Before he ever left, he'd made a conscious decision to leave his watch behind. He wanted to keep himself ignorant of Time, to somehow pretend it didn't exist. But it wasn't possible. Even when he stood still, he could feel it moving forward. Even when he threw his whole body against them, the clockhands never stopped twitching. He couldn't make them stop. And if he lingered long enough, they'd catch him in a sharp vice, and cut him in half. There was simply nothing he could do.

So he left his watch behind. What else could he do? It was something. It was a start.

* * *

She had been dozing on her couch when the doorbell rang, the chimes a broad hammer dispersing the fog in her brain. Blinking rapidly, nearly falling off the furniture in disjointed surprise, it took her a second to remember where she was. In the dark everything was so unfamiliar, a different country altogether. Her nightvision, to say the least, was crappy, but she hated to put up a thousand nightlights. She wasn't afraid of the dark, she just couldn't see very well into it.

Across from her the television stared back placidly, the faint afterimage of whatever program she was watching still etched in the muted grey square, hazy memories frozen and indistinct. She couldn't even remember what had been on. The news, probably, at this hour.

Her feet were on the floor and she was rising to a standing position when the bell rang again. Maybe it was the fact that she was tired, but there was a trembling, insistent quality about it. Her imagination obviously. It was only a doorbell. But who the hell was behind the door at this time of night. As she made her way from the living room into the kitchen toward the door, she glanced at the digital clock sitting on the counter. Half past ten. Jesus. The numbers glared at her from the darkness, lone islands in a voided sea. For a scary second she didn't recognize them as numbers at all, just red lines on a black background. Sometimes when you stared at a word long enough it just became a collection of letters. Forest for the trees. Isn't that how the saying went? Her head was a jumble of mismatched thoughts, a shelf of jigsaw puzzles come crashing down, the pieces all thrown together.

Shoes scuffed on the floor outside, a distant scratch. Who the hell was at the door? It occurred to her that nobody with good intentions ever visited at this time of the night. That thought made her hesitate, slowed her forward motion. This was a safe neighborhood, but what did that really mean? Any kind of nut could be out there. No place was ever exempt from bad things. She might as well just go back to bed and forget she ever heard the doorbell ring.

Something kept her in the kitchen, though. Footsteps shuffled again, almost shyly. Did criminals step a certain way? The absurdity of the thought made her giggle slightly. What the hell, she finally decided. No harm in looking, right? You only live once.

Sliding up to the door, she pressed her eye against the peephole, getting a warped, bulbous view of the hallway right in front of her apartment.

A man swung into view, the lens causing his head to somehow seem a million miles from his body. It couldn't hide the expression on his face, however. Detached and pensive, she recognized it instantly even as its presence made her even more confused.

As she stared, he started to turn away, a strange resignation in his stance. What was this? Now she was curious. Oh no you don't, she warned to the retreating figure. Now that you've got me up, we're seeing this through.

Moving swiftly, she called out, "Wait!" as she unlocked the door, the edges of sleep causing her to fumble just a little. A second later she swung the door wide open, revealing a young man, still thin in a bulky winter coat, hands in his pockets and compact. Frozen in mid-motion, his body half turned away, his eyes widened slightly as light from her apartment spilled out over him. His shadow struck the opposite wall and seemed to split. God, she thought to herself, you're still the palest one in the whole damn family. Are you ever going to get some sun?

Leaning against the doorway, she rested her forehead on her arm and one foot over the other. She didn't bother to speak. Not yet. Let him do the explaining. Wow, it really is him.

Pivoting smoothly to face her, all he said at first was, "Hey," as if he was just been passing by as she had thrown her door open and this meeting was a complete coincidence. You never change. I could go five years without seeing you, and it'd be like there was no time in between at all.

"Hey yourself," she answered, friendly but neutral. Let him squirm for a minute. She didn't care if he was family, that didn't mean she had to make this easy. "So what are you doing here? This can't be just a social call." Her voice was casual, but knife-edged. She'd been having a wonderful dream before the doorbell rang, too. She was sure of it. Everything had been light. "I know you wouldn't wake me up just to say, `hey', right? I know you're a more thoughtful person than that." She tapped her fingernails on the wooden frame of the doorway, the chattering sound the only real noise in the area. "So what brings you around?"

He didn't say anything for almost a minute. Then, spreading his hands out wide, he unleashed one of those odd, cryptic, yet strangely endearing smiles that she always thought him incapable of pulling off until he actually did it.

"I missed the melodious sound of your voice?" he said in his quiet voice, offering both an explanation and the suggestion that if that excuse didn't work, he had ten more waiting to try out on her. If her cousin was one thing, it was persistent. Sometimes she wondered if it was the only constant thing about him. Even if he never seemed to change one bit. It wasn't something she couldn't easily explain.
Nor did she really want to. It was way too late for her to think about. Brushing some of her hair away from her face, she broke out into a grin, stepping back from the doorway and motioning for him to come in.

"That's enough to gain you entrance," she told him. "But believe me when I say, Tristian," she added, grabbing his arm as he came closer, stopping him, "that if you want to stay, you'd better come up with a more plausible excuse than that, or the only way you're leaving is out the window."

"I see," he answered, the word almost a thin murmur. The calm smile hadn't left his face. Under his coat he seemed so wiry, his arm a cluster of taut cables. He made a move to step back into the hallway, saying, "I think we'd best take this conversation outside then, and save yourself the trouble of straining-"

"Oh, can it, you," she sighed with mock indignation, "and just get in here," half throwing, half leading him, through the door and into her apartment.

