“Would you recommend the enchiladas?” Parcell Prescott asked me as we all took our seats at the Long Barracks Steakhouse, a tourist place across the street from the Alamo.

Well, almost all of us. Sal looked at me, rolled her eyes, and went to the bar. She hadn’t wanted to come, but I told her I couldn’t do it without her.

“Enchiladas?” I responded. What sort of a question is that? “Never at a steakhouse.” Someone needed to set that man straight.

He might be the president of the Network, but he had a lot to learn about regional cuisine. Parcell Prescott was a man of about sixty, wearing a sleek blue serge suit and tortoiseshell glasses. He smiled a lot.

“They smile with their teeth,” Saligia had once said of the Network Executives. “You try and do that to a dog, he’ll bite you. These people aren’t human.” That woman does employ a good deal of hyperbole in her talk.

With Sal sulking on a stool across the room, it was just the three of us attending that unofficial meeting. Prescott, Ida, and I.

A waiter appeared with a bottle of champagne. Prescott took the bottle and filled our glasses.

“Oh, and steaks, all around,” he said, dismissing the waiter.

Prescott turned to Ida. He was about to say something, but instead addressed me.

“Congratulations!” He held up his glass.

So far so good, I thought. I’d been apprehensive when I learned that the head of the Network had just arrived, unannounced, on the morning train from LA.

Ida, too, seemed surprised by his visit. It was almost painful to watch her thrown off balance.

However, Ida Mayfield didn’t get to where she was without being able to play the game. But the same could be said of Silverio Moreno.

We both lifted our glasses and drank along with Prescott.

“Congratulations, Mr. Moreno,” Prescott continued. “For delivering us our highest ratings ever! It’s a treat when something good can come from something bad.”

Ah, the unfortunate drama with the jumper.

Prescott placed his champagne flute on the table and shifted in his chair.

“My dear Ida,” he said to her. “Word has reached me that you’re on something of a tear.”

“Excuse me?” Ida attempted a smile. “I was not under the impression, Parcell, that you sent me here to clap people on their backs. I came to investigate a serious incident.”

“It is my understanding that this incident, as you call it, has been taken care of. The body disposed of in an unorthodox, yet effective manner….” Prescott looked at me. “Correct?”

I responded with a vague nod, more interested in watching Ida’s inelegant attempts to regain her composure.

“It is important,” Ida said, squaring her shoulders, “for all parties to make sure that such an incident does not repeat itself. There are procedures in place to keep that sort of thing from happening. Procedures which, in my option, have become quite lax.”

“Understood, Ida,” Prescott said. “Well put.” He turned back to me. “I trust that things are returning to normal at the station. All hands getting back on track and doing the good work. Don’t forget to keep these stellar results coming, sir. I mean, my goodness, these ratings are the highest since last year when that chap on your show turned out to be a cannibal! As I recall, we sent you a hefty bonus that month.”

“It was much appreciated,” I said. “I bought a Zeppelin.” I held up a finger to a passing waiter. “Might we have some rolls and butter.”

“Excuse me?” Prescott said.

“An airship,” I explained. “A small three-man model. But an airship, none-the-less. Maybe we can take a ride while you’re in town. I keep it in a hangar on the south side of town.”

I was confident that Prescott wouldn’t take me up on the pleasure flight. He really didn’t like to mingle with subordinates, which was he how he thought of me. In truth, my Zeppelin was just an old army surplus observation blimp, and I doubt three people could have comfortably shared the gondola. Also, the airfield wouldn’t let me use hydrogen, and there was nary a liter of helium to be found in all of San Antonio. Not that Prescott needed to know any of this.

“I am afraid I’ll not have time,” he said, just as I had expected. “I will be departing on the afternoon train. I’m glad to have learned that things are well in hand here. Back home in LA, of course, everyone loves the unexpected and intimate drama of Serpientes y Escaleras.”

“Live television should be exciting,” I said giving him my humblest self-depreciative smile.

“That is its magic,” he said in full agreement.

That was the thing with these TV executives. With them you got nothing but a bunch of mixed signals.

Ida was sent to play the bad cop. Rebuking our sloppiness. Then Prescott comes in to praise our exciting edginess.

But I could navigate such things well enough, I suppose. Swim about in the gray areas.

“We’ll do our best to keep the surprises coming,” I said, sneaking a glance to see how Ida was taking it all.

Not too well.

“Wonderful to hear, sir,” Prescott said. He looked up. “Ah, our steaks have arrived!”

###

I had hoped that when the meeting was over, I would have an idea as to when Ida would be heading back to LA. I was happy to learn that Prescott didn’t plan to stay, but as for Ida’s time-line, nothing was said. So, I don’t know what, if anything, came out of that meeting.

Lunch, yes. I did get an excellent steak. Though the baked potato had enough butter and sour cream to drop me into a coma. When I returned to the penthouse, I had to fight to remain focused on an important little project I had recently begun.

Working with my hands took my attention away from my inner, mental activity. Therapeutic, in a sense.

Because, if you ask me, thinking is the worst. The absolute worst thing. I envy those who meditate. What I assume they can do, after years of practice, is to flip some switch in their brain, and mute all that chatter. Probably not how it works. But wouldn’t that be a joy?

I couldn’t stop the stampede of diverse thoughts, but I could inject a modicum of calm so they weren’t always trampling one another.

Ida Mayfield, that lone individual, five and a half feet tall and certainly tipping the scales no more than would an English Sheepdog, little Ida was causing the majority of my mental turmoil.

She wanted a particular set of results. Something which could be measured and predicted. Her presence was like having a referee checking and rechecking the rulebook, and holding it up to our faces when she felt someone had drifted away from those absolute parameters. She demanded that we all agreed as to what was black and what was white. What was right. What was wrong.

As I said earlier, I prefer those murky and hidden inlets. And the truth is, when I’m not allowed to swim in the waters of ambiguity, I panic. Well, that might be too strong a word. But I do stop having fun.

During lunch, there was a moment when I thought I had reasserted my position. I mean, it was my show. Parcell Prescott understood that. Right?

But when Sal and I were walking back to La Vida Tower, she suggested that I had accomplished little more than shaming Ida. It had been a fleeting victory which might just make things more strained. At least until Ida returned to LA.

Sal was probably right.

Often I told myself that I was good at playing politics. But I wasn’t. Intrigue eventually bored me. And all that poking and prodding and manipulative teasing I would do to play people off one another just created disharmony and distrust. Mostly because I never finished what I started, and everyone would be left pissed off at me. And each other.

But how else, other than intrigue, could I get what I wanted when the Network provided my only access to the airwaves and thus my beloved audience?

Lord knows I couldn’t just be straightforward in my demands. Neither Ida nor Prescott had any interest in what I wanted from the show.

Ida’s absolutism was that of a humorless and dogmatic bureaucrat. She demanded that the show must be consistent on what makes one contestant more virtuous than another. “Don’t confuse the viewers, dammit!” she would say. “None of your moral relativism. You’ve been explicit that Door Number One is Salvation, while Door Number Two is Damnation. Be firm. Be declarative. And, for fuck sake, be consistent!”

There was a simple wisdom there.

And I hate simple wisdom.

It left no room for the element of surprise. The shocking twist.

Ida felt I inserted a capricious trickster element into the show, at times sending the rascals and libertines through the door of virtue, and the self-sacrificing followers-of-rules through the door of vice. Quite true. But I was making a point, I really was.

Ida refused to listen.

As for Prescott, the man had little concern as to who went through which door.

“Sy, the Network’s contract with your production company simply states that two contestants, for each episode, must exit through those doors,” Prescott was fond of saying. “One through Number One, one through Number Two. And though our contract makes no stipulations about the ratings, we both know that fewer eyes on screens will have a consequence.”

He never said it aloud, but I knew Prescott understood that my unorthodox moral code, which so confounded Ida, keep our viewers returning week after week.

As for my Vision, the Network cared not a fig. If I ceased to be useful to their ratings, I’d be replaced. I had been in this business long enough to know even the most venerated celebrity was disposable.

I don’t want you to think that the fickle nature of show business was weighing on me. I’d never put much interest in job security. What I feared most was not being able to complete what I felt was the underlying purpose of the show. Ever since the Changes, with such a remarkable thinning of the population, I came to the conclusion that everyone who was still in this world had a part to play in something important. And because of my level of fame, I had to assume that my part was rather grand. I needed the time to figure out if my theories were correct. I didn’t need Ida and her ilk slowing down the progress of my experimentations and discoveries.

Therefore, because I needed to quiet down all those thoughts, I was trying my hand at making a video recorder. I had to delve deep into my memory of that semester I spent studying electrical engineering. Though I’m afraid much of my class time had been spent dozing in the back of the room—a result of frequent late night gigs with my surf rock band, Alamogordo Beach.

So far I had not electrocuted myself while working at the kitchen island of my penthouse, soldering the electrical leads from a spare studio camera to a transcoding box of my own design.

Earlier in the day, Rose had come up to the penthouse to talk. The interruption was probably a good thing, too. I had almost inverted the wiring of a 200 volt capacitor. That would have been very bad news! Let me just say, when working with machines that plug into the wall, look up the term reverse polarity. For some idiotic reason, there is less standardization in the world of professional electronic components that you might think.

Rose was caught up in some generic existential crisis. Generic? Well, generic for someone working on Serpientes y Escaleras.

I felt it high time to clear the air between us.

Tighten up our bounds of mutual trust.

No more secrets! Or, at the least, fewer secrets.

I let her know that I knew all about her deceased brother. And that I was a keen enough observer of human nature to see that she had come to work on my show so that she could be here when her beloved brother Lionel came through one of our arrival portals.

I didn’t sugar-coat it. Told her straight out that such a thing was a long-shot, at best.

Probably I am the last person one should come up for solace. I’m afraid that I blathered some banal bromides to her about “chin up” and “stay the course.” How things worked themselves out over time, and that we were lucky to have her sensitivity and intelligence.

Maybe it did help her. You know, in the way my hobbies and projects pull my mind away from intrusive thoughts.

She then switched gears and delivered on what I had been waiting for: her description of traveling through the mystical aether, as she psychically hitchhiked inside the minds of our contestants.

Fascinating, for sure, but short on factual information. Of course, every little piece of the puzzle gets me closer to turning my Plan from an amorphous wad of what-ifs and dare-I-evens into something polished and implementable.

Implementable?

Well, you get what I’m saying.

Rose planned to continue her experiments. Most important to her was to hitch a ride with one of the show’s losers. Take a peek behind Door Number Two.

It fit into the scientific method. Collect a range of data sets and compare them, but I doubted that those two doors our contestants left through really went to different places. I mean, there were two different doors through which they arrived, but I noted no discernible differences between those two groups. Why would the mystical exits into our building be that different than the entrances?

However, that was just conjecture on my part.

