spreading through the clear water. Nature’s irreverent corruption of itself, as if trying to dispel the illusion of her purity.

I step out of the water and onto the beach, alone now. The other cheetahs, the other versions of me, are gone, but I know they’re only gone in that I can’t see them. They’re somewhere.

They’ve always been somewhere, living their lives just as I was, until one day they woke up wise and all substance drained from the world. Like me, they went through the motions of fixing their lives, becoming less and less important all the way, feeling only a quiet anxiety growing in the back of their minds that, one day, they could no longer ignore.

It’s like learning how a magic trick is performed. Until someone shows you, a tiny part of you believes that it might, just might, be a miracle. You lose something wondrous when you realize it’s an illusion. In my case it was my whole world, and I wasn’t the only one.

I breathe deeply. No matter. I’m on the beach now.

I smell a barbecue, just over the dune. You know, I could really go for a bit to eat right now? It’s weird, I know. I just saw the world vanish but it wasn’t real, it wasn’t meaningful, nobody in it really existed. Maybe I don’t either. Whatever; I could eat, and the grill smells good.

I ditch my shoes and the sand is warm between my damp toes, spraying behind me as I jog up the dune. I crest it and look out – more water, but blue, this time, and still. A lake, so clos to the sea? And the trees: delicate things that haven’t the fortitude to withstand the harshness of salt sea air.

And yet here it is, and when I start down the dune it stops being a dune and becomes a hill, and I’m in the shadow of a tall building that I don’t bother to look at because I see where the smell of grilled meat is coming from.

My body lies alone, unattended, on the bank of a lake in England. It’s burned almost beyond recognition and it’s fully, wholly dead. There’s no spark in it, only... an echo, an afterimage. Ambient thoughts that I can feel when I approach it.

There’s someone nearby, someone holding this body, standing right next to me. I feel them more than I see them. They couldn’t see me anyway, so why should I look?

That’s me, lying there, dead and burned. Someone loves him very much and misses him deeply already, but he died contented. I can feel it.

He died, and my life changed. All he’d learned passed into me and who knows how many other versions of us, all of us suddenly the beneficiary of some of life’s profound lessons.

I see them on the hill. Doctors and soldiers, hermits and priests, the young, the old, the scarred, the beautiful. A teenaged cheetah in the loincloth, a cub in his pyjamaes. All of them stand on the crest of the hill and more come every minute, circling the horizon, coming through the delicate trees on the far bank of the lake. Brothers, fathers, sons. Criminals and victims. All of them here, just as I am, because they received this man’s final reward.

If only I’d known then what I know now.

Well, this is what you get. People making all the right decisions with none of the wisdom behind it. Smart, rational lives with no meaning at all because there’s nothing to be learned or lost or loved.

“This wasn’t a reward, you know,” I whisper to the scarred, unrecognizable corpse on the bank of the lake. “You did it to yourself. So proud of your breakthrough, you were. So distracted by the thought that this new wisdom could have improved your life in the past that you didn’t think about your future.”

I understand him as I’ve never understood myself. He can travel between worlds, as many worlds as there are versions of us along the hill and the treeline, watching us, and more. He can be other people, go to other places, and ruin them or make them better.

“All these worlds were yours. For you to explore, to live in and learn from. Without you, none of us really matter much.”

I’m dead, is what the corpse doesn’t say. Of course it doesn’t say these words, because it’s dead. I hear them anyway.

“Only because you think you’re dead. You died in the past, and you can’t change that, you know it. But the present? You can do anything. Be anything.”

I take his cold, burned hand, squeezing it, pressing the seared flesh to my lips to kiss it. “We need you, man. You’re what keeps us going. We’re out there trying the shit you don’t, so you’ll have something to discover, and while we’re doing it our lives have meaning because we can fuck them up. Without you, we’re just... this. Sock puppets in cardboard worlds.”

I stand, and kick my dead body in the side. It jostles, the seared skin crackling, and it rolls wetly back. “So quit being dead, asshole” I say, with stern conviction. A shout goes up behind me. A thousand voices in a thousand languages yell their admonishments. I kick myself in the ribs again.