The door shut almost of its own accord a moment later, submerging the hallway in emptiness.

* * *

"Kitchen or living room?" she asked, already subconsciously clearing off the kitchen table. Several pieces of a newspaper littered the otherwise clean surface, though she did notice that all the pieces were from different dates. She wondered if she had ever realized that while reading them. None of the articles looked familiar anyway.

"Kitchen's fine," Tristian told her, stepping forward to help her with the newspapers. He was too late, she had already gathered them up into a neat pile and tossed them onto the countertop. Maybe later she'd take them out for recycling, although she suspected the landlord simply threw it all out. Did it really matter anyway? What's one pile in the scheme of things?

"Works for me," she agreed cheerily, pulling out a chair and plopping herself down into it, tucking one foot under her body. It made her feel taller when she did that and being that her cousin had over a foot on her, she needed all the help she could get. A bare moment later she had jumped back up, manners poking through the night's haze. "Geez, do you want anything? Water? Coffee? Beer?" The last was said partly in jest, although it was possible she might have a few cans in the back of the fridge, remnants of a girls' night out, or a summer party, or something.

"No, nothing for me, thanks . . ." Tristian replied with his usual diffidence. His hands were still in his pockets and he was lurking at the opposite side of the room, pacing in a small line with uneasy steps. There was a distracted tilt to his gaze. He still hadn't unzippered his jacket.

Now that she was up she'd decided that coffee was a good idea. "Sure, you don't want any coffee?" she asked as she dug out the can and started to scoop a few cups into the maker. "Or have you sworn off drinking all liquids entirely now?"

"I had to drive later that night, I told you . . ."

"In six hours . .." she countered with an impish smile. "God, you must be the only person our age that I know who won't take advantage of an open bar." Measuring enough coffee for two, she filled the pot with water. About to pour it into the machine, she halted halfway, fixing her cousin with a piercing gaze.

"Tristian, my dear, are you cold?" she asked in sweet, caring tones.

The other man blinked, seemingly torn away from regarding his warped reflection in a smudged butter knife. "Cold? I . . . ah, no, not that I'm aware of . . ."

"If there's one thing I learned from my parents," she said to him, steamrolling over his fumbling reply, trying to keep a teasing smile off her face, "it's that in your home you can make everyone play by your rules." Pouring the water into the coffee machine, she added with a stabbing finger, "And in this home, I've got two rules . . ." pointing one finger to the ceiling, she said, "One, if you stay for more than five minutes you have to find a seat . . ." a second joined the first, "and two, until someone changes the definition of inside or we lose power, jackets come off. I may not have the world's largest closet but I don't keep wild animals in there either . . . your coat will be safe, I swear."

He had looked away during her minor speech, staring at his splayed fingers resting lightly on the counter, his very posture suggesting he had been struck with absent violence. For a weird second she thought she had somehow offended him, which she had always thought to be utterly impossible. He was so passive, she used to tell him, that if someone asked him politely to stop breathing, he might just shrug his shoulders and do it. Her mother would always correct her. He's just even-tempered, dear. Not everyone can be assertive. Maybe there was a difference. Maybe.

Improbably, a smile cracked his face, a thin, weary thing. "These rules seem pretty . . . specific," he told her with quiet humor. His voice betrayed nothing else. "Just how long have they been in effect?"
"I decided a little while before you got here," she shot back flippantly. "Call it foresight, if you want. I've always had that gift." Tristian shivered a little as he unzippered his coat. That's the problem with wearing that damn thing all the time, she wanted to tell him. It just makes the rest of the world seem cold. Smoothly he draped the garment on the back of the nearest chair, pulling it and seating himself without a word. Without the coat on he seemed even thinner than usual, all sharp edges and angles. She tried to remember what he looked like the last time she saw him and found that all his appearances blurred together. He had been born like that, as far as she could tell, emerging fully-formed. Which was absurd, but he was absurdly consistent.

Speaking of odd, a snarled contour of light hovering near his hip caught her eye. Squinting and leaning forward across the table, she said, "Hey . . . wait . . ." reaching out and pointing at his waist, which hovered at about eye level now.

Tristian, only half-seated, halted the motion, frozen. The edges of his lips twitched in what might have been a smile, maybe even in relief.

"Hey, what is that?" she asked, pointing at the thing dangling from his belt, all strangely curved plastic that danced just on the edge of familiar. Her eyes flickered up to meet his. "Is that some kind of flashlight? You work for a mining company now?"

"What?" he asked, in that frustrating way of his, playing dumb when he knew perfectly well what she was asking. He glanced down, following the direction of her finger, and seemed to notice the object there for the first time, engaging in an exaggerated pantomime of surprise, a ridiculous enough expression that she half-expected him to clap an open palm to the side of his face with a quiet Oh my. "Oh. That." His brows furrowed, as if he hadn't expected her to ask that question. "Can you take a raincheck on the explanation? For a little while? It's a bit of a long story."

Mister Consistency. "Fine," she sniffed, settling back in her seat. "Later, if you must." But she couldn't keep the devilish glint from her voice. "Still, you know, if there's no later . . ."