And I knew that Rose—once she got the courage—would be able to tell me if Door Number Two might hold secrets different from Door Number One. Oh, she’d manage. Rose possessed two wonderful qualities. She was headstrong, and persistent.

I wasn’t convinced, however, she’d do it tonight.

But I wasn’t in a great hurry.

First I wanted Ida gone.

And then there was the question as to whether or not my special electronics project would amount to anything.

The technical novice would struggle to make sense of the mess on my kitchen island. I would excuse you for not even being able to realize that there were three separate devices because off all the wires, tools, technical reference books, eggs shells, and that dirty wire whisk. Those last two things were because I had been making some tapioca pudding.

First, there was the spare television camera. Then there was the old Akai GX-77 reel-to-reel tape recorder which was normally stored up in the control booth, but never used. I wanted the Akai to record the images from the camera. But, of course, the Akai reel-to-reel was an audio recording deck. So, the trick was to get the camera’s electromagnetic signals converted so that they could be recorded (for eventual playback) onto the 1/4 inch magnetic tape. Which brings us to the third contraption on the counter. My home-made transcoding box.

The camera wasn’t a part of this invention, creation, whatever you wanted to call it. Not really. It was just to test things out. Eventually I would be using the cameras downstairs in the studio.

If this all sounds nuts, I guess it was.

In an ideal world—meaning, before the Changes—I’d simply use some digital thingy and that would be it.

But those thingies are all gone.

It helped that my technical training predated digital technology. A technology which no longer existed. I had seen it happen as the Changes took place. All the computers, cell phones, gaming consoles, MP3 players, all those marvelous gadgets began to vanish. Systematically erased from the world. We had not been thrown back to the stone age, really, just back to the analog age.

The fact that television was still about—though the programming meager—seemed odd. But no more odd than the retrograde technology we were left to use. And for some reason (or, perhaps, no reason at all) videotape technology was also gone. To add to the confusion, one could still encounter the occasional audio recording device (such as the reel-to-reel tape deck on my kitchen island), but there seemed no existing devices to record images.

But that’s not true, I hear you say. What about that videotape Ida brought from LA?

Strange, right? That the Changes seemingly affected different parts of the world differently.

Unless she was lying.

Though if Ida was being honest, that meant a complete archive of my show did exist. I won’t lie. I’d like to have all those tapes. And a machine to play them on. But I’d be damned if I would ask the Network for anything. I never want to be beholding to the Parcell Prescotts of the world. So, I’d have to make my own gear to create my own archives.

Besides, if my creation did work, it might help me move further down the road of my grand inquires.

My creation?

Would you look at me. Such ego. My re-creation, at best.

Oh, hang it all! My brilliant re-creation!

I had an encounter again with August in the lounge earlier this morning. It was so weird. All my feelings of pity and tenderness toward him were gone, just a dull dread now. I couldn’t quite explain. At first I thought I had been swayed by Saligia’s opinion of the man. But what if I was just getting better at this Reading business? I did have a Fitzroy of 1200, whatever that meant.

But there was something else going on with him. The times we’d spoken in the past August had been so unguarded. Open. But now, there was no eye contact. Not from either of us. He wasn’t avoiding it. He was taking in everything, his eyes moving over everything. Not darting about, but caressingly. And when he would let those eyes glide over me—my fingers, my lips, my shoulders, it wasn’t prurient. I know how to deal with that. It was something else.

I did know, though, if he had looked me directly in the eyes I would have looked away.

I was initially drawn to August because he was unlike the other contestants. Most of them wandered about in a fog like so many toddlers roused from nap time. But August was curious from the very beginning. He hungered for answers.

I saw in him a kindred spirit. I, too, wanted answers.

But these last couple of days…well, his hunger seemed specific. He had become a spider, waiting, watching. I think he’d found, if not the answer, some important answers—answers he will not likely share with me. Answers that had given him purpose.

I couldn’t blame him his secretiveness. I had my share of secrets. But with August, from his view point, everything had to feel so urgent. He came through a strange door into a world he did not understand. And he had been told he would soon depart through another door. To another world? Perhaps. Perhaps, though, to nothing at all. I could only vaguely imagine how he must feel.

Saligia was afraid of him. Lydia felt some sort of maternal impulse toward him. Sy saw him as a villain in a soap opera. Me? Well, true he now gave me the creeps, but I still felt I owed him answers. The same way I felt I owed answers to all of the contestants. It was just that he was the only one who seemed to want them. But I didn’t have the answers to his questions. Or even my own questions.

I had hoped that once I became a fully integrated part of the show, I’d finally know what was really going on. Not so. Well, I guess I was slowly piecing things together.

Just what was the “necessary service” Lydia spoke of which we were supposed to be providing?

The closest anyone had come to making an unambiguous statement was the day in the studio when Sy glanced across at me. I was probably chewing on my thumb, looking lost and worried.

He told me that the game show was moral in nature. The entire production team served as karmic arbitrators for the contestants. I was now part of that responsibility.

Before that, I’d never given much thought to how Sy opened the show every evening with his high energy musical theme, adding some electronic echo effect to his glib banter. His flowery metaphors about virtuous contestants being allowed to climb a ladder to the “pillowy clouds” of paradise. And those others—the ones who had tainted their lives with an overabundance of vice—they could expect to plummet down into some hellish “unforgiving swamp.”

If the show was literally rewarding the most righteous, then whose moral compass was being used?

And who or what sent us these reincorporated people?

That they had died, of this fact I no longer doubted.

With Saligia’s help, I had peered into each contestant’s entire existence, from that chaotic and fidgety moment of birth, to that tragic moment of death, whether it was swift, or so slow it was hard to discern—like how when you pull on taffy and it gets thinner and stringier and at some point it can’t hold itself together anymore and those cottony fibers of sugar separate. But there was always death when Saligia let me look into those lives.

What a place to end up. On the set of a game show…to have the fates of one’s afterlife decided. An unforgivably vulgar situation if you stopped and thought about it. And then we sent them off to, where? Heaven? Hell? Some sort of reincarnation, with the winner getting a flashy, superior new life? Enlightenment? And what of the loser? Was it straight to the glowing charcoal pits of hell? Or, perhaps, reborn as a dog or some species of intestinal parasite?

I was trying to catch a glimpse of this other place with my experiments of remaining, well, plugged into the contestants as they left us. But I felt I might not be understanding all of the impressions I had managed to experience.

I took the elevator up to the penthouse.

Sy had told me to come up whenever I wanted. So, why not? I had nothing on my schedule for the next couple of hours.

When the elevator doors opened, I immediately felt like an intruder. I would had assumed that there would be a door to knock on. But, no. The elevator opened right into Sy’s home.

There he was. Dressed in a paisley Nehru jacket and tartan Bermuda shorts. He stood at a kitchen island near the center of the enormous room. The entire space was open—the full top floor of La Vida Tower—with windows looking out to the city spreading away in all directions. The only obstruction to the epic view was the elevator enclosure in the dead center that I had stepped out of.

I approached the kitchen area. On the huge island table was spread an assortment of transistors, wires, silvered-tipped vacuum tubes, and all manner of electronic equipment I wouldn’t even know how to describe. Sy held a soldering gun over a plastic circuit board with hundreds of wires poking out. He didn’t look up when I stopped to stand beside him.

“I know it’s not showtime, yet.” Sy let a drop of molten metal fall delicately into place on the board.

I supposed that was his way of asking why I was here.

I felt embarrassed, suddenly not knowing that exact reason I had come up.

“I’ve found myself preoccupied with thoughts of life and death,” I found myself admitting.

Sy removed his work gloves and looked down at the counter. He shook his head, as though in defeat.

“This stuff isn’t easy,” he muttered. “Not by a long shot.” He pointed to a stack of worn and dog-eared books. “The technical manuals don’t help much. They just make me feel ignorant.” He turned to me with his charismatic grin. “And what I want to feel like is Dr. Frankenstein making his big discovery! I’m not proud to admit, Rose, but I’m in over my head. Just like you, right? Your thoughts about life and death? Sheesh!”

“Well, it’s what we do, right?” I asked. “Deal with all that stuff?”

He sighed and stepped around the counter to place his hands on my shoulders. If this were a scene from an old movie, he’d begin explaining to me about the birds and bees. He needed to be clenching a pipe between his teeth so he could dramatically remove it.

“When you came to us, Rose, I had a feeling about you. You’re smart. Driven. Fearless. From the very beginning, Lydia was so flustered with your Fitzroy score that she ignored the rest of your personal file.”

“My file?”

He turned away and rummaged in a low cabinet before standing back up with that same manila folder I’d seen him consulting back when I got my promotion.

“I stole it off Lydia’s desk weeks ago and never managed to return it. Anyway, here’s the thing. Lydia doesn’t know anything about your brother. But after what happened with Bianca and her emotional breakdown, I tend to side with the good doctor in her general concern about the mental state of our staff, particularly the Readers.”

I didn’t care for the way that Sy was talking to me like I was some emotional child.

“I can assure you—”

But he didn’t let me finish.

“We all have our emotional scars, Rose. Trust me. And yet we carry on. So, if you want to talk about your brother and, well, your feelings—”

“I don’t know what all this has to do with,” I trailed off, having no idea how he had segued from my dilemma about life and death to my brother, Lionel.

“I’m talking about the reason you came looking for a job here,” he said. “It’s obvious. Well, to me. But let me be honest with you. To the best of my knowledge and my observations we have no control over who comes to us through the arrival portals. It’s random. It’s such a long shot that your late departed brother will ever come to us.”

He had left me speechless. I was completely pushed off balance by what he knew and what he did not know. About me. And about my brother.

“I appreciate the candor,” I finally said because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I guess, mostly, I wandered up here because I’m at loose ends,” I added.

He nodded and placed my folder on top of the stack of electronic books.

“I had really hoped you came to tell all about your experiments,” he said, giving me a hopeful wink.

“Experiments?”

“Playing at being Eurydice. Or was it whatshisname who went into the underworld to get her back? Orpheus?”

“You mean me staying mentally connected while the contestants leave us?”

“Precisely. I’ve been wanting to give you time to process your experiences and all that, but I’m quite curious.”

I was surprised. Sy was not only admitting that he didn’t know something, but was wanting me to, well, educate him. I felt like I was back with Fran at the Omega Hotel.

“Friday was, well, interesting,” I said. Sy nodded, encouragingly, and moved forward to rest his elbows on the counter to listen. “When that contestant stepped inside—”

“Priscilla?” he interrupted.

“Yeah, Priscilla. When she walked through Door Number One, I did this thing.”

“Thing?” Sy furrowed his brow.