“Quit being dead, bitch. Get back on the horse.”

•

Sometimes, in life, fairly often in fact, all you need is a good kick in the ribs.

Or to be roused from bed in the weekend when you really want to sleep a little longer. You hate being woken, but why? You can lie in bed and enjoy doing nothing, wasting some of the precious few heartbeats you get over the course of your life.

Sure, a wake-up call may be an annoyance. But it gets you up and at ‘em, gets you out the door and once you’re there... anything can happen. Anything that couldn’t while you were sleeping.

So my heart beats one more time. Maybe it’s a last-ditch chemical discharge, some enzymes or proteins or whatever that built up enough power to spasm my heart one more time, sending just a teeny bit of oxygenated blood into my cooked brain, enough for a few cells to fire so I can think one thought.

“Back on the horse.”

•

I see a figure in a black traveling cloak standing over a a gasping, choking boar.

I don’t know why I’m here, floating over this scene, watching a cloaked version of myself stand over a wounded man in the Briarwoods outside Visène. A few memories tumble through my mind. John, of course, but also Allon, and even Clarissa.

Pinned under his own dead horse the boar turns his head to spit his blood in the grass.

“Mistle’s your name, isn’t it?” the cloaked figure asks the boar. “You don’t remember me, I’m sure. I look very different than when you saw me. When you abandoned me.”

That’s it?

That’s how petty I was? I left Carrick behind and spent the finest years of my life on a mission of revenge because the man who found me when I was born, who saved me from falling to my death before I could even open my eyes, later abandoned me?

I blink, and it’s me standing over the boar. Me, with my memories of the ghost ward and manipulating timelines and sending clippers to Tennessee. Me, who gave his life for his love and died of fire and smoke, only to be roused again byt the other lives he could have led.

Me, who thinks killing a man who saved your life is a ridiculous thing to do.

“There’s someone who wants you dead,” I tell him as I crouch down and push the horse off him, the horse he rode, who tripped over the wire I’d tied between two trees. “They let you know they were chasing you so you’d rush into the woods and fall into the trap they left.”

None of it’s a lie, except of course, you and I both know who ‘they’ are.

“Perhaps you should be dead, eh? Go somewhere new, where people don’t know you. Pick a new name.”

The boar rolls onto his side, rubbing his aching legs, wiggling his feet to check they still work. “Who are you, stranger?”

“We’ve known each other since before I had a name, so I think it fair to call me ‘friend’,” I say, taking his forearm and helping him to his feet. He’s wary of me, stepping back when he sees the hilt of the kinfe at my belt.

He reaches for his sword when he sees me pull back my cloak and reach for my belt, but he grabs only air, his scabbard torn off when his horse tumbled. “Easy, Mistle,” I say with a grin, entirely unafraid of the gruff boar, and untie my purse from my belt, tossing it at him. “Here. I owe you. It isn’t much, but it should get nice you and far away without going too hungry on the road, and maybe even help you make an honest man out of yourself.”

He’s confused. I have that effect on people. I remember how I found myself in these woods, the Briarwoods, north of Viseène, just after I’d jumped off the lighthouse and thought of Allon. When I woke up then I had a freshly split lip, so I know what’s coming.

I brace myself when he swings his fist, but I don’t defend against it. He punches me in the jaw and sends me sprawling. Injured, he runs away.

These were the last moments of the man called Mistle.

My jaw aches, and I love it. Pain is life. It means you exist and you have something to lose, and anything you can lose is a thing worth loving.

There’s no greater shame than wasting something before it’s taken from you, because you’re so afraid of losing it you’d rather pretend it isn’t yours.

Hey, what do you know? Allon was wrong again. She said you can only slip into a life at a point after the last time you visited it, but she was wrong, just as she was wrong about observation being the key to traveling.

The story of your life won’t let you make a liar of it. It won’t let you step in and change things that you know turn out differently.