Somehow he frowned and smiled at the same time, looking down at the table. Always so damn dramatic. "It's a sword," he told her flatly, as if unsure he was using the right words, the right language. "You know, a glowing one, like in the movies. It was given to me by higher beings. I use it to fight aliens." A muscle in his face was twitching quickly, like he was chewing the inside of his cheek.
"Jesus, then don't tell me, asshole . . ." she said with a laugh, shifting so that the foot she was sitting on was free. A second later she drew her other leg up so that her shin was resting against the table. "How you say those things with a straight face I have no idea . . . you ever try poker, Tristian?"
"Once or twice," he replied with a self-effacing smile. "But I don't think I have the luck for it. I never seem to get the right cards."

"Poor baby," she teased.

He shrugged, the smile unwavering. "I'll be okay."

Silence settled in, a falloff in the barrage. Scratching absently at the fabric on her pants, she said idly, "So, when were you going to tell me?"

His eyes ever so slightly. "Tell you?" he asked and his words were bone-dry. "What would I . . ."

Pulling her knee in closer and staring at him over the joint, she continued archly, "So your entire plan was to just show up here out of nowhere, make some small talk and then leave? Did you figure I don't keep a watch or a calender?" He had folded his hands together, watching her talk, elbows on the table, one hand stroking the other wrist. Her words were kind but trapped with meaning. "I may not have graduated from college, but I'm far from a moron. I know you, Tristian. We practically grew up together. You're only spontaneous when you get a chance to plot out how you're going to do it." Her eyes narrowed slightly, along with her voice. Distantly she wondered when Tristian had managed the perfectly expressionless expression. He was going to be a creepy old man someday, if he kept this up. Ah, everyone needed something to strive for. "So . . . what's wrong, Tristian? Why are you here? And so help me if you try to lie, I'll throw you out of here myself, and I don't really care if you get the door open in time or not."

"If I lie, how will you tell?" he asked mildly, the murmured words almost a challenge.

"Because you were never any good at it," she shot back, more defensively than she intended. Goddamn, he was frustrating. No wonder the boy had always been single. She loved him, maybe more than she did most of the family, but sometimes it was like he deliberately tried to chase everyone away, by acting as obtuse as possible.

"Well then . . ." was his only reply, was all he said.

* * *

When he cascaded through the bowels of summer, the years were meaningless.

The last time he wore shorts was at her house, the grass tickling his calves. From a distance she made fun of him, the way family did, the way they did when they never saw you and there was no other way for kids to connect. The rest of the family was so far away, seen through a telescope turned around the wrong way. Voices were wrong, distorted. He remembered a volleyball flying overhead, arcing far past his reach, outrunning even the blunted thud of the return serve, the object rocketing into the misshapen tree that acted as their mysterious, unmoving unspeaking fourth team member. As usual, it failed to pull its weight. He couldn't see who had sent it back. They were alien, ascending. The sun in his eyes turned everything golden, the haze pulled him down. It was too warm here, too damn warm.

Meaningless because time stopped in the heat, too tired to proceed. Winter only came by accident, an old enemy barging in the door and setting up shop. Only then did it all move forward again.
And why don't you? were the first words she said to him. Words congeal and condense, descending through layers of liquid memory. It might have been the first time she asked him about his habit of standing even with a multitude of chairs present. A private joke made public. Speaking what everyone was thinking. Her grin defused all anger. Later he watched them all slip into the pool, sliding into a pool of his own solitude, taking trails back in an effort to get himself lost. Where have you been, she asked from the second floor, carved in air conditioned splendor, her voice out of synch with all of it. Where do you go? Or maybe it was him. Maybe it was always him. Without words it was all dishonesty. But he had nothing else. He can't remember what he eventually said. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps he had just walked away, deeper into thought.

It wasn't that he saw her only in the summer, it was just the way his memory worked. The science of kinetics. Only motion left an impression. The scarring of animated hope. A crowded room, a clatter of voices. Images frozen onto a deck of cards. Laid out, you'd never see the whole scene. In stillness she was the lone vibration. An odd pair is not a bruised fruit. Nobody ever understood that joke. He could only compensate by leaving the scene entirely, moving parallel to it, watching from behind frosted glass, trapped by his own freedom.

I don't get you, she might have told him, at eight, at thirteen, at seventeen. He wasn't surprised at all to find that she made it through. As long as I live, I don't think I'll get you.

The room twisted, images like cardboard slid from view, summer jerked, awoke and sprang upwards, fluttering ever toward the elusive sky.

* * *

"Here," she said, "let me help you with your excuse." Cocking her head to the side slightly, she splashed a disarming grin on her face, saying in a gruff, innocent voice, "What? Can't a guy take time to visit his favorite cousin?" Tristian stared back at her silently, as opaque as ever. "And of course I wouldn't believe that, so now that we're gotten it out of the way, we can skip right to the interesting part." Leaning forward a little, she tapped the table lightly, as if trying to get his attention. He barely seemed there anymore, receding into a distant background. "People don't visit people at this time of night, out of the blue for no reason at all." Meeting his eyes wasn't the same as seeing him. "Is it your parents, Tristian? Someone else in the family? Girl troubles?" She was so used to seeing him at parties and other family events where he had to be social that she had forgotten what he could be like sometimes, how he could simply close up to the point where nothing would escape. Talking to him required pulling each embedded fact out one by one, and sometimes in the tugging, some blood came with it. It couldn't be helped. Not if you cared. "God dammit, Tristian, talk to me. You came here for a reason, why the hell would you come and just sit there-"

"I want to talk," he spat out suddenly, like the very effort had dislodged something unpleasant. "I do, I want to, I . . ." he got up abruptly, nearly knocking the chair over in his haste. For a second she thought he was going to grab his coat and simply walk out, but instead he curved to her left, closer to the living room, the edge of the kitchen, the border of light and dark. "There are things that I . . . but I can't just, you see . . ." his inability to finish a sentence was maddening. She didn't dare stop him. Digging his hands into his pockets, he took a deep breath. He seemed to be making a great effort not to look at her. Letting the breath out slowly, he said, in a measured voice, "I'm not used to this type of thing, I . . . I have to ease myself into it." She had no idea what he was talking about.