“A shift in my posture, you could say. It feels like leaning back, just a few inches. But not with my physical body. And instead of letting go, I increase my grip, my mental grip. That was right when you began to blast the theme music through the studio. Applause sign flashing, audience screaming..and when that door slammed shut, I was there, inside that little white closet behind Door Number One. In there with Priscilla. I felt the floor drop away and I fell—we fell—so fast there was no time to think. But it wasn’t about speed or anything frantic or…I mean, time moved at a different rate in my head than it did in the TV studio. Slow, but highly energized. And then she landed. That’s the only word that fits. Priscilla landed. That was when the connection ended.”

“What do you mean, exactly?” Sy tilted his head. “Was it abrupt? Like when someone had tripped over the plug to the TV?”

“More like the aftereffects of a muscle tremor, or an echo. I hold it all in my mind as long as I can. Those thoughts and impressions of the contestant—images, emotions. It fades away pretty fast. But I feel the pleasure and relief at having arrived safely at a welcoming destination. I don’t know where it is they go, but the place is filled with soothing green light.”

“Green,” he muttered, nodding. And then, louder: “The contestant is happy? Or you’re happy?”

“Both, I suppose. And there was a face.”

“A what? A face.” He laughed. “Is the face happy, too?”

“No. No emotion at all. Faint. Very faint. I couldn’t even guess as to its gender.” I shrugged. “Maybe I just imagine that last part. But that is all I can remember from Friday night. Monday, also.”

“If I recall correctly,” he said, “both were winners. So, now we have a notion as to what’s on the other side of Door Number One. And?”

“Okay,” I said, and I knew he could hear the nervousness in my voice. “I am curious, too—and a bit scared—about traveling with someone through Door Number Two. But I can’t just hop from one head to another. At least not yet.”

“I see.” He held me in his gaze, waiting.

“I can stay with anyone that Saligia connects me to,” I explained. “Even after she’s pulled away. But, as luck would have it, the last contestant has usually been the winning contestant. And that means, of course, Door Number One.”

“Not last night,” Sy said softly.

He was right. The final contestant to play last night lost—he had gone through Door Number Two.

“I saw it on your face,” Sy said with a chuckle. “You chickened out.”

“I did. But one day….” I held up my hands. What else could I say?

“Well,” he said, “when that day comes, let me know what you find on the other side. As for right now, I can see you’re still discombobulated. At loose ends.”

“Am I?”

“Why don’t you head up and check in on Sal. She’s been moody all morning. Two loose ends make more sense than one, right?”

I wasn’t sure about that sort of logic, but because he had put his gloves back on and lifted the soldering iron, it was clear I had been dismissed.

But, upstairs? To Saligia’s place?

I’d never been to the roof. And how would Saligia feel about people barging in on her?

I spotted the ladder, over beside the elevator.

Why not?

I headed up.

The rungs of the ladder were padded with foam-rubber and gaffers tape. At the top was a metal panel with a large black lever. I pulled it, and a hatch opened easily on pneumatic pistons. I climbed up and out into the sunlight, marveling how the hatch closed, slow and with a hiss of air.

A warm breeze pushed my hair about. No clouds in the sky. The brick structure behind me that sat atop the elevator shaft obscured part of the roof—that part I assumed where Saligia’s shack was. That could wait. I filled my lungs with fresh air and looked west to the courthouse and San Fernando Cathedral.

I was turning around, trying to decided whether to go find Saligia or climb back down—you know, chickening out again—when I heard a loud metallic clang.

“Confound you!” a voice cried out.

I peered around the corner of that brick cube which contained the elevator machinery. A woman in coveralls was crouching down, fighting with a socket wrench.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I was afraid that was directed at me.”

The woman looked up with an open smile. A red bandana held her short hair from her face. There was an oval name tag at her breast embroidered with the name Nora.

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’ll be out of here in a jiffy. Well, no more than two jiffies.” She turned back to the iron panel she was trying to replace. “Maybe three jiffies.” She paused and looked back up. “Hey, you’re the girl from TV! You’re Rose. Where’s your red dress?” She chuckled, proud, perhaps in her powers of deduction, and returned to her work.

I looked across the roof. There it was. Saligia Jones’ shack.

So small. Like a garden shed. It looked insubstantial, like a gusty wind would take it away. As I moved closer, it seemed less flimsy, and roomier than I had first thought.

I heard a scratching sound from behind it. When I rounded the corner, Saligia looked up in surprise. She was surrounded by large wooden planter boxes filled with herbs spilling over their edges. Oregano, dill, and basil.

“Rose!” she exclaimed, clutching a tiny trowel in a gloved hand. “I had thought I was up here all alone. Well, just me and that elevator girl.”

“Sy said it’d be okay.” I looked around. “What a view!”

“It’s my sanctuary. The gardening, especially. It helps me quiet my mind. Let all those irritations waft away. They always come back because, well, life. In a couple of hours Sy has a business lunch at some restaurant and, of course, he needs me to go along with him.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to intrude.” I didn’t want to add to her daily irritations.

“What?” She smiled. “Don’t be silly. Come inside. I’ll make some tea.”

I followed Saligia into the shack.

Inside, I could see that the place had been constructed of bricks and heavy timbers. The large windows on two of the walls helped to give the place a sense of spaciousness. There was a table, bookcase, and two armchairs. Against the wall across from the door was a narrow bed covered with cushions.

Saligia placed a kettle on a hotplate.

We sat in the armchairs.

“I don’t get guests,” Saligia said. “Other than Sy.”

She looked at me. I realized I had laughed.

“Guests,” I said. “Always that word, right? What people call the contestants. Well, Dr. Hetzel, for one. It’s her favorite euphemism for—”

“I hate that term, REINCOR. Even reincorporated arrivals, which is how Michael puts it, thinking he’s softening what just sounds like a slur.”

“All of this,” I stammered, looking for the words. “It’s just so—”

“Crazy?”

“So unnecessary,” I finally said. Wasn’t that how Marta described the Great Expanse? “And those poor people who come to us…we owe them something. Answers, at the very least.”

“And where do you expect to find these answers?”

I looked at her, surprised, I guess.

“Rose,” she said quietly, “we’re all in the dark. Everyone.”

Everyone? I wasn’t buying it. Maybe Saligia and Sy were lost and grasping at shadows. But what of that awful Network woman?

“There are two things you know for certain,” Saligia said, getting up to pour the boiling water into a ceramic pot in which she had placed a handful of loose tea leaves. “People come to us through those pods on the 28th floor. People who have lived full and complete lives. They were born, struggled, loved, worked. And then they died. Yes. They died. Most—if you haven’t realized this already—died months or a couple of years before the Changes. Where they wait until we receive them, I have no idea. But, eventually, we do receive them. We get to spend some time with them. And then we send them on their way. That’s the second thing you know. They leave us for another place. A place where they arrive at safely—you learned that firsthand. No screaming, no terror. No being flayed alive or dunked into a caldron of molten lead.”

She began pouring tea into the two cups.

“That’s pretty much all I know, as well,” she added. “As for our guests, we treat them with compassion. I don’t know what else you think we owe them.”

Well, at least I owed a thing or two to myself.

“I want to stay in the mind of a contestant who goes through Door Number Two,” I told her. “You know, all the way to the other side.”

Her hand shook, just enough to slosh a few drops of tea onto the table.

“Curiosity should have its limits,” she said, reaching for a towel.

But I was nowhere near my limits. I wanted to know so much more.

“Look Rose, I know you’re going to do whatever you decide to do, but, if you want to know my thoughts on the matter, well, sometimes the best course of action is to garden and enjoy a nice cup of tea. You’re young, but it helps to have a place free of the unknown. You need time to breathe. To be still.”

“But don’t you want to learn—”

“Rose, you have no idea what I’ve learned over the years. I’ve had this, this thing—and please don’t ever call it a gift—my whole life. It did not come to me because of the Changes. And I’m confident you can develop the same skills. Fully develop them. You’re special, too. But it comes at a heavy price. Everyone has an ugly side. Every saint you meet will have some vile, toxic cesspool somewhere inside.” She tapped at her temple with a finger. “I’ve spent decades teaching myself tricks to shut out most of it. And I backslide. I do, Rose. I get curious. I start picking, prying. And it’s always horrifying. Then I start drinking to shut it out. It’s a miserable cycle.”

I glanced over at her. Was she peering into my thoughts? Because I disagreed with her. When she helped me, during the show, to get into the minds of the contestants, I saw and felt and intimately remembered their most cherished and their most shameful moments. It all seemed so perfect, flaws and all. Beautiful. Even the ugliness.

“Those people we choose from the audience are strangers,” Saligia said, so I guess she was listening in. “But let me tell you, it’s different when you find yourself in the heads of friends or lovers. Let’s talk about something else.” She pushed a jar of honey across the table to me.

“If you’re like me, nondairy creamer in your morning coffee is a sad excuse for the real thing.” Miles looked sternly into camera three. We were on a commercial break, and because Miles was delivering the spiel of one of our sponsors live in the same studio as our show, we all had to make as little noise as possible. I rummaged around in my snack drawer with quiet and delicate fingers until I found a blueberry muffin.

Miles had paused for a dramatic beat before allowing his face to open up with a broad grin. He lifted a small cardboard carton.

“I’ve changed my tune,” he said into the camera. “And I’m sure you will, too.”

He was pitching some abomination called Impossible Cow, an opaque pearly fluid made from some sort of seed or nut.

Back when we started Serpientes y Escaleras, the Network wanted me to do all the commercials. I put a stop to that nonsense day one. Boundaries are essential in this business.

Sal would have loved to increase her screen time as a pitch-woman, but it was decided that she lacked the human warmth for such work.

Miles, however, was a perfect salesman. The man oozed human warmth.

While gently removing the plastic wrapper from my snack, I realized I felt good. I attributed my sense of buoyancy to the weekend jaunt out to the country. It left me invigorated. Ready to dive into my grand plan. My important work.

But first, I needed a timeline of when Ida Mayfield would return to LA. I wanted to be free from the Network’s scrutiny.

Of course the problem wasn’t just Network snooping. I mean, even if all Network employees left town, I would still have a cluster of people who couldn’t be trusted—and I had hired many of them. I’m not saying they’d go snitching to the Network, nothing like that. It’s about that deeper level of trust. I wanted to be surrounded by people with vision. Curiosity. People who, when learning of my subversive scheme, would respond with giddy excitement.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, I had somehow managed to surround myself with mediocracy. True, some of the team, like Myra, can be fiercely focused, yet still lack that necessary component of inspiration. Even Hal is good enough at his job, but, vision? Let’s get serious. I mean, this isn’t a fairy tale.

I had Sal, of course. And now there was Rose—she and I were on the same page, even if she didn’t know it yet. Raul was certainly a possibility, but I just couldn’t see his particular skillset being of much use. What I really needed was someone with more of a technical mind. There were experiments I needed to do, and—I’ll be honest here—I could barely tell the difference between a Phillips-head screwdriver and that other kind. I might talk myself up, but the truth is, I’ve no more knowledge of electricity than a parakeet. Electricity, that was some dangerous stuff!