It won’t let me go to that alley in Nagasaki and distract that boy from sending a bomb to 2006 any more than it’ll let me go to 2006 and stop myself from feeling so miserable and sorry for myself that I scream out across the universes and invite anyone with a problem they can’t solve to dump it on me.

That’s what happened. The thought’s as clear as a bell. That’s when I felt such despair and sadness that I craved it without knowing. I did corrupt the world, I did invite chaos and ruin, but it wasn’t my hubris, or my adventuring.

When you’re sad, there comes a point where you start to feel protective of your sadness. Do you know what I mean? Maybe you’re suffering unrequited love, or an injury, or financial misfortune. And, like a wound you can’t stop poking, you run your sadness through your mind over and over, and try to make it grander, more important.

You absolutely refuse to think that your heartache is anything less than epic. You weren’t just infatuated, yours is a forever love and you’ll suffer the pain of rejection until the day you die. Yours is an injury, a handicap, that will cripple your ambitions for life; you’ll never be able to achieve the things you so dreamed of doing. All your prospects have been taken from you and you’ll die penniless.

It’s the kind of self-indulgent that can make a world-hopping demigod like me punch holes in reality to let even more precious misery in. It’s kind of silly.

And I know, there’s something sick about calling the nuclear devastation I caused ‘silly’ and attributing it to a bout of depression. You’ve followed along with my stories, you know it’s a bit more than that.

People have died, people I cared about. And these, unlike Mistle, I can’t bring back to life through a clever little loophole.

Allon’s dead, and I’m a bit to blame and so is she, and I’m sad about that. I’ll never stop missing her. But I know, too, that if there were a clever little loophole, then nothing she did would have mattered. And nothing I did would have mattered either.

•

And so I wake up on a cot in Camp Curie. Not in the Ghost Ward, just a cot under the awning of a tent along one of the many mud lanes in gen-pop, where the survivors of the nuclear disaster are housed.

Partly it’s a prison. The assumption is a terrorist attack, and the boys and girls from the government in their fancy suits are working triple shifts to interview survivors and collate data to find out if maybe someone in the camp was responsible for the bombing.

My head hurts. Really, really badly, especially when I sit up.

“Whoa there, get back down,” a firm voice says, a hand pressing to my chest and pressing me back onto my cot. I look up at John, my John. I haven’t laid eyes on him in so long, not this John, the dog who bit an apple one sunny afternoon and stole my heart.

“I’m still mad at you,” he says sternly, and I can hear the seriousness in his voice as a truck rolls by in the mud. He leans over me to fetch a plastic cup with a straw, pushing it into my muzzle, and I drink. “Careful now, just a little. Kevin told me what you talked about, you know.”

“He’s alive?”

John nods, his expression softening. “Sorry, I forgot how long you’d been out. You... you remember where you are, right? What happened?”

I take another sip, and the water feels as good on my tongue as the lake felt on my burned body. “The bomb,” I croak. “Camp Curie.”

“So after Ms Appleby did her little spiel in my studio – she’s alive, too, the bitch – and you couldn’t eve get it together to say you were sorry, or even fucking look at me, I went home and yelled at Kevin about how men are no better than women, and you’re just another Allison, and all that shit. It was pretty douchey, but I’m not gonna apologize for it – you really hurt me.”

I’ve travelled across realities. I’ve pulled memories and skills from other minds in other universes. I’ve rewritten history and manipulated events in my own past. I found Allon when she was lost, across the vast expanse of reality, and I saved another John’s life at the expense of my own... and yet here, on this cot, with people walking hurriedly around me and my John berating me, I feel as small and useless as I did that day in his studio.

But the difference is that I know this isn’t the end of the world. It’s a consequence of a mistake and I’ll have to do better.

So I don’t despair. I don’t invite an antimatter bomb from a future Martian war-colony, I don’t break a hole in reality large enough for Hannibal to march his army through. I just lie there and take a dressing-down from my boyfriend, who’s justifiably pissed off at me and needs to get it out of his system.

“And once I calmed down enough, Kevin told me you’d come over and talked. About his gambling, him trying to turn his life around. He told me that you said you understood, and how you really did, but that it sounded like you were talking about something else.”

