It’s what no one tells you. Drop-line wrapped around your arm. Shoulder dislocated. How the ocean 220 feet down is like leaving your body, your memories of last week and last year, your ideas of sunlight, your wife and kids, your prognosis, your bearings, your basic arithmetic, your up versus down—leaving it behind, all of it, because you have no other choice. At that depth, with your tri-mix running out, you have to be ready and willing to shed everything you hold dear, the clothing that made you real, your exteriors and your way of speaking, your Saturday interests that other people recognized you by, every goal you ever entertained no matter how far-fetched, like finishing a second doctorate in anthropology and learning how to play spinning glass bowls with wet fingers and traveling from the Black Sea coast to Istanbul in a hot air balloon, all the dressing up of a life that clings to you as much as you cling to it. You have to be willing to let it fall away from you at depth, every part of it, without resistance. For this is no soft interworld of blue-gray inner space or low atmosphere prelude to outer space or idyllic Sargasso Sea painted slapdash one afternoon by an impressionist. This is how you approach an ending where the only sound is the hush of air through your regulator on each short breath to preserve your time, whatever that means now, and the bubbles escaping, the carbon dioxide you have to let out, one less circulation of air in the meticulous universal accounting of all the circulations you’ve been granted since birth. You approach twilight at 220 feet like sitting at a small round table in an empty jazz club waiting for the band to come back when you know they’ve already left for the night. They left hours ago and aren’t coming back.

Bottom time after an 8-minute descent is 15 minutes and you’ve been there now for 40 minutes and your dive partner, your friend, your teammate of 20 years, godfather to your son is lying motionless on his back on the hull of the overturned yacht beneath you. There is no time for grief. There is no time for hindsight. There is no time for reviewing your life and replaying all the poor decisions and revising the stupid things that came out of your mouth. But more importantly, there is no time for the 15 stops you need on the way back up that would allow the nitrogen and helium to safely leave your body. While you could emergency launch yourself to the surface by filling your buoyancy vest, you’d likely be dead by the time you got there or shortly thereafter from your lungs overexpanding and the embolisms that come with it, air forced into your bloodstream heading straight for your brain and heart, helium and nitrogen bubbles like a disturbed ant colony swarming out of every body tissue and lodging in places they shouldn’t be, every joint, every artery, every vertebra.

The mission as they laid it out shoreside seemed straightforward, stepwise, blueprinted with if-then solutions to all conceivable crossed wires, debris snags, equipment failures, and mathematic miscalculations, everything except for the magnetic anomalies, the geomagnetic spikes that kept cropping up around the Catalina Terrace. Nothing you could do about them, but the specialists assured us they had poured over the data and picked the right window. These magnetic field variations corresponded to sharp increases in sea floor density, 5 to 10-minute peaks of concentrated gravitational force across a mile-wide area which the navy speculated had caused the sinking of at least fifteen small vessels around Catalina Island over the past few years, including the 65-foot Irwin yacht Bellina upside down beneath us. Most of the peaks hit during the winter and spring months and only a few occurred between July and September. The threat assessment that Sunday morning in August remained low. Sky clear, wind non-existent, sea traffic at a minimum, no amplitude increases that sometimes predicted the spikes.

So we splashed in at 0800, ready with our well-rehearsed entry and exit path: descend to the bottom on the buoy line and swim up into Bellina. Its stern had lodged in the sea floor at a slight angle that would allow just enough of an opening if we removed our tanks and vests, dragging them in behind us. Once inside, we only had to swim 20 or 30 feet to the master stateroom where we would search for the target, either in the under-berth drawer beneath the main bed platform or in the room’s safe. We brought an exothermic cutter in the event Grayson had stashed it in the safe. The cutter now lay beside John on top of the hull. Topside had gone quiet. Surface, can you hear me, John’s gone. They couldn’t. No was coming.

It happened toward the end of our descent, so fast you could only react by reflex. A little less than 40 feet to go to Bellina’s hull and the baitfish around us scattered. We felt a deep vibration, a rumble, what an underwater earthquake might feel like. The moment I felt it, I knew. I wrapped the buoy line three times around my left arm and yelled to John “spike!” but he only had one hand lightly touching the line and the massive gravitational surge yanked him off it like a leaf in a tornado, sucking him down at a speed I estimated at 50 miles an hour, slamming him against the fiberglass hull of Bellina. My shoulder separated. I screamed into my regulator. It felt like a giant had wrapped its arms around my legs and was doing everything it could to pull the rest of my body away from that line-wrapped arm. Everything went dark as if I had slipped under with anesthesia without counting backward from 5.

When I regained consciousness, I flailed in my disorientation. Pain knifed through the left side of my body, reminding me of how much trouble I was in. I went straight for my SPG. 600 psi. I tapped the gauge. 600 psi. Not enough gas to get back to the surface. You’re taught in SEAL training that if you know you’re not going to make it, if you’ve exhausted all your options, you do whatever you can to complete your mission. It was the same way with my gall bladder cancer, my oncologist placing his hand on my shoulder, telling me it was Stage IV. Mission above all else. We would do what we could until the end. I had a mesh lift bag. I had a knife. If I could get down to it, the thumb drive in that safe or drawer would set us up pretty well for off-world exploration and military superiority for the next 100 years. They didn’t tell us what was on the drive, but my guess and the whispers around it pointed to schematics for an anti-gravity propulsion system that Bill Grayson had designed during his time with Reed Aerospace, reverse engineered from downed UAPs and one in particular in the Taurus mountains of Turkey, the size of a football field, so large it couldn’t be moved, where the propulsion system underneath the object had remained untouched, pristine since it had come down like Bellina on its crown.

I cut my dangling left arm free from buoy line and floated down like a jellyfish, past John, to the sea floor, my head lamp cutting a path. The opening underneath Bellina appeared larger than the ROV mapping suggested so I didn’t need to remove my equipment to slide in. Using my right arm to pull myself along, I navigated down the narrow hall toward the master stateroom, pausing to push away sheets of fiberglass batting from the ceilings and walls and going slow so my tanks didn’t snag on the exposed electrical wiring and I didn’t catch myself on the two detached doors I passed or the splintered wood coming in at dangerous angles or the broken railings. Once inside the stateroom, I reached up to the bed over me and found the drawer handle set close to the floor, now the ceiling. When I pulled it out, folders, papers, and two spiral notebooks drifted down—and a red flash drive. I grabbed it, put it in my vest pouch, and checked my SPG. 400 psi. At 7 atmospheres breathing at .5 cubic feet per minute with about 10 cubic feet of air left, I had about 5 minutes. I hurried.

