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Do you know what most people do when they learn they have a terminal condition while they’re still fit? Most people do none of the things on their bucket list. They don’t go skydiving and they don’t go on a world trip.

They go to work.

It’s Monday, and I’m in the art supply store and my vixen friend asks if I’m okay. I lie to her, very well, and she invites me to another quiz night which I decline with a pretty good excuse.

I try not to think about the fallen Naval officer who fled from his madness and into the arms of cheap Hong Kong opium, or about the institutionalized patient in 2017 who killed himself rather than let me become him.

When the art supply store becomes a pottery and my nine-year-old paws are covered in mud, I ignore my teacher’s admonishments and close my eyes until I’m in the art supply store again, and put the pot of teal paint I’m holding on its proper shelf.

I never once think I’m losing my mind, that’s the only thing I’m certain of. I can feel my mind changing on occasion, when my wrinkled green shirt becomes an apron and the smell of paper and ink is replaced with the scent of fish and herbs, or when I’m in a tunic and there’s a sword in my paw; I feel younger and less experienced, or older and more bitter and sexually aroused by the bleeding wound in my neck.

It’s nothing short of amazing what you can get used to, isn’t it?

•

It’s Tuesday and I come home from work, my arms laden with brown paper bags with groceries. I didn’t bring my pills with me today, so I take the bottle off the kitchen counter, pour a glass of water, and swallow one pill.

I don’t take it because I’m afraid, that’s not what I’m feeling. I take it because John is coming over tonight. We spoke on the phone briefly last night, and he told me about the meeting he had with a small-time gallery about displaying some of his work, and how excited and nervous he was about the two-week wait before they give him an answer.

I’d be lying (as I often do) if I said I wasn’t being selfish. Certainly, a big part of it is that I don’t want to frighten or confuse John by having another ‘sode in front of him, but another part of it is that I want to have a nice evening with him, and that part’s selfish.

A thought crosses my mind and I leave the groceries in the kitchen, hurrying over to my desk to grab a notebook and pencil, and write down the instructions for the meal I plan to cook for John. I simplify it a little because I can feel it slipping away as the pill does its job and I must finish before it’s gone.

You wanna hear something cool? Lemme tell you something cool. I think you’ll be impressed.

I did something really stupid or really brave when I was in the grocery store half an hour ago. I couldn’t think what to make for dinner, and half-considered just ordering a couple of steaks or something when I smelled fish and tomatoes, and looked down to see a clean linen apron covering my body.

But instead of closing my eyes and waiting for the wave to pass, I stayed there. It’s like I had one foot in the grocery store and one foot in the kitchen where I was quickly but carefully dicing vegetables. The other cooks spoke German, and when one of them addressed me I responded without thinking, but since I don’t speak German I don’t know what I said.

With twenty-first-century eyes I surveyed the spacious, pre-electric kitchen, a place where I felt safe and in control, where I took pride in preparing delicious, healthy meals for the customers. And with a chef’s eyes I pored over the contents of the grocery store shelves, ignoring how odd it was that I was looking rows of metal jars with paintings of peas and carrots on them.

I thought about John’s tastes, about what I smelled in his apartment and saw in his fridge when I briefly poked my nose in there. For a dog I could do no wrong by serving him some nice cutlets, but I was sure he had those all the time and I’d be competing with the memories of his parents’ cooking, so whether I won or lost, he’d feel a little conflicted.

I decided on smoked mackerel, with vegetable soup for starters and oven bread and cream cheese. Some fried mushrooms and steamed carrots, and maybe broccoli if I could find the makings of a nice sour-cream sauce to go over it, otherwise whole-leaf spinach with a simple, understated vinaigrette.

The separation was mutual and gentle. The chef and I both wanted to return to our own worlds, even though we never left them, and our minds disentangled naturally – no, magically, like milk and coffee separating in a cup of latte, entropy reversed by will and agreement.

When I was fully in the grocery store again I still had the memories of how to cook the meal, I could visualize it perfectly, my experienced hands moving with swift certainty in front of my mind’s eye.

But that’s fading now I’ve taken the pill, and the desk I’m writing on is made of varnished mahogany, beautiful but nicked and scarred with age, which is why I could buy it so cheaply from the thrift store. So I write down what I need to do and roughly how long I need to do it, and I know it won’t be as good as it would have been if I’d taken the pill after dinner was done, but then the front door bell rings and I don’t regret my timing at all.

•

John’s never had mackerel before. When I tell him it’s my favorite, I wonder whether that’s a lie. Growing up, I loved the hamburgers from the greasy spoon where my adoptive father, Mitchell Kenna, used to take me on our monthly Guys Night.

But in Carrick, Mickel Kenna used to take me fishing in a rowing boat quite similar to the ones in the boathouse on John’s family estate, and we’d always throw them back unless we cought a mackerel who’d wandered from the sea into the bay. Those we considered gifts from the Fates, and we’d always bring them back to Doria. I’d clean them and she’d cook them for us.

“I dreamed about you, you know.”

I melt at those words, but I’m surprised as well. Not at the fact that he dreamed about me, that’s just flattering. Gives me butterflies in my stomach. What surprises me is that I’ve been so in my own head these last few days that I’d completely forgotten that other people have dreams too.

That other people are real.

Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten quite so much. I’ve heard that food makes you metabolize medicine or drugs more quickly, and I wonder if I should take another pill. I only have six left.

“I hope I wasn’t too rough on you,” I say with a waggle of my brow. I take another sip; he brought a fantastic wine. White would have been a more traditional companion to fish, but this combination works incredibly well.

I shouldn’t know that. I’ve always been a beer guy. That settles it: how can I pop another pill without him noticing? I’ll wait for him to go to the bathroom or something.

“It wasn’t that kind of dream,” he says with a chuckle, refilling his glass and topping mine up as well. I squint my eyes and look at his glass. It’s a wine glass. It’s made of glass. We’re at my black table, standing on four of its six legs because there’s only two of us. I lit candles because I thought that’d be nicer than the simple Ikea overhead lamp.

I’m paying attention to the details that would normally slip by because I want this to be real.

I want to be here, smelling fish and mushrooms and candlewax, and not in Clavier Keep where there’s burning blood and screaming and I’m being born.

I can do this.

For John.

“It was a really nice dream. You know how it always feels like your dream gets cut off before it’s finished? This one wasn’t like that,” he says, rising to take our plates to the kitchen, unasked, and though he gestures for me to sit I join him. My hands are on his hips, my chest against his back, and I rest my chin on his shoulder.

“Then I hope it had a happy ending,” I say an mock-hump against his tail. He laughs and presses back against me, turning to lick at my snout.

“Out of the gutter, buddy, didn’t I tell you?” I release him, letting my paw linger on his gorgeous rump a little too long, and I ask him to take some bowls and forks to the table while I lay out the tiramisu. Store-bought, of course; my German chef counterpart wasn’t much of a dessert man.

“It was just you and me under the stars. It was just after sunset but it got dark quickly. We were cold but we didn’t want to go back, so we just huddled together.”

I carve him a slice of the ice cream cake and he scoops some up, but I stop his paw, take the fork, and feed it to him. There’s a fleck of moccha powder on his lip, and I lean across to lick it away. It takes a lot of willpower not to kiss him. “Go on.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but that’t it. Just you and me under the stars. It was so peaceful.”

I smile at him, a broad, playful smile and I see the cautious curiosity in his eyes as I pick up the plate of tiramisu and head toward the door. “Bring your fork. C’mon, what’re you waiting for?”

•

We sneak quietly up the stairs; I whisper to him how nosy Mrs. McInerny can be. The top flight of stairs is unlit and I have to navigate by touch, stifling a laugh when he grabs my tail “so I don’t lose you in the dark”. He lets go when I ask him to hold the plate with our dessert, so I can work the number lock on the door, and a moment later we step out onto the roof.

“Was it like this? Your dream, I mean,” I ask him and my smile only lasts for a second before he kisses it away.

The streetlights below emit a pale yellow fog of light, but the sky is cloudless and we can still see some stars. He’s lying on a tarp covering whatever rubbish the landlord has chosen not to clear away, and I’m nestled against him, and he feeds me ice cream.

I point up at a small cluster of twinkling dots in the firmament. “See those three? That’s the Well. That’s my family’s constellation.”

“Your what?”