"Then do that, Tristian," she told him, changing position so that she was sitting crosslegged on the chair. "I don't know why you make everything so damn difficult." She tried to make the sentence as joking as possible, but she was being serious as well. Nothing was simple with him, he seemed to have only two modes, evasion and silence. Forcing him into a third option was enough to derail him completely. "I'm not a stranger . . . just say what you want. What's so hard about that?" But of course he wasn't going to answer that particular question.

"There are ways of doing things," Tristian replied, hinting at a sideways smile, "and then there's my way." Taking his hands out of his pockets, he stood with a nervous tilt to his posture, anxiously massaging one wrist. "And, ah, lately I've found that . . . maybe I'm just getting older but . . . I can only do things my way. It's just a quirk, I guess. That's all." He pivoted to face her, and for the first time she got a decent glimpse of the object at his belt. It hard to not stare at it, it barely seemed natural at all. But it was probably just a fancy flashlight. Didn't he have that one friend who was always into that weird toys. He probably got it for Tristian as a birthday present. Her cousin was still talking. "So you'll, ah, have to just bear with me, I'm afraid, I . . ."

There was something oddly physical about his gaze, his eyes exerting an uncomfortable pressure. Apparently sensing it, he turned away abruptly, clasping his hands behind his back, finding something inherently fascinating in her cabinets.

"This is the first time I've been here, you know," he announced to nobody at all. "When did you move here? Last year? This is the first time."

"Well you've got me beat," she said with a quick smile, "because I've never been to your place." It wasn't clear at all where this was going. "So do I have permission to show up at any old time, you know, in return for this surprise?"

"Sure. Anytime," he said simply. His back was still to her, she couldn't see his face. "Anytime you want." Rotating slowly on one heel, his eyes swept the place, not really seeming to take in anything. "This is a nice place though, I really like it. Are you here all by yourself?"

"Relatively speaking," she answered, watching him as he paced lazily around the room, sticking to a tight half-circle in the kitchen. Silently she counted the seconds until his wandering would start to drive her nuts and she made him sit back in the chair. That's the way it had always been with Tristian, he only listened for so long. You could yell at him, but it would wear off. "I mostly just sleep here lately, between work and going out with friends . . ." she flashed a grin at him that might have been a warning. "Just because I live alone doesn't mean I have to sit here by myself all day."

"Point taken," he might have muttered after a moment, although it wasn't quite clear. "That's good . . . good to hear. That was my fear when I moved out . . . that I'd just spend most of my time alone, you know . . ."

"I imagine your friends drag you out on a regular basis . . ." she said with a light laugh. Was this what he came here to talk about? It was hard to say. Dammit. "I've met some of them, remember? If there's one thing they're not, it's shy, hm?"

"No, no they're not," Tristian replied with a matching laugh. "They definitely aren't. They keep me busy, most of the time . . ." his fingers were idly tapping the flashlight at his belt. From her angle it looked like an armored insect attached to his hip, drawing blood from him at every step. Maybe that was why he was so pale. "Or they try." The last was said softly. "It seems to me that I'm not the easiest person in the world to get along with."

"No kidding," she said with a gentle, if probing, laugh. "But I don't you're worse than anyone else out there." She waited a second before adding, "Even me," although she really wasn't sure how true that was. She wasn't perfect but neither did she have her cousin's insistent idiosyncracies. In that sense, he was in a class by himself.

"Thanks," he said tersely, drawing his mouth in a tight line. For a second she thought she might have offended him. His body language was incomprehensible. Nothing escaped. Nothing at all. He started to wander back toward the chair, a motion she silently cheered on. When he reached the table he merely placed both palms flat on the surface, exhaling a quick breath, as if the short distance had taken more than the usual effort. He bowed his head briefly and then looked up at her. His grin might not have been entirely natural. "Look at us, on our own finally. We've come a long way . . ." for some reason he sounded like he was talking only to himself, leaving her with the disquieting sense that she was eavesdropping. Looking at her again, his gaze shifting back into focus, he added wryly, "Seems like just yesterday you were trying to shove me into the pool, eh?"

The words triggered a memory unbidden and she had no choice but to smile in response. "I'd never seen you swim before. We were eleven, I figured it was past time you learned." Slipping one elbow back so it rested on the back of the chair, she shook a finger idly at him, saying, "You were a slippery thing back then, though."

"I made up in agility what I lacked in social graces," Tristian said modestly. "Was it true that my parents paid you to try that?"

"No, they offered me five bucks later to try it again," she replied mischeviously. "But you never went back near the pool and I couldn't lure you. Your parents promised to send me pictures if you they ever managed to get you in the water."

He beat her to it. "Still waiting, I take it?"

"Yeah, but I have faith . . . sometime before I die, I'll see it." His lips twitched but he didn't respond immediately. "Even if I have to flood your basement and push you into it." He gave a sharp exhalation of amusement at that image. She let it settle and fade before launching into her next question. "How'd they take it? Your parents, I mean. About you moving out?"

