The reel to reel tape deck hummed with a warm tone. I stood at the counter of my kitchen island and watched the narrow brown tape as it was pulled across the playhead. A single RCA cable went from the line out port of the tape machine and into my custom converter box. Then, a coaxial cable snaked out from the converter device across the counter to where it was plugged into the video input of an old analog CRT video monitor. Why wasn’t the blasted thing working?

I had no patience for a blank screen, and I was just about to give the whole contraption another whack, when I heard the bell to the elevator.

Oh God, I hoped Sal was up in her rooftop shack, and not rummaging around down here looking for a crossword puzzle book or something. The last thing I wanted was to have Sal complain to me about our poor security. I told her the other day I’d have that elevator girl fix things so people couldn’t ride up to the penthouse without a special key, but I had forgotten all about it. The truth is, I wasn’t sure how to go about that. Was there some sort of requisition form?

Besides, Sal’s fears seemed absurd. What was up with her recent obsessive talk about malignant forces, marauding maniacs, or whatever? I mean, she was the psychic around here. Why worry about the vagaries of happenstance when you’re a clairvoyant?

Probably she’d tell me her powers didn’t work that way.

Rarely did I concern myself about such matters of random violence. Still, I did turn my head in the direction of the elevator, and waited. Would I be rushed by a crazed killer or overly obsessed fan?

I was not. The doors slid open to reveal the last person I expected to see. A thrill did surge through me, but not one of danger. My ratchet crimping tool slipped from my hand, but I caught it before it hit the floor.

Morris? Morris Fisher? Here?

How long had it been? Three years? Four? More?

The bright overhead fluorescent tubes of the elevator gave his arrival an unearthly aura. If Hollywood could have embellished that moment, dry ice fog would have spilled out into the penthouse in slow motion. The ominous soundtrack of layered electronic drones would shift to deep percussive thuds that would represent the heaving heart of the protagonist (me), as his heroic beloved, thought long dead on a distant planet, makes his unexpected second act appearance—his handsome face battered and burned from the brutal proximity to neutron stars and the caresses of lusty radioactive aliens. And I probably would have swooned, just as the script demanded.

Interesting. I had not noticed before how my fantasies leaned toward science fiction.

However, even without those elevated imaginary elements, Morris made quite an entrance. He always looked as if he hadn’t shaved for three days. His perpetually unruly hair left most people thinking he had just climbed off a motorcycle. Long before I met the man, he had perfected his uniform of brown leather jacket, jeans, and engineer boots.

I felt foolish and overdressed in my electric indigo silk moire pajamas and Peranakan beaded slippers.

Once I realized I wasn’t going to swoon, I decided to play it as cool as possible. Unflappability is a universally attractive quality. I’m quite sure of it.

“I wasn’t expecting company,” I called out across the room. “But I’m happy it’s someone who might be able to help me.”

Morris stepped into the penthouse. He held some sort of oblong item in a brown paper bag. The elevator closed behind him. He looked around, uncertain, before heading over.

It wasn’t too hard for me to play it cool because I didn’t yet know what Morris wanted. Was he happy? Angry? Did he want to reconnect with me romantically? Was he just here for Sal?

I’m not sure how I did it, but I managed to hold back a massive grin that threatened to break across my face. It was Morris! How I had missed him.

“So, this is going to sound crazy,” I said in a relaxed convivial tone as I returned my attention to the electronic devices and the wires spread across the counter. “I’ve converted a video signal into an audio signal, and now I’m trying to get it back to video. But it’s not cooperating. How difficult can this be?”

Pesky emotional baggage aside, Morris was exactly the sort of person I needed. Not just to help with my current contraption, but also to round out my crack team of metaphysical broadcasting guerrillas! The man was a master of all sorts of technological doodads.

“And it’s good to see you, too, Sy,” he said in that low and soft voice of his.

“What? Oh, right. I guess it has been awhile.” 

He leaned in closer. The paper bag crinkled softly where he gripped it. I thought Morris might reach out with his other hand and touch me. But he didn’t. I guess those days weren’t going to return. I wondered if I even wanted them to.

Oh, dear. Was he wearing Old Spice?

“You look, younger,” he said, sounding perplexed. Envious, no doubt. Good genes and good face cream. “I almost didn’t recognize you when I saw you on TV the other night.”

“You, I must say, look exactly the same,” I said. It gave me an excuse to look him over. “It’s been a few years, right?”

He removed a dark green bottle from his bag and placed it on the counter beside a spool of 22 gauge insulated copper wire. It was some exotic liqueur with an unpronounceable name which, were I to judge by the earthy green glass, was made with kiwi fruit and Brussels sprouts.

Morris had never been well versed with social niceties. To show up with a gift was so out of character. Maybe he had matured.

He leaned against the edge of the island, crossed his arms, and gave me that familiar warm smile. It made you feel as if he had a secret to share, but first the two of you should retire to some place quieter, more private. My eyes drifted to the bottle. Should I go get a couple of cordial glasses? Maybe undo the top button of my pajama top?

But of course, I’m forever misreading body language.

Morris reached up and pushed a white stubby button on the video monitor.

“There’s your problem,” he said.

The screen came to life.

“How’d you do that?”

The man was a genius! Well, when he wanted to be.

“It looks like this funky antique Soviet video monitor has a manual format switch. You were in SECAM. Never put your trust in anything other than the tried-and-true Trinitron broadcast monitor.” And then he laughed. “What am I saying? You’re re-inventing the wheel with…what the hell is all this?” Morris tapped a finger on my transcoder box.

Before I could answer, his eyes drifted to the TV screen. A gray and silver image undulated into view.

“What the hell is that?” he asked, moving around to look closer. “Looks like a NASA transmission back from Tranquillity Base, but with, you know, some tentacled alien.”

He had his face inches from the screen.

“What are you into these days, Mr. Moreno?” Morris whispered.

“’Tis but Cleo,” I told him. “Recorded on quarter-inch magnetic tape.”

I then pointed across the room to the large fish tank.

“That is Cleo,” I said.

Morris ambled over and hunkered down. He rested his forehead on the glass and squinted in at my beloved pet octopus.   

“Cleo? But wasn’t that your dog?” Morris stood up and turned to me. “Wait. Is this Cleo, you know, after the Changes?”

“Don’t be absurd. It’s only a name.” I walked over and stroked the side of the aquarium. “A name I quite like. Cleo. Before my dog, I had a parrot. Guess what her name was?”

“I’m thinking that this isn’t just any squid.”

“It’s an octopus. Australian blue-ringed octopus.”

“Ah, an exotic, poisonous pet. Why am I not surprised? It’s not like Silverio Moreno would have fantail guppies. Too mundane.”

Seems we’d shifted from playful banter to glib barbs.

“Is this where I say, ah, Morris, how I’ve missed you?”

“Jesus, Sy.”

Morris stepped back and looked at me up and down. Then he scanned the huge apartment.

“Jesus,” he repeated, but in a tired whisper.

I watched him walk over to one of the conversation areas. He sunk down into a sofa and looked over at me. Now he looked older. Just a bit.

“The last time I saw you, Sy, you exploded.”