When you know it’s getting close to the end, the cold of the ocean at depth presses in, the chill carving its way through your dry suit to your skin until there is no escaping its blade, every inch of you shaking uncontrollably, but also with a tranquil inevitability, a peace of mind you can only experience immediately after the trauma of being born and just before body and mind reach their final small stretch of runway. Nothing bright just yet, only that infinite field of blue-gray twilight and the cold. I placed the drive in the mesh lift bag and was about to pull the red trip line that would pierce the CO2 cartridge and inflate it when I sensed something behind me. I turned and there within arms-length hovered a yellow and brown spotted Goliath Grouper, the largest I had ever seen, 8 feet long. With the smallest flicks of her fins, she floated in place, mouth parted slightly, yellow unblinking eyes locked on mine. I closed my eyes and felt her presence, a very old intelligence, somehow part of me and part of the same force that shook the seabed and dragged John down to his end and which now ushered me to the edge of mine.

No.

The word, a drip of lava, burned a red-yellow streak through me as it fell down across the screen of my mind into my chest and stomach.

No.

I loosened the top of the mesh beg and took out the thumb drive, holding it between my thumb and forefinger, now almost void of feeling, my hand shaking. The Goliath, statuesque, opened her mouth a little wider. I flicked it toward her, the drive tumbling in slow-motion, end-over-end, toward her jaw. She lurched forward, snapped it up, and swam off in the direction she had come from, vanishing into the blue-gray expanse.

The breaths I could take from my regulator grew shorter and shorter and I began sinking back down to the sea bed. I waited for the illumination they promised, a signal as if from a distant lighthouse, blinking then solid, then blinding, wrapping its cold fire around me until I was fully saturated in it, indistinguishable from it. Reuniting or restarting, traveling out over the Catalina Shelf. Once beyond, plummeting down thousands of feet into the unseen world, twilight now a full flat darkness without sound. I would come to rest at some point, having let go of my tanks and dry suit along the way and the boundary of form and shape. They all would be waiting for me there at the bottom to tell me I had done okay. I had done what I was meant to do.

You can listen to the cinematic version of this story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and here on Substack.

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The Memo

Date: February 26, 1976
To: Mr. Jacob Byrne, Director of Fish and Wildlife Agency

Dear Mr. Byrne,

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has examined the hair and tissue samples submitted in connection with your request for assistance in determining whether they may be of unusual biological origin.

As a result of our laboratory analysis, the hairs are concluded to be of no known animal species, including deer. We will continue our testing.

We appreciate your interest and trust this information will be of assistance and kept confidential.

Sincerely,
Jay Cochran
Assistant Director
Scientific and Technical Services Division, FBI

Peter found the memo about 5 years ago folded between some fish and wildlife magazines in his father’s office after he passed away. That night after the interview, almost exactly 50 years since the memo was written, he poured himself a drink and sat down with it again, feeling the weight of those words much differently now. It was like whoever wrote it was speaking directly to him.

The Interview - April 20th, 2026

“Thank you so much for agreeing to sit down with me,” said Peter. “You’ll get used to the light.”

The creature grunted, squinting into the glare of the softbox light. He picked a twig out of his tangled brown fur on his arm and smoothed the hair down in that spot. They sat across from each other in green cushioned armchairs in the cramped living room studio of the converted rancher.

NBTV camera man, Derrick Corley, gave the rolling signal. Peter picked up the clipboard from the small mosaic coffee table between them.

“I guess my first question is . . . how would you prefer to be addressed?” asked Peter. “What we would call you is maybe a little insulting, I’m guessing. No?”

The creature opened its mouth and nothing came out, but not because he lacked the ability to speak, or a language to speak with. It had simply been a while since he had heard himself say his own name.

“Atohi,” he said after a long pause, voice rough as sandpaper. “My name is Atohi. I’ve named myself for the forest I’ve lived in.”

“There are so many things people want to know about you, Atohi. I guess, to begin with, how old are you and how did you learn English?”

“I’m 125. My birthday was yesterday.”

“Oh, was it? Well, happy belated birthday. Did you do anything special?”

Atohi shook his head.

“And how did you learn English?” asked Peter.

“From the North Bend Public Library. All the books left outside in the donation box.”

Atohi’s rasp gave way to a steady melodic baritone the more he spoke, like amethyst slowly revealing itself from the center of a geode after two hundred years of enclosure.

“They would only gather up the books and bring them inside once a week,” said Atohi, “so there were always plenty to choose from out there. And I learned too from televisions turned up loud in the cool months through open windows.”

“Do you have any favorites?” asked Peter.

“Yeah, anything by Michael Crichton,” said Atohi. “Jurassic Park. Airframe. Sphere. They’re gripping, especially late at night by the fire. But I also really appreciate the greats—Hemingway, Faulkner, and the existentialists like Nietzsche, Sartre, and de Beauvoir.”

“Atohi, how do you think people might see you?” asked Peter. “Do you feel you need to show who you are here today, in a deeper way, one that gets beneath the myth?”

Atohi grunted, crossing one leg over the other, holding it there by the ankle.

“There are things I get enamored with,” he said. “Green crayons. Pepperoni pizza. Airplanes. Then there are days I get sick with all the names for things in my head. Perilous nomenclatures.”

“Is that why you’ve avoided contact? To stop thinking so much?” asked Peter. “It seems like you’ve gone through great pains to remain hidden except for the occasional photographs.”

Atohi sighed. “Well, first off. I like the forest. It’s peaceful. There’s a simplicity to it. I guess I’ve chosen a lifestyle that Jon Kabat-Zin has called voluntary simplicity. Do you know of his work? Wherever You Go, There You Are?”

Peter said he hadn’t heard of Kabat-Zin.

“It’s rooted in the idea that there is something beautiful in only doing one thing at once. I’ve found some of your devices. Dropped on trails. I’ve played with them, and within a very short amount of time found myself feeling duller on the inside. Leaves on the trees. The sound of the Snoqualmie River. That is the true energy of presence. That is what brings me to a place of centeredness and aliveness and elevation. It makes me think about what existence is and what humanity truly needs.”

Peter put his clipboard down and leaned in toward Atohi. In an almost plaintive way, pleading to a certain extent, he asked, “What do you feel humanity truly needs, Atohi?”

“For a long time now, I’d say the past 10 years especially, I’ve felt a growing urgency to come forward. I’ve observed carefully. Quietly from the trees. There’s a brewing disregard, an apathy I’ve noticed people tend to show toward one another, with increasing regularity, the sine qua non of their waking hours in the sped-up artifice they call daily life. That’s just life, you might say. But I would describe it as a callousness of heart, wouldn’t you? That has infected and spread, like the Annosus Root Disease. Have you heard of it?”