I shake my head. The pill’s definitely wearing off. “That was some good wine. I’m such a lightweight!”

He laughs softly, and grows quiet. “There’s something I have to ask you,” he says, his voice sounding small and a little frightened. I shift my weight against him, feeling his firm chest behind me, resting my head on his shoulder. I feel his heartbeat. “Are you... seeing anyone else?”

I look at him curiously, even though it’s too dark for him to see my face. “No?”

It takes him a few minutes before he continues, and though I feel a knot tighten in my stomach, I let him work it out in his head and don’t press for an answer. “I was. When we met, I mean. It wasn’t anything serious, just a rebound fling. I’d just broken up with my girlfriend and I was playing the field, you know?”

“So you don’t normally follow strange cats home for a quick romp after they tell you their name?” It’s a feeble joke, but cut me some slack, I’m a little emotionally confused right now.

“Only the sexy ones,” he assures me, setting the plate aside and wrapping his arms around me. “Let me just get this off my chest, it’s been eating at me... I’d been dating Allison for about two years, we were talking about moving in together, and I find out she’s been screwing somebody else. So I break up with her, and I’m pretty torn up.”

I don’t interrupt him, I can sense he just needs to talk, but I put my paw over his to let him know I’m with him, I’m not shocked, and he squeezes me tighter. “I don’t know who she was cheating on me with, I didn’t give a fuck. I was done with her, and pretty angry. So one night I get a call from a buddy I used to fool around with at art school, you know, my experimental phase,” he says with a chuckle, “and we go to dinner and we go to his hotel, and we do that a few times. No strings, no big deal. He only called me because he was gonna be in town for a week or two on business. He had a gallery showing and he took me to the opening and introduced me to the curator.”

“So he got you in the door for a showing of your own work? Sounds like a good friend to have. What’s his name?” I do my very, very best not to sound jealous, because I know I shouldn’t be.

“Roger. And he is, he really is. I told him about you the next time we had dinner.” John goes quiet, almost like he’s holding his breath. The knot in my stomach tightens.

“You had dinner... and...?”

The dog shakes his head. “No ‘and’. We have dinner, say our good-byes, he goes back to his hotel to pack for his red-eye flight back to Montana and I spend the next few weeks pining for you like a teenaged girl.”

I try to fake a laugh, but it sounds fake even to me, and I pull from his grip and sit up. “I’m sorry, John.”

“Hey, hey, I didn’t mean it like that,” he says, his voice so soft and gentle. His arms are warm and strong when he sits upright as well and embraces me again. “I just wanted to clear my plate and tell you this stuff. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“No, I want to explain. Turnabout’s fair play, right?” I’m grateful that the air’s so cool. My ears are burning, but I’d be shivering if I didn’t have a warm dog holding me. “I was... I was pretty messed up. I wasn’t living a good life, and then I saw you...”

So I can experience different versions of my life. I’m starting to accept that, crazy as it sounds, and the quality of the meal I cooked for us is evidence that I’m starting to learn how to control it. It really is pretty cool, all considered, but the superpower I really wish I had right now is the ability to try two different approaches to the same problem and find out which one works.

I love you. The words are burning on my tongue, it’s swollen and dry and trembling with the need to say them. And I know John’s into me; he stopped seeing Roger and he tried to find me and Kevin says he couldn’t stop talking about me.

But he’d been with his girlfriend for two years and that ended just before he met me. He’s still feeling betrayed – in hindsight, I don’t understan how I could have missed the signs of his heartache when they were so obvious and I have so much experience reading people. Any time I left his sight his shoulders would slump a little, and any time I walked back in the room it’d take his smile a second to come back. It was sincere, every time, but it would take a little while for the lingering sadness in his eyes to melt away.

He doesn’t need a new commitment, and certainly not with a first-timer like me. Hell, just explaining that to him will probably freak him out. He’ll probably say he loves me too, but saying those words will remind him of that bitch Allison. And I’ll be so happy and clueless I’ll rush him, and I’ll think I’m being romantic when really I’m just being clingy and pushy...

And, Jesus Christ, what if he doesn’t say it? Am I really so arrogant to think I’m more to him than an infatuation? That’s all I know how to be, after all. That’s why the lonely or married men and women I used to live off of wanted me. I was new and exciting and made them feel special.

Maybe that’s what John needs right now more than anything. He needs me to be uncomplicated, new and exciting, and to make him feel special. I can do that. I can do that really well.

“Anyway. I had a really great time with you and I thought, you know, it was just a nice fling. I thought that’s what you thought, I mean. And it made me want to clean up my life, so I did. I got a new place, I got a new job. You made me a better person.”

John was quiet, his nose pressed against the back of my neck, his breath alternating warm and cold. “I think I like your confession better than mine.” He laughs before I do, and I turn and push him back onto the uncomfortable tarp and make love with him under the stars.

•

“It’s like you two have this sick conspiracy to ruin my life,” says Kevin as he signs the last of the forms and the asshole cop mutters a last homophobic slur as he escorts us out of the holding area.

While there’s very little more romantic than screwing under the stars, with only your lover’s body to warm you in the autumn chill, there’s no bigger buzzkill than cops busting through the door with flashlights and guns just as you’re getting your partner to, you know, bust.

“Anonymous tip, my ass,” I grumble, pulling on the spare clothes Kevin brought for each of us when he came to bail out out. “It was that old bitch Mrs McInerny, I’m sure of it.”

John hadn’t had such a hard time bearing the indignity of being dragged, cuffed and naked, into a police cruiser on charges of ‘public indecency’. If anything he saw the humor in it, but he knew better than to try to explain it to me. “We were making a lot of noise up there. She probably thought we were burglars.”

“It’s not fucking funny!” I snap at him, but both him and Kevin are grinning, and I know this isn’t one I can win. “Look, thanks for posting bail. I know you don’t have a money tree at home, but I’m at just a dime over minimum wage, so it’ll take me about two months to pay you back.”

Kevin starts to shake his head, and I put my hand on his shoulder. “Dude. It’s my house, it’s my mistake. I’m paying you back, that’s that.”

John invites me back to his place and I want to go, but I didn’t lock my door when we snuck up to the roof and I left candles burning, so regretfully I kiss him goodbye (if the fat cop had been around to see it, I’d have made it a nice deep long one), thank Kevin again, and wave them off while I flag down a cab.

The cab’s a horse-drawn carriage with a lantern hanging from it, rattling down the cobbled road, but I’m too tired to fight it this time. I grab my coin purse from my belt, dig out a Joey for the driver and only when I’m standing before my manor do I concentrate, forcing my high-collared cloak to change back into the sweater Kevin loaned me.

As I sneak the hidey-key from behind the potte geraniums and let myself in the front door, I briefly wonder if I shouldn’t have spent the night in the manor, as it looked mighty comfortable. I dismiss the notion, even though my apartment briefly wants to become a rather lavish dining room with a chandelier, but I steel my resolve.

I blow out what few candles haven’t yet burned up, and quickly wash the dishes just to give my trembling paws something to do. The night’s revelations, the insult of being busted by the cops, and my own cowardice in neglecting to tell John how I really feel about him...

I’m tired but I’m too wired to sleep. Also, the bottle of wine John brought is still almost half-full and it’d be a shame to let that go to waste, so I put on a Stones record with the volume set to low (I’m not one to tempt fate) and sit back in my easy chair to just chill the fuck out.

When I bring the glass to my lips it’s an earthenware cup, warm, with a strong scent of honey and nutmeg. I snort and I’m about to push this away, but I change my mind. Maybe I’m just acting out because I’m pissed off at the cops for dragging us off – which they would fucking never have done if I’d been porking some chick up there – but I’m feeling damn bold right now.

I’m in a large tent, and I can hear men and horses outside. There are oil lamps on a wooden table made out of a tree cut not far from here. I know that I’m a officer of the cavalerie, the stripes on the sleeves of the uniform jacket draped over my cot tell me that I’m a lieutenant.

I lead a small portion of the regiment camped here, and if I looked at the parchments on the table and read the tactical maps, I know I’d remember the details of our campaign. It doesn’t spark my curiosity, though, and the spiced mead Jonathan brought over is too good to waste.

Jonathan. That’s how I know John here. He came to my tent for a ‘strategic consultation’ that didn’t last long before we set upon one another. We quickly disentangled when we heard what sounded like footsteps approaching; he buttoned up his uniform and I threw on my robe.