Ah, that.

“Were you blown clear?” he asked.

I crossed over and took a seat in an armchair.

“That was quite a day,” I admitted.

“I just…look, Sy, if I had thought for one second you were alive, I would have hung around.”

“No need to explain,” I told him.

“But it was such a strange day.” He furrowed his brow, bringing those memories back. I had a feeling he had been tormenting himself in this manner over the last few years. “The stegosaurus, the meteor coming down and destroying the production truck—”

“A meteor?” How awesome! I never knew a meteor had been involved.

“Well, that’s what it looked like to me.” Morris shook his head grimly. “And then that manuscript you said you had back in the motel.”

“Motel?” What was he going on about now? “Manuscript?”

“Our motel in Fort Stocked. The day of the explosion. You told me you had this manuscript of a book by this physicist.”

“Oh, right. Dr. Marjoko’s Anomalous Quantum Fluctuations and Scalar Field Instabilities and Their Role in the Manifestations of the Changes.” I had to laugh out loud. I was able to remember that ludicrous book title, but I couldn’t recall more than three of the Seven Dwarfs.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Morris said, leaning forward as if this was something important. “Someone had broken in to the motel room and stole it. So, clearly, I thought—”

“Please, Morris, don’t give it a second thought. I certainly wasn’t expecting you to bring me that old manuscript. The bottle of green liqueur was more than enough. Besides, that was ages ago.”

He was shaking his head, not wanting to let it go. Before he could start spinning out some patchwork of whatever stale conspiracy theories he had been cobbling together over the last few years, I made another attempt to let him know I held no grudge for whatever action he had done or imagined that he had done.

“Look, Morris, if you haven’t noticed, the world has quite literally changed since those days. The very fabric of reality rewoven with, for all we know, candy floss and corn silks.”

“I guess I’m just rattled,” he said. “You being alive and all.”

“Still in one piece,” I said, lifting up my arms so he could see, not just me, but the whole place. “Tip-top shape, and living at the top of the world. Well, top of San Antonio, but it’s a start.”

“From a dead man to a penthouse apartment.” Morris scanned my massive home—no doubt impressed.

I caught sight of a slight graying at the temples of his auburn hair. He must be about forty by now, but to me he was still that adventurous and reckless man in the full flower of youth.

“And beloved by millions,” I thought to add, to clarify my importance.

“Millions?” Morris’ eyes returned to me. “Are there that many people left?”

“That I don’t know,” I told him. “I don’t get out much these days. But they tell me our ratings have never been better. Of course, I’d like to think that millions of people are obsessing over me.”

We’d slipped back to the banter. Which was fine. I guess. But Morris was so cagey. And so damn serious. He probably thought he had something to do with that explosion. Perhaps he had. I knew that Sal believed Morris was responsible. Sal! Now that would be an interesting reunion.

And then I had an excellent thought.

“Please, Morris, tell me you’re looking for a job.”

“If you’ve been reduced to using that antique equipment,” he said, “I don’t know how useful I could be around here. But, sure, I have nothing but free time these days.”

“Tell you what, old chum, I’ll turn you over to my director, Hal. I’m sure he can use your help with the camera or audio departments. As for the vintage technology…it seems that after the Changes ended, there was nothing left but analog television cameras. And only live broadcast. Videotape, gone. Digital? Don’t even dream about it. We’re lucky we can broadcast in color.”

“But you’ve found a workaround.”

“Pardon?”

“Your reel-to-reel octopus footage.”

“Ah.” I turned in the direction of that the mess of wires and electronic components covering my kitchen island. The man must think I’ve gone bonkers. “Well, I’ve hit a wall in my knowledge of video technology. I was never the best student.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But you’re an excellent teacher.”

“What?” Me? Silverio Moreno teaching Morris Fisher about technology? Clearly he was making a joke, but it had zoomed right over my head.

“You taught me to dance.”

Ah, we were no longer talking about electronics. I would think he’d be curious as to why I was recreating the video tape recorder. But, no. Morris was reminiscing about that weekend trip we took years ago. Morris might be shy at times, but I’d always found a way to get him to loosen up. In fact, back in the day, he never questioned my impulsive plans—such as on that trip when we dressed up in cassocks and slow danced in the courtyard of Santa Fe’s historic San Miguel Chapel.

“It was windy that day,” I said, playing black in my mind that lovely memory. “And then there was that unexpected updraft.”

I did it! I could still make Morris Fisher blush. Clearly he also remembered that we hadn’t been wearing anything under those cassocks

“We shocked some tourists, as I recall,” he said with a wistful smile.

“Well, I probably should put away my little experiment for the time being,” I finally said, standing up. “I have a show to prepare for. I guess I should say, we. We have a show to prepare for.”

Morris stood up as well.

This was turning out to be a great day.

“So, Hal?” he said, switching gears into his professional persona.

“Yep. Take the elevator down one floor. Ask around.”

I opened a lacquered box on the coffee table and pulled out a neck lanyard with a card in a plastic pouch displaying the logo for my production company.

“Put this on and you’ll be official.”

As Morris slipped the credentials over his head, I wondered, what next? A hug? Handshake? High five?

Morris is an odd one. He’ll be, one moment, a chummy touchy-feely backslapper, and then an aloof hands-off stoic. The man takes intimacy entirely too seriously.

The hell with it. We’re grown men.

I slapped him on the buttocks and walked back to the kitchen island.

“Welcome to the team,” I said over my shoulder.

He returned to the elevator and headed back down.

That all went well. We’d established our roles.

Then I realized we had never spoken about Sal. The one topic we definitely should have covered. And more than that, we should have gone up to see her or called her down. She had as much emotional investment in Morris as I did—probably more.

I could imagine the scene now, her grousing on and on about how men are so caviler when it comes to the emotions of other people…the entire male gender’s obligate inability to recognize nuance and nicety.

What had she once said?

“Men are blunt, selfish heathens.”

Something like that.

So, should I go up to the roof? Tell Sal about the new developments? It’d be all tears and shouting, no doubt. The return of her old beau who had left our lives years ago without ever having said goodbye.

No. Best to let things develop at their own pace. Besides, I didn’t want my stomach in knots before I even had lunch. Conflict can kill an appetite.

But first, I needed to straighten up. Or at least put a tarp over my experiment so I wouldn’t get mustard over everything.

As I rewound the tape of that muddy and gray footage of Cleo, my Plan was taking on greater form and clarity. Still a bit fuzzy, granted. But with Morris back in the mix, I’d have things in a sharp focus in no time.

Right?

Absolutely! Nothing could stand in the way, now.

“I was being somewhat facetious,” Raul explained when I met him in the lobby of the Cottle Hotel. “On the phone, you asked me to name the restaurant, and well, I love the decor here, even if the food is so-so.”

I couldn’t help but smile. I liked this man.

“Fondu Fantasque?” I said, looking up at the sign above the entrance. “I’m game.”

“I know the owner.” Raul shrugged and gave me an almost shy smile. “He has a weakness for whimsical dining. His previous venture in this same space was called Crêpe Cod. But people in this city didn’t seem too excited about a fusion of pancakes and fried fish.”