“I haven’t,” admitted Peter.

Atohi explained it was a kind of root rot that passes easily from tree to tree, by the lightest root contact.

Peter hesitated as he considered the implication. “Isn’t the only true cure then to cut down those trees and dispose of them before they can infect others?” he asked.

“Peter, please tell me you aren’t trying to corner me on live TV into arguing for immoral and destructive solutions,” said Atohi.

“No, of course, that wasn’t my intention, I—”

Atohi gently interrupted him with the remedy.

“You begin to fight it from the inside,” he said. “You treat the desiccated soul with an awakening. That’s why I’m here today with you. To try to warm the ground a bit, to help your viewers pause. To guide them in reflecting a bit more than they are normally inclined to. We are just different branches on the same tree. I really believe that. Despite the fact that time and evolution and survival instincts have chosen different paths for us, we remain essential to one another. I could not stay hidden in the forest any longer. How could I when it’s so apparent, when I can see and you can see, in full daylight, this new path we might travel down together. I am no brute.”

Atohi stood up, his head grazing the ceiling, his brown fur seeming to poof out with static electricity. He looked directly into the camera. Derrick instinctively took a step back.

“And you out there, listening, watching this, are not so irrevocably lost to malaise and cold-heartedness. There is nothing that says we have to continue on this trajectory. I want to help with the transformation, the reorientation as I think of it, as Kierkegaard and Fromm and Buber and Marcel have all argued for, to prompt that turn toward inward truth against the forces pushing us inexorably toward diffusion, disconnection, and anesthetized living. So I am here to announce my candidacy for mayor of North Bend. Will you join me, North Bend, in turning toward all things possible, and doing that together despite our differences, setting aside our labels for the promise of tomorrow?”

Atohi turned to Peter and extended his hand. Peter Frenetti was NBTV21’s only station manager, producer, and reporter and knew he was in the middle of a monumental moment, something that could alter the lives of future generations, far beyond Washington State. He stood and placed his hand in Atohi’s, hoping that Atohi knew his own strength and would not squeeze too tightly and crush it. With a lighter than expected touch, Atohi raised Peter’s hand in his, drawing his arm up into the air.

“And cut!” Derrick shouted. “We’re in commercial. Terrific. Really good.”

“That was great, wasn’t it?” Atohi said. “So will you do it? Will you be my campaign manager?”

Peter said he would, even though he felt a pit in his stomach when he thought about politics and how messy it could get. He could hardly bear the thought of people saying mean things about Atohi. There was something about his new friend that gave him tremendous hope, how he was scholarly but not erudite, down-to-earth but not crass, sensitive and wistful but not airy, a role model of a leader the world yearned for, even if it didn’t quite know who that leader was. The forest would no longer be a place of secrets.

You can listen to the cinematic version of this story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and here on Substack.

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You can’t argue with Maude. She’ll stare at you like you’re an aardvark with a space helmet on backwards and won’t speak, her way of making time elastic so you eventually decide enough is enough and leave. There’s a standing lamp on one side of her desk and a bent black metal bookshelf on the other nearing collapse filled with copies of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. You’ll wonder if you’re in the right place. Look for the sign taped to the wall that says: Interdimensional Lost and Found Agency. Someone hung it in a hurry between the fire extinguisher and the Tips for Safe Lifting poster.

Maude will ask your name. Give her your first name and the first initial of your last name, but not your full name. Otherwise she’ll add it to the list and you’ll be banned from the ILFA forever. You have to remain anonymous, or mostly anonymous, in order to “look in the bin.” Maude will ask for your license and registration. Just give it to her, without any questions, or else she’ll cross her arms and you’ll be done and you might as well take to wandering the earth because sometimes there are second chances but most times there aren’t. Maude’s seen a lot of uncertainty when people approach the idea of interdimensional retrieval. The way she sees it, leaving your body in one of the three dilapidated gym lockers off to the side should be like hanging up your jacket, a routine part of moving from one space into another, with an unshakeable willingness to step out of yourself to recover what’s fallen into the cracks between worlds.

After you give your name, you have to say the pass phrase, but without stumbling over the words—hippopotamuses don’t like cold rivers. You have to say it while crinkling up your eyebrows and pursing your lips and raising your arms in the shape of a Y and picturing cumulonimbus clouds. According to studies of successful interdimensional search experiences, transitional moments from this reality to the one folded in the shape of an S, Reality 1 they call it, requires this kind of process to loosen the mind from the body, as if your physical being was an egg shell, your mind the albumen, your soul the yolk.

Assuming everything has gone smoothly up to this point, Maude will ask you to sit in the Frank Lloyd Wright plastic bucket chair in front of her desk. Try not to stare at the mess, the clutter of contracts, pink receipts, and manila file folders. Any kind of critical aura detected and she will stand up and point like an angry principal to the double doors leading out of the stock room. That would be your signal to leave Esquire Shoes for good and so what’s lost between dimensions will remain lost and you will have to get used to the lingering emptiness in the space it once occupied.

“What have you lost?” Maude asks, ready to write it down on a water-stained yellow legal pad.

Javier expected to say his wedding band. It slipped off while at Citizen’s Bank Park at the ball game two months ago. He had put on some sunscreen on and threw up his hands to cheer after a home run. When he got to his car after the game, he realized it was missing. But as Maude waited for his retrieval focus, he realized he didn’t pay ILFA $500 to find his missing wedding band.

“Myself,” he says. “I’ve lost myself.”

She didn’t blink. “In what sense?”

“I’m an AI casualty. Back in June. Reservation Desk International. Now I wake up late. Clean the cat’s litterbox. Straighten up around our apartment. Send out 10 or 15 resumes. Take a walk. Come back. Watch TV. Sometimes I go to the gym. Other days I go back to sleep. I ask myself what is it I’m supposed to do? Who am I supposed to be? I look in the mirror and ask. I don’t want my wife to know that I’m asking these kinds of questions. She says I’m helping, you know, I’m useful. And I suppose I am. But I feel like I have this echo inside me so that when I speak, I hear my voice bouncing off the sides of a deep canyon and coming back to me, which makes me feel just how big and open and empty my inner world is.”

Maude puts down her nub of a pencil and smiles, a faint warmth in her eyes.

“We get your type every now and then,” she says. “And I always tell them the same thing. If you step into that locker over there and remove your body and go rooting around in the bin, sometimes you’ll find a self that doesn’t belong to you, but which fits just fine, even better than the one you were born with. There are thousands upon thousands of people dipping into the bin, looking for a better alternative.”