Even though the footsteps passed and we still both still hungered for satisfaction we chose to err on the side of caution and said our good-nights, risking a last kiss before he went back to the tent he shared with the other riders. I burned a pinch of cloves in each of the laps to mask the scent of sex.

And still I don’t believe myself to be mad. This tent is every bit as real as the glass spires and roaring metal chariots that I lived among mere minutes ago; this war is every bit as important as my employment among the shelves of art supplies, or my duties as a shaman’s apprentice, helping him to paint his aging body and grinding the herbs that his gnarled fingers can only point at.

I’m not insane. These are not fantasies. These are the stories of my life, told in different places, in different times, with different people and different outcomes.

I know at least one where I am dead, and one where I’m a catatonic addict, lingering in the dragon’s embrace to escape this twisting, writhing tale of mine.

I haven’t before had a chance to reflect so lucidly on my condition and my mind yearns to explore it, so when I hear footsteps approaching my tent in a hurry, and I know that there is danger and I must quickly rise and arm myself, I flee to another story.

I’m in the woods, under the stars, suffering the cold of a light drizzle. My small cooking-fire has long been snuffed and my traveling blanket is still damp from last night’s downpour, but at least I’m alone and calm.

I killed Mistle today. The man who found me in Clavier Keep, who left me for the Kennas to find. I left Carrick for the City, after the Arbiter, in his wisdom, sent a letter to his friend in the city’s council by courier . I travelled only with such supplies as I needed for the trip, posing no appreciable target for any highwaymen, and on my arrival I identified myself to the council’s clerk and began the process of securing lodgings.

I marvelled at the ingenuity of the arrangement. The house I’d inherited from the Kennas was sold for a modest fee to an older boy I’d known in the Sayer’s schooling when he asked one of the Ver Tallens daughters’ paw in marriage. We went to the Writ where I struck the house from my page in the Book of Carrick, and the Arbiter made arrangements for the money to be waiting for me in the City when I arrived.

By the time I was fifteen I was earning a decent living on the shoe-mending skills I’d learned from my father, and I’d even fashioned some workboots from scratch that proved quite popular among the local merchants’ wives. A few of their daughters perused my wares on occasion, no doubt testing the waters of my eligibility, but I had no interest in them. Or anyone.

I noted with some concern that here, under these alien stars, I never met John. Shivering under this blanket my heart houses nought but the dying embers of revenge, now executed.

I put it out of my mind. I’m not entirely sure about my motivations for killing Mistle, any more than I cared about the parchment maps in the tent, and part of me worries that if I think too hard on it I might taint my pleasant memories of Carrick with darker recollections.

It doesn’t matter much. I found this place so I could think in peace, and I’m confident I know my way back to the world where I’m drinking John’s wine.

It may be finished by now, actually. There’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? When I took the horse-drawn carriage I was brought home, and when I returned to 2006 I was home as well. I can’t imagine I just popped in and out of existence.

No, I think the stories of my life move on even if I’m not in them. The decisions I make in one version, if I’m conscious of them, if I’m paying attention, do seem to carry over in some way in other versions. I’m sure that if I’d taken the carriage to another place and shifted back to 2006 I wouldn’t have been at my apartment.

So I wonder, I wonder. Is there a version of me, right this moment, in another world, finishing the last of John’s excellent wine?

Does that story even exist? Or is it simply paused, waiting to see what I do here, now, waiting to incorporate those decisions into its plot when it resumes upon my return?

I don’t like that thought at all, not in the slightest. Worse than the cold, it cuts at my heart to think that John might not even exist right now.

I have to leave this place. I can’t let him not be, it isn’t right. I close my eyes, and think of... wait.

A smile tugs at the corners of my bloodied lips. In 2006 I’m sitting alone and fuming over some bigoted cop. I won’t be able to sleep there anyway. So maybe I can delay returning there a little longer.

Maybe I can explore a little further. Find a story where John is in my life... but where he came home with me tonight. Let’s see...

•

It’s 1984, and we’re in my twenty-second floor loft. Jon’s naked and lean and he’s straddling me on my Italian leather couch, tugging my Indian silk tie away with his teeth. Chaka Khan pumps out of a five-thousand-dollar Philips installation as he leans back, exposing his fabulous body to me, raking his claws down my shirt to paw at the fastenings of my Ralph Lauren pants.

I’m buzzing with energy, my heart thumps in my fingertips, and it’s just like that first time I met him on the street: electric. I lean in to gnaw at his neck, gripping his gorgeous rump in my paws, feeling the hard evidence of his equal hunger for me when I glance at the glass-topped table behind him and see an untidy pyramid of white powder and a razorblade.

Ah.

I leave my coke-head Yuppie counterpart to enjoy a drug-fuelled romp with John. It’s not that I’m uptight or nothing, I felt like I was having an awesome time, but it’s not what I’m in the mood for right now.

Did Nero ever have such a luxury? Did Louis XV? The ease with which I now slip from one life to another, confident and bold... How much would they have sacrificed or risked for even a glimpse of what I do now, so casually?

As I slip away from 1984 I succumb to a moment of worry, and I learn that when I transition I gotta keep my emotions in check. I wonder if I’m being careless, and as the eighties fade away, the next world is slow to take its place.

It’s... dim, in a way. It feels a little more solid, but at the same time I feel like I’m floating. I don’t know where I am, but I’m not afraid. I’m not curious. I feel totally, totally neutral.

I glide through hallways. Men in white pass me without remarking on me. I pass through doors and walls and don’t question it. I have no hands that I can see.

I smell linoleum and antiseptics, and I cease my wandering. In this world of utter indifference, this mental institution that ignores me, there is a faint remnant of a... not a presence, not like that. Like an extinguished coal-fire. No light, just lingering heat from the ashes.

It’s lower than I am now, and I sink through the floor into an administrative office, empty during the night shift. I sink again, and see myself laid on a gurney, naked, cold and dead.

My eyes are so bloodshot you might as well call them tomatoes, and so swollen that my eyelids can’t shut. There are stains around my mouth, sickly brown and yellow.

Even in my disfigurement and emaciation, I am, in my way, beautiful. My pelt is rough and patchy but the pattern of my spots is still as elegant as ever, an optical guide down the curves of my body to the jewels between my legs.

I observe impassively, analytically, objectively, and feel nothing. I think very little, and remember only shallowly. My memories are like photos copied a hundred times too often, bereft of detail and importance.

I leave only because nothing further interests me.

When I find myself on my knees in the temple where I serve, my meditation is broken by a sudeen panic. I’m not scared of the sacred flame I’m praying to; I’m scared of the place I just left, and the thought that I could just have easily never thought to leave.

That story, where I committed suicide by taser, still continues without even that version of me in it, and I hope that I’ll remember never to return there. Like the opium den it’s a place I might not be able to leave again.

How lucky have I been so far to have fallen into stories that would trap me if I’d visited them? How many are there where there was no Mistle to take me from my mother’s cooling body, or where I fell ill and no medicine existed to save me?

How far have I pushed my luck?

I feel regret for breaking my medication. I foresook my duties to the Flame, and must make amends. I leave myself to my prayers, but even as the temple fades from around me and I know that I should return to my apartment and John’s wine and Kevin’s loaner clothes, the thought of John is strong in my mind.

In the quiet of the night, guided only by the light of the candle I hold, I make my way through the unfamiliar corridors of John’s family estate. It’s cold, but the evening’s brandy still warms my belly and makes my bare footfalls unstead. It doesn’t help that the stone floors are polished to a shine, and the pads of my feet squak on occasion

Left, I think... this might be it. As I stand before the ornate doors, my fist clenches just before taking hold of the latch. I think that John lies slumbering beyond these doors, but what if I’m mistaken? What if I come upon his parents? How will I explain violating their privacy in my borrowed night-gown? Caution almost gets the better of me, but just as I steel my nerves and reach out again, the door opens.

I stagger back, reeling in a sudden fright, almost slipping on the polished floor, and John, for his part, almost does the same.

For it’s John who opened the door – like me, in his nightgown, with a candle. Like me he found sleep’s grasp too feeble, and stole into the night to find warmer company.

I’m not afraid any more. Caution has fled me, and though it might return when dawn breaks and the full measure of tonight’s risks bear down upon me, but now I merely stride forward, into John’s chambers, and into his arms.