"All right, I guess," he replied with a shrug. Something about his stance made her wonder how much attention he had been paying at the time. "I moved out in stages and kept shuttling back and forth between the two places, so it was pretty gradual. One day I just stopped going back and forth. I'm not sure if my parents really noticed . . ." he trailed off, shook his head. "That didn't come out right . . . I mean, they did notice, but I'm . . . I'm not really a man with much presence, so even when I was home, I never left much of an impression. I kept my own hours and habits, like a glorified boarder or something." He was trying to hide his resignation and only partially succeeding. "They miss me being around, I'm sure but . . . they're probably not sure what it is exactly that they're missing." He said it so matter of factly that she wasn't sure how to respond to it. "I guess it's better than my mother calling me every night and crying how much she wants me around. We're all adults, we all move on." His words were taut and detached.

You came here to talk, but you haven't said what's wrong. These are only symptoms. She never saw herself as extraordinarily perceptive and yet with every word it was like he was trying to blur the air around himself, distort his image until everyone forgot what he looked like. But that couldn't be right. Why would anyone do that to themselves?

"Were your parents any better?" he asked suddenly, the first real initiative he had shown all night. Distantly she could hear the coffeepot bubbling. It'd be ready soon. But words were taking her, driving her along. "You know, when you left? Did they deal with it all right?"

"They were okay . . ." she ventured, shrugging briefly before slipping off the seat to deal with the furiously percolating coffee. The strong scent wafted through the room, brushing away whatever vestiges of weariness remained. An old mug was still in the sink and she rinsed it out quickly as she opened the cabinets above the sink to look for another cup for Tristian. She found one that stated in no uncertain terms "I hate Mondays" along with a cheesy smiley face might have been a sticker somebody had put on. "It took a while for me, too, only because I spent so long looking for a place that my folks had plenty of time to get used to the idea." She giggled a little. "Honestly, I think they believed it more than I did, I took so damn long." She poured the coffee into the two cups with practiced ease, not bothering to add anything else to it. Generally she took her coffee black and she honestly doubted Tristian was really going to drink his before it became cold and she didn't have that much milk to begin with. If he wanted it, let him get it. "But when I moved, I did it all at once, we boxed everything up the day before and then went and did it . . ." as she transferred first one, then the other cup to the table, she looked sideways at Tristian and said, "Are you sure you weren't there? Half the family showed up, I'm pretty sure I coerced you into helping out somehow."

"I don't even think I was in the area at the time," he said vaguely, eyeing the coffeecup with veiled intent, as if debating whether he was going to shock the hell out of her and actually drink it. "If I was, I would have helped." Vague humor skidded across his face. "I mean, what kind of an excuse would I have had . . . I'm within walking distance."

"You are," she agreed cordially, taking a sip of the hot liquid to test it, putting it down a second later. Still a bit too warm. Another few minutes. She had time. Tristian was still staring at his, trying to read patterns in the steam. "A good thing too, I wouldn't have to walk as far to kick your ass." Her fingernails tapped a tinkling rhythm on the ceramic. "Your parents actually stopped by, they said you weren't around but they didn't know where you went. Your father almost gave himself a hernia picking up a box of books. He must have thought it was make-up or something."

"Sorry I missed it . . ." Tristian replied offhandedly. He started to pick up the cup and abruptly put it down with a quiet clatter. Too hot for him, maybe.

"It was a long day," she continued, her hand forming a tent over the top of the cup, the warmth tickling her palm. She wasn't staring at him anymore, but at his coat directly across from her. It was a different coat, she thought, but it looked the same. Maybe that was his secret, he just kept replacing all his belongings with newer versions. Maybe that was the trick to staying young. "We did it all in one day and at the end of it I went back to the house to take one last look and make sure I didn't, you know, forget anything." She took a deep breath. For some reason, these memories always made her chest hurt. "And I went into my old room and it was . . . it was empty, all the stuff, I moved it all here, it was in boxes and sitting somewhere else. And without any of my stuff there, it felt just . . . hollow, it was just four walls that happened to meet by circumstance. If I talked I could hear the echo of my voice, like I was falling away." Tristian had stopped moving, ceased pacing. Finally. "And it hit me then . . . it hit me that my life was changing." She tried the coffee again, found it much better, let it roll down her throat, bitter and just short of scalding. "You don't think about when you go through school and grow up because everything around you in the same, it never seems to change and so you can sort of convince yourself that . . . you're just trapped in this . . . stasis and it'll be the same forever." The heat scraped her voice into something hoarse and she took a moment to swallow and recover. Did she ever tell anyone this? Is she telling anyone now? "And I was standing there in my room, my empty room, not even really mine anymore and I realized I didn't live there anymore, I was going to be sleeping somewhere else . . . maybe not for the rest of my life but definitely never there again." Tristian hadn't sat down again but he had moved closer to the table. His waist was eye level again. The flashlight dangled before her eyes, just out of reach. What was it, really? Why did it seem like such a part of him? "And I turned around to leave, because I didn't want to stand there getting depressed all night, and I saw my mother standing in the doorway. I'd never seen her face like that before, I didn't even know how to describe it. I was hoping . . . I wanted her to say something cliche and typical, like you'll always have a place here or you'll never stop being my girl but she just . . . she made this sound and walked away. I think she went into her bedroom. Later, I walked by and the door was shut and I heard this noise inside." Her voice was clogged, unwieldy. The coffee was searing her nostrils. "I realized . . . I think I realized that . . . it's not until everything changes that you realize that you're changing with it . . . and it's even worse for parents, I think because when they have kids they convince themselves that . . . that they're not getting older and then we go and . . . we go and move out and leave and . . . they realize, they see that the whole time we've been growing up, they've been getting older, nothing stops for them. I think we all delude ourselves into thinking nothing ever changes, until . . . until stuff happens that we can't ignore and . . ." She had to hold the cup with both hands and the coffee barely seemed to have any taste. "I like it here," she pronounced with quiet fervor, "I like living here and I like being on my own. But it's . . . it's a devil's bargain because, to get to this place, to have this freedom, you have to accept getting older and once you accept it, it's a ball that won't stop rolling." Looking up at him she found that he had moved, he was standing on the other side of the chair, as if trying to see if she looked different from an alternate angle. Meeting his eyes, she said, "So we're getting older. What are we supposed to do about it?"