Javier eyes the lockers. Their dented doors have endured the anger of many post-game losses it seems, or post-dip disillusionments.

“Umm, but would I be able to keep it? I mean, isn’t it someone else’s? Won’t they be looking for it? Won’t they want it back?”

“How many things have you lost and stopped looking for in your life?” Maude asks.

Javier nods, seeing her point.

“Sometimes you have to just say forget about it—and move on. Do you want to move on, Mr. Javier?”

He entertains the idea of an entirely new consciousness and direction and spark. His shoulders relax and he slumps back in the chair, forgetting that the bucket curve is making his back ache.

“Will I move into whatever body it is, whatever self, for good?” he asks. “And am I taking a chance that it will be worse, because it’s one that someone else didn’t want?”

Maude’s smile grows by a sliver, still noticeable and still faintly warm.

“I guess it’s always a risk,” she says. “You only get one dip in the bin.”

Javier stands and walks over to the first locker, wondering what it would feel like to shed himself and sort through the options in the bin, whether he would grasp their entire range of memories all at once before having to decide, what age they might be, their health status, moral fiber. So many unknowns. But the appeal of it comes sweeping back as he thinks about the long hours on his couch of late, staring at the ceiling, feeling next to nothing.

“Is there anyone famous in the bin?” Javier asks, wondering what it might be like to walk the red carpet and drive an Aston Martin. “Someone who would give anything to have an ordinary life like mine?”

Maude stiffens. “I’m not allowed to tell you that. Privacy rules, you know.”

“What if I wanted to stay between dimensions and just float. Like in a pool, without stepping into any other self? Do people do that?”

“Some do,” Maude says. “But I can’t tell you what that’s like because they never come out of the locker.”

She glances at her watch, a tarnished silver antique by the looks of it. Javier wonders if she plucked it from the bin herself, maybe a perk of the position.

“It’s almost 8. I’d like to go home soon. What’s it going to be, Mr. Javier?”

“Yes, okay,” he says, standing. “I’m ready. Does it matter which locker?”

She says it doesn’t and offers him a small bag of kettle chips from her top desk drawer. She says a second can feel like a year and so he’ll definitely want a snack to tide him over. Maude watches Javier eat the chips as if watching a child to make sure they finish their vegetables. She takes the empty bag from him, folds it in half, and deposits it in the small plastic wastebasket by her feet.

Javier straightens his shirt and steps up to the first yellow locker. He pulls the latch and the door groans as it swings open, rusting at the hinges. A small wave of humid air hits him as if coming off an ocean south of the equator. He can see the locker doesn’t have a back to it, but is the entrance point to a long narrow rectangular passageway that disappears into that humid darkness. He looks back at Maude who gives him a little encouraging wave. Javier turns sideways so he can fit inside, realizing he’ll have to sidestep his way along. Maude moving slowly from her arthritis, makes her way over to the locker to see him off.

“Safe travels,” she says. “Oh, one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“Best if you don’t deliberate too much. Just choose one that chooses you and come back.”

And with that, she slams the door behind him, plunging Javier into the thick damp tropical darkness. He stands there in the dark, breathing the humid air, reviewing his life from the beginning and its status quo handoffs from one ordinary, uneventful milestone to another and thinks why not dip into the bin. Marina would miss him, but she would get over it in a week, maybe two, and maybe even feel a little relieved.

He shuffles sideways along the passageway about twenty feet or so, pausing in between each step to make sure he still has a solid floor beneath him. At one point, his right foot comes down and doesn’t touch anything. Eyes adjusted to the dark, he sees he has arrived at the edge of a deep shaft, what seems like an air duct, shoulder-wide, leading straight down. The source of the humid breeze lies somewhere far beneath. He considers turning back, more out of fear of leaving his body, not knowing what it would feel like, wondering whether it would hurt. He had always had a fear of needles and so he hoped it wouldn’t be like getting jabbed with needles. But then he thinks about emptiness of his apartment, the monotone coldness between him and Marina, how the dust drifts in and out of the sunlight and settles over everything—the TV, the sofa, the photographs and he closes his eyes and steps sideways off the edge.

Here is the entry into the interior, the point of occlusion they call it: where you detach from the outline of your body. Something in that humid tropical air tips the scales, taking you from loose correspondence to a staggered offset. You fall down that air duct in full possession of yourself as formless yet coherent energy, a vibrational heat concentrated as if from the surface glow of a red giant star, retaining within its final throes all your accumulated memories, likes, dislikes, worries, and aspirations. You have the sensation of seeing, expanding in every direction, a full 360 degree panoramic view—which at first are the metal sides of the duct and at the end is the far vista of all the caught materials between dimensions. It will feel like you are falling for days, which is why Maude wants everyone to have a little snack before they go. You land in the bin after a year of falling, 12 months compressed into 3 seconds.

Here you swim among the smaller ephemera, the wallets, socks, earbuds, car keys, retainers, coins, phones, rings, bracelets, charger cables, sunglasses, driver’s licenses—and the medium kind, cats and dogs of all sizes and breeds—and the larger kind, from the whirlpools, disappeared 767s and 777s over the Indian Ocean and vanished cars from I-60 and missing boats from New England harbors. Here you await the other energies until they drop down into your vicinity. There are millions of vicinities and millions of new arrivals each day in those vicinities, searching for new histories and futures. The bin stretches across Planck’s constant and this is felt as nature’s lack of continuity in these between-states, in Reality 1, shaped like an S, sandwiched between Realities 2 and 3, where the speed of light is doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

Then come the twinges, the photonic dialogues. Simple exchanges of life topographies and intentions on horizon 0, a kind of interdimensional speed dating. Javier trades life landscape glimpses with a bee keeper from the UK, an architect from Vancouver, a writer from New York City, a fisherman from Norway. None seem to fit until he merges with a more nondescript harmonic energy, graceful in its curiosity, soft in tone, warm in heart, one from the Hollywood Hills, early 60s, looking for no one and nothing in particular. Javier questions why he chose to root around in the bin.

I’m curious, that energy says. I guess I’m also looking for a more ordinary perspective for the years I have left. Javier asks who he is. Keanu, says the energy. Keanu returns the question, asking the reason for Javier’s dip in the bin. Because I want to feel and know things that are extraordinary and be friends with extraordinary people and go to dinner parties and award shows and see the world. Does that make me shallow? Or a bad person? Keanu says not at all and he thinks they’d make a good match.