Foolishly we snuff our candles just after closing his doors, and it’s only with some stumbling and boyish giggling that we find his bedpost and climb onto the sheets.

How I wish I’d left just one flame burning, or that I’d ventured to the window to cast open a curtain and let in some moonlight. As I peel away his gown and feel a body I’ve only ever seen wrapped in velvet and lace and silk, I wish so terribly that I could see it.

I imagine the contours of his pelt, where the black of his shoulders meets the white blaze on his chest, on his belly... my word, he’s every bit as excited as I am.

When I cast my own gown aside he’s no less curious about me, and his paws caress me, and pass lower, and they grasp the fullness of my appetite, and I know heaven.

My inexperience is a disadvantage only in theory. When he eschews my kisses I wonder if I’ve displeased him, until he pushes at my chest and meaneuvers lower and I learn the true reason why the Lord endowed us with a tongue.

Oh, I’ve heard of this, of course. Drunken jokes among my father’s peers, the succulent lies of classmates who claimed to have lain with ladies of the evening, and the fiery, colorful diatribes of a priest now long dead.

But this can be no sin. The devil, in all his wickedness, couldn’t conjure such an ecstasy. As I writhe amid the satin in the dark under John’s loving minstrations I feel my spirit elevated into ethereal spheres hitherto undreamt of, the very antithesis of the carnal, and the only thought that carries me back down to the mortal plane is that most mortal of impulses: to emulate the divine.

I curl onto my side, I grasp the very finest of him, and taste the true unvarnished essence of my beloved. I strive to match the art he practices between my legs and soon find myself overtaken by it and graduate from emulation to invention, much to John’s palpable delight.

And although I can scarcely imagine it there, with salt and rapture on my lips, this is but the cusp of the education I’ll enjoy in John’s bed. In night’s nurturing bosom we are Eros and Anteros, shackled to one another through flesh and love and desire.

And when we lie spent in one another’s arms, heedless of the risks of being found so at the breaking of dawn, he halts his breath for a long, salient moment. I feel his eyes upon me, and hear him wet his lips to speak, when the phone rings and I nearly drop my glass.

Drunk and tired, with pale blue light seeping through the blinds and heralding the dawn, with no more than an hour’s time before I’m expected at the art supply store, I stumble and fumble and put it to my ear.

“I’m sorry if I woke you, but I couldn’t sleep,” John says. “I just wanted to tell you I love you.”

•

The day passes quickly. I should be a wreck; I spent so long on the phone that I had no time to make coffee or even shower. My vixen friend – her name is Clarissa – remarks that I reek of deodorant, and it’s true, but at least the sharp smell of citrus is more professional than the scent of dog on my pelt.

But I’m not a wreck. No amount of sleep or caffeine could have flushed the booze from my brain as John’s affection, and even when other realities poke their snout around the corners of the shelves, inviting me to play, I push them back as gently and as easily as sending an obedient pet back to its basket.

There’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here, doing a day’s work, even putting in a little overtime so I can pay Kevin back with all haste, and looking forward to joining John for dinner.

Even when John calls me with sorrow in his voice to tell me that an idiot at his atelier accidentally snapped a copper twig off his centerpiece sculpture and he’ll need to work through the night to fix it, I don’t give in. It feels like cheating, like fast-forwarding through a good movie.

I’ll let my English self and his John sneak through the estate and have their secret trysts, and I hope for my Lieutenant that the night’s trouble was a false alarm, that he might have Jonathan join him for a nice, quiet patrol of the woods after daybreak.

For the first time in my life, I have everything I need. I have my pride, I have prospects, and I have love.

I wonder, only philosophically, if John would have felt compelled to call him if I hadn’t slipped into another night where we could make love. The fluidity of my reality seems so unimportant now, and even my ability to travel between worlds and lives and times and places feels trivial, like a hobby I’ve enjoyed but will soon lose interest in.

Oh, I don’t doubt that it’s real, that I imagined it. I know for certain that I’m not crazy, that these other lives exist and that I’m learning how to use them to my advantage. The best evidence came when John called me a pet name over the phone that he’d never called me before, except as once as Jonathan and again in the dark bedroom of his family estate.

I’ll wonder, later, what I would have done if someone had told me of the consequences of the journeys I took last night. Would I have stopped it then and there? Would I have forsaken that night of passion in the dark?

I’m almost certain I would have been weak, and stupid, and in love, and I’d have taken the journey anyway.

If only to hear him tell me he loved me.

If only to hear him call me “Fair Game.”

•

We don’t see each other for a few days, and even our phone calls are brief, but I’m content to wait. John needs to spend time with his sculptures, since the curator will be coming by for a viewing this coming weekend. I miss him, of course, but I’m perfectly content to wait.

Him saying the L word doesn’t mean we’re moving in together and picking out curtains, I know that well and good. I also know I’m not the first person he’s loved, and that I’m almost certainly not as meaningful to him than his last girlfriend was for the two years they were together.

But hearing those words from him just put me at ease. I don’t have to watch my step around him, withhold my feelings because I’m afraid of alienating him. He can just live his life, and I can live mine, and I’m certain I’ll see him again.

I missed quiz night with Clarissa and her friends, but I join them for dinner on a weeknight and propose we try out a new Israeli-Italian place. It turns out to be a grotesque disaster: the food is abominable, the waiter has a black eye, no patience, and doesn’t listen to any of the notes we make. “I’m allergic to corn, can you ask the chef to leave that ingredient out?” Lifting the top layer of cheese off his pizza, Tom finds an ocean of corn just below it.

It’s a wonderful evening, and it makes me see just how much I like these people. I tell them about John, and as the terrible wine flows, I tell them how we met. I even tell them how our second proper ‘date’ was interrupted by the city’s finest, with a few theatrical flourishes to leave them howling, of course.

“Did you hear about the shipwreck?” asks Tom, the only other feline in the company.

“In the Weekly World News, you mean?” We stare at Clarissa for a moment in disbelief. “You got a problem? It’s funny.”

We spend some time poking fun at Clarissa and probing her to judge the depth of her loyalty to that ridiculous periodical. She’s a feisty one, masterful in her resistance to ribbing, but Tom steers us back on topic.

“So anyway, guys, this story isn’t bullshit. It was on Fox News yesterday too.”

I snort into my terrible wine. “Oh, then it must be true, huh?”

Tom’s on a roll, though, and completely ignores me. “The professor in charge of the investigation was a lecturer of mine, so I called him and got the low-down. From the wreckage he thinks it’s an English clipper, early nineteenth century, although he’s already catalogued quite a few anomalous designs.” There’s a gleam in his eyes as the cat tells the story, just like on those rare occasions on quiz night when a question comes along that he alone, as a history major, has an answer for.

His eagerness suspends our disbelief, and Clarissa capitalizes on our weakness. “That’s not the weird part, though. The weird part is that it washed up in Tennesse. Fifty miles from the Mississippi. How does a galleon wash up in Tennessee overnight?”

“It wasn’t a galleon, it was a clipper.”

“Might not have been. Anomalous designs, remember?”

“Whatever!” says Tom, a little too loudly. “Guys, guys, listen. Jim – professor Barnes – had just gotten the results on the third carbon dating test when I called him, and he sounded really freaked out. Like, I could hear him trembling, over the phone. Get this: the ship appears to be completely carbon inert.”

“Wow,” I say, and Tom rolls his eyes.

“Okay, so carbon dating works by measuring the levels of an isotope called carbon-14, right? It’s in the atmosphere, plants absorb it, so you find it in anything made of organic materials. We know how much carbon-14 was in the atmosphere at different points in history and we know at what rate the isotope decays, so you can determine how old a piece of wood or cloth is by measuring the carbon-14 levels of a sample and calculating back from there.”

Mark, the closest thing our group has to a jock and Clarissa’s on-again, off-again fuckbuddy, gets as antsy as he always does when any of the college graduates of our little group show off their learning. “I guess we won’t need your ass when that comes up on quiz night, huh?”

Tom ignores him as easily as he did me, leaning forward over his uneaten, corn-filled pizza. “Guys. There was no carbon-14 in any of the samples. Even if it was sixty thousand years old, there’d still be traces of it. That shit’s in the air right now, you’re breathing it, absorbing it in your cells. That boat, guys, was made from wood that was never exposed to Earth’s atmosphere.”