The hotel lobby as well as the restaurant had all the elements of a Victorian gentleman’s club with the low lighting, polished dark-stained wood, and plump upholstered chairs. 

“For a fondu place, it seems quite upscale. I feel woefully underdressed, if not downright shabby.”

My leather jacket had seen better days. Probably I should have given it a good rubbing with some saddle soap and linseed oil. Raul put me to shame in his deep russet sport jacket and charcoal Merino turtleneck.

A slim young man in formal wear approached holding two menus. He escorted us to table in a book-lined alcove.

“It’s a casual town,” Raul said, lowering himself into his chair. “Besides, what you lack in finery, you more than make up in style. I like a man in a vintage aviator jacket. Is that a Boyville?”

The man had quite an eye, though I suppose it was his profession.

After we had ordered and been served a bottle of wine, Raul brought up our mutual friend.

“You said the other night you are a friend of Silverio’s?”

“Well, it’s been a few years since I’ve seen him. But, yes.”

“So you’re in the business as well?”

“The business?” I had to laugh. “You mean show business? It’s starting to sound like we’re in a movie.”

“Is the dialog becoming stilted?”

“Probably not,” I said with a shrug. “But I find that these days I keep overanalyzing my speech. You see, I went into seclusion for a few years. There it is, again. Seclusion. Who says that? I meant to say, I moved to a cabin in the mountains.”

“So romantic. Were you hiding from the law? Or maybe you’d taken up the life of a gentleman of leisure?”

Raul had a smooth and easy-going manner. I admired men like him. I try to be one myself, but I can never quite get it to work.

“You say that so well,” I confessed. “Gentleman of leisure. Outside of books, I only ever hear that phrase used as a sardonic euphemism. You know. A bum. And that would a be closer description. I just opted out when the Changes finally exhausted me. Moved out to my uncle’s hunting cabin. He had left a note on the little cork board by the door, where he kept his shopping list. It said that if any of his nephews—there’s three of us—were to drop by, we were welcomed to any or all of his possessions. He had departed for, he wrote, a Grand Tour of the Orient. People don’t use that word anymore, do they? Orient?”

Raul lifted his shoulders and eyebrows just enough to convey that he was not one to judge.

“There was plenty of oatmeal and military rations,” I said, continuing. “A shortwave radio. Which didn’t work. Some books. A set of bong drums. Those were the possessions I was welcomed to.”

I paused.

“But show business,” I said, bringing us back. “Yes. I have worked in the entertainment industry for some years.”

“Oh, I thought we’d gone off that topic. I’m still intrigued by your life in the outback.”

“I read the encyclopedia. Counted the stars. I ate a rattlesnake. Once. That about sums it up. I left because, well, I guess I got bored.”

“Then show business it is. Let me see.” Raul leaned in closer to me. I caught a whiff of a pleasant blend of vanilla and jasmine. “You’re no actor. Not enough poorly-concealed neuroses. I’d think maybe a stuntman, but you’re too spry. And you’re too flippant to be a director. Not self-absorbed enough for a writer. Too shabby—if I might use your language—for a producer. That leaves someone from the crew side of things. Yes. Clearly, you’re perceptive, very visual. So I’d say camera department.”

“I would say you’re the perceptive one,” I said, impressed. “You pegged me fast. I’ve worked as a camera operator and DP on more movies and TV shows than I’ll ever be able to recall.”

“I see so few people from the industry these days.” Raul nodded, and then he laughed. “Well, that’s patently wrong, isn’t it? I see them every day. But that’s just from the show I work on. Do people still even make movies or TV shows these days? Other than Serpientes y Escaleras, I mean. I’m not even sure if Los Angeles still exists. Sure, that’s where the Network officials say they come from when they make their unannounced visits. But try and talk to those people. Ask them, straight up, what other shows the Network produces? They’ll just stare at you with unblinking insect eyes. I’ve given up on all interactions with those people.”

Raul took a deep breath before continuing.

“Network. The Network. Like there’s just one. Maybe there is. It’s certainly true in this town. If Serpientes y Escaleras were to shut down, I don’t know what I’d do. Am I too old to wait tables?”

“You could move.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Even though they say the Changes are over, I’m nervous that it might still be crazy out there.”

“It seemed safe enough when I was traipsing across the prairie a couple weeks ago.”

“You know how I came to be in San Antonio?” Raul smiled, shaking his head. “I came here in the early days of the Changes, when things were just slightly weird. I had flown in to see my niece get married. It was a lovely ceremony. Afterwards, she and her new husband got out of town just in time—flew off to their honeymoon in Corfu. I had booked a flight back home to LA the next day. But during the night, it disappeared. The airport, that is.

“So, that was that. I was terrified to take the bus—who knew what might happen? I lost my apartment back in LA. And my job. I was head of the wardrobe department on The Price Is Right. I loved working on that show! I was purging thirty years of polyester turtlenecks, and neckties wide enough to park a buffet on. You’ve never seen so many flared trousers and aloha shirts! 

“But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t screw up the courage to try and make my way back home to California. That was the only work I knew. After college, my life revolved around film sets and TV studios. Before that, I was a boy living on a pistachio farm outside of Yucaipa.” Raul laughed. “Pistachio farm! I know, I know. Now I’m the one waxing romantic. The sad truth is, the pistachio isn’t a young person’s nut. My father witnessed a massive downturn of sales as, year by year, our dependable consumer base died of old age or were rotated off a solid food diet.”

“So, you were here in town when Sy started up his game show?”

“Serpientes? Yes. But I was here before then. When I gave up hope of getting back to LA, I found work as a production assistant on Saligia Jone’s psychic dating show. So, if you know Silverio, do you know Saligia?”

“I do. But, wait, are you talking about her show Silverio produced, Duplicity Revealed? I wouldn’t call that a dating show.”

“That one was before my time. This one was Procuress of the Heart. Saligia being the titular character. A psychic matchmaker. She helped the lovelorn contestant decide from a panel of eager suitors. A far cry from The Price Is Right, but it paid the bills. Silverio was on the books as producer of that one as well, even though no one had seen him in a couple of years. The rumor had it he was dead. But, obviously not, as he eventually moved to town to start up the game show. That was right around the time La Vida Tower disappeared.”

“Yeah, I heard something about that.”

“One day it went away like cigarette smoke wafting out a car window. Left a gaping hole where it had stood. And three days later, it came back.”

“Like Jesus?”

Raul laughed.

“I don’t know about that. But when the sun rose on day three, there it was, La Vida Tower. It looked, well, similar. A slightly different architectural style. Everyone seemed happy to have it back. I don’t know what happened to the people who were in it when it vanished. But when it reappeared the military moved in on it fast. Big army trucks and men in uniform surrounded the whole thing. No one allowed in or out.

“At some point, it was no longer the military overseeing the building. It was the Network. They hired Silverio to create a game show. They scrapped Saligia’s dating show and brought her on as host. And, what do you know, they needed someone to run the wardrobe department, so Saligia put in a good word, and here I am.”

“I understand that Sy has the entire top floor,” I said. “That’s quite a perk.”