Tristian pursed his lips, appeared to think about it. Out of time with his actions, he suddenly said, "Keep doing it, I imagine." There was strained conviction to his voice, forced persuasion for a person who wasn't there.

All this talking had left her feeling drained, her vitality leaving with her words. What the hell time was it? She couldn't see the clock from her chair. It was too hard to tell. There was a fragile melancholy settling over her heart. Tristian's influence of course. She never thought about this crap. How did he do it?

Trying to brush it away, she said archly, "But enough of my babbling . . . I thought you came here to talk and all you've done is let me ramble about old stuff." Gesturing toward the cooling cup of coffee. "So come on, have a seat, don't let this nice beverage go to waste. Do you even know what the price of coffee is these days?" He didn't move. His eyes sought the physical form of nothing. "Have a seat, Tristian, and talk, if that's what you want to do."

"That's what . . ." he started to say and then realized he was merely parroting her words. With careless fingers he snatched up the cup, took three hard steps across the kitchen toward the living room, drained half the cup in a gulp that nearly made his neck bulge outward. She half-expected to see steam spill from his ears, so rash was the action. But it was over before she could even hope to stop him. That was the thing with Tristian, he either gave you plenty of warning, or none at all. Setting the cup down on the counter, he leaned against the wall, staring out toward the door, not looking at her. "You like change, don't you?" The question was weirdly rhetorical. The answer was supposed to be obvious but she had no idea. "I mean, for all our talk of growing up and older . . . you like change, right?"

"Sure I do," she answered carefully, trying to follow the tortuous path of his logic. "Without change I'd still be living at home, or dating that dick who thought I was going to keep his place neat for him because that's what women do . . . or forever working as a waitress, or a million other things." A wicked smile crept to her face. "I mean, without change I'd never know how good mint toothpaste tastes after you wake up hungover."

He laughed quietly at that. "Nice to see that you've learned something this week."

She made a face at him, although his expression didn't change remarkably. "It was last week, I'll have you know," she responded with a grin. When that didn't warrant a response, she tried again. Brushing some hair out of her face, she said, "If you're trying to say that not all change is good, I agree, Tristian, I do . . ." pausing to take another sip of the cooling coffee, she added, "Remember when my grandmother sold her house to move into the smaller one . . ."

Something glittered in his eyes, an awakening of memory. "That's right, the one with the deck . . ."
"On the second floor, right, right," she confirmed, pleased that he still remembered. Sometimes memories felt so lonely, less real. Knowing someone else shared them was oddly comforting. It validated a tiny part of her existence. "It was all enclosed and nobody ever wanted us to go up there because, I don't know, they felt like the floor would break or something . . ."

"You convinced me to sneak up there with you anyway," Tristian recalled, his hands in his pockets now. Getting him to sit was obviously going to be a futile endeavor.

"I think it was the other way around," she countered playfully.

"Maybe," he answered gamely. He was staring at his feet now, his expression intent. "I remember looking through the screen, at everyone so far below . . ."

"We were only one floor up, dear," she teased gently.

"I know," he laughed, "but I was a lot smaller then, it all seemed so much further away. Everything was cut up into little squares. The whole family was so tiny. It was like being in an airplane. I felt so separate from everything. Someone waved to us and I couldn't tell who it was."

"It was your mother, telling us to get the hell out of there," she told him with a giggle. "I think grandma locked the door in afterwards." She sat back and crossed her arms, sniffed. "Figures. I so wanted to try launching some water balloons from there."

"And then she moved and it was gone . . ." he noted, almost mournfully.

"Yeah, grandma couldn't move around as well and so she went to the ranch house . . ." she finished the memory for him. "The new house was never as much fun, but what can you do?"

"Things change," he murmured, taking one hand out of his pocket to grasp the opposite shoulder.
"We already established that," she said dryly. And then, in a softer tone, "Tristian, we know change is good and bad. We're not six anymore. We know this . . ." He was staring at her without moving his head, his eyes patient. "The question is . . . the kind of change that happened to you . . . which is it?"
Tristian didn't say anything at first. Instead he pushed him off from the wall, slipped his hands into his pockets, started to walk across the room. Halfway to the door he stopped and doubled back, snatched the coffee cup off the counter with deliberate care.

Without moving, she heard him say quietly, "I'm not sure."