Clarissa is just as excited. “So since there were no bodies, or cargo in the hold, the going theory is that it’s some kind of space-ship, and they’re looking for the aliens that survived the crash.”

The dead serious look on the vixen’s face has us in stitches, and Tom raises his hands in defeat. He’s lost us, and he drops the subject, and I don’t think about it again until the end of the dinner.

Everyone’s got their wallets out, and I’m about to remind them that I have to pay Kevin back for bail so I’m gonna do the math and pay exactly what I owe, when I look in my wallet and don’t recognize the color of the bills.

I hold my wallet below the table’s edge while the others pile their money and Tom counts the total, and I take a note out. One thousand Italian lire. I flick through the others, finding different demoninations of the same currency.

I sigh at the inconvenience, but I have experience with this now. Holding all the bills in my wallet, I close my eyes, and gently push, forcing the money back to its own time and place, just as I did at the store today when the cash register wanted to become a strongbox.

It doesn’t yield, though. Furrowing my brow, I push harder, but I can see the light dimming and the sound of the restaurant grows more muted. It’s like pushing against the wall while standing on a slippery floor; the wall won’t budge, so you push yourself backward.

Before I slip too far away I pull myself back and check the rest of my wallet, and look up to see the confused faces of my friends.

“Earth to Game,” says Mark. “You chipping in or what?”

“I’m gonna have to put my share on my card, is that cool?”

As I flash the plastic, I quietly pray that it will stay a Mastercard long enough for the ferret with the black eye to swipe it.

•

Before you ask: I don’t go to Tennessee. I don’t contact this professor Barnes and he doesn’t fly me to CERN to hook me up to a synchrocyclotron to disentangle my quanta. That’s what people in thriller movies do because they’re contractually obligated to move the plot forward and resolve it in ninety minutes.

I do what you would have done. I try to ignore it.

Don’t think for a second you’d have done differently. This isn’t like taking your car to the shop when it starts making a funny noise; it’s like having your dad investigated by the IRS when you notice some irregularities in his financial claims.

You try to ignore it. Try, I said. You know there’s something wrong but you don’t think it’s a big enough deal to make a fuss. You think to yourself that if it gets worse you’ll take action, but really what you’re hoping very hard is that it’ll just go away and stop bothering you, so when it does get worse, it’s only a little worse, and not worth going to any trouble for. If it gets really bad, you’ll take action, you’re sure of it.

Mañana, mañana.

I stuff the lire between the pages of a romance novel on my bookshelf, and lament the loss of the eighty bucks I had in my wallet when I headed out.

And just like you would have done, I get on with my life.

I think about heading downtown to John’s atelier to surprise him with some take-out food, but it’s already pretty late and I’d have to take a cab back home, so I just give him a call instead.

Whatever worries I still harbored melt away when I hear his voice, and I only talk to him for about five minutes because I can hear how stressed he is and how badly he wants to get back to his work.

I ask him if he’d like me there for moral support on Saturday when the curator comes to look at his work. I’m about to add that I don’t want to be pushy and I’ll understand if he doesn’t want me in the way when his voice breaks in relief and he says yes, he’d love me to be there to steady his nerves.

I don’t know if I’m officially his boyfriend right now, we haven’t talked about that, but if I am, I feel like I’m a pretty good one.

•

Pushing away the tentative encroachments of other realities has become so routine that I don’t even realize I’m doing it. Friday afternoon my manager takes me aside for a moment and I receive the first promotion of my life: next week I’ll be partnered with Clarissa, who’ll give me hands-on training for me new duties at the cash register.

After work I head down to John’s place, waiting until the last moment before hitting an ATM, and I hold the money in my hand nervously as I walk up to the door, checking every other minute to make sure they’re still US currency.

“Hey dude,” says Kevin as he opens the door. “John’s still out.” I tell him I know, I just came by to drop off the first installment of my payback, and he looks nervous for a moment. “You know what... if it’s okay with you, I’d rather have a bank wire. I’m trying to avoid cash for a while. Kicking a habit, you know?”

I debate whether I should let him know that John told me about his gambling. I only want to be supportive, since the weasel’s been good to me and I like to think we’re becoming friends, but I’m concerned it might be a breach of privacy.

“Come on out of the cold, dude. I was just gonna make some coffee.”

He says it feels good to talk about it, and getting it out in the open will help him keep up the discipline he’ll need to get his life in order. After coffee I bully him into letting me do the dishes and clean up the kitchen, and leaning in the doorframe he tells me about his addiction.

Like I said, I like this guy. I want to support him, because he looks so fragile, but what the fuck do I know about gambling? Now, if he’d been hustling husbands and wives for rent money, I could be like a big brother to him and help him turn his life around.

I want so badly to understand him and give him some good advice... so I carefully ease my self-control as I dry the glasses.

It’s hard to describe. I’m searching for memories I don’t have. I don’t let other versions push away the kitchen or Kevin, it’s all in my head. I pass gently among my other selves, like I’m making my way through a quiet, crowded library, never fully becoming them, only cautiously feeling out whether any of them have what I need.

A clergyman, a child soldier, a nurse... a beggar. This one shows promise. I feel a great reservoir of sorrow just beyond the membrane separating him from me, and while I keep the brunt of it at bay, I leave a tiny gap to let some of his memories seep through.

“It was dice, for me,” I whisper. My accent sounds strange to my ears, so I clear my throat and concentrate, keeping myself together. “Every bad roll spurred me to try again and recoup my losses; every good one had me believing I was on a streak I mustn’t break.”

“Exactly, exactly!” says Kevin, with such relief I want to reach out and hug him, though I know we’re not that sort of friends. “Money never entered into it, when I think about it, not really.”

“It was about being special,” I say, wiping my paws and hanging the dishcloth to dry. “When I won, it was like I had some sort of magic, like I was better than the others at the table. I knew things, I could do things that those poor mortals could never hope to.”

“Right? Right? That’s the sickest part of it. Dude, you wanna stay for dinner? I can order us some Thai, or whatever you’re into.”

I nod. I do want to stay for dinner. It sounds weird, but it feels good to talk about this too, even though I don’t understand why. “Only if you’ll let me pick up the tab. Gotta do something with this cash, right?”

We talk, Kevin and I, for a long time. Over Thai, over beer, over coffee. It feels cathartic, opening up to someone so fully, so honestly.

“Sometimes it feels like it’s no big deal, it’s just a little indulgence,” he says as we sit on the couch, both staring at the ceiling, enjoying the buzz of a post-dinner beer. “And sometimes it’s a reward, if you’ve just had some really good luck. And if you’ve had really bad luck, it feels like it’s your only chance to get a break. So you always go back, no matter the excuse. It’s fucking pathetic.”

That sounds wrong to my ears, though I don’t know why. I don’t say it aloud, of course, but I keep coming back to the feeling of specialness. Being unique, meaningful, important.

After the third beer I realize I’m not talking about gambling.

“I’m not dumb enough to think I can just quit. I can’t see the future,” he muses, sounding a little sad. I don’t touch him, I don’t look at him, that feels too... I don’t know, too intimate. This is just guy talk, and he needs his space to feel at ease. “But I know I’ve got to be done with it. And not just because of the money – fuck, I’ve wasted so much of that, it’s embarrassing. But that’s not why I’ve got to quit.”

I turn my head, reclining on the couch, and look at him. I want to hear what he has to say. I want to know how he’s going to solve it for himself, so maybe I can learn from it. I need to.

He sits up, passing his bottle from one paw to the other. “Betting on ponies doesn’t make you special, even if you win. That’s ridiculous. It makes you cheap and small, it’s like buying yourself a first-place marathon medal without ever runningn one, or a purple heart, or printing a college diploma off the web.”

Like sneaking into England because your boyfriend went home and you still want to spend the night with him. Like pulling a German chef into your head because you’re a crap cook and want to impress your date.

I push the beggar from my mind and stand up, too quickly, but I manage not to stagger too much as I walk to the window and poke my snout between the curtains. My breath steams the glass as I look up and see the Well, and the Lamp, and the Plough and grunt as I push them away again. I never learned any constellations in school and certainly not those foreign, heathen ones.

“The breakthrough comes when you realize it’s not a choice between being special and ordinary,” I say, and I try to sound as if it’s something I learned long ago, after the gambling phase I never had, and not something that’s occurring to me right now. “You can just be you. You can just live your life. Make it as special or ordinary as you want.”