“I suspect that man can be a firm negotiator. When the mood strikes.”

“And the two floors below that are the show’s studio and production offices, right? That’s what my friend said.”

“The maintenance woman?”

“Yeah. She also said there’s some sort of dormitory.”

“Dormitory? I guess so…in a manner of speaking. And even though the top three floors are given over to the show, the fact is, the Network controls the entire building.”

“This Network, it’s headquartered in Los Angeles?”

“That’s the narrative as they present it. Those Network people used to come to town on big black helicopters. A hold-over from the military connection, maybe? They’d land in Travis Park. But one day, that fancy bullet train appeared. And ever since, that’s how people arrive here from the outside world. By train.”

“That’s how I got here.”

“From California?”

“No. I snuck on the train when it stopped in a town in the desert near a glacier.”

“Ah, of course, one of the weird gifts of the Changes.” Raul smiled. “A glacier in the desert. Why not?”

“Fran said that you have an interesting theory about the Changes.”

“Ah,” Raul said, looking up as the waiter arrived. “I was thinking of the sirloin and Gruyère. For two.” He looked over at me.

“Sounds delightful,” I said, happy to have him order as I hadn’t even glanced at the menu.

“You’ve seen the show?” he asked once the waiter had left.

“That snakes and ladder game show? Well, I was in a bar right when I hit town. The show was on their TV. Mostly I was watching the people watching the TV. I’ve never seen people that engaged by a game show. I didn’t recognize Sy or Saligia. Not at first. Saligia never used to be so intense and, well, performative. She’s looking well. Do you do the hair and makeup on the show as well?”

“Just wardrobe. It sounds like you know her well.”

I didn’t feel like getting too deep explaining my, well, complicated relationship with Sy and Saligia, so I just nodded.

Raul kept looking at me.

“I was wondering,” he finally said, “if she always had that…gift?”

“Mind reading, you mean? I never spoke about it with her, really. It was her profession. The stuff of night clubs and birthday parties. No sane person believed in it. Of course the Changes happened, and now we have to pretty much believe in anything and everything. So, what the hell, maybe she can really do it. Maybe she has always been able to do it. I think too much about these sorts of things and I get sick to my stomach. This turning my back on critical thinking.”

“I’m the same.” Raul shrugged. “Anyway, that’s the central conceit of Serpientes y Escaleras. The mind reading element. Like yourself, I just take it in stride. Besides, it’s not the strangest thing that goes on with our game show.”

Ah, here we go.

“Do tell,” I prompted.

“Well,” Raul said, leaning across the table, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “Where do you think we get our contestants?”

I, too, leaned across the table until I was inches from Raul’s face. I lifted my eyebrows.

“Tell me, Morris,” he whispered, “how would you do it? Let’s say you produced the show.”

I nodded and leaned back in my chair.

“Well, the best way,” I said, thinking things through, “would be to hire professional actors. They’re dependable. Hit their marks, enunciate clearly. And they tend to respect a non-disclosure agreement. But if you guys are truly pulling random people from the audience, then I guess you’re putting out a general call for interested people to show up, like any other TV show with a live studio audience.”

Raul smiled and sat up straight.

“Oh, they show up,” he said. He paused to sip some wine. Then he leaned forward again to whisper. “We have two little rooms on the 28^th floor. About the size of closets. Curved inside. One could say egg-shaped. White. A kind of enameled metal, perhaps? Each has a single door. A handle like a walk-in refrigerator. There’s a rubber gasket around the edge of the door. And at the beginning of every day, there’s a light no bigger than your thumbnail that comes on at the top of each door. And when it begins to glow green, you can open that otherwise locked closet. The green light means that a new constant has arrived.”

“I see,” I said. Actually, I didn’t. “People materialize, you mean? Two every day?”

“Well,” Raul stretched the word out with a wry smile as he sat up straight. “Every Monday through Friday. Because, you see, those magical portals, or whatever they are, take the weekends off.”

“How civilized.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“And where do they come from?” I asked.

“No idea. You can try and ask them, but most are muddled in their thinking. The ones with clearer heads sometimes have memories that they died. So there’s that.”

“Okay,” I said, “I think I’ve got it. An office building in San Antonio is where the souls of the dead wait for their turn to be sent further on their journey into the afterlife…which is decided on the set of a TV game show. Seems rather gauche. But what do I know? Though, at two souls per day, five days per week, you guys’ll never catch up. That’s some heavy duty job security, I’d say.”

Raul smiled and buttered a piece of bread. We sat in silence for a moment. I’d learned to recognize the face of a man about to launch into a story. 

“Not so long ago,” Raul said, his voice quiet, “we had one of our contestants rush out of the studio while we were broadcasting the show. Just the other week, in fact. Right there in front of the cameras—the woman didn’t even wait for the commercial break. She managed to pry open a window out in the hallway and throw herself to her death. Fell to the pavement 300 feet below.”

Our silly banter had taken a turn. 

“My god! That’s horrible.”

“That all happened off camera, of course.”

“To her death,” I said in almost a whisper.

“Pardon?”

“I was echoing your words. I didn’t think that was a thing anymore.”

“Death, you mean? Well, I don’t know what else to call it. I helped Michael retrieve the contestant. That’s Michael Larkin, one of the Readers. Anyway, I wasn’t prepared for what we found down on the street. I should point out, I had never seen a dead body before. And, to be honest, I still don’t believe I have.”

I listened to Raul tell the story of the jumper, wondering if I would have any appetite left once our meal arrived.

Some of the things Raul spoke about I didn’t quite understand. Particularly the mind reading stuff. I’d seen Saligia do her routine years ago, but it didn’t in any way resemble her act on Serpientes y Escaleras. I had a difficult time imagining that somehow Saligia could mumbo-jumbo her way into the brains of the contestants and fish out incidents from their entire lives.

Raul explained, they weren’t supposed to be sent people whose lives or deaths were overly traumatic. This could be harmful to Saligia and her Readers. Of course if that were true, Raul mused aloud, that begged the question, who or what was on the other side of those portals deciding who to send through?

The contestant who jumped, it was learned, too late to do anything about it, had a history of mental illness. She had taken her own life before she appeared on the show.

For the time she spent at La Vida Tower waiting to be chosen as a contestant, she had no memory of her past life. But on the day she was picked, at some point towards the end of the broadcast, this woman experienced a moment of absolute lucidity. She saw her final moments, jumping to her death from a bridge. That was when she bolted, ran free of the studio, found that window, and leaped out.

The moment she rushed off set, Hal, the director, cut to a commercial. Michael ran after the contestant but wasn’t fast enough. He and Raul took the elevator down to the street.