As I ate my muffin, I let my gaze drift over to Rose.

She stood in the center of the stage staring at her shoes. Her head bobbed as if in time with a sluggish waltz. Was she counting her breath? Some sort of relaxation exercise?

During our time at the cabin, Rose conveyed her frustrations. She felt that she should be more accomplished in her Reading skills. Able to get deeper into the heads of the contestants.

Sal explained to Rose that she would improve. First, she needed to get past the side effects, and those would begin to dissipate over the next few days. That had surprised me. I was not aware of the headaches and the dizziness. But it made sense that one could become exhausted with all that popping in and out of people’s noggins.

Rose must have noticed me watching her, because she walked across the stage to me. I handed her a tangerine flavored Gummy bear.

Miles was still flogging fake bovine products, so I kept it to a whisper.

“The glycerin lubricates the vocals cords,” I told Rose, pointing to the little candy. “Learned it from an aging soprano. It did wonders for his vocal fry.”

She popped it in her mouth.

“So, how’s it going?” I asked.

“The vertigo is hard to shake,” she told me.

Raul came to kneel in front of me so he could adjust my belt. The buckle had shifted a couple of inches to the side. Raul was a stickler for symmetry.

“Vertigo?” I asked her. “I thought that only came at the end. You know, when you’re telepathically connected to the contestants when the magic door is shut.”

“That’s the worst, sure,” she said. “But it also happens every time Saligia severs the connection.”

That sounded awful.

Suddenly Raul gasped and grabbed my wrist.

Apparently I had been about to wipe my fingers on my jacket.

“How many times have I told you?” he hissed. “No greasy food.”

I had to smile. I was looking down at a handsome and dapper man on his knees in front of me cleaning my fingers with a moist towelette. Raul’s criticism of my muffin-eating was loaded with just enough fussy maternal frustration as to almost—but not completely—dispel a mild sensation of erotic frisson.

Funny, that. My doctor and my tailor agreed on the same thing. No greasy food. Well, for different reasons.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Sal walk over to join us.

“Rose,” she whispered. “You’re doing it again.”

What was she talking about? Rose was just staring off into space. Ah. No, she wasn’t. Rose was looking over at him.

“You need to keep your focus on the stage.” Saligia placed a hand on Rose’s shoulder. “I need you to be present.”

“Sal’s right,” I said. “You keep looking over at your beau.”

Meaning August.

He had been seated in the front row today.

“He makes me think of an owl,” Rose said softly. “And I’m a little mouse, alone in the middle of a field.”

That surprised me. I thought Rose liked our mystery man. Or at least felt pity toward him.

“You’re no mouse,” Sal told Rose. “But, dear, every time you catch a glimpse of him, a bit of his inhuman iciness drifts through my brain like a fistful of razor blades.”

They both really did not like that poor fellow.

“I’ll keep my eyes on our two contestants,” Rose said.

“Or me,” Saligia added. “If you find yourself adrift, look at me.”

“Don’t forget me,” I said. “I can be looked at, too.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Raul muttered. He stood up and tilted my head a couple of inches to the right. He licked the corner of a handkerchief and scrubbed some crumbs or something from my cheek. “Over here snacking and making a mess.”

“Will we get a repeat performance tonight?” I asked Rose. “Watch again as you remain mentally connected when the winner is sent to the great beyond?”

“Wait,” Raul said with keen interest. “You can do that?” He looked at Rose. Then at Sal.

“Why would I want to do that,” Sal said dismissively. “It’s not like any of us will ever be going through those doors.” But I knew that Sal was afraid. With her it was that simple. In the push and pull between curiosity and fear, her fear always triumphed.

“But….” Raul wouldn’t let her off so easily. “A chance to take a peek into that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.”

I do like a man who can quote Shakespeare.

Sal just shrugged. So Raul turned to Rose. Brave Rose.

“You’ve done this before?” he asked her.

Rose’s gaze had drifted back to August. She shivered slightly, and then shifted so her back was to the audience.

She looked at Raul with some hesitation. I realized that after our weekend retreat, Rose had come to trust me and Sal. She wasn’t so sure about sharing her secrets with others. Of course, everyone loved Raul, so she relented.

“Just a bit,” she told him. “Tentative, at first. A little taste. When one of those doors slams shut on a contestant, there is this surge of prickly electricity.” She brushed a finger across her temple. “In the beginning, I let the mental connection break because it’s really uncomfortable. That’s why Michael disconnects even before the door closes. Though for him, it’s just mild dizziness.”

At the mention of his name, I looked over at Michael. He stood next to Ida, bobbing his head in slack-jawed agreement to whatever she was whispering in his ear.

“Well, of course,” Sal told Rose. “That’s because Michael never connects deeply enough to feel much of anything.”

“But you persevered,” Raul prodded.

Rose nodded.

“When the door closes,” she said, “that’s when the contestants leave. Some automatic switch on the door, I guess. They fall. Sort of. They have this sensation of falling inside themselves. I don’t get any fear from them. More of a sense of surprise. On my first three days, that was the point when I would disconnect. However, Thursday night, I stayed in that man’s head—but just at the surface of his consciousness—all the way. Luckily, no one noticed over the commotion—Sy playing music, the audience cheering. I had no sense of up or down. I had to stand absolutely still or I’d fall over. And then, the winner arrived. Somewhere. And I had the weirdest sensation. I felt like someone had shoved me into a vat of frigid syrup. I was absolutely paralyzed. I was no longer connected to him, but, still, that paralysis lasted for the entire duration of the credits.”

“And tonight,” Raul said cautiously, “you’re doing it again?”

“That’s the plan.” Rose looked around at the rest of us to see if anyone would dissuade her. I think she was hoping me or Sal would do just that. But we did not. “However tonight,” she added quietly, nervously, “I want to get as deeply as possible into the mind of the winner before the door closes.”

“Is that safe?” Raul asked with a hushed gasp. He looked at me, then at Sal.

“She’ll be fine,” Sal said. “But,” she turned to Rose, “if you vomit, you’ll have to clean it up yourself.”

I personally loved how Rose approached life. Like a scientist. Well, a mad scientist. I just hoped she’d keep sharing the fruits of her experiments with me.

“Wait.” Raul’s voice had an edge to it. “What if your contestant goes through the other door? Now that can’t be safe.” His eyes nervously darted from Sal to me. “Can it?”

He had a point. But before I could offer some advice—though I’m uncertain what that advice would be—Myra waved her hands toward our group like she was chasing flies from a picnic table. Raul headed back to his racks of clothes along the back wall. Rose and Sal returned to their places on the stage.

Miles was wrapping things up over in the corner where we shot the commercials. Yammering on about how “it holds the essence of the charcoal,” “is perfect for summer cookouts,” and “plays nice with all condiments, be they mustard, mayo, or the most exotic of salsa!”

It seemed Impossible Cow had a line of faux meat as well.

All eyes in the studio settled upon Myra as she began the ten second countdown for the return of Serpientes y Escaleras from the commercial break.

Camera three was pivoted on its well-oiled casters away from Miles, and then it was rolled in my direction. I started up the theme music with some fancy Liberace finger-play across the keyboard. Ed took up his position in front of the seated audience. He clapped his hands to the music and grinned like he was possessed. Immediately the audience was as excited as Ed.

Michael nodded to Rose as he walked past her, and then he placed a hand on the shoulder of one of our two contestants, Jerome. Rose did the same with the other, Priscilla.

And by whatever spooky powers Sal had control over, she sent her hoodoo into and through our two Readers, causing both the contestants to return to their somnambulant and dreamy trance.

When the red light came to life atop the camera pointed at me, Ed and Valerie had the audience in top form. Cheering, applauding.

I was, of course, already into my performance. Up on my toes, leaning over the keyboard, mashing out chords. I wondered if we could get one of those bubble machines like Lawrence Welk used to have.

I gave Rose a wink, mouthing the words: You got this one!

Slowly, I swiveled to face the camera. I always felt a surge of electricity whenever I peered deep into the camera lens. The curved glass elements shimmered with concentric iridescence all the way down to the black metal bushing protecting the photodiode substrate of the image sensor. A fierce hunger overcame me as I confronted something deep inside there. Something so toothsome, so luscious. I never attempted to hide my rapturous and ravenous recognition. Way down in there was the most delicious thing on Earth.

My beloved audience.

“Welcome back to Serpientes y Escalerrrrrrras!”

I looked over at Saligia. She ran her hands down her thighs, smoothing her skirt.

She indulged me those sweet and protracted moments when it was just me and the people—all over the city, and maybe cities beyond—sitting in front of their television sets as they allowed my words to drift intimately into their ears. I admit I felt an energy that I can only think of as supernatural. I still haven’t figured out if I had power over my audience, or they, over me.

I held that final chord in a sustained reverberation. My grin melted into a soft, seductive smile, the one you reserve for that special someone when the both of you are separated by a flickering red candle on a small table in a shadowy and smoky cocktail lounge.

I let my eyes lose focus a bit. My pulse thrummed along strong and steady in my neck.

When the studio audience had quieted down, I spoke in a whisper, my eyes cutting toward Sal.

“Why don’t we jump right back into the action. What do you think, Saligia?”

She nodded and stepped forward into a pool of magenta light.

“Our contestants are all set,” she said, her voice strong but soothing. She looked from me to the camera trained on her face. “Priscilla has the board for this next round, and she is in the lead!”

I lifted my arm to indicate the lighted game board, displayed above the stage.

“True,” I said, my voice ripe with untold possibilities. “But competitor Jerome could take the lead at any time. There are no certainties in Serpientes y Escaleras, are there, Saligia?”

Saligia nodded in vague agreement. Her eyelids struggled—as if from her generously applied mascara as well as the psychogenic burden of cosmic energies—and then her eyes closed. She lifted her arms with the palms open to the heavens like a priestess in ritual adoration to some dark deity.

I knew the spooky stuff was happening. I could see the change come over the Readers. Michael’s face took on the irritation of a commuter jostled by a fellow passenger on a train. But Rose embraced it—she wore an expression of dreamy alertness.

The connections had been made.

I tried to be present and follow the successes and setbacks of our two contestants, but their life stories failed to hold my attention. Lies, infidelities, shoplifting. Probably some virtuous behavior as well. But mostly I just went through the motions. Playing occasional interstitial music, pushing buttons to advance the lights on the game board, applauding in delightful affirmation, shaking my head in grim commiseration.

The very basics to earn my paycheck.

My mind was plunging into the future, struggling to give shape to my Plan.

Part of it concerned a better understanding of these portals. The ones downstairs through which our contestants arrived, as well as these two through which they departed. And here Rose was—completely unprompted by me!—doing important reconnaissance into the weird realm beyond those departure portals.

Finally, the show came to an end, bringing us closer to Rose’s little audacious experiment.

Priscilla won. And by their impassioned cheers, the audience felt she deserved it.