The warmth of their merge becomes a light blue fire. There’s the sound of air being sucked out of the bin, a small pop. As the lift begins, Javier’s memories start to fade, of Marina and his cats Frankie and Betts and the heaviness of lying on the apartment sofa all those days. As he’s rising, a white gold wedding band floats by and he draws it into the center of himself instinctually, a center now more occupied by long film shoots and crowded premieres and backlots and parties lasting until early morning. The original Keanu drifts further away, becoming the energy of who Javier was and is for good, distant and strange now, being drawn up into the air duct attached to the stock room of Esquire Shoes.

He wonders what Keanu-as-Javier will think of Maude and hopes that she’ll be nice to him. Nearing his own intake channel, the one lined up with Culver City, Javier senses the wedding band, pulled into the core of him, indistinguishable from the one he lost, and this sends a flare of panic outward, against the pull. He struggles to reverse the merge, fighting to get back to his original air duct like a swimmer trying to free himself from a riptide, flailing to recover the memories of Marina and his cats and the couch. But it does no good. He’s rising fast through a different rectangular shaft, 12 years passing in a single second, absorbing into Keanu’s body that stands mid-stride like a wax figure in that locker-bound corridor of darkness. Amid an onslaught of sensations in his new body, a thought materializes like none he has ever had before, one drenched in warm California sunlight: I have a lunch date tomorrow with a producer at Chateau Marmont on Sunset to discuss another Matrix project. And then a feeling he cannot locate from any residual strand of his previous life: bliss. Maybe it was there. And maybe it wasn’t. But he feels it now. And that’s all that matters.

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How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t want to go up the hill anymore. I’ve said it again and again and still your assumption is that I’m just going to go because that’s what people expect. Don’t you understand that it’s not been a good place for me? I don’t fare well up there. It’s a cloudy day. It’s a sunny day. Same thing happens every time. Tell me, why is it, with modern conveniences, that I even have to go up the hill? Can’t I just go to the nearest house, ask to use their bathroom, and assuming the homeowners are nice, they’d allow me the privilege of using their bathroom, whereupon I would turn on the sink faucet and fill up my pail and thank them for their hospitality and leave.

And here’s another thing I wonder about. Why in the world would they put a well on top of a hill and not at the bottom where someone’s much less likely to fall and break something? Oh there are wells at the bottom of hills? Well it’s a little late now to be telling me that, isn’t it? It didn’t occur to you to tell me any earlier? That I might like to know these trips up and tumblings down were wholly and completely avoidable? All those trips to the ER, all the casts, the months of rehab, all the pain medications because vinegar and brown paper on the head only goes so far. Small detail that escaped you. Whoops. Let’s leave that one out of the conversation. Meanwhile I’m trudging up there, tired, hungry, thirsty, through snow and rain and mud, on Sundays when most other people are lounging about in their backyards—no, not me, I’ve got to go up there and get the water. I don’t even know who I’m getting the water for. Not to mention what it’s put my friend though. Let’s not forget about her. She’s got a few things to say about it too, you know. If you thought to ask her. She’s got the injury history and hospital bills to show just like I do, only more extensive. Her ankles still haven’t properly healed.

I don’t know why we always had to go up there together, but we did. It was nice to have company on the way up and yes, on the way down too, even while falling. You know, I think you knew all along what the risks were, before the very first time she and I went up there, and you still watched us go. Why is that? Is it that you wanted to see us come tumbling down? Because it made you feel better about your life? There’s a word for that. It’s called schadenfreude. Where you take pleasure in others’ misfortunes. Repeatedly. Because something essential is missing in your life and you don’t want to admit how bad you feel, or work on it in therapy, so you need to watch us lose our footing over and over again. It’s a shallow fill. You may not see the harm now, but one day you will. One day there will be a word you learn called karma. And it doesn’t help one bit to hear at least you aren’t stuck in a box all day, popping up at random times that are out of your control.

But I can tell you this. Things from this day forward are going to change. Yes they are, because my friend and I have retained counsel. I’ve got two words for you: class action. Plenty more like us who’ve been sold a bill of goods, told to go up the hill, get the water, come back down. Who told them they had to go? Where did the order come from? And more importantly, who owns the hill and the well and the water? Where’ve they been in all this? And why have our misadventures been published for entertainment purposes and without our knowledge or consent? Do the hill owners even know people are getting hurt on their property every day? For no good reason? That’s what they’re going to want to know. Look, contrary to what you may have heard about me, I’m not interested in a big cash settlement. A public apology would be nice, but I won’t hold my breath. I can tell you this. I’ve been going up and falling down this hill so freakin’ much I don’t even know what I want out of life anymore. What would I do if I wasn’t doing that? I have to figure it out, what else would hold meaning, and I acknowledge that’s 100% on me. With open eyes, you do have to look back on it all and find the silver linings.

The most obvious one is that my friend and I are engaged. If I had to explain it, because we are very different in a lot of ways, the foods we like, the music we listen to, our political views, I would say this: falling so many times together led to a bond no one else could ever understand, one that runs from friendship straight through to falling and from falling to something ever after and from ever after back to friendship. I can tell you this though, there’s not gonna be any pails or water or chapel on a hill in our ceremony. I think both of us need some distance on it. It’s hard to sleep at night. I have these vivid dreams of getting the pail of water and thinking everything’s fine, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, there are planes in the sky, and then I look down and there’s water coming out of the bottom of the bucket. There are holes in my bucket. And I’m panicking because I’ve got to get the bucket down to the bottom of the hill mostly full and I’m not going to be able to do that, because I’m sure it will either have all leaked out by then or I’ll trip like always and the rest will spill out as it comes rolling down after me. In my dream, the bucket is huge, like half the size of my body, which I’m not sure how to interpret. The thing is, I’ll be in the supermarket in the pasta aisle and all of a sudden I’ll remember the dream and it will come back to me as if I was dreaming it there and I’ll see the hill like I’m standing right on top of it and I’m terrified, frozen in the pasta aisle as people stare me and ask me if I’m okay and do I need them to call someone. It happens to her too. She’ll be driving, usually on Forest Glen Lane and we’ll get to that incline, not even a steep one, and she’ll start hyperventilating. I talk her through it and she talks me through it when I’m in the supermarket or the mall. That’s just what we do for each other and one of the reasons we need each other, but it’s exhausting.