It’s too late to get home with public transport, and while I’ve got the cash in my pocket to take a cab, but Kevin says I’m welcome to stay over and wait for John to get back.

I take the offer gratefully and John comes home just as Kevin’s pulled me into a firm guy-hug to thank me for listening, which he quickly breaks, looking flustered. John’s smirk and raised brow at the scene are infectious, and I can’t help but play it up.

“I’m sorry, honey, but now at last the truth is out. I only used you to get to Kevin! We’re soulmates, he and I – ours is a forever love!”

It’s a lame-ass joke, and I know full well Kevin doesn’t swing that way, but I didn’t expect him to just shut down the way he does. He tries to put a brave face on it, saying he’s tired and heading to bed, and we’re welcome to polish off the couple of beers left in the crate, but I can tell I hurt him pretty badly. I look to John as Kevin shuts the door to his room, who looks just as confused.

But soon enough we’re on the couch, his head on my chest, my arm around his shoulder, and we forget he even has a roommate.

•

He falls asleep like that and I keep an eye on the clock, letting him snooze for half an hour, but not long enough for him to be sore from lying in that weird position on the couch.

I need the time to think, anyway. Spending the night in the family estate wasn’t cheating on John, I know that just as surely as I know I’m not insane. But Kevin was right: I was cheating myself. Skipping to the next chapter of the book, then flipping back, toying with the fabric of reality just because I got a hard-on.

I kiss John’s ear, smiling as he shifts in his sleep, flicking it against my lips. I’m not going to cheat any more. I’m going to do right by him. No more shortcuts, he deserves better than that.

Tomorrow is Saturday. I’ve got my followup examination at the hospital, but I should be done with that in time to get to John’s atelier before the curator arrives. It’s going to be the first time I actually see his art, and I’m quite excited about that. For the life of me, I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else.

I nudge him awake, help him out of his clothes, and put him to bed. He’s already out by the time I crawl next to him, and when I do he rolls over to put his snout on my shoulder.

I close my eyes, and sleep peacefully for the last time in my life.

•

It’s Saturday, and I’m a little on edge from sitting in the hospital waiting room for so long. I want to get the examination over with and go to John, but I also want to do this right. I still have six of the pills at home, and I know opiates can keep me grounded, but I also know there’s a strong risk of addiction. I’ve seen where that can lead, and I don’t want to go down that path.

So when the doctor asks his questions, I answer them as close to honestly as I can. When she asks whether I’ve had any more migraines, I tell her I’ve had headaches, but they weren’t as severe and I could manage them without the pills.

The visions have, after all, been more manageable.

She asks if I’ve had speech problems and, remembering how I sounded when I channeled the beggar, I admit to it. Loss of balance, too, and double vision is an easy one to cop to.

I’m calm and honest throughout. I don’t outright ask her for anything, but I tell her how I feel, what I experienced in terms she’ll understand. She says she’d like to run a few more tests, if that’s okay, since she’s noticed I keep looking up at the clock.

She informs me that an MRI test was scheduled at noon, to be observed by students, but that the patient in question had suffered complications and the slot was now open.

She wouldn’t normally suggest a procedure like this so early in a diagnosis, but since the procedure is non-invasive, not even requiring contrast fluid, and the slot is already open, it couldn’t hurt. Including prep time it should only take half an hour, and since analysis of the results will be conducted with the students this afternoon, I could come back in the evening to discuss my results.

‘Prep’ consists of stripping, and a full-frontal examination of my body by the doctor, who adds that if I’d be more comfortable being inspected by a male she could ask one of the students in. I’m not exactly sure that an eager twentysomething doctor-to-be would help put me in the right frame of mind for this examination, so I tell her I’m in her hands.

The MRI machine, she explains, uses a powerful magnet and she has to make sure I don’t have any piercings or prosthetics in my body, and patients often forget about those when they’re clothed. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d considered getting my sheath pierced. I’m so glad I didn’t.

Never has a garment been invented that is less flattering to the body than a hospital gown. Honestly, as I’m led through the imaging room and laid on the plateau that will bring me into the tunnel of the magnetic chamber, under the watchful gaze of white-jacketed students observing behind the glass, I’d much rather be naked. At least then I could show off, you know?

I have to lie still for twenty minutes while the machine thumps and clangs around me. The doctor’s voice drones over the intercom as she explains to the students what they’re observing, how the data is being fed into the computer, how they ensure both patient confidentiality and backup security. On a few occasions she turns off the intercom, no doubt to talk to them about looking for signs of danger on the screen, so she doesn’t needlessly cause me concern.

While John is on my mind, I use those twenty minutes to reflect mostly on myself. The world is still vague, it’s still as ethereal as ever. I have a hard time remembering what race the doctor is, and whether she examined me in a private little room or in a curtained bed. I don’t know how many people were in the waiting room, or whether anything interesting happened while I was there.

There’s something wrong with me, and I’m here because I hope there’s a way I can fix it. To just be anchored like everyone else, to be a normal person.

The doctor is a doe. I see that when she comes into the imaging room and helps me out of the machine. I take a moment to stretch my legs, so I can concentrate on my surroundings. The MRI machine is made of white plastic, designed to look like it’s heavier on the bottom than the top and the tunnel is curved to make it seem shallower and brighter than it is – all to subdue claustrophobia. The floor is carpeted, not bare linoleum, and all the fixtures including the door-handle are made of wood or plastic. There are five med students waving at me through the window. In another life, I’d happily fuck any of them, and I hurry to the changing room before that thought makes itself evident in the front of my gown.

I’m going to have to get used to this. Concentrating. I can’t rely on addictive pills or medical miracles to fix whatever it is that’s wrong with me. First and foremost I’m going to have to do it with good old-fashioned commitment and discipline, just like Kevin.

My shoes today are loafers. I wore them instead of sandals because it’s getting too cold, and I wore them instead of more comfortable sneakers because I need to be presentable for John’s curator.

My shirt is a button-up. When I went home to change before my hospital appointment I dug it out of my closet and took five minutes to iron it. Oh, yes, I own an iron and an ironing board. I’d bought them when I furnished my new place, turning over a new leaf, but didn’t wind up using it as much as I thought.

My lower half is covered with a pair of jeans, but they’re less than a week old and today’s the first time I’ve worn them. I’m not wearing any underwear because if things go well with the curator I’m really hoping I’ll get lucky with John as soon as we’re alone.

I shake paws with the med students, who thank me for the privelege of peeking at my brain. As I leave the hospital I remember that I forgot to pay attention to what they looked like, but my overriding impression is that they were pretty forgettable. No great loss there.

•

My phone’s out of juice, so I can’t text John to let him know I’m running late. I try to flag a taxi but it’s a horse-drawn carriage again, and by the time it’s turned a corner I still haven’t managed to push it back to a regular yellow cab.

I think about cheating. Maybe I could find a version where the city’s smaller and I can reach John on foot... No. If I’ll break my commitment just for the inconvenience of being a little late, then I’ve quit before I’ve started.

It’s hard to concentrate on my surroundings and hurry to the bus stop at the same time, but I’m going to have to learn discipline. If I can’t do it when it’s inconvenient, then I’m not really trying.

I once heard that kids with some kind of autism freak out when they walk down a busy street because they see everything and it overwhelms them. They read every sign, recognize every shape, study every face, hear every voice. It’s a cacophony of information and they can’t shut it out, they can’t filter it like regular people can.

For me, it’s the other way around. I filter everything all the time, and even when I notice something, it passes through my consciousness without leaving much of a trace behind. I wonder what that says about my condition.

Maybe I’m living so many lives at once that I can only live them very shallowly, or the density of them would overwhelm me like those poor autistic kids. Maybe it’s a Schrödinger’s Cat kind of deal – horrible thought experiment, that – and the world only exists when I look at it.

I’m so lost in contemplation I notice way too late that I’ve missed my change-over stop, and after a quick conference with the bus driver to figure out an alternate route, I stay on the bus for two more stops and anxiously wait for the next connection.

And still, I force myself to notice things. I resist the urge to analyse and focus on the real things that are really happening around me, like the baseball lying on the sidewalk at the bus-stop, unattended and unclaimed, and the sound of an ice cream van, and what looks like a glowing blimp hovering over the city. Must be some sort of promotional thing.