“We weren’t the first on the street,” Raul said. “There were two men in short sleeve shirts with ties—can you imagine? Anyway, they seemed to be in charge. Michael rushed to them while telling me to keep any bystanders away. I caught a glimpse of the body. I didn’t see much, but I can tell you this, it wasn’t human.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s hard to explain. It was broken, yet it still had a form. But no…anatomy. No arms, no legs. The three of them—Michael and the other two—placed it into a sort of black zippered bag. I would have helped them carry it into the lobby, but the thing was small. And so light that one of the men wearing a tie was able to just tuck it under his arm. We all hurried inside and got on the elevator. The man with the zippered bag put it down on the floor. We rode up in silence. When the door opened on the 29th floor. Michael told the men in the ties that we’d take it from there. They stayed in the elevator. But here’s the thing. It took both Michael and me to lift that body bag from the floor. It—whatever was inside—had increased considerably in weight. Also, it had expanded as well—the bag bulged.”

Raul finished his wine and poured another glass before continuing.

“We took that bag into the studio. The audience members were still in their seats as a couple of our crew people did their best to distract them while Michael and I lugged the zippered bag into the little white room behind Door Number Two. And then the cameras came back on and Sy and Saligia and the rest of us finished off the final minute or two of the show, pretending all the while that there were still two contestants. The contestant who was still standing, you might say, was escorted through Door Number One, and both doors were slammed shut.”

“No one noticed?”

“About the fact that when we came back from commercial there was just one contestant? Well, you’re a camera man. You know how easy it is to fool an audience. It’s not what you show them as much as what you don’t show them.”

“And that thing in the bag. The body or whatever?”

Raul just shrugged.

“It went wherever. I suppose. To the same destination as those contestants who have been put into that cramped space always go. Once the door is shut. Goodbye. I believe her name was Connie.”

And at that, our food arrived. A large steaming caldron of melted cheese and two platters holding slivered beef and cubes of bread.

I was heartened that I still had my appetite.

In many ways Raul had said so much. I was afraid he must have broken any number of non-disclosure agreements.

On reflection, however, I had been given little in the way of answers. Only vague descriptions, each of which led to dozens of other questions.

“It seems like so much energy aimed at such an inconsequential thing,” I said. “Takes the show-must-go-on to a whole new level. Why even put her remains in that portal thing?”

“It’s where she was going to be placed all along,” Raul said with a shrug. “And she had to go somewhere. Besides, no one has any idea what might happen if each of those portal things isn’t utilized for its intended purpose every broadcast day.”

“So, if all the people in the audience have come through the portals, but only two arrive and two depart each day, why the extras? See what I mean? Your studio audience.”

“That’s how long it took to get the show up and running,” Raul said, leaning over to sniff eagerly at the pot of molten cheese. “The arrivals began to accumulate. To hear Sy explain it, that’s how he came upon the idea of a game show. They would be his live studio audience. So, by the time they had the studio outfitted, and the production ready to go, there were 23 extra arrivals.”

“Wait. 23?”

“Well, actually on the weekdays between the morning arrivals and the end of the broadcast, there’s 25.”

“No.” The math wasn’t adding up. “That’s not what I meant. If two arrive, and two depart. Shouldn’t there always be an even number?”

“I should think so.” Raul smiled and picked up a skewer. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

Raul dipped a cube of toasted bread into the bubbling cheese.

The other night when my memory fully returned I decided to tour my environs in a more methodical manner. I waited until all of my co-contestants—my fellow prisoners—were fast asleep in their simple little rooms. The lights, during those late night hours, burned at half-intensity. The lounge and corridors took on a cozy quality. A young man, whose name I didn’t know, was available to us if anything unusual came up. Sort of an orderly, I guess, with basic medical skills. He spent most of his shift lounging on a sofa in the nurse’s office reading or napping.

I carried with me a half-eaten apple so it appeared I had innocently got out of bed to enjoy a midnight snack. It proved unnecessary. No one noticed me.

It only took me a several minutes of canvasing my prison to learn that there were only three locked doors—well, other than those two metal portals down the corridor marked arrivals. The one for the stairwell that led up to the studio. Then there was one at the far end of the lounge through which I’d been able to catch a glance a time or two. It opened onto a lobby where I had seen a pair of polished steel elevator doors. And finally there was a door just past the wardrobe department that appeared to lead into a corridor of office suites.

All of the doors were fitted with the same model Hammett-Glaze mortise locks. I’d gotten past such locks before, but only using my own pick set. Possibly I could scrounge around and fashion something that might work. The doors themselves were heavy slabs of solid oak. Except the double doors that led up to the studio. Those were cheap hollow core construction, usually used on closets. It’d be noisy to break through them. I also noticed that the hinge pins were accessible. I could get a butter knife and a can of Spam from the kitchen and knock them free in two minutes, tops. But, again, it’s not quiet work.

If I could chose, it would, or course be the door to the elevators.

The talk I’d heard about a woman jumping out a window to her death suggested we were on an upper floor of a tall building. Early on, I had been under the impression we were deep underground. Maybe because of the whole afterlife conceit of the TV show. As well as the lack of visible sunlight.

So, an elevator was what I wanted. Or stairs—going down.

My earlier thought that maybe we were back in time—that damn candy bar Silverio Moreno was eating—no longer had the slightest sway over me. Everything about the place fit solidly into a 21st century office building. Drop ceiling acoustical tiles. Fluorescent lights. Vents for an HVAC system. Standard American electrical outlets.

Nothing out of the ordinary about the place. Well, except those arrival pods. And me—a dead man.

The air vents were too small to consider as escape options. And though the ceiling tiles above would in no way support my weight, I decided to see if the inner walls of the offices and corridors went all the way to the true ceiling. In most tall modern office buildings the inner walls do not support the structure.

I hopped up on the long table where they laid out our daily breakfast buffet and gave myself some added height by standing on a plastic chair with tubular legs. With slow and soft movements I pushed up one of the white fiber tiles and slid it aside. Directly above I saw a heavy iron pipe. I gripped it tight and raised myself up until my head and shoulders were in the dark cavity above the ceiling of the lounge.

I found nothing of note. The dead space was about three feet high with enough ambient light from the gaps in the fluorescent fixtures. And, yes, the walls did indeed go all the way up.

Yet I lingered. My feet dangled above the buffet table as I supported myself by my strength alone. The sensation was marvelous! I pulled myself up another inch. Two. I did a series of pull ups, amazed at my physical strength. It was a far cry from those last weeks in the hospital when I could barely lift a spoon to my mouth. And I wondered, had I ever been so strong? Even in my youth? So…vibrant?

As I hung there, I wondered what I should do now that I had been given a wholly unexpected second chance at life?

Well, first I had to get out of this place.

I needed a plan.

I replaced the tile, put the chair back at a table, and returned to my room. Maybe a good night’s sleep would clear my mind even more.

###

I had made a decision to avoid the drugged food they served us in the hopes that my senses would become sharper. I had learned it was easy enough to grab fruit and chocolate bars from the kitchen throughout the day, so that would do to keep my strength up, at least for the immediate future. But I didn’t want to arouse suspicion, so the following day I headed to the lounge along with the rest of the group for our daily scheduled breakfast.

The line moved at a slow shuffle as we filed into the kitchen, were given our trays, our food, and then each of us made his or her way to a table. Today I chose a suitable dining companion, a large muddle-headed man who usually sat by himself. He barely noticed as I periodically added my food—discreet spoonful at a time—to his plate, until he had finished his breakfast as well as mine.