John clutches my hand, and kisses it, and my heart leaps in my chest and my headache flares. “He said you talked about how you did stupid stuff to feel special, and how you knew it was bullshit and you turned your life around. You were talking about sleeping with that Appleby bitch, right? Her, and whoever else.”

I want to tell him no, I want to come clean and tell him that I didn’t mean it then, but that it’s still true. I wanted to tell him I dropped my bullshit playboy lifestyle when I met him and I’m sorry it came back to bite him in the ass, and to ask his forgiveness like I should have done back in the studio.

But my head, man. It hurts so much. I know that opiates are no good for a guy like me and the camp staff aren’t going to waste any perfectly good morphine on a headache when there’s people in ghost ward dying in abject misery, but Christ, I could really do with something to take the edge off.

I can’t bring myself to speak, but through the whining of my headache I can still hear John.

“Fuck it,” says John. The dog pinches his snout and laughs. I wish I could laugh with him. “Fuck it, man. It’s not as if that cunt’s gallery is still standing, and all my art’s been vaporized. But you know what? I’ll make more. And it’ll be better. That’s how you show a bitch like Appleby what you’re made of, and I’d like to think I’d have had the balls to do it if the city hadn’t been nuked, too.”

I look at him, but he’s growing blurry. I feel my fingers tingling, and I’m tired, so tired. I don’t know what’s happening to me.

“Allison’s not gonna make it, but they’re taking good care of her, and they’re gonna let me see her again tomorrow. That’s life, right? I hate that it sounds so easy when I say it, but it’s true. I’m alive, you’re alive, Kevin’s alive. I think I saw Clarissa, your friend from the art store, the other day.”

He squeezes my hand, and suddenly my head feels warm. There’s a... not a snap, but something like it. Like when you’ve got a crick in your neck and you pop it just right. I feel good, suddenly, like I did in the lake, falling, falling.

“I’m alive and you’re alive, Game. That’s gotta count for something. You know I love you, right?” He lets go of my hand to pick up the plastic cup again.

I didn’t know that. I hoped, I dreaded, I denied myself the fantasy and I assumed the worst, but I didn’t know until he said it. And I’m glad he said it now.

My aneurysm burst, see. That’s what just happened. That headache that mounted, then that sense of relief. I’m dying in his arms and he doesn’t know it.

But it’s okay, really, it’s okay. John said the words I needed to hear the most. It’s all I’ve wanted for so long. They fix everything, they make everything okay.

I don’t bother reflecting on my life, my lives. It seems like I’ve been doing nothing else lately, constantly reminding myself of other lives I’ve lead, mistakes I’ve made, so taken by the novelty of what I could do.

Maybe all of it was bullshit. Maybe everything I told you was just crazy talk, you know?

Maybe I’m just a guy with a lively imagination, post-traumatic stress disorder and a serious brain condition, lying here on a cot in a camp next to a nuked-out city, whose misfiring neurons feed him brain-fevered fantasies to help him deal with some simple heartbreak and the shock of witnessing a terrorist attack on his home.

I’m sure the news will be reporting on head-cases far crazier than me in the next few weeks.

So it’s okay, really it is. We all have to die sometime, and we should all be so lucky that we get to die being told that we’re loved, that we’re forgiven, that we matter.

So I confront my own mortality, hard as it is for me to imagine a world without me in it, and slip away, slowly, easing out.

John will be sad, but he’ll get over me. We haven’t known each other that long, and though he may be the love of my life, can I really delude myself into thinking I’m the love of his? Can I really delude myself into thinking I’m that important?

Can I really delude myself into thinking that I don’t, absolutely, totally and with every fibre of my being, want to live and find out?

I die. My body slips out from under me and I detach from it, but not before I take one last trip in the split-second when John reaches out for the plastic cup and everyone on the street is too busy with their own shit to notice me disappearing from my bed.

•

And then I’m back!