Some days lately I think to myself, what else could I have done with all that time? What could I have accomplished? What could I have contributed to society? Did the water I collected do anything for anyone? Even the little bit that was left in the pail by the time I rolled to a stop at the bottom. Was I bringing it to those who needed it most? I think I would have liked to have been a bus driver or train conductor, taking people smoothly from one place to the next, calming their nerves with the simple motion of buses or trains or cars. And they would tell me stories about their lives and we would feel connected and they would feel happy that they’ve lived so much when they see my eyes light up with their adventures. We could share them like we would share a sandwich. I could figure out what my last name would be too, maybe taken from one of the famous Jacks out there—Jack Nicholson, Jack White, Jack Black, Jack Kerouac. I might like to be an actor. I might like to stay at a hotel in Colorado in the middle of winter. I might like to play the Sax-A-Boom on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. I might like to write the Great American novel on a taped-together scroll of paper 120 feet long. No more hills. No more pails. No more pointless trips up and down fetching water from wells. This is my beginning. This is the story I will write. I’m starting over. I’m leaving the land of valleys and meadows and mountains and broken crowns and going to the city. I haven’t decided which yet. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle. Maybe all of them. I will look up at the stars not with my head pounding from all the falls but pulsing with wonder, light-headed thinking that someday I could travel to the moon if I put the time in, if I studied to become an engineer or astrophysicist. It’s all within range, all ahead of me. I just have to close my eyes and take the first step forward, the one small step, in full trust that my foot will come down on a flat and stable surface and it will not slip out from under me. Then I can take another one. And another. Nothing to carry. Nothing to collect. With the only instruction I hear in my sleep, in the supermarket, in the car, at the dinner table: Live.

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They are not who they once were.

Or perhaps, they are exactly who they’ve become.

You will disappear for a bit, but don’t be afraid.

Maren took her earbuds out, turned to the man sitting next to her, and asked if he heard the announcement. He surfaced from a real estate document on his laptop to tell her he hadn’t heard anything. It was a male voice, monotone, different from the pilot’s, and came through her earbuds over Enya’s “Orinoco Flow.”

“You don’t sleep much on these do you?” he said. He introduced himself as James. “You should try, we have about 7 hours left.” Travel fatigue, she thought. An artifact of a liminal state, that warm ethereal looseness between dreaming and waking, a green ocean flickering in and out—Let me sail, let me sail and Maren moving in and out of awareness, gliding over it all, under it, coming up, feeling the pressure of her head against the plane window, then swept back under the submersive vibrational hum of the 767’s engines.

Maren felt safe in her logic, with her dreams reflecting a familiar sequential rhythm as in she entered a house and left the house and entered the house again through the same door an order reflecting a life of sound deductions and linear deliberations. Daughter of a mathematician and doctor, Maren savored the solace she extracted from any tree of facts, no matter how small, ten years into a notable career as a corporate contracts attorney from Sydney. She lived a line-itemed, sleep-deprived, but never inefficient life, a first choice by her clients in exchange for the subjugated emotional intimacies of her five-year-old marriage to a talented guitarist from Tanzania, a marriage ebbing into an intercontinental malaise, with fewer connection points between her consulting trips and his gigs in Gosford, Springwood, and Sutherland. On this particular week long trip to Los Angeles, it crossed her mind that he might ask her for a divorce. It would probably arrive by text, late at night, his time, while in the arms of someone else or sitting at the edge of a disheveled Airbnb bed, her one-word reply prepared in her messages app well in advance: Okay.

So with the crystalline ocean and bell tones luring her further away from a life she had already departed, Maren thought that her mind decided to speak to her, giving her permission to disappear for a little while without a fractal collapse of the order she had for years cultivated in precise syncopated appointment-blocked hours. Its invitation: to muster the courage and linearity she knew she would need to rearrange being in relationship—to her husband, to her work, to time itself. In her broken sleep, the single beam of an overhead reading light became the moon over a green sea turning a dark midnight blue and back to green. The sun came out beside it, an orange glowing circular fire, cutting a gold path across the Orinoco ocean. Maren opened her eyes as one does when the sun first touches you in the morning, resting against your forehead and cheeks, to discover a smaller version of that sun just outside her oval window, hovering in the night a foot or so above the plane’s wing. A latticework of white electrical streaks coursed across its surface in shifting geometrical patterns. She grabbed James’ arm hard and pointed at it.

“What the hell is that?” he said, the orange light illuminating his face like a campfire.

It’s an orb, she said. They’ve been in the news, over past few weeks, over the ocean and Sydney and in the Blue Mountains. My god, it’s beautiful.

You will disappear for a bit, but don’t be afraid.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

Of course he didn’t, but they were not thoughts anyway, not anyone’s, not a voice but an understanding, a knowing, not internal or external. The orb rose and fell slightly but never touched the wing. The cabin’s overhead reading lights went dark throughout the cabin, as did the seat screens and no smoking and lavatory signs. The orange light fell over everyone’s faces, many sleeping remaining asleep. As Maren stared into the sphere, a warmth expanded through her mind and spread from there down the back of her neck, forward into her chest, and then down into her stomach, like someone had flipped her upside down and dipped her in warm bathwater up to the waist. Maren almost didn’t register the feeling of James pulling at her arm as he pointed to the opposite side of the plane. When she disconnected from it and looked across the aisle to where he pointed, she saw the second orb bobbing above the other wing. Gasps, exclamations, phones out but not filming since they had gone dead.

Both orbs shot up, leaving the cabin in total darkness. She wondered out loud if the cockpit controls had power. Maren grabbed James’ hand and squeezed it, her heart accelerating. She said they’re gone and James said he didn’t think so and he was right. Two bolts of orange lightning flashed simultaneously on opposite sides of the plane, just missing the wings. More gasps and exclamations. A few seconds later two orange bolts again. After the second flashes, Maren pressed her face against the window, getting as close as she could, squinting to see better what they were if they recurred. They did. She counted. One, two—and flash. Flashes on both sides of the plane every three seconds.

It occurred to her that they weren’t lightning bolts but the orbs, no longer floating but moving at unimaginable speeds, high to low back to high, crossing the wing edges, and doing it over and over. It’s them, she said to James, breathless. They’re circling us. They’re circling the plane. Every three seconds became every two seconds and then every second, as they seemed to speed up, creating an orange strobe effect. With each pulse they could see other passengers’ faces gripped by fear, awe, or both. Some people cried thinking there was something wrong with the plane and that they wouldn’t make it. The captain never said anything over the speakers to soothe nerves, but probably because the speaker system had gone out with the interior lights. The flight attendants hurried up and down the aisles, trying to calm people down without success.