When it occurred to me—back before my memory returned—that the meals were drugged, I accepted it. Looked forward, even, enjoying the languid subtle stupor.

After depositing my tray and empty plate on the shelf outside the door the kitchen, I walked over to a sofa where Rose sat holding a clipboard. When I sat in a chair beside her, she looked up from filling out some sort of form.

“I think I’m here because I died,” I said to her.

She looked up. Seeing who it was, she put the cap on her pen and tucked it behind her ear.

“That’s quite a thing to say. Does this mean your memory is coming back?”

I was curious how she might respond to such a confession. There was curiosity in her face, along with something else I couldn’t immediately place.

“There are some things I remember,” I lied—because I now remembered everything. “Every day, I seem to remember more. And I distinctly have this image of myself in a hospital room. That’s the last memory. Well, before here.”

“But things are still cloudy?”

“Yes. But I have this strong impression I was very sick. Terminally ill.”

“I’m wondering,” she said slowly, measuring her words, “that time between the hospital bed and waking up in our arrival room, any memories from that time? Impressions?”

Curiosity and fear. That was it. Curious about my experiences. And fearful of me. She was afraid of me. She hadn’t been like this around me—guarded, cautious—back before my memory had returned.

Could it be that her change in attitude—her new behavior toward me—was connected to the return of my memory? I must admit that I now had vivid recollection of so many things I had done in the course of my life she would no doubt find unsavory, or even terrifying.

Of course, I had to take a moment to process my new line of reasoning. Did that mean I now believed that psychic powers were possible? I suppose I had to at least give consideration to that possibility, taking into account I now believed I had been resurrected from the dead.

Of all the things that I currently found troubling and concerning—death, rebirth, the passing of moral judgement—she wanted to know about something relatively inconsequential. My journey through that limbo separating death from life anew.

Her curiosity on metaphysical matters held no interest to me. Besides, there was still a gap in my memory, and even if I had wanted to, I could not have answered her question. Maybe one day I would ponder that time I had spent between the then and the now.

Before I could think of a suitably vague reply, I saw one of those locked doors open. The door with the elevators on the other side. Dr. Hetzel entered along with Michael trailing behind. Michael spotted Rose and said something to the doctor before heading over to us.

“I have to think that August is your favorite,” he said to Rose. “You’re going to make the rest of the contestants jealous.”

Rose managed a smile. It was clear she didn’t care for Michael.

“I thought I might go across the street to the new coffee place,” he said to her. “Want to come along?”

“I can’t,” she said. “Busy day for me.”

“It must be nice,” I said quietly. “Just to be able to go through that door out into the world. Enjoy a cup of coffee.”

I had planned to keep a low profile as I put together my plan of escape. But time was important if I wanted to avoid eventually being chosen to play that idiotic game show. I wanted to see what might slip out if I threw these people off balance.

And my words indeed did have that effect on the both of them, especially Michael.

His eyes widen in confusion. Then he smiled with wonderment as if watching a dog who had begun to walk about on its hind legs. Without taking his eyes from me he lowered himself into the sofa beside Rose.

“Don’t worry,” Michael said to me in a decidedly smug and patronizing tone. “You’ll get out soon. Every day your chances increase.”

Was there a hint of a threat?

I was about to set Michael straight on embracing a common fallacy concerning statistics, but before I could open my mouth, Rose spoke. Also concerning statistics, but from another angle.

“That’s funny,” Rose said to Michael. “I’ve also been thinking about chance, and its relationship to the length of our contestants’ tenure here.”

“What are you talking about?” Michael asked.

“I was going through the records.” She flipped to a page at the back of her clipboard and tapped at some equations I couldn’t quite make out from where I was seated. “We’ve been on the air for 423 shows. That’s 846 contestants who have been chosen. The longest anyone has spent waiting, from arrival to departure pod, has been seventeen days. Doesn’t that seem—”

“Statistically unlikely?” I asked, looking at Rose. “Extremely, so. Of course, I assume the game’s rigged. Isn’t that in keeping with the entertainment industry?”

Michael looked at me as if for the first time.

“I’d think the real question is,” I continued, “why are contestants not allowed to linger?”

I saw Ida from the corner of my eye as she crossed the processing lounge.

“Perhaps we should ask her,” I said, pointing. It was my attempt to sow some seeds of disharmony.

My words didn’t give me the results I expected. Michael stood up with the fervor and alacrity of a puppy spotting his master.

“Oh,” he said, immediately forgetting about me. “I have to go talk to Ida about some new marketing ideas I have.”

As Michael turned to head off, my hand shot out, dipped into his trouser pocket. My speed and dexterity even impressed myself. No one noticed as I pulled out his key and unhooked it from the clip on his belt loop. I transferred the key to my own pocket as Rose watched Michael walk away.

Michael always followed in the wake of someone else. Some superior whose favor he was currying. I gambled on two things. One, when Michael realized he no longer had his key, he would not remember when he last used it. Two, Michael would not admit to having lost something so important—probably he would himself steal a replacement, no doubt from an inconsequential underling.

“I’m sorry,” Rose said to me. “Michael’s something of a—”

“Buffoon?”

She laughed. Then she said something about having a busy schedule and excused herself.

423 shows. That was a new piece of information. Was it useful? I had no idea. But it hardly mattered now, I thought, resting a finger on the outside of my pocket feeling the outline of the key.

The ASES, or, the All-Seeing Eye Society, met every Wednesday night in the basement of an old building downtown. Now that I was known to the group, or more specifically, to the elderly woman in the wheelchair who stationed herself at the end of the shadowy marble-tiled corridor, I was allowed to bring a guest.

I pulled out my membership card with the society’s logo of that flying eyeball in the clouds. I held up the card, but the woman was looking at my face and not my card.

“Ah,” she said, smiling up at me. “You’re Fran’s friend from the other night. I never forget. And,” she pointed a bony finger towards Nora, “I see that you’ve brought a new initiate into our conclave of brethren and sistren. Another who seeks the truth.”

“I’m so happy to be here,” Nora said with a little curtsy.

“We’ll fix you up with your own membership card.” The woman turned to the folding table beside her and opened a small polished teak box. She removed a card which she gave to Nora. “No dues to be paid, no oaths to be made.” She passed Nora a pen. “Please, write your name on the verso. I’ll avert my head while you write. We respect anonymity.”

“That’s so sweet,” Nora chirped. She scribbled on the back of the card and slipped it into the breast pocket of her coverall.

The woman pulled from the side pocket of her wheelchair a bedraggled peacock feather, which she then waved feebly in the air above Nora’s head. Once the simple ritual was complete, she gestured for us to enter the meeting hall.

I felt somehow slighted, as no one had given me a feather benediction.

The grand wood-paneled room was dimly lit by a pair of red crystal chandeliers high above. The maroon carpet muffled our footsteps as we made our way past the rows of folding chairs which faced a slightly raised stage. I counted seventeen people scattered about the room on the hundred or so chairs. We chose a couple of chairs in the back row, near a table holding a large coffee urn and a solitary box of cookies.

We sat in silence, surrounded by the polite murmuring of conversations. I felt Nora’s elbow in my ribs.