The bus! Thank god. I pay my fare, and stop just a little too long to look at the bus driver. The bear scowls at me, no doubt thinking I’m checking him out. I mean, I am, but, you know, I’m only doing that to anchor my transcendent consciousness to this plane of existence, not because I’m into fortysomething bears. That phase is long behind me.

The city passes by my window and I concentrate on it, in part to make sure I don’t miss my stop again. The curator should already be there. I’m sure he’ll forgive me, John’s not a petty kind of guy, but I do feel bad. We pass a gaudy barber’s shop with hand-painted signs like in a ‘50s musical movie, where some cops are dragging away a screaming mare with a beehive haircut. I snarl powerlessly.

Fucking cops, man.

What’s this city coming to?

The driver stamps on the brakes when the schoolbus we’re tailing suddenly stops in front of a green light. The doors open and squealing kids stream out, chased by a flurry of bats. I curse loudly, then apologize to the shocked squirrel lady next to me. Fuck, fuck, fuck... how many more delays is this day going to throw at me?

Fuck it, I’m close enough. I ask the driver if I can get off, rolling my eyes when he visibly fumes at my choice of phrasing, but he’s glad to be rid of me and now I’m sprinting up the block.

Fucking bats, man. What kind of a prank is that to pull on schoolkids? And Christ, I’m cursing an awful lot today. That’s another bad habit I ought not to indulge.

Fortunately, I’ve never wavered in my workout regimen, or my afternoon runs, so I’m in good condition for an extended sprint toward John’s atelier. Wait, am I really? Do I really work out? Can I remember what the gym looks like? And I don’t own a tracksuit, do I?

Whatever. Whatever. I’ll figure it out later. I’m focusing as hard as I can on the sidewalk I’m running down, dodging rough-looking pedestrians and trashbags (this is a pretty shitty neighborhood), so if I’m accidentally channeling some paragon of physical fitness, then right now I’ll call it an accident and next time I’ll figure out how to resist it.

1402, 1404, 1406... I cross the road during a lull in the traffic, and skid to a halt in front of 1417. It looks like renovated school building from the twenties. The brickwork is grimy, but the art deco flourishes are evident in the tall windows and the ornamentation of the windowsills.

I climb the steps, taking a moment to catch my breath, and pass under a cast-iron arch boldly proclaiming this to be ATELIER 1417 and into a white-walled lobby where a self-important but obviously unpaid hipster skunk mans the single glass desk.

“Hey,” I say, sounding way more out of breath than I mean to. “I’m here to see Jonathan O’Shea.”

“Who?”

“John Shea.” Fuck. Fuckfuck_fuck_. I am slipping up. Keep it together, Game, keep it together.

I tolerate a long, judgmental stare from Hipster Skunk before he sighs and points down the only corridor. Way to be helpful, dude.

I wish I’d worn sneakers instead of these loafers; they squeak like a motherfucker as I sprint up the corridor, and, again, I really gotta get this swearing under control. Am I channeling a sailor or something? Jeez.

I pass open doors and catch glimpses of studios that I don’t care about. John’s is at the end, I know that much, and I slow my feet so I don’t make too poor an impression when I walk in. I hear his voice coming from the open doors at the end, talking animatedly and eagerly.

I smile. That’s my guy. He didn’t need me here at all, just listen to him. He’s in his element, perfectly blending his enthusiasm with professional confidence, and I hear a sharp woman’s laugh that doesn’t sound completely fake. The gallery curator must be a chick. The laugh is oddly familiar.

Through the door I see an unintelligible mass of warped and tangled metal on a pedestal, and then I see John backing toward it. “Now this piece, I know I’ve been dancing around it, but this is the one I was telling you about. I started it two weeks ago, and it signifies the ecstasy of transitioning from loneliness to – oh, hey, there you are!”

His smile is infectious, and he makes a quick apology to the curator who must be browsing the rest of his studio. He comes out to meet me and plants a kiss on my lips, and I swear I can hear Hipster Skunk tut-tutting way down the hallway.

“I’m sorry I’m late, baby. Things ran late at the hospital and then I was so anxious I missed my connection–“

He silences me with another kiss. “Don’t worry about it, I know you tried. You didn’t need to hurry, though,” he says, lowering his voice to a whisper. “It’s going great. She’s eating it up! Come on, let me introduce you to her.”

He takes me by the paw and leads me into the studio. I feel like an autistic kid when I glance at the artwork laid out on workbenches and tables. Wood, stone, copper – is there anything John can’t shape into something fascinating? I squeeze his paw and smile, and honestly I’m more excited about spending some time examining his art after the curator chick leaves than I am at the prospect of getting lucky.

I look at the curator, a jaguar like me, well into her forties but still possessed of a delicate grace. She’s wearing one of those chinese dresses – the word cheongsam tugs at my mind, but I know that’s not a memory of my own, so I push it aside. Black silk suits her, and I make a note to try it for myself next time I’m out shopping for clothes.

John clear his throat. “Ms Appleby? I’d like to introduce you to my muse. It was meeting him that inspired the piece I was telling you about,” and John’s voice fades to a muffled drone, overpowered by the rushing of the ocean in my ears as the curator turns around, the blood drains from my face, and I my life turns to shit.

Her smile never wavers, but it goes from feigned, professional warmth to sincere, cruel mirth. I can’t help my ears folding back, and I struggle not to crush John’s paw in a white-knuckle grip. My eyes are wide, I know it, I know that she can see the fear on me, I have no chance to play it cool. I shake my head at her and mouth please, but that only fans the fire in her cold, wicked eyes.

“Oh, John, introductions aren’t necessary. Game and I go way back, don’t we, dear?”

John stops talking about his prize piece, the one I apparently inspired, which he spent the last week fixing. He squeezes my paw, but I don’t return it. I can’t meet his eyes. I just fucking can’t.

Whatever interest she had in the sculptures is gone. She carelessly runs her claws over the stylized wings of a bird carved from mahogany, and I can hear John take a breath and open his mouth to admonish her, swallowing his words before he speaks them. “John, my dear, you’re quite a bit younger than his usual fare. And you’re not married, either. Branching out, are we?”

“What are you talking about? Ms Appleby, if you could–“ The bitch silences him with an easy wave of her fingers, her eyes still fixed on mine.

I so intensely want to leave. Not out the door, I mean. I mean leave. Carrick, or the estate, or the cavalerie. Anywhere but here. I can feel them inviting me, like a house with all its doors and windows open, or like Ms Appleby, when she was still Mrs Appleby, wearing her come-hither gown as I climbed over her with a rose clenched between my teeth.

“Interesting strategy... quite bold, if I do say so. Ingratiate yourself with a promising talent, so that when he makes it big... John, dear, you met him five weeks ago, didn’t you? That’s when you started that marvelous piece behind you.”

John releases my hand. I still can’t fucking look at him. I can sense his confusion, but he’s putting that aside. He wants to focus on his work, on this fantastic opportunity. He ignores her jibes and intimations and latches on to the first chance she gives him to talk about his art again.

She’s toying with him. That’s what she likes to do. She passes me and I want to grab her arm, I want to snarl at her, but I know I can’t. I’ll only make it worse. There’s still a chance... who am I kidding. I couldn’t be more fucked even if I kneed her in the cunt and clawed her fucking face off.

“Don’t,” I whisper, and she gives me a last, lingering smile.

“I’m afraid I don’t agree with your interpretation, John. This piece isn’t about union. To me, it’s about betrayal, deception. Seduction and adultery. I see a young man who parades his body to manipulate people for sport. I see a ruined marriage, a lengthy divorce, but there’s something behind it, something deeper...”

I have my back toward John. I know he’s looking at me, looking to me to make sense of it, but I put a paw on the wall and lean my forehead against it. There’s nothing I can do.

I hear the hoofbeats of the cavalerie, I feel the heat of the sacred flame. But I don’t go there. Not out of loyalty to John; I know that’s over. The Appleby witch is seeing to that and there’s nothing, nothing I can do to stop it. And yet I stay here. In 2006. In this, this terrible shame.

I stay because I know that this is what I deserve.

Fuck, I really thought I could just wash my hands of the life I lived – not another version, this life – and dance away, to a new apartment and my first real boyfriend. That I could chalk it all up to the wild oats of youthful indiscretion and everything would just be peachy.