The contestants were then led to their respective doors through which, once opened, they willingly stepped inside. Michael stood beside the loser’s door; Rose, the winner’s. They waited patiently on my instructions.

I could feel that my toupee had slipped half an inch. I gave it an expert tug and pressed down where I knew the double-sided tape to be. When the camera cut to me, I was ready.

“Adieu to you both, winner and loser,” I said with grim gravity. I lowered my chin as I expect would some Victorian judge passing a verdict (though in a much more ornate wig). “Michael, Rose, do the honors and send these two off on the next leg of their grand journey.”

“Serpientes y Escaleras,” Saligia intoned in such a low register it might as well have been, and may God have mercy on your souls.

Both the contestants peered out from those little rooms. Their nervous expressions were the last we saw of them as Rose and Michael, in unison, slammed shut Door Number One and Door Number Two.

As I played us out with a shameless pastiche of Bert Kaempfert’s “A Swinging’ Safari” (but in a disconcerting minor chord), I watched Rose. She faced the camera, but I knew her eyes barely registered on anything in the studio. Rose was with Priscilla, inside her head. And Priscilla, as they say, had left the building. Perhaps to some other dimension? Another plane of existence? The pillowy clouds of high heaven? But if Rose’s stiff-limbed stance—she looked like a cat frozen in surprise when it has found itself upon a waterbed—was any indication, I would have to say Priscilla had not yet arrived at her destination.

Saligia, I saw, held her jaws tightly clenched. Was she struggling to keep from picking up those stray thoughts as Rose hitched a psychic ride through that mysterious portal?

I wondered if Rose enjoyed riding that transdimensional wave. Did she have enough presence of mind to savor it? Or was she just holding on for dear life? She had said that the time before when she had done this (though not so intimately connected), that just as the theme music ended, she arrived. Somewhere. And the mental connection had been severed. I hoped the same thing happened this time to jerk her back to her body. If not, what? Would I have to try dousing her with that bottle of warm orange soda that had rolled to the back of my snack drawer? That would be an inauspicious return to the real world after learning the secrets of the universe.

I could see on the television monitor above the audience that the credits were just about to end. There, the twin logos of the Network, and my very own Silver and Brown Productions.

Ah! Rose was back.

“That’s it, we’re out,” Myra said with a staccato snap of her tongue on the final T.

Ed and Valerie moved among the audience—those still-unchosen contestants—praising them for their good work, getting them to their feet, leading them out of the studio. The camera crew glided their bulky equipment over to the far wall. Hal—visible in his booth at the back—put his feet up on the switcher board and I could just make out the flask as he tipped it back. Michael had found his way to Ida’s side—if he were a dog he’d be rolling on his back in a desperate submissive display. Saligia had already slipped out. I knew she’d be on the elevator to the penthouse to get one of her cold compresses from the refrigerator—she kept a stack of them right beside the bottle of vodka.

And Rose. She stood motionless, still beside Door Number One. She looked down on the floor at the pool of magenta light where Sal had been standing last. When a crew member shut off all the lighting instruments on the overhead grid, Sal’s spotlight vanished. Rose pulled back, startled. Her right hand trembled slightly. She looked down at it with irritation before making a fist a few times to get the blood flowing.

That’s when I knew she’d be fine.

Raul was watching her, as well. A look of paternal concern softened his features. Then he looked over at me. I shook my head. We should let Rose process whatever she had experienced. If she needed any of us, she knew where we were.

She took a deep breath, and without acknowledging anyone else, she walked through the exit door.

I have to say, I envied Rose her wild ride.

I felt it only proper to give her some space. But not for too long. I wanted to know everything she had learned.

It would likely figure into the Plan.

I was enjoying my mid-morning break in the Processing Lounge. That’s where Michael found me, just as I finished off my yogurt. Normally, he spent little time in the lounge. The contestants, he told me, gave him the creeps.

He walked up carrying his cup of coffee and wearing that expression which he thought conveyed guileless congeniality. I hadn’t yet developed my “reading” skills to see through this facade, but of course I did not need them. Micheal was not as clever as he thought himself to be.

Ever since I arrived at work morning, I knew he’d want to grill me about the weekend. I had hoped to forestall it longer.

“I wondered where you were hiding,” he said, sitting down beside me.

He pivoted around and swung his arm across the back of the sofa. I didn’t care for his phony intimacy.

“So, camping,” he began, attempting the tone of small talk. “Really? Marshmallows on sticks over a roaring fire? Did you guys sing songs?”

“There’s really not much to tell. Sy has a cabin built on the hillside with a wooden deck. A bit of a reach to call it camping, though. Saligia did crossword puzzles in a hammock. Sy made lemonade and sandwiches.”

“Oh, it’s Sy now, is it?”

“I suppose so. Anyway, if you’re hoping for something juicy, I can’t help. We read. We talked. There was some wine. The basics. What people do.”

That was all true. Just three folks spending leisure time together. I had wanted an opportunity to ask about the portals. Learn more about these “very special people,” as Dr. Hetzel called them. But Sy quickly put a stop to that with his no-shop-talk policy.

I had a nice time, though.

I did my best to give Michael some details to placate him. Such as how we assembled a fruit salad. Our leisurely hike out to a charming waterfall. And the evening we played a word game Sy invented called Sounds Naughty But It’s Not.

“Well,” Michael said with a smile, though I could tell it was forced. “Clearly you have been drawn into the inner clique. But I’m going to trust that you’ll keep me in the loop.”

But poor Michael was far out of the loop. And it was tearing him up. He did his best to hide it as he stood, mentioned something about a meeting with the marketing team, and headed off.

It never occurred to me to tell Michael about the Great Expanse. He was like so many people I know, completely incurious about matters of the extraordinary. Particularly when it didn’t concern him. The existence of a huge disk of glass, flat as a still pond and the size of a city, whose surface defied the laws of physics—at least as I was taught, and I would assume, Michael as well—should at the very least be worthy of a conversation over yogurt and coffee. But I was certain if I described the journey across that expanse in Sy’s Jeep, Michael would become bored, glance at his watch, even, and quite probably make up some excuse to get up and leave. As if he found something distasteful about such matters.

I guess I, too, eventually became a bit bored with the Great Expanse.

However, things picked up once we got to that big tent. I found the experience enjoyable, but it was hardly like running away to join the circus, as Sy had suggested.

True, there had been sawdust on the floor. And amid the array of strong and unpleasant odors, I would not have been surprised to see an elephant or two, but I saw no exotic animals. Not a single trapeze hung above, nor were any clowns in whiteface and oversized shoes wandering about. And you know, I certainly wouldn’t have said no to a hot dog or a bag of popcorn. Sadly, it was just row after row of folding chairs facing a low wooden stage—though the thousands of lit candles gave the whole place an almost magical feel.

I didn’t know if Sy kept to some sort of schedule. Did they expect him every Saturday, midmorning? Or had they simply seen our slow approach across the glass surface of the Expanse? Whatever the case, the tent had been made ready—prepared for our arrival.

Saligia and I followed Sy to the stage. He positioned himself behind a podium festooned with jasmine, sunflowers, and flowering branches of huisache. Two chairs had been placed on the stage, one on each side of the podium. Saligia sighed and sat in one of them. She looked over at me, so I sat in the other.

We watched as the people silently filed into the tent, seating themselves in the rows of chairs. They all smiled, looking up at the three of us with expressions of intense benevolence. It was very unsettling. I had a moment of abject terror, wondering what might happen to us if Sy broke character, and failed to give these people whatever it was they thought they needed from him.

My money was on burnt-at-the-stake.

But Sy, that impulsive rogue, seemed to feed off of audiences. He might poke and tease and dig at those around him with the occasional subtle taunting, but when adoring eyes were on him, and a rapt audience awaited, he remained on topic and in character. And, well, that man could deliver.

It was quite the show.

He began with a deep-throated benediction, tossing in some Latin. Though for all I knew, it could have been Portuguese or made-up gibberish. He followed with a short sermon about a country road that split in a fork. There were no signs to indicate which road went where. Most of the cars took the road to right, following those in front of them as though they knew where they were going. A few would occasionally take the road to the left. The adventurous minority. But what of that one car abandoned on the roadside? The driver’s door was left agape, and far out on the boulder-strewn plain a distant figure could be seen making his or her own way. “The third way,” Sy said meaningfully.

Had he prepared it? Or was he improvising? And did it matter? It didn’t seem too heavy with meaning to me, but the way Sy delivered it (one moment grand, the next, grave), and the manner in which the people in those folding chairs received it, I felt I must have missed something.

Even overly abstract and meaningless to my ears, that silly sermonette had my scalp tingling.

Next, he performed a short wedding ceremony for a young couple. Then he blessed a couple of babies. And when, at the very end, people lined up for the laying on of hands, so that Sy might heal their ailments, Saligia grabbed my arm and dragged me outside where we waited in the Jeep.

She grumbled that Sy should either fund a clinic for these people or just let them be. For someone so comfortable in the role of mindreader, Saligia Jones had little patience for faith-healing.

When Sy eventually emerged, clutching his hands to his breast as one caught up in an unctuous rapture, Saligia impatiently beeped the horn to pull him back to reality. As we drove off, I still wasn’t sure what those people thought about Sy. Was he prophet or preacher? Maybe this was just the logical response people had when meeting a TV celebrity in post-Changes rural America.

The smiles we received when we arrived and the sad yet grateful tears that accompanied our departure still lingered disturbingly in my mind on Monday morning.

Now all of that Michael would certainly have found worthy of his attention. How Sy gleefully allowed those people to fawn all over him. How Saligia found the entire experience distasteful. People like Michael are constantly collecting those sorts of things that gave them insight into others. They will pounce on any of the personal stuff usually tucked behind their coworkers’ public facades—insights and behaviors that they might one day use to their own advantage.

All that information about both Sy and Saligia would have brightened Michael’s Monday.

Not that he would ever hear any of it from me.

However, per my agreement with Fran, I should have reported all of that stuff to him. I guess Michael wasn’t the only one I was avoiding. I should have at least told Fran I’d not be able to make yesterday’s weekly debriefing meeting because I’d be out of town. But I didn’t. And now, it just felt too weird. I mean, he would love to hear all about the Great Expanse, the crowd in the tent, the weekend at the cabin. But, they were my friends now. Sy and Saligia. They trusted me.

I knew that I had to suck it up and explain to Fran why I couldn’t keep feeding him insider information. Certainly not in the way I had been doing before.

###

The daily training sessions with Dr. Hetzel and Saligia continued. I was glad. The whole Reading thing remained elusive, beyond my reach. Well, when Saligia wasn’t there to help me. And, really, it seemed that she was doing most if not all of the work.

Of course, no one had said I would be able to go about my day—far removed from Saligia—and jump from mind to mind of people around me. But, I hadn’t been told otherwise. It certainly had an appeal. Mostly the training was to satisfy Dr. Hetzel that I wouldn’t become overwhelmed by the extreme emotions that had damaged Bianca.