Every second became a constancy of blinding orange light pouring in through the windows, as if a hundred orbs had joined the first two, spinning at light speed around the plane, around its full length, circling it in perfect rotational synchronization as if weaving a sleeve of solid light around them. Then the plane’s engines stopped, their loud whir giving way to the sound of wind rushing across the wings. Night turned to day in the cabin. People covered their eyes and pressed their heads against the seat backs because the orange light hurt from its brightness and people cried and hugged their children and prayed out loud. A stillness washed over Maren, her heart slowing to its sleep rhythm. She looked at James who also seemed to feel that equanimity, not a thread of panic in his eyes, only knowing. It’s going to happen now, Maren said. Yes, James said. Then everything went black.

The Edge Harmonic

Maren felt herself as a breath moving through a micro-thin membrane of iridescence, shrunk to a few molecules in size. She felt her mind still somewhat intact glinting with dislodged and jumbled memories: swinging high with her brother on that rusty swing set in their backyard in Katoomba, kissing Ibrahim on their second date in a smokey underground jazz club, spreading her mother’s ashes from a frog urn into Wentworth Falls, her name called in court after a motion of admission to solicitor status, locking herself in the bathroom after a fight with Ibrahim over his infidelity.

When she felt the outline of her body again, it was right where she had left it. Window seat, row 20. She looked around the empty cabin at the vacant seats, belts neatly buckled and centered on the seat cushions. She did not remember pulling her window shade down. Someone had drawn them all, except for one on the opposite side of the plane, open a crack and ushering in a thin blue glow. Maren unbuckled herself, got up, and made her way down the aisle to the front of the plane. The open side door revealed a step-off, an edge where the jetway should have started and instead of a tarmac below, she found herself looking down into a blue glowing chasm. She closed her eyes and put one foot out over the void and pushed off with the other. She floated down instead of falling fast. Her feet landed on a spongy wet material, squishing as she came down on it. A blue mist engulfed her, so thick she couldn’t see more than one arm’s length in any direction, nor determine the source of the illumination. James? Are you here? Is there anyone here?

You are here.

Where is here? Who are you? Where is everyone from the plane?

You are a notion now, an edge harmonic. Look back.

Maren looked back at the 767. The blue mist cleared around the fuselage. Layers of aluminum began peeling off without sound as if a massive heat gun made them curl up and off the plane. When they curled off it, they floated up in silence and disappeared into the blue mist which had thickened like cloud cover over her. Soon every physical piece of the plane had peeled off and risen up into that cloud. Only a grayish outline of the plane remained, a 767-shaped cut-out. A notion of a plane.

Will you do that to me?

It’s already happened. The body you feel is a trace, an edge harmonic. You are a notion now. This is how you are able to pass through.

Pass through where? Who are you?

We are the ones to whom you speak. Who have been with you before you were born and who are with you again now, at the beginning.

The beginning of what? Are you angels?

We are an assemblage, a culmination, the interstices of all things felt and held.

Can I see you?

The blue mist parted like a curtain rising up into the low cloud ceiling and there before her stood a group of four thin eight-foot beings with bluish skin that seemed to shine, long arms, long legs, small heads. Under her feet, a wet moss extended for hundreds of yards around them and curved upward in the distance as if carpeting a giant bowl-shaped valley. Rows of planes lined the valley, some as large as the 767 behind her and some as small as Cessnas. At least a hundred of them glowed with gaseous blue swirls and wisps, a fluorescence she felt as sadness.

Where are the people from the planes?

They are beginning their new journey elsewhere.

Will I go too?

Yes, but you will begin someplace special.

Where?

A place like where you are from, but at its beginning.

Like another earth?

A place of possibility.

Will anyone be there?

Yes. One like you.

I am afraid.

You don’t seem afraid. The notion of your heart is not afraid.

But I am.

You see order in all things. The crystalline notes. You are elemental.

One of the beings came toward her, taking two large steps forward, smooth and graceful as a ballet dancer. It slowly extended its arm toward her and touched the top of her head with one of its fingers. Maren gasped because upon contact she saw a blue ball floating in space, twice the size of earth. This is where she would be going.

I don’t think I can be what you want me to be. I cannot go. I will disappoint you.

The being crouched down so its head was eye-level. Maren reached up and touched its face. It was smooth, shining, serene. It had a small line for a mouth it did not seem to need. Its dark eyes felt human and kind, familiar as though of someone she had met once, years ago, at the outdoor Rocks Markets by Circular Quay.

You will be who you are, who you need to be, to begin again.

As she looked around at the derelict planes and the mossy holding ground, Maren understood what this meant. Not beginning again as in starting her own life over, but as in the lives of all those she would split off into.

Will we not hurt each other anymore?

The being removed her finger and backed up with grace to rejoin the others.

It’s time for you to go.

The blue mist descended from the thick cloud ceiling, its brightening glow consuming the planes and their edge harmonics and the beings and Maren. She took a deep breath of it, a deeper breath than she had ever taken before and felt weightless, ascending, accelerating out of that atmosphere into space with stars of all kinds—red, orange, blue, white—rushing past her in a bow-like arcs, bending streaks. She felt herself curve around the edge of a black hole, grazing its horizon, but not drawn into its center. She traveled like this for hours it felt like, every memory of every moment in her life tumbling across her mind. She felt herself as a consciousness outside of those memories but still integral to them, as if they could not fully separate from her, nor she from them. In that waterfall of unbounded mind she began to feel other memories that were not hers flooding through her in such rapid infinite succession that she felt like she had become the recipient of all human memories from the beginning of existence, all the terrible and beautiful articulations of a life left to become what it would be. Moving at the speed of light where every passing energy took some from her and gave some back, she felt like she needed to hold onto these traces most of all, so that they would be there with her when she began to slow and the stars around her slowed to points and she felt in her widening field of awareness the curvature of that enormous place they had promised with its untouched oceans and quiet forests and snow-capped mountains.

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I promise you this. I will not grieve my own brief signature of existence. My green light is a solitary star blinking in the Coriander Forest of Cherry Hill, unseen under the domed glow of the nearest city’s gathered light. Three short bursts of bioluminescence followed by three longer ones followed by three short ones. I float up and repeat the pattern, float down and repeat it. No one comes. No one like me. No one in the grass answers with flashes. Not anymore.

The people got together and made light for themselves, to see in the dark. They built large nests of buzzing steel and wire to make this light and make more of it, keeping it on for longer and longer and in every season. We could not find each other anymore as their light consumed more of the dark, illuminating the low parts of the sky. At first, it thinned our gentle flashes, but we still found each other in our slow meandering flights. But then they added more lights along the streets and around their homes, in front yards and backyards. The distant towers grew higher and their lights stronger at every height and our small pulses dissolved faster into that perpetual low-hanging glow.