And then, in a violent flurry of motion, he spun around, the cup already back on the counter, his face paralyzed by animation. "Do you . . . do you remember what I said about . . . about this . . ." and suddenly the flashlight was in his hand, in a motion so fast that it seemed to just appear there. How long had he practiced that for? No more samurai movies for him, definitely. "When you asked me before, do you remember what I said?"

She actually had to think about that one. How long ago had it been? Time was out of step with her. "You . . . you said a lot of stuff . . ." he really didn't but she didn't know what else to say. "About aliens and . . . fighting and . . ." This was ridiculous. Where was he going with this? Had he finally lost it?
Something in his eyes told her otherwise. There was fevered honesty there, far short of madness, nestled with the experience of a vision that was just coming forth now. "What are you trying to tell me, Tristian? That all of that was true?"

"And what if it was?" he asked, his voice as slippery as he used to be, almost siblant. "What would you say then?"

She pulled her legs in so that she was curled up as small as possible. It wasn't fear. She was just more comfortable this way. "I wouldn't say anything," she told her cousin. "I like to keep an open mind." What was she saying?

He was pivoting almost lazily, his gait absurdly controlled, the flashlight resting easily in his left hand. "Good, because . . . because I don't know what to say either, I came here to talk and I don't know how to say what I, how to . . ." He was facing the living room, his eyes half-closed, concentrating intently.

And then in a sharp, quick motion, he stepped forward, whispered harshly, "Don't say a word . . ." and thrust the arm holding the flashlight into the living room.

Someone flicked a switch, and painted the air crimson.

* * *

Faded from sight, the afterimage was still scrawled across her retinas, a negative spear slashing sideways in her vision. If she looked at Tristian it bisected him every time she blinked. You bastard, she thought at him, you asked me not to speak. You didn't mention that I needed to blink, too.
Tristian hadn't moved from his position near the living room, except to turn back toward her. The object was switched off and was held tightly in his hand, as if he was trying to squeeze it out of existence. She had no idea what it was. She had no idea what she had just seen. For a second, he had seemed somehow different, a man wearing an illusonary skin that the light had briefly burned away. For some reason, the man underneath had seemed more familiar. Tristian was staring at her and his face was set, neutral. Clearly he was waiting for a reaction. But her brain hadn't even figured that one out yet.

She released the first words that came to mind. "So I take it you didn't get that a garage sale, huh?"
He blinked, as if she had just asked him why he insisted on wearing his pants backwards despite the weather, and seemed unsure of how to respond. For a second, she was afraid he might just walk out, afraid that he had revealed too much and frightened her. She didn't want that to happen.

"It's a joke, Tristian," she said to him, "one of those things we tell when we can't think of anything else to say. It's a family trait." Not that her parents had been a laugh riot, settling for silence when all else failed, but this wasn't really the place to go into that. He was still staring at her, like she had made the thing extend from her own hand. "But you're going to have to say something soon, Tristian, or I'm going to start babbling. And if I run out of things to babble about, then I start talking about random things, like the last few dates I've been on. You have to make me stop, Tristian, before it's too late."

The last sentence was spoken in a quasi-feverish rush, an attempt to capture his attention again.
Her words woke him up somehow and he smiled faintly, slipping back into the present. With an unconscious motion, he returned the object to its place on his belt. She thought he might sit down finally. No such luck. It just gave him an excuse to pace again. Tristian always had an incredibly annoying style of pacing, because he refused to stick to a rigid repetitious line, but instead kept varying his path so it just looked like he was randomly wandering around the room. The general consensus was that he did it deliberately, but nobody was ever going to get him to admit to that. She made a mental note to get everyone to gang up on him at the next gathering. Was that considered an intervention?

Turning away from her slightly, he ran a finger along the counter, perhaps looking for dust. His eyes saw something else entirely. "Since we last saw each other there's been some, ah, changes in my life."
"I'll say . . . you didn't have that thing at the barbeque. It would have made cutting the steak that much easier." Without the object present it was simpler to just speak about it in the abstract, not unlike discussing nuclear fallout and life on other planets. Unless it's right there in front of you, it just never seems real.

"I didn't? No, I guess, I . . . that must have been a couple of weeks before . . ." her cousin seemed confused by his own timeline, although she didn't want to press him. "There was a point that . . . I think I was out of synch with . . . with a lot of things. Like time." The last two words were tossed off as an afterthought. How Tristian spoke them without sounding delusional was beyond her. "And if I try to explain, it just won't . . . it's just not going to . . . make sense . . ." He was trying to convince a person that wasn't her and wasn't him. "So I'm not even sure how I'm really supposed to-"

"Whoa, pause for a second," she interrupted, resisting the urge to hold up a hand like she was a traffic cop. He met her eyes in a wary fashion, with the wired tautness of someone who expected either of them to disappear at any moment. "How about we try this, how about we try something radical . . ." it was hard to keep a grin off her lips. He looked so silly when he was paying close attention. "Why don't you start at the beginning?"

Tristian wet his lips, glanced at the wall behind her, then at another wall. "Sure . . . why not?" he said almost breathlessly. "The beginning, then. We can start there."

"That's better."

* * *

To slip, to shift. Time as elusive as a handful of light.

Once, twice a year, you forget and don't forget. The details blur, the minor changes become more jarring. Memory alters characteristics without asking permission. The tilt of a voice, the relative height, the color of hair. Night arcs forever downward and it's as big as the world. What did you ever have in common? Genetics links everyone. You can't just that as an excuse. This fragile distance was too tenuous a beast. Never wanted to spend the time to travel. It's a finite currency and a volatile one when provoked.