I know, I know, I’m a cheater. All this time I’ve been talking about lessons I’ve learned and accepting consequences, and doing better, and now I cheated again. But you should know better than to think I learned nothing.

Maybe this is another mistake, I can’t know that. I’m just a guy, you know? We make mistakes all the time. Life would be so boring if we didn’t, and we’d learn so very little.

I’m not cheating out of fear, this time, nor out of ignorance, nor curiosity. I know exactly why I’m cheating. I want to live, but more than that, I want to live with John. For John.

So when the last breath leaves my body, and nobody’s looking, I drop it in front of the emergency ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore somewhere in 2010. A resident trips over me and immediately checks my vitals.

Within seconds I’m rushed into the ER. Paddles to my chest, people yelling complicated stuff about how many units of this or that they want stat. They love that word. I appreciate, in my detached way, watching all this happen from above, how concerned they all are with me.

My heart starts beating again and I’m pulled down toward my body just as they jab a needle in my arm and sedate me. I know that might trap me, but hey, in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.

I wake up with bandages on my head and they tell me I had a ruptured aneurysm, that they saved my life, that it’s a good thing that I was left outside the hospital just as it happened because another few seconds would have meant permanent brain damage, if they’d even managed to revive me.

I know I’m using these people, but it’s not as if I’m a huge imposition. This is their job, these doctors and nurses, in 2010, a future where the United States of America didn’t suffer a nuclear attack. I’m just a patient and they saved me, and I’m really glad they did.

They want to know who dropped me off at the hospital and where I’m insured, so I just don’t talk at all. They tell me that after my recouperation there’ll be an inquiry, but that my first focus should be on getting better.

So I do that.

The bandages come off my head they tell me this whole Dear Liza story: I was bleeding from inside my brain, so they had to fix an artery, so they had to go into my brain with a tube, so they had to drill a hole in my skull, so they had to plug the hole with a titanium patch, so I should mention that next time I go through a metal detector.

I get out of bed, and walk to the bathroom to take a pee. Never underestimate the importance of taking care of your body’s needs.

And then I’m back in 2006, in Camp Curie, with a newly healed brain, where my boyfriend says he loves me, and pushes a straw between my lips to let me drink.

I don’t know where it’s going to go next, this story of mine. I don’t know how long John and I will love each other, or what mistakes we’ll make.

I don’t know if I’ll stop going on adventures, or pulling skills from other lives. I mean, would you? I know that if I go adventuring again I’ll be more cautious, more careful. I know a lot more now, but something tells me I have even more yet to know.

Maybe I’ll take John with me some time. Show him Élique, or the beach or... probably not the lighthouse. We’ve all got things in our lives that we’d rather not share in too much detail with people we love. Bad decisions we made that we’ll just gloss over and move on.

Do you feel cheated? After all, I started off telling you how I was dead, and then when it came down to it I changed my mind at the last minute.

At least I didn’t just leave this body and take another one from another world. Maybe the lieutenant in the cavalerie, to see if he and Jonathan ever managed to consummate their romance. Or maybe I’d arrive in the lieutenant’s body and find myself a lone survivor on a battlefield, standing over Jonathan’s corpse, and decide to simply take his body back to 2006 and surprise John at my funeral.

At least I’ve learned that lesson, right? I may have cheated death, but I did it at least a little responsibly. That’s progress!

More than progress, it’s a choice. Not a knee-jerk response, not an overreaction, not an act of desperation. I know better than anyone what consequences might await me for this fresh arrogance, saving this body by slipping it into another world to be fixed, and slipping just as quietly back. I chose to do it because I thought this was the least risky way to do it, and because, of course, I want to live. I can’t apologize for that.

And be fair. Be fair. This world’s just a little bit more interesting with me in it, right? Come on, admit it. I’m not such a bad guy.

And I mean to be a pretty good guy. I can’t bring the dead back to life, I can’t prevent things that have already happened. And I can’t pretend that I’m wise and perfect and all-knowing, either.

But I can try to do right by the people I care about, even when I make mistakes. Especially then.

To make mistakes, to learn, and do better.

To play the game of life.