I traveled further to the woods of Borton Mills and those of Croft Farm. I traveled to the Bunker Hill Trails and even as far as Wallworth Park. I land exhausted on a spate of dry earth. I take flight and pulse. I land again and rest. After I rest, I float up again, hundreds of times by night’s end. No one answers in Borton Mills or Croft Farm or the Bunker Hill Trails. No one answers at Wallworth Park. No one like me joins me on my rest or in my flight. My time is short and I am thinking there is at least one like me, there must be, but maybe given up their search and now spending each night on a branch or on a stone by a stream, not flashing, not doing anything, but waiting for the end.

The people’s light is a quiet oblivion. But I do not blame them for it. They are doing what they need to do for themselves. Yet the ones who are open-hearted, who once cupped us in their hands to delight in our luminescence and our calling, they now look out into their yards and into the forests and there is no more visitation and joining, no more flickers of joy in our clandestine meetings, just darkness uninterrupted. And they turn away and go inside. I have seen them do this, with looks of disappointment on their faces. They do other things and forget about us. They assume we have forgotten about them too. I have not forgotten about them. There is one house at the end of a long street where a number of them live. When I have finished my searching, I go there to hover by their downstairs window and sing my light out toward them. But the strong lights of their space take up too much of their eyes and flood their hearts and pull their attention to flat surfaces spilling every kind of colorful light, and so they do not see me and come out with their excitement and their cupped palms.

My wings are weaker now. My body aching. I cannot fly as long or as high. I need more rest on the ground or on a branch. But the strange thoughts still come to me as they have since I became aware, drawing me toward one of their steel and wire nests not far from the Borton Mills forest. It is one that all their light must pass through in order to spread out into the world and up into the sky. I have just enough strength in me to get there this evening. And so I go at dusk. It will take me most of the night to get there, leaving me no time to send my pulses out. I am convinced there would be no one to answer me anyway.

As I get closer, the light from the generation of their light feels heavy around my body and disorienting. But I am pulled, as if by a knowing, toward the buzzing of light’s passage through three large-ringed spirals that rise up from gray boxes planted in concrete. This is where I must go, toward the middle spiral. It will be my last flight. My body knows this. My heart knows this. As I approach, my weakened luminescence gathers somewhere deep in me to surge forward, as if gathering for one last gasp of calling.

I am so close to the spiral now, inches from it. The buzzing deafens, the flooding light from poles around the boxes making me so heavy that my wings cannot work and I begin falling from my height, but I am right over the spiral now and about to land on it, pulled down onto it, and just before I touch it, that last gathering of light in me pours out like a green fire whose brightness pushes back the floodlight from above. And I touch that spiral and there is a tremendous explosion as I feel my body release me from its small delicate confines into a blinding light, a sudden evaporation of form and shape, with a thunder that rips open the sky and engulfs the ground beneath me and the air around me in an incinerating heat. And as I go into it, I feel the people’s light that has for so long domed the sky from the near city and from scattered pools of light along streets and around houses and from their yards, go out. And there is darkness again. Pure darkness, solid and untouched. And as I leave my thoughts, the brief knowing of a world, the remainder of my inner light extinguished with it, one last tiny glowing pulse escapes, miniscule but answered by one long pulse followed by three short ones, somewhere in the dark beyond me.

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After a failed last-ditch effort to prove we can change, humanity is given one last chance to save itself by an alien race getting ready to take over our planet.

I am still alive. Look out and you will see the apple trees dressed in moonlight, that never show their breath yet breathe. They would not flaunt their leaves by day. If this is true, let it be. Not so, not so. Not a voice I recognize, yet mine. Falsetto, falsetto. I hum so that I know I am alive.

What purpose is this, to watch from here and not know how it ends? My ledge is one of limestone, roughly hewn, my bed a block of wood. These thirty nights I have not found sleep. The voices come unannounced and read me again their gentle verdicts. A room I can barely walk two steps in. A barred window chokes the light. I cannot smell the spring air, but it is raining. There is another room I sit in. I wake each morning to division. A double-window, glass the likes of which I have never seen so clearly through. I watch the dry fountain for it to flow, a stone angel at its base, one wing missing, broken off.

The heart is an insistent thing, short and steady in its work, immune to the terse convictions of those who have never heard it sleep. I am not mad. I have told them I am not mad, but possessed by a sudden streak of luminescence. I must tell you of the lights before it is too late, for tomorrow they will walk me through Rouen. I am in two worlds at once, pulled between. One with a fountain and an angel with a broken wing, a house dire in its emptiness and maze of halls. In the other I am shackled at my feet to a block of wood, a bed in which I cannot sleep for those who watch me with eyes that do not close.

The one whose double-window lets me out among the apple trees, is this Normandy? Meadows shrouded in moonlight, yet peaceful and plain by dawn. There is an infant crying somewhere beneath, dull cries that do not cease. Falsetto, falsetto. I must go to bring it ease. The child’s name is Oliver and he is mine. I hum so I know that I am still alive.

I might leave this room through the double-window, as I attempted at Beaurevoir, to make a final resting place of straw and dirt. Or to try the door again, three keys turned at once and step out into the hall, rush down the spiral stairs, go to Oliver and raise him from his seat and soothe him until his cries fade into me. Somewhere there is a room with a bath, a place where water falls as if from a well above. I will leave it running so all the rivers never stop when I am gone, the Loire and the Loing and my dear Moselle, the one which feeds the marshes of Lorraine. I am myself and no other. Oliver will not stop crying. He is mine. I hum so that I know I am alive, but I cannot reach him quite in time.

In this house of solitude, never any sound like voice or the call of birds, rock pigeons, sparrows, and carrion crows. Never any sound in the preparations for life, but on a hill overlooking the orchard and in a courtyard where an angel spends its portion of eternity looking down, not up at me. It has one broken wing. There are no protections, none left to see. He will not stop crying in his high chair. I could not tell you his complaint. I would go to him if I could, but the door is locked and there are chains around my feet.

Is it November yet? Or May? I must tell you of the lights I’ve seen that cross the sky at night to me and call me by my given name, a syllable, an exhalation, a brief cry of fire, my heart a cloud of butterflies released into the rolling meadow just beyond the apple trees. Is this Normandy? I have followed the voices where they lead and not questioned what they asked me to forget. I have seen them with my eyes, the multitudes in their final throes, but I have not yet seen myself. Who am I if I am not alive? What room will my breath no longer forget? Give me to the windows I am looking through. I must tell you of the lights before I descend the limestone steps. I have told you. He is crying. Falsetto, falsetto. It is done. I have left.

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