This afternoon when I walked into the darkened room behind the mirror, I saw Sy sitting with Dr. Hetzel. I paused, thinking I might have arrived too early, but Dr. Hetzel waved me in. The two of them were talking intently. Sy wore a white lab coat and a pair of red flocked velvet capri pants.

Saligia was in her chair off to the side, working on her knitting. As usual, she was dressed in black and, in the low light, almost vanished against the dark wall.

I went ahead and sat down in the special chair reserved for Reader training.

“Don’t worry, Rose,” Saligia said without looking up. “They’re not talking about you.” Sy and Dr. Hetzel were looking at something over my shoulder. “They are talking about him,” she added.

I turned to look into the bright classroom on the other side of the glass.

It was August. He sat in there, on the special chair, all alone.

“Poor guy,” I said. “I was just talking with him. He just wants answers, but no one will give him any.” I knew exactly how he felt.

“Don’t be so free with you pity, Rose,” Saligia told me.

“Oh, but Sal,” Sy said, “it’s all part of Rose’s charm.” He smiled at me. “Lydia here worries about that fellow, August. That why she asked me down. I’ve come here for, what was it, Lydia?” He turned to Dr. Hetzel. “Consultation? Something like that?” Sy looked back at me. “And I was deep in a personal project when I was summoned.”

“Perfecting his egg salad,” Saligia said in a way that made me think she didn’t much care for the dish.

“Sugar is the key,” Sy said, raising a finger to his temple. “But too much and it fights with the dill weed.”

“This guest of ours, August,” said Dr. Hetzel ignoring Sy’s aside, “he’s an anomaly.” The doctor looked over at me. “And the one thing we don’t need in our REINCORs is something out of the ordinary.”

“You want your extraordinary guests to be ordinarily extraordinary?” I asked.

“That needs to be your new tongue twister, Sal,” Sy said over his shoulder.

“Consistency is key,” Dr. Hetzel told me. “We have these people come to us in a wide range of mental function. Some are like sleepwalkers. Others, just as lucid as anyone you might meet in the street. But they all are generally well-adjusted.” She leaned forward looking at me. “What I mean is that each of them has found a manner to incorporate his or her sense of self into the experiences each encounters from the moment of appearing in the arrival pods to that eventual time when one of our two departure doors is closed shut.”

“Except for August,” Sy said.

“And Connie,” Saligia added, mentioning the woman who “jumped.”

“Yes,” Dr. Hetzel said, lifting her head to look through the window at August. “Those very rare exceptions.”

Was she suggesting that we do some sort of therapeutic work on August? I did not feel in any way competent to do that sort of thing.

“His befuddled metacognitive state is the issue,” Dr. Hetzel said. “It threatens to push him into a state of existential distress.”

“But he wants his memory back,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Oh, he has plenty of memory,” Saligia muttered.

“Memory is a complicated thing,” Dr. Lydia said.

“Is it?” Sy didn’t sound convinced. He walked over to the window to get a better look at August.

“Clearly he is—well, was—a very well-read and educated man,” Dr. Hetzel said. “With what appears to be a photographic memory. But, other than his name, he’s made almost no progress at all recovering those personal memories. His own life events. His biography.”

“Amnesia!” Sy turned to Dr. Hetzel. “Like in the movies? I’m starting to like our mystery man.”

“Amnesia doesn’t work that way,” Dr. Hetzel said. Then her voice fell to a whisper. “No, there’s something not right about this one.”

We all looked at August sitting motionless in the other room. Saligia finally broke the silence.

“It’s because he’s hiding.”

“That sneaky rat,” Sy said with a sly smile.

“His thoughts, Sy. He’s hiding his thoughts.”

“Can he do that?” I asked Saligia. “Hide his thoughts from you?”

“He can if he’s hiding them from himself,” she said, returning to her knitting.

I didn’t believe her. Suddenly I felt a tension in the room and I wondered if I shouldn’t excuse myself.

Sy began to laugh. He crossed back over to the sofa and dropped down beside Dr. Hetzel.

“Now I know why you called me down, Lydia. You want to crack August like a boiled egg. Get at those hidden secrets. But Sal—the noggin expert—is resistant. So you want me to sweet talk her, right?”

“We need your help, Saligia,” the doctor said, turning away from Sy to look at Saligia. “August needs your help.”

Saligia stopped knitting. But she didn’t look up.

“Delving?” Saligia finally said, her voice a whisper. “Plumbing? Try to crack through what he can’t recall or, more likely, what he’s hiding?”

Dr. Hetzel nodded. “I know that that immersive level of contact isn’t always pleasant for you,” she said. “But you wouldn’t be alone.”

I knew the doctor was talking about me. I had no objections—of course, I had no real idea of what all this might entail—but Saligia looked so uncomfortable with the idea.

“But why?” I decided to ask Dr. Hetzel. “What would it serve?”

“Well, this could have some impact on you, Rose. You should know that I have as much responsibility for the mental well-being of the trained Readers as I have to our guests. And we’ve seen what can happen when a Reader gets too deep into the mind of someone who is deeply troubled, like Bianca did with that unfortunate contestant.”

“Connie,” Saligia said. “Her name was Connie.”

“We’re all still rattled,” Dr. Hetzel continued. “That incident has eroded all our collective confidence. You feel it too, Saligia. I know. Doubt. Doubt is the worst in this work we do.”

Sy was doing something I found interesting. In a fluid and silent fashion he had gotten to his feet and positioned himself at a point in the room where he could see Dr. Hetzel, Saligia, and myself without having to move his head. We were all like players in some staged scene being presented for his personal entertainment. I wondered if he were even aware of what he was doing.

I watched as Sy fine-turned his voyeurism by shifting about five feet to the left to that he could “frame” August into his view as well.

That was when I realized that August made me nervous. Why was that? What had changed? Was it some unconscious bit of behavior where I was aligning myself with my new friend, Saligia? Or was there some psychic leakage from August’s unsavory mind that my super-sensitive brain was picking up on? With Saligia’s help, no doubt. Whatever the case, I was less favorably disposed to that man than I had been when I entered this room.

And though I felt compassion for all the contestants—even those who might have some unsavory bits floating about in their heads—I wondered why they didn’t do the obvious.

“Why don’t you choose him tonight?” I asked. “Get him out of our hair.”

There followed an awkward silence that made me think I had overstepped my station. Asking them to break the rules of the game. The random nature of the choosing of the contestants.

The silence lasted a little too long. And then, I knew. I knew that there was nothing random about the show at all.

“We don’t play God on this show,” Saligia said softly.

But obviously no one in the room believed that to be true.

“Saligia?” the doctor asked again. “Can we do this?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” she said, looking at her hands as she stroked her knitting needles. “Maybe next week. That man,” she said in a whisper, “he scares me.”

“Okay,” the doctor said, taking a breath. “So I guess we need another subject to work with today for Rose’s session. How about that woman who arrived the same day as August.” Lydia leaned forward and selected a piece of paper from the pile on the table. “Stacy.”

“I’d like that,” Saligia said. “Thank you, Lydia.”

“I’d go get Ed to bring in Stacy,” Dr. Hetzel said.

“Oh, I’ll go tell him,” Sy said, standing up. “Besides, I need to get back to my egg salad.” Sy removed the lab coat, exposing a teal cardigan partially hidden by a candy cane striped apron. “Salmonella hides everywhere.”

Dr. Hetzel nodded.

“And now, Rose,” she said to me, “let’s get back to your exercises.”

I have been a prisoner in this place a full seven days.

I still can find no memory of my time before I came here, and I have no strong indications that I might be improving. However, there is an accumulation of a week’s worth of experiences I can reflect upon. This has caused, I suppose, a rudimentary sense of self to arise. I see it in how I react in various situations.

This feels so wrong: passively watching as a new personality emerges.

Is this the most I can hope for? Building a new identity from the ground up?

What happens when I’m finally chosen and marched through one of those doors? Nothingness? Another clean slate I have to begin filling again?

Of course, I hope to have escaped before that happens.

Sometimes my imagination takes flight and I entertain certain fantasies. Maybe I’m some experiment in cloning—an assemblage of cell cultures grown in that little white room. Or perhaps I’m a robot. Recently built, switched on, programed with facts but no past.

The factual stuff filling my brain is as strong as ever. I know things. Everything, it seems. Well, that’s not true. But suffice to say, I am a warehouse of information.

Today I sit in the lounge on a sofa leafing through a nature magazine. In front of me, two woman play ping pong. I barely pay attention to them, but, if I like, I can play back in my mind the running tabulation of scores from the three games they’ve played since I sat down. The odd manner in which the game of table tennis is scored makes perfect sense to me.

As do so many things I encounter.

I look down at the magazine in my lap and analyze a photograph of an elderly woman with a beaded headdress. She sits on the ground of an open-air market and displays a woven basket filled with spiders. I know that the woman is Cambodian from her manner of dress. Also, I know that the contents of the basket—fried spiders—are a local delicacy. The spiders are specifically Haplopelma albostriatum. I don’t need to read the article to check this fact. It is already in my brain.

I am also aware that eidetic memory—known to most people as photographic memory—is rare.

I’m curious. Have I had it all my life? Unfortunately, I can’t figure access that part of my mind. The part which holds my personal memories.

Of course it’s no work at all to call up those impersonal memories. I know the Arabic names of each star in the constellation Cassiopeia. I know pi to the fortieth decimal. I can rattle off all the birthdates of the rulers of the Ming dynasty. I know how to field dress an elk.

But I can’t remember my mother’s name or the color of my first car—if, indeed, I ever did own a car.

“Do you mind if I sit with you?”

I look up from my magazine. It’s Rose.

When I nod, she sits beside me and opens a container of yogurt.

I close the magazine, not wanting her appetite ruined by the image of edible spiders.

“Who’s winning?” she asks, nodding to the two women.

I explain that Darlene and Helen are playing as representatives of Door Number One and Door Number Two, respectively.

“And Helen is winning,” I add.

“A tournament?” she asks.

“They have used that word.”

“I’m torn,” Rose says with a laugh. “Who should I cheer for?”

Rose strikes me as the type who roots for the underdog.

“Maybe the one who needs it the most,” I say.

“Than Darlene it is.”

“But just because someone is losing, does that make her an underdog? I would think that Door Number Two is always the underdog.”

Rose makes no attempt to disagree with me.

After a few minutes of slamming the little ball back and forth, the two women change sides.

“They’re just so adorable,” Rose says. “Ready for anything we throw their way.”

“Embracing the inevitable?”

“Well, that’s one way to put it.” She frowns. Then her expression softens. “But, it’s one of the reasons I like coming down here to the lounge. You guys are all so, well, serene.”

“We are given drugs to help keep us docile. They call them vitamins, but that’s just a convenient figure of speech.”