"Of course you don't want to hear it. But I have to tell you anyway."

* * *

". . . the stuff about the speech and the alley and what happened there, I'm going to skip it because it's just not important . . ." the cadence of his speech was deafening and she was doing her best to follow the madcap angles of his thoughts. He was nervous about something, he kept crossing and uncrossing his arms as he paced. "But that night I ran into two . . . beings, I guess, that's the only way I can describe them, to call them gods, it just, it scares the hell out of me, to think of them that way, but hell, it's probably true . . ." Had he ever told any of this to anyone? Was it because she was family? Did he think she was going to run screaming from the apartment, run all the way to his parents and tell them that their son had become a raving lunatic? Based on his words and mannerisms alone, it might be true . . . if not for the object he carried. He certainly didn't build it himself. Tristian was smart, but not brilliant. Someone gave it to him, obviously. The fact that she was trying to rationalize all of this logically was either a credit to her ability to deal with shock or merely a symptom of her weariness.

"And I've never even seen them before but when they talk to me, I can hear . . . their voices are embedded in my bones, I don't know why . . . it doesn't make any sense . . ."

She had to stop him before she totally lost the thread. "Hold on, hold on, Tristian . . . who is they . . . who are you talking about." When he stopped moving it only seemed like half of his body agreed to it. He jammed his hands into his pockets in a futile attempt to look casual. There was a sickly look to his eyes. "You keep talking in general, but you're not saying, it's going to drive me nuts if you don't-"

"Agents," he spat out and for a second he thought he had sneezed.

"Agents?" she repeated. "Is that what you call them or what they-"

"I don't know," he replied quickly, nearly decapitating her sentence. "That's what I call them but I'm not sure if I made it up or if that's what . . . if they call themselves that." For a second he looked absolutely miserable. "I don't know," he said again. "I keep waiting for it to start making sense but every day brings something else I don't understand and I'm . . . it buries me, I can't see anymore, I can't . . ." shuddering quietly, he ran a hand tightly through his hair, biting his lip to keep himself from speaking further. "This is stupid," he whispered. "I'm just wasting your time, I'm okay, I shouldn't be . . ."

"Have you heard me complaining yet?" she asked mildly. Her hand was still wrapped around her coffee cup but she hadn't taken a drink in a while. It was still lukewarm. She took a sip both so she could convince herself she wasn't wasting it and to give her a second to think. "Because I want to listen, Tristian, but you have to work with me here . . . take it slow. Take a deep breath . . . can you do that?" He stared at her without comprehension. "No, I'm serious, a nice, deep breath. Come on, I know you can." She kept her voice light, the tone of someone instructing a petulant child.

A lopsided grin peeked out of his face briefly even as he turned away. She tried to hide a matching grin as she heard him exhale.

He placed both hands on the countertop, bowed his head. He did look thinner, but she couldn't be sure if that was because she hadn't seen him for a while or it was just the long culmination of gradual weight loss.

"Perhaps," he said, his voice slightly muffled by distance, "perhaps I should start over." He made a sound that might have been a snorted laugh. "Allow me to introduce myself." There was a flat resonance to his voice, a recitation of something that he could never get to sound as good as it did in his head. "My name is Tristian Jacart, and I'm the host of the Agents."

"Well," she said, drumming her nails on the table, "I guess that's a start." For some reason she kept waiting for him to comment that he was a man of wealth and taste.

"Trust me," he said, "that sounds as weird to me as it does to you." He had turned around again to face her, and looked slightly calmer. The object swung at his belt placidly, almost blending in with his pants. The afterimage still lingered in his mind's vision. She didn't want to ask him what he used it for. Maybe he just needed it to open doors.

"And how long have you been a . . . host?" she asked, trying not to picture him in a bad tuxedo ushering guests into a stuffy restaurant. It was all she could do not to giggle. Somehow this conversation was just barely becoming surreal.

That question made him frown distantly. "Since the day I was born, apparently."

"And what exactly does it entail?" Not laughing while speaking those words was one of the hardest things she'd ever done. Not that she wanted to make fun of him, it just struck her as so odd. And yet, part of her believed it. There was too much conviction in her cousin for it to be otherwise.

He was quiet for a long time, chewing at his lip thoughtfully. "You know," he said, with a sharp laugh, "I have absolutely no idea. I'm still waiting for someone to explain it to me."

* * *

Crisscross winds strafe the uptown traffic.

I don't ever remember her at the house at the place in the world I used to live.

"You can't expect me to play in these shoes . . ."

"Well, then, I guess you'll have to figure something out, hm?"

Relationships in a family are splatters of hideous, gnarled threads, never seemed to connect anywhere, hanging all the time, all too ready to choke someone who tried to unravel them. Most of them are well defined. Mother to son. Son to father. Father to daughter. Daughter to brother. Brother to sister. The line goes in hysterical circles and there's no guessing for when it might trip you up.

What is a cousin? Can you tell me that?

The son or daughter of aunt or uncle, that's what they are. That's what I can tell. That's what I'll say. But what kind of relationship is that? There's no guidebook for it at all. It can be as distant as the lights on the apartments I used to see when I used to cut across the parking lot. The buildings jutted far above the surrounding landscape and at night it sparkled with urban jewels, glittering with dewdrop decay. They were sentinels, and I could never touch them. Family can be like that, unassailable. Sometimes it happens even if you don't want it to be that way.

It doesn't always have to that way. Sometimes it's not