Sport. That’s what she called it, and she’s completely right. That’s what it was for me. I liked that they wanted me, that I could make them hunger for me. I loved feeling the bliss radiating off them when I was with them, and let them believe I was there because I wanted them just as badly.

Maybe the curator told her husband about me, thinking I’d move in with her if she divorced, and then found that other people were living in my house and my phone number didn’t work any more. Maybe her husband found a rose I’d left behind once too often to explain it away, or one of her friends had seen me squeeze her hand at lunch in Club Augustine.

She’s right to blame me. She’s right to punish me. She’s a fucking hag for doing it by making John suffer, but I can’t do a damn thing about it.

I can pick and choose course of my life. I can live in other worlds, be other people. I can be noble, or innocent, or cynical, or vile. I am the master of my fucking universe. But I can’t escape the consequences of my choices.

I’m not special. I’m a fucking chump, that’s what I am.

She goes on for a while, but John quickly gets the message. She still makes a show of it, relishing her power. “I’m sorry, dear, but I just don’t think this material is appropriate for our gallery. It’s lovely work, a great first try, but it’s imbued with such hateful, misogynist content. But I’ll tell you what,” she says, and I can hear her sneer, I can hear John tensing as she puts her paw on his arm. “I’ll talk to some friends at other galleries about your work. I’ll tell them all about you. Maybe one of them will have an opening for you.”

I can’t even hate her, not really. I do, of course, because I’m weak and small and selfish like that. But she isn’t being so pointlessly cruel because she’s evil. She’s not. She’s a snob and a bitch, true, but so is everyone in the circles she inhabits and she’d be eaten alive if she was soft.

What she is, is really, deeply hurt.

And I’m the one who hurt her. However it happened, I destroyed her marriage. I made her feel worthless and unimportant, and it’s that pain, that deep, gut-wrenching pain that’s made her lash out like this. A small, stupid part of me that clings to a clueless sense of nobility actually hopes it makes her feel better. She didn’t deserve what I did to her, even if I was too young and thoughtless to know that I was doing it.

And John doesn’t deserve this either.

He’s quiet after she’s gone. For a second I think he’s waiting for me to speak, and I wrack my brain to think of something I can say. Not an excuse, not a less horrible framing of my history with her. Not even a lie, even though that’s the only thing that can save my relationship with John.

I’m trying to think of something more meaningful than “I’m sorry,” but he leaves before I can even give up and blurt out those pointless, powerless words.

•

I arrive home in a daze. The TV shows a news report about a major fire in the city. It sounds like an airplane crash until a crying eye-witness talks about a hot air balloon or a blimp, but either way, I don’t care.

I plug my phone in the charger and see I’ve got eight voicemail messages from a number I don’t recognize, and a text from the same number reminding me of my followup at the hospital later, but I don’t care about that either.

You know what it feels like? It feels like I’m looking at myself on that gurney, with puke on my face and an electrocuted brain turning to mush. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.

So I spend the rest of the day doing the things that I’m supposed to do. It’s Saturday, so it’s laundry day, so I take my clothes to the laundromat and watch them spin for an hour. I hang them in my closet. That’s the extent of my activities for the day.

I don’t care about food, so I don’t buy any. I don’t care about company so I don’t call Clarissa to see what she and her friends are up to. I don’t care when I hear a bunch of kids screaming in French on the street outside, until finally I hear police sirens and shouting. The screaming stops and the cruisers drive off, and I don’t care.

I don’t decide to go to the hospital, I just do it because I’m supposed to. I sit in the busy waiting rom for an hour and accept the doctor’s apologies when she comes to get me.

She takes me to her office and we pass gurneys lining the hallways with people on them. I don’t focus on them, so I couldn’t tell you what they looked like or what was wrong with them. The only thing I do notice is the mare from the barbershop with her mane styled as a beehive, now utterly ruined as she lies open-eyed on a bed in a hospital hallway with her knee-length skirt hiked up too high and nobody around who cares enough to straighten it for her.

She shuts the door to her office and I sit down. It’s quieter now, but I can still hear the voices outside, still see the stress in her eyes.

She apologizes again, and she clips my MRI scan to the lightbox on her wall, and I can’t help but laugh when she explains to me that I have an inoperable aneurysm.

•

I’m a light-house keeper. I’m cold, my bones are sore and my cane has seen better days. With gnarled fingers I grip the railing as I climb the spiral staircase, upward, slowly and achingly upwards, awkwardly carrying my cane and a jug of thick oil.

The beauty of the sunset is lost on me – cateracts, you see – and I’m so close to deaf that I can’t distinguish the crashing of waves on the rocks below from the keening of the gulls overhead. With a pained whimper I pour the oil into the reservoir, wet my finger in the slime to dab at the wick, and pull flint and tinder from my pocket to ignite the lamp.

After checking every hatch and seal I make my way down again, grateful that I’d thought to light some candles before I went up, because night comes quickly here and the windows show only black by the time I come down to close the curtains. Yesterday’s stew is quietly bubbling in the pot over the fireplace, and it smells of nothing.

I didn’t bother going back to my apartment before I came here. I just left the doctor’s office. Left it, I mean. I didn’t think of anywhere I wanted to go, so I found myself here, in the lighthouse, old and alone.

It still doesn’t feel like I’m far enough. Far enough for what, I don’t know, but I know that I’m not there yet. I don’t know why I didn’t go to the mental institution where I’m dead, since that’s how I feel. Maybe my corpse has already been cremated there and the world simply ceased to exist.

The first emotion I feel is pity. Not for myself, not quite. For some reason I think about the Navy man, catatonic on his sofa, and I think I misunderstood him.

Through the haze of opium I felt such sorrow, such fully accepted pain. It’s a pain I understand, now. Maybe his addiction had nothing to do with the craziness of other lives. After all, it only took me a week to get so used to it that I now take it for granted, and I lived in a world where science and psychotherapy were everywhere.

Maybe he just made mistakes, and paid the heavy, heavy price. Knowing how he’d earned that punishment and accepting it totally, totally, he didn’t chase the dragon to keep the madness out of his head or even to forget about his misdeeds. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing and he doped himself to protect me from becoming him.

I wonder if I should do that. Go back to 2006, hit up a dealer for some coke or morphine – I’m sure Clarissa’s crew could hit me up if I asked the right way – and seal myself in in there, like a pharaoh in his tomb, and let my other selves get on with their lives. Maybe if I close myself off, one of them will become the adventurer that I’ve been.

All of that’s wishful thinking, though. It’s a cop-out, to imagine that my existence can be taken over by a version of me that didn’t make the decisions I made. It’s bullshit.

I know for certain – don’t ask me how, but I know, I know that there is only one of me. I made those mistakes in 2006, even while I lived all those other lives, while I was all those other people. While I was old, while I was young, while I was happy, while I was dead.

Just as I know for certain that I’m not crazy,

Which brings up an interesting point. Can I trust my certainty? Couldn’t that just be another symptom of madness? Madness, for instance, caused by a swelling in the brain.

Like an aneurysm, to pick a completely random example.

I wonder what’s happening to me in 2006. Even if all of this is real, and not a brain-damage-induced hallucination, my story is still continuing back there. Have I been sitting in the doctor’s office all this time? Has she diagnosed my catatonia and put me on a waiting list for a gurney in the crowded hospital hallway? Maybe next to that overmedicated mare. Maybe I should get a beehive wig so I’ll fit in better with my new neighbor.

But the story always continues whether I’m there or not. So maybe I’ve had a conversation with her, explained why I laughed, asked pertinent questions about the next steps. Because what’s important, what’s really important, is knowing what I’m supposed to do. Then I can just do it, and fast-forward through whatever remains of my life.

She didn’t actually say that I definitely had an aneurysm, only that there was a strong indication and she’d like to book me for a confirmation CAT scan with contrast fluid. She didn’t actually say that it was inoperable, only that the shadow was in a notoriously difficult part of the brain.

But of course it’s an aneurysm. Of course it’s inoperable. Because, my friend, as I’m sure you’ll understand, that’s just the kind of day it is.

It’s a day when burning blimps fall onto the city out of thin air. A day when bats fly out of a schoolbus. When a mare in a beehive haircut and a dozen French children suddenly find themselves in an unfamiliar city in an unfamiliar century and scream in panic.

When chaos mounts, and the hospitals fill to bursting.

When my world falls apart in every sense.