“Are you sure?”

Her confused answer pushes me off balance. She seems genuine in her ignorance.

“I thought you could read minds?” I say, closely watching her face to learn what I can.

“Well, I’m just a beginner.”

Again, there is no hint of dissemblance. Does she really think she has the power of telepathy?

“So, you believe in paranormal abilities, but you doubt that the people kept on this floor are given sedatives?” I ask.

She puts her spoon and yogurt down on the table and thinks for a moment. Then she shifts in her seat and looks at me.

“Last week was a first for both of us,” she says. “I was promoted and you arrived here as a guest.”

Her career advancement hardly seems equivalent to my unexplained appearance in that tiny white room, not to mention my memory problem, but I let her talk.

“I’ve learned things about this place, this show.” She turns to watch the ping pong ball bounce back and forth. “Over the years I’ve come to accept so many impossible things…you know, out there.” She waves her hand in the air to indicate, I guess, the world beyond. “And now, it seems, I have no choice but to embrace the reality of mind-reading, too.”

I wonder how I would react if I wasn’t being fed the sedatives. Because even with this chemically induced equanimity, my stomach twists at her confession.

If this young woman who seems rational and competent believes in something so fantastical and wrong, where can I begin to place any sense of hope? It suddenly seems likely that everyone—my fellow “guests” and those “caring” for us—are all utterly insane.

She slips her shoes off and tucks a foot under her thigh. She rests her hands in her lap a moment and then looks at me. But she doesn’t say anything about drugs, telepathic talents, or hints about what’s so impossible out there. No. She asks about me.

“Any luck with the memory?”

I shake my head.

“Not even impressions?” she asks softly. “From before they opened that door on you? How about emotions. Were you calm? Frightened? Do you know how you came to us?”

Doesn’t she?

Why is she asking me this? This isn’t just idle curiosity. She wants something specific. But this isn’t fair. She has to give me something as well. Answering my questions would be a good start.

But I know she’ll say what everyone else says. I should take such talk to Dr. Hetzel. And that woman’s no help.

I furrow my brow in deep concentration, as if I’m trying to remember. And then, a bit of playacting, I groan as if a terrible shadow has drifted across my mind.

“Maybe later,” I say as I stand up. “It’s a lot to confront. I think I’ll rest in my room before tonight’s show.”

Even if I have something to give her, she has nothing for me. Just a mind filled with foolish fantasy.

Is it pity I feel?

Maybe. But there’s something else. Hopelessness.

I have only myself to rely on. And if I’m to find a way to escape from this madhouse, it will have to be on my own.

I leave her sitting there, pensive, thoughtful.

Good timing on my part, as I see that unpleasant associate of hers, Michael, approach us.

###

When I return to my room, I realize what I had told Rose is not wrong. I am tired. A nap has great appeal.

As I reach inside my locker for an extra pillow, I snag the back of my hand on a burl of metal. I react to the sharp pain by pulling away and mange to give myself a cut about three inches long. I turn to the sink and run water over the bleeding wound. The odor of blood hangs there in the room. Fetid, metallic. Beguilingly aromatic.

A rumbling and ragged drone—originating far in the distance—rushes close with an increase in volume until everything vibrates in sympathy. An intense orange light pulses, slow like a heartbeat. It then speeds up until the frantic strobing reaches such a high frequency that it becomes a smooth warm glow all around. This body of mine drops away—but, no, it is all my senses that are ripped away and pulled aloft, crammed up against the ceiling, so as to observe the man—me—standing below. Then, the consciousness, above, and the physical, below, fall together again, and lock into clean alignment.

What just happened?

I steadied myself against the sink and slowly inhaled until my lungs were filled.

That rush of vertigo, which had come and gone, left behind a wonderful gift. A pristine and sharp focus on everything that concerned me. The totality of August Mathers was accessible. Warmth welled up inside my chest, an exhilarating electrical charge ran all over my flesh. I felt whole, again—so grateful to have myself back, that I wept.

I was born in 1966. Lived my entire life in Denver, Colorado. My mother was named Florence. She told me I had no gumption. And, as she was an excessively religious woman, she saw sin in everything I did.

My hand was still under the running water. I tore a strip off a white undershirt and made a crude bandage. It was strange to have all this information available in one sudden chunk. Not just those previous free-floating facts, but memories and experiences.

It was like finding yourself holding a globe of an alien planet, with a geography and history unknown to you, but as you moved it around, looking at it this way and that, you realized that, yes, you did know it. You knew the name of every city; which country invaded the other, and when; how cold was that mountain range in winter; how deep that sea. And that globe, it was my entire life.

A heady swirl of impressions and sensations. Tastes. Sounds. Odors. Like blood. Especially the smell of blood. So many wonderful and vibrant memories!

All the stuff of a life lived.

And there were no surprises when I now looked unflinchingly at my life. I found myself almost gasping at how sharp and exciting were so many of the moments. How natural it all seemed in its full summation. Even my final moments were just so…fitting. The whole of it packed together like asparagus spears in a can. No wasted space.

Everything including my death in the prison hospital had a sense of proper placement. I had only been in my early fifties. Taken down—completely by surprise—by pancreatic cancer. Strange to have found myself in prison for tax evasion. Not for those bodies in the backyard of my mother’s house, or those I buried, later, in the field out beyond the suburbs. To the world at large, I died a dull and mildly unsavory middle-class, middle-aged white-collar criminal.

But I knew better.

And now! Alive…again? Looking in the mirror was so odd. I had become younger. How miraculous!

Was I here to be judged for my past actions?

The man I faced in the mirror—until moments ago his life had been simple. He had been an innocent with no memory. A fuzzy, tentative, soft fool.

Is that how I would be with no memory?

What would that baffled man of only a moment ago have made of the real August Mathers? A man with so many dark secrets.

That innocent me who walked into this bathroom—what would have been his ethical boundaries if truly tested? If he had met a remorseless killer, would he have been repulsed, or intrigued? An interesting experiment. One I could not do. It was too late. That innocuous man was gone—a sort of death.

But what was death?

I had died. If I could trust my memory—and I felt it was the only thing I could trust. In my memory, I had died. Yet, here I was. And what of that ludicrous gameshow? It must indeed be how my past behavior would be judged. Could it really be that the mind-reading nonsense was real? At this moment, it hardly seemed any more improbable than the fact that I had died and then been brought back. To, apparently, witness my final judgement.

I didn’t have to scrutinize my past behavior to know I wouldn’t appear pure of heart, not to the likes of these people.

But scrutinize, I did. Because I could. My personal experiences were as easy to recall, now, as was the scientific name of those edible spiders. If I were the sort of man to use such language, I’d call my prodigious memory a blessing. The wild talent to revisit those sweet interludes of my life. And the end of that life of mine? I peered back to those final moments. How long ago had then been? It seemed like just yesterday. Perhaps it was. Or maybe it had been centuries in the past. I had no idea how the rebirth business worked.

I had been lying on a thin and uncomfortable mattress—my death bed, in fact—raised up so I could see the nurse doing her crossword puzzle. Tubes and cables snaked around me. There was one monitoring my vitals. Another delivered drugs. One of which was morphine, though I wasn’t in pain. The radio on a shelf overhead had been tuned to an oldies station. Doris Day was singing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.”

The nurse was asking help on 16 down. I knew the answer. It was Damascus. But my voice wouldn’t work. And that’s when I drifted away.

They talk about a beautiful and beckoning from light down a tunnel. Angelic music. A calm sense of comfort.

There was nothing of the sort.

Somehow, I ended up here, in a place as sterile and tedious as that prison hospital. A dormitory beneath a TV studio.

I voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Oh, my goodness! What happened?”

I looked up.

It was Valerie. She grabbed my hand and pulled back the impromptu bandage to inspect the cut.

“Oh, it doesn’t look too bad,” she said, smiling to encourage me. “Let’s see what we have in here.” She pulled a small first aid kit from the back of the locker. She brought her cheerful, giddy face close to mine. “Don’t forget. We’re here to take care of you and keep you safe.”

Saturday had started off overcast and dreary. I had given up hope that the cloud cover would burn off by midday. I checked my watch. It was ten minutes after twelve. I twisted around on the bench, scanning the pavilion across from the Alamo. No sign of Nora. Odd. She seemed the sort of person to take a scheduled appointment very seriously.

I avoided eye contact with the young black man in wireframe rose-tinted glasses and sporting a fez—the man who was operating the falafel stand over beside the gazebo. I met him Wednesday night at a secret meeting Fran had taken me to. The All-Seeing Eye Society. A group which, it seemed, I too now belonged to. It was a group devoted to uncovering the meaning behind the Changes, be they mystical, scientific, or something beyond the “mind of mere mortals”—which is how many of them spoke. Each member I met seemed to have his or her own theory. The falafel vendor was no exception. What was his name? Napoleon? Nebuchadnezzar? Something grand and historical. No doubt an alias. Anyway, he had postulated that the Changes was connected to the terraforming technology of an alien race to make Earth more favorable to their needs. The human race—the man with the fez had ominously intoned—was now living on borrowed time, as the alien colonizing ships were obviously on their way.

“They’ll be here soon enough,” he had told me last night while I was helping myself to butter cookies and fruit punch at the back of the auditorium. “That’s why we need to hone our ninja skills!” I had politely given him a donation after he pressed into my hands his self-published pamphlet, The Role of Nunchaku and the Tiger Pit in Earth’s Final Skirmish!

When I rounded the gazebo earlier today, I noticed him. But before I could utter a greeting, Napoleon—or was it Leopold?—had subtly touched his lips with a finger and winked. Of course. We were members of a secret society. I nodded and smiled, and I continued further down to select a bench as I waited on Nora.

###

Fran was one of those types who collected people, and usually interesting ones at that. He curated his circle of associates and friends. This made him well-suited as the head of the All Seeing Eye Society—though he was quick to correct me that the ASES was guided by a rotating advisory committee comprised of members.

“These days I prefer to maintain a low profile,” he explained. “You can get more done through surreptitiousness and subtlety. Mostly I work on outreach. Finding like-minded individuals, such as yourself.”

That was not only how he increased the ranks of ASES membership, but also how he filled the rooms at the Omega Hotel. When a vacancy came up—presumably because one of his “sad bachelors” had regained the trust of a formerly dubious spouse—Fran would scour the city, in search of a newly jilted and dejected gent wandering with socks, underwear, and a toothbrush clutched in a wrinkled paper sack. “I’m a quick study on the mettle of a man’s character,” Fran insisted. “Even with a hanged head and a tucked tail. If he meets my criteria, I steer him to the Omega.”

That was what he told me on my first night in town. I did my best to explain that I had not been tossed to the curb by an angry woman.

He shrugged.

“It is of no importance,” he said as we rounded the corner and came to a stop in front of the two story building on a seedy street. The building ran the entire block. The brick had been painted, but decades of filth obscured the color.