“Falafel man,” she hissed. “Two o’clock.”

I tilted my head. There in the front row was Charlemagne DeWinter, unmistakable in his fez and rose-tinted glasses.

“I do believe you’re right,” I said.

I looked around the room and saw some other familiar faces from my previous visit.

“Remember how I told you the other day that they shoot a TV show in my building?” Nora’s voice remained low, still in her conspiratorial whisper.

“Sure.”

“Well, that man walking in right now works on the show.”

“Well, of course,” I said, absently. “You’d probably know them all by now.”

“What?”

“Because of your job,” I clarified. “I mean, everyone has to get on the elevator.”

“Now wait just a minute!” Nora’s voice rose as she cut her eyes at me. “I told you, I’m a technician. I’m not some darn operator, trapped in a little room all day, tipping my hat, morning sir, morning madam, what floor will it be? I’m a trained and respected specialist, servicing the upper transoms, greasing the back sides of the landing doors, checking the cable tension of the car slings. Yesterday we had to shut down shaft B, and I was hanging by a harness for about an hour tightening the bolts to the guide rail bracket. I’m an integral part of building operations, sir. Integral!”

“Of course.”

“He’s Raul,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“The man who just came in. Well, he’s sitting down, now. Right next to our friend, Charlemagne Falafel.”

“You say he works on that Serpientes y Escaleras show?”

Once this fellow Raul had situated himself next to the falafel vendor, he immediately became as nondescript as the folding chair in which he sat—the danger that comes from sitting beside someone much more flamboyant than yourself. But, when I looked closer, I saw there was something special about Raul. Handsome, certainly, with his pleasant face and dark complexion. And undeniably distinguished with a touch of gray at his temples and the stylish taper to his sport coat.

“Yes,” Nora said. “He works on the show. Costume department. Raul Somethingorother. Probably I could track down his last name.”

“I believe we’re to respect everyone’s anonymity here,” I cautioned her, at the very moment Fran walked up and clapped me on the back.

“My good friend, Morris! I see you’ve brought a guest.”

“I have,” I told him. “Fran, allow me to introduce—” I reached into Nora’s pocket and removed her All-Seeing Eye Society membership card. I suspected she was playing at being someone else. I turned it over and read aloud: “Shelvia Woolridge.”

“Well, Ms. Woolridge, or if I may, Shelvia—don’t really use surnames here—we have a treat in store for you tonight.” Fran gave her a wink. “Our guest speaker has some intriguing theories to challenge and perplex your worldview. Oh, and it looks like it’s time for the presentation!”

Fran hurried off.

“Maybe it’s going to be your friend from the show,” I said to Nora.

“I’m betting on the falafel guy,” she said, taking her membership card back from me.

“I doubt it. He spoke at the last meeting. It was all about the impending arrival of our alien overlords.”

“Looks like we’re both wrong,” Nora whispered, nodding her head towards the man walking down the aisle towards the lectern.

He was rail-thin, and in his hopsack blazer and light blue speckled cravat, he radiated the air of a southern lawyer. He moved with the focused energy of a younger man, but when he reached the front of the room, I saw him wince as he climbed the two steps to the stage on arthritic joints.

There was a scattering of polite applause.

Fran arrived too late to assist the guest speaker, but he crossed the stage with the older man. They both stood at the lectern for a moment, waiting for the room to fall silent.

“What a nice turnout this evening,” Fran said into the microphone. He scanned the audience with approval. “Most of you in this room have known me for years, but I do see a few fresh faces. And to those I say, welcome. My name is Francis, but please call me Fran. The All-Seeing Eye Society is run strictly by volunteers, so, if you have a small donation to cover our refreshments, there’s a little jar on the table beside the coffee carafe. Our restrooms are out the door, and immediately to the left. And for those newcomers, we do all hope you return. Think of this room as a zone of tolerance for all ideas, no matter how far-fetched or implausible. As we all know, we live in implausible times. No doubt we all have people in our lives with no interest in our inquiries as to what has happened to the world. They care little when we speak of our notions concerning the Changes.”

Morris saw heads bobbing, and he heard murmurs of agreement.

“That’s why our organization is important,” Fran continued. “Without the All Seeing Eye Society, we would—each one of us—feel so very alone. Of course there are other groups scattered about. But they are narrow in their assessment as to what is going on—or, what they gather is going on. And because most of those groups hold deeply dogmatic tenants, they seem to many of us in this room as religions more than anything else. But we are seekers, not zealots. Each one of us gathered tonight might have strong feelings of one theory above another as to the true nature of the world after the Changes, but not one person who I have met and spoken to in this room feels he or she has a complete picture. So, please, listen with an open mind to our guest speaker. Some of his words, his ideas, might be just what you came here tonight to hear. Without further preamble, allow me to introduce Warren P.”

As Fran backed away, giving a slight bow to the audience, the guest speaker stepped to the lectern.

“Warren P.,” the man muttered with a smile. “Makes me feel like we’re in some sort of support group. Which I guess we are. My name’s Warren Pruitt. I’m an electrical engineer and software developer by trade. Not much call for such work these days, so I suppose I’m retired.

“Me being up here in front of you fine folks has been a long time coming. I’ve known Fran for a years. He’s been chipping away at my resolve. And, well, here I am.”

Warren paused a moment to look down at Fran who had made himself comfortable in a chair on the front row.

“Back before the Changes,” he said, continuing, “I worked in a government-funded lab known as the Center for Quantum Information and Control. And now the laboratory, and, to the best of my knowledge, the United States of America, are no longer viable institutions, I feel I am no longer bound by the raft of non-disclosure forms I signed during my tenure.”

I noticed that most of the audience members leaned forward in silent fascination, ready to learn classified secrets. I realized I was doing the same.

“We were tasked with utilizing an obscure property of quantum coupling so we might observe particles or events below the Planck length,” he continued. “I called this property quantum lensing. Co-authored a paper on it, even. There was the possibility that we might discover that we do not live in a naturally occurring universe, but in fact inside a computer simulation. Strange to think that trained men of science would pursue such questions for a living. Now if all this sounds bizarre, you don’t know quantum mechanics.”

Warren chuckled, looking out into the audience as would a standup comedian who had just delivered a dependable punchline.

“Oh my goodness,” Nora whispered in my ear. “He’s adorable!”

“Put aside, for a moment, the existential implications. We were not concerned with matters of philosophy. We were engineers. Besides, if we proved that the universe was a vast digital simulation, the practical applications to be exploited were absolutely staggering. Of course, that was a big if. You see, this could only exist if space-time were quantized, meaning that at some infinitesimally short duration, time was discrete. Can you imagine that? That the universe might be composed of an outrageously large number of frozen moments, like a multidimensional flip book?

“It was all fringe theory, I should make this clear. We had no real expectations that it would turn out to be true. Indeed, the study was wrapping up, with no interesting data discovered. To the very outer limit of our technology, there seemed no indication that space-time was quantized. Even using my quantum lensing techniques. We were just at the point of putting to rest once and for all the notion of a simulated universe, when the Changes happened.