“Fifteen rooms,” Fran said. “Small, but serviceable.”

Something glinting caught my eye. Something that I took to be a telecommunication satellite was in the middle of the street. I wasn’t sure if it was modern art or some remnant of the Changes. Because Fran made no mention of it, neither did I.

We walked to a recessed entranceway. Overhead hung a small white sign with black lettering. The symbol for the Greek letter, Omega, followed by Hotel. Beside it, slow pulsing neon tubes read: No Vacancies.

“Don’t let the sign fool you,” Fran said as we stepped inside. “We’re very selective here.”

“Low profile.”

“Yep,” Fran said with a grin. “You get it.”

A series of flickering fluorescent tubes the color of those yellow bug lights lit our way up the stairs. The stale air held an assertive though not quite overwhelming aroma of roach bait.

We emerged into a dim and dingy—but in a cozy way—lobby with several sofas and easy chairs facing a TV set. At the far end of the room was a wooden counter with an adding machine, thick ledger book, and a gleaming and curved nickel-plated call bell.

A man with worn jeans, bedroom slippers, and a dark paisley dressing gown released a long delicate snore from where he lounged in a vinyl upholstered chair. His head listed to the side. His bushy eyebrows reached up to the edge of a knit cap.

Fran pointed to the corridor past the check-in desk. We made no sound on the deep carpet, but still the man in the chair ceased his snoring. His eyes fluttered open.

“What’s this?” he asked in a rasping voice.

“Didn’t mean to disturb you,” Fran said quietly, pulling me along down the corridor.

Halfway to the end, we stopped at a door marked with the brass number eight.

Fran opened the door and turned on the light.

I walked into a cramped room with a narrow bed near a window. A plywood table and a chair with tarnished metal legs were the only other pieces of furniture. A TV was bolted to the wall. Fran opened the door to the bathroom for me to inspect. Toilet and sink.

“New guest?” the man with the wild eyebrows asked from the hallway. He leaned into the room eyeing me with curiosity.

“That’s the hope, Brad,” Fran told him,

Idly I picked the TV remote off the table where it sat beside a scorched hotplate. I aimed the remote at the television set and pushed a button.

As the set glowed to life, I began pushing a button labeled with an up arrow. I cycled through dead channel after dead channel. Nothing but white snow and white noise.

“What’s he doing?” Brad asked Fran.

Fran ignored Brad and watched me with amusement.

A door across the hallway opened and a large, solid man wearing blue pajamas patterned with hundreds of teddy bears walked in to join us.

“I believe tonight’s broadcast has come and gone,” he said in a strong yet jovial voice.

I clicked once more and the sound of static ceased. There was an image on the screen. A simple slate. No logo, no station ID, just text that explained the time and days of the week when Serpientes y Escaleras aired.

“So, you folks only have one channel?” I asked. “A single channel that broadcasts only one show? Two and a half hours of programming per week?”

Sounded like such a waste. Another product of the Changes, no doubt.

“Makes us appreciate it all the more,” the large man said. “I’m Tomás Castillo.”

He reached out to shake my hand.

“Morris Fisher,” I said.

He took a seat on the bed. Fran sat in the chair.

I turned off the TV and returned the remote to the table. I leaned against the wall near the window.

“I saw a bit of it earlier,” I said. “Some sort of game show, right?”

Tomás’ eyes widen with excitement.

“You’ve not seen it before? It’s so much more than a game show.”

“Yeah,” Brad said, still standing in the doorway. “They also have commercials. Aunt Ginny’s Delicately Caustic Laundry Soap. And that Mongolian barbacoa place on Zarzamora.”

Tomás did not take his eyes off me as he stood, placed firm hands on Brad’s shoulders, and maneuvered the man into the hall as if putting the cat out. He closed the door and sat back on the bed.

“Serpientes y Escaleras,” Tomás said with a wry smile, “is an unflinching examination of morality. Followed by a final judgment. Destiny made manifest, one might say.”

“Well, I did see earlier how seriously people take it,” I said. “But it’s just a game show. I mean, I used to work in the industry. Those shows, they’re all scripted.”

“Ah, but this one is different,” Tomás said. “The basic conceit. It’s serious business, don’t you agree? The weighing of the human soul? And if you squirm at that word soul, we can say character.”

“You’ll scare him off,” Fran said to Tomás. Fran turned to look at me. “Somewhere between Tomás’ uncritical acceptance and your pragmatic skepticism, there is something that needs closer examination.”

“Closer examination? Of a game show?” I wasn’t sure if they were setting me up for a joke. I looked at Tomás. “So, you believe the winner is sent off to Paradise?”

“I don’t know about that,” Tomás said. “But the contestants are sent somewhere.”

I saw no point in arguing. Besides, I was getting tired.

“Well, I won’t deny that the Changes left some puzzling things behind when the wold finally decided to settle down. Who’s to say the world of crass TV entertain hasn’t changed as well. I’ve been away from such things for a few years.”

Tomás nodded.

“I thought as much,” he said. “And you’ve seen some of those puzzling things?” He held up his hand and gestured vaguely. “Out there? In the world beyond our city?”

I shrugged.

“He’s come to us from a long journey,” Fran told Tomás. “An adventurer.”

I felt a need to clarify things. Adventurer sometimes had negative connotations. But before I could speak, Tomás leaned forward.

“A journey? Do you have a car? Hardly anyone I know has one of those anymore.”

“I came here on the train,” I told him.

Tomás sat back and crossed his legs. He regarded me with an expression of displeasure. One of his toes poked out from an argyle sock.

“They only let the crème de la crème on their precious train,” he said as an accusation.

Fran seemed somewhat suspicious as well, and I was beginning to fear I might lose my bed for the night.

“You didn’t tell me you came here on that train,” Fran said. “Just that you passed by the train station.”

“I stowed away in the engine compartment,” I explained.

“You what?” Tomás asked.

He blinked his eyes and looked over at Fran.

Both men began laughing so loudly that someone in the next room banged on the wall.

“I like you,” Tomás said, his voice booming with warmth. He turned to Fran. “Have you signed this man up yet for membership?”

“My intention all along,” Fran said. He removed a small metal case that look appropriate for holding mints. “And getting him a room, of course.”

Fran removed a slip of pasteboard the size of a business card from the case and walked over to me. He placed it on the bedside table. He handed me a fountain pen.

“Just sign your name on the back,” he said. “You’ll be a full-fledged member.”

The white card had a picture of a disembodied eyeball from which sprouted what looked like the wings of a goose, opened in flight. It hung in the air surrounded by clouds. Above were the letters A S E S. And below, in further explanation: The All Seeing Eye Society.

I turned it over. Beneath where it read Member in Good Standing was a line for me to sign my name. I did so and returned Fran’s pen.

“We meet once a week,” Tomás said standing. He slapping me on the back. “You’re one of us, now. I hope to see you Wednesday night. Fran will tell you the location.” And he left the room.

“A hundred and fifty a week,” Fran said. When he saw my confusion, he added, “Not for this,” as he tapped at my membership card I still held in my hand. “No dues, ever, for the Society. I meant the rent for the room. That is, if you’re interested.”

I was. I paid him for a month.

“I’ll go fetch you your key,” Fran said with a wide grin. He stood and patted me on the back. “Welcome home!”

When he left the room, I looked around. I would unplug that hotplate before I went to sleep—I didn’t trust the wiring. But it would do.

###

“Oh, goodness, I am so so sorry,” Nora said, plopping down on the bench beside me. “I absolutely hate to run late.”

“That’s fine.”

“Hey, that’s it, isn’t it?” She pointed to the Alamo. “It’s so small!”

“I guess you’ve not been exploring the city much, have you?”

“You’re not going to believe it, but I got a job!”

“That was fast.”

I wondered what sort of job she was doing where she was allowed to wear those coveralls of hers. Then he realized they weren’t the same dingy gray coveralls I’d seen when we met in Great Falls. These were olive in color, with sharp creases along the sleeves.

“Tuesday I was talking to this guy in a coffee shop. When he learned I was the chief technician for the MagLev train depot in Great Falls, he offered me the job. On the spot! To be his assistant. He’s the superintendent of elevator services of the La Vida Tower. It’s that big building right behind you. See it?”

I nodded. That was a very odd coincidence. Everything in my life lately seemed to revolve around that building.

“Chief technician?” I asked.

“What?”

“You were Chief Technician back home?”

“Sure. Why not? Ice chopper and hose monkey doesn’t sound so glamorous. A girl’s gotta embellish the CV at times.”

“So, do you have elevator experience?”

“What’s to know?” She shrugged. “They’re elevators. They go up, they go down. Besides, I’m getting on-the-job-training for the other stuff.”

“Other stuff? Other than up and down? You mean, like sideways?”

“You’re a riot. I’m talking serious stuff. The backup generators. Emergency call buttons. Climate control modules. I was being humble. There’s a lot to learn when you’re assistant to the superintendent of elevator services of the La Vida Tower.”

“I guess so.”

“And I have an apartment in the basement.”

“Good for you.”

“Probably I shouldn’t have told you all that.” She paused to glance around the plaza. “I did have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Some sensitive stuff going on in that building. Don’t know what all. Not yet. There is some TV show up at the top. Celebrities like their privacy, I guess. How about you?”

“Me?”

“Your adventures in the big city.”

“Oh, well, I have a hotel room over near the courthouse. Met a group of freethinkers—“

“A what?”

“A bunch of cranks. You know, crackpots. Fruitcakes.”

“Oh, I do. They’re the best.”

“And I also learned an old friend of mine lives here in town.” I turned to catch sight of La Vida Tower. “I think I’ll look him up.”

“Look at us!” Nora said, beaming. “Landing on our feet in a strange city. Just like in Of Mice and Men.”

“What?”

“The Steinbeck novel.”

“I know Of Mice and Men.” I looked at her to see if she was pulling my leg. “But I’m not seeing any similarities.”

“You remember. When Jorge and Jenny escape the Dust Bowl by traveling to Bermuda? They meet those pirates at the dog track? Just like us. Here. In front of the Alamo.”

“Did you by chance read that book after the Changes?”

Nora ignored me as she dug through her pockets. She pulled out a wad of crumpled dollar bills.

“Look! I got an advance on my first week. Let me buy you lunch.”

I allowed her to lead me to the falafel stand by the gazebo.

“How’s the day treating you, strangers?” the vendor asked. He repeated his knowing wink at me. “You folks new to town?”

“My goodness, no,” Nora said with a titter. “Alamo City born and bred, my colleague and I. We’re arborists over at the botanical gardens.”

I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or roll my eyes. But I did like her playful side.

“Well, you’re new to me,” the vendor said, again with that wink to me. “My name’s Charlemagne DeWinter, purveyor of the choicest street grub this side of the Aegean, wherever that might be these days.”

Of course. That was it. Not Napoleon. Charlemagne.