“Now, we all know, it’s hard to get any two people to agree on what happened during the early, chaotic days of the Changes. It seems like each one of us has had unique experiences, often quite divergent from others. This makes it difficult to generate a robust empirical model, phenomenologically speaking. What I, personally, can attest is that in our laboratory we began to witness what appeared to be an emerging quantization of time. A granular quality began to coalesce around 7 femtoseconds. This phenomenon had not been there before. But it was real, I assure you. We had a sister lab in Sweden replicate our results. This was April of 2020. Before any of the anomalous manifestations that soon came to dominate everyone’s life. This was two or three weeks before all hell began to break loose.”

My attention began to wander sometime around the phrase “an emerging quantization of time,” and as Warren Pruitt began delving into a version of string theory with “eleven spatial dimensions, and two temporal dimensions,” I was wondering if I could manage not to attract too much attention with a trip to the snack table.

Nora seemed of the same mind. We both rose to our feet and snuck to the back of the room. As we sipped coffee and nibbled on cookies we watched the audience mesmerized by the man at the lectern. He began to expound upon his theory, speculating that before the Changes, we all lived in a simulation.

“A video game of such sophistication as to be beyond human comprehension. That’s why we missed it in the lab. It had been running at such a level of speed and complexity that our equipment couldn’t detect it. And then something happened. System failure? User error? It was like playing some seamless 3D video game with 128-bit graphics and something happened and everything dropped to an 8-bit processing rate. Anyone here remember Space Invaders? Of course, such analogies are moot. Computer games are all gone, now. Thanks to the Changes. Gone like the internet and the compact disc.

“It’s unsettling, I know, to think that each one of us is in actuality an artificial mind generated by ones and zeros. Whether we have free will or not, I have no idea. But I am convinced that before the Changes we shared this simulated world with millions, billions of people who weren’t people. Not sentient like us. What is it that the kids would call the characters who moved around their computer games like so many extras in a movie scene? Non-player characters? Yes. NPCs for short. And I would postulate that as those novel and irrational events—what we called the Changes—were a clear indication that somewhere outside of our universe, perhaps in some other dimension, something had gone wrong. Something went screwy on that super-duper supercomputer running our cosmos. Hardware, software? Maybe a power outage? That system failure reduced our universe to only the real players—the sentient ones. Us. All of those secondary characters in our lives had all been deleted, purged from the memory. Those cities and countries we had never visited? Gone. Were they ever there at all? And for the worst period of the Changes, before the chaos settled down—well, for the most part—we were at the whims of the principal players, those of us who remained. All of the nonsense we might believe in became manifest, be it ghosts, telepathy, even house cats with the power of human speech. There were no safeguards in the programming.”

He paused for a moment to let his words sink in.

“Well,” Warren said, scanning the room. “I was asked to set aside time for questions from the audience.”

Immediately half a dozen hands shot up.

“Don’t you want to raise your hand?” Nora asked. “Get some clarification?”

“About talking cats? Or quantum lensing?”

Before Nora could respond, Fran walked up, leaning in to snag a cookie.

“Some wonderful words, wouldn’t you agree?” he asked us both.

“I do believe you said the same thing last week,” I said, “about that Charlemagne fellow and his alien theories.”

“I did indeed. An open mind will not stagnate. And as we live in wondrous times, it stands to reason that a multiplicity of small truths might move us to the greater truth.” Fran pivoted around and looked out across the room. He lifted a hand in a paternal manner. “Each of us has a piece to the puzzle. See that gentleman down front? The one I was sitting beside?”

“Raul?” Nora asked.

“So you’ve met him,” Fran said, eyeing Nora with newfound respect. “He has some very interesting information. He’s hesitant, but I’ll get him on stage eventually. And I’ll have you each at the podium, too. Just watch.”

At that point, voices were being raised at the front of the room.

Fran hurried away from us.

Nora and I followed.

A young man stood on the floor at the edge of the stage looking up at the speaker.

“So, let me get this straight, Pruitt,” he was saying with his hands on his hips. “All the people who have disappeared because of the Changes were, what was the phrase, non-player characters? Just some digital fabrications? Little more than set design? Well, I can assure you, my grandmother was nothing of the sort. She was sound in mind, body, and spirit when she vanished during the Changes. Not only will I not have some armchair theorizer slander my family’s good name, I will also not quietly sit here as you gin out some preposterous speculations which are so easy to disprove!”

Fran stepped up on stage and eased himself beside Warren Pruitt so he could speak into the microphone.

“I think we’ve run out of time for this evening’s convocation. Let’s have a big round of applause for Warren P.”

Mr. Pruitt bowed to the warm applause and left the stage.

“I should remind our audience,” Fran continued, “it is unlikely that any one of our speakers will bring with him or her the single and complete answer to the questions we all have. We share ideas, here. This is a forum for the free exchange of information.” Fran looked down at the young man who still held his ground at the edge of the stage. “And if anyone has any issues with the content of these meetings, please discuss them privately with myself or Ms. Maribel V., who you meet at the door.”

The young man snorted at that and walked off.

“There are still plenty of refreshments at the back of the room,” Fran said. He then added something about raffle tickets before he left the stage.

I decided to sit down in an empty chair next to Raul. Nora remained standing just a few feet away, watching me with mild curiosity.

“I understand we have a mutual friend,” I said to the man beside me.

Raul blinked. He realized he was being spoken to, and he turned around.

“Pardon?” Raul looked at me, scanning my face, my hands, my clothes. And then he noticed Nora.

“Ah,” Raul said with a smile. He then raised his voice loud enough so she could hear as well. “If it isn’t the assistant to the building superintendent at La Vida Tower.”

“Elevator technician will do just fine,” Nora said with a dip of her head.

“Oh, no,” I corrected Raul. “Not her.”

“Hey!” said Nora, crossing her arms.

“I’m speaking of Silverio Moreno.”

“Well,” Raul said with a wry smile. “A friend of Silverio Moreno? A rare bird, indeed, I’d think.”

“Morris Fisher,” I said, giving him my name.

Raul introduced himself, as well, and he shook my hand.

“And this is Shelvia,” I said.

“Shelvia is my All-Seeing name,” Nora said. “My real name is Nora.”

“Of course it is,” Raul said with a warm grin. “It’s stitched on your coveralls.”

“What?” She blushed when she looked down and saw Nora embroidered on her chest.

“Fran was telling me you have some interesting theories about the Changes,” I said to Raul.

“Silverio Moreno, Rose, and now Fran? Sir, it looks like we have quite a few friends in common. As for my so-called interesting theories, well, that seems quite a stretch. What I would enjoy, would be the opportunity to discover what other people or things we might have in common. Let’s meet for drinks or dinner some evening.” He scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me. Then he stood up. “However, it’s getting late, and I’m no night owl.”

Raul patted me on the shoulder, gave Nora a gentlemanly bow, and he politely excused himself.

“Had enough of the All-Seeing Eye Society Tonight?” I asked, turning to Nora.

“Let’s give it ten more minutes. The angry guy’s still skulking around. He’s gonna sucker punch Mr. Pruitt any minute, wanna bet?”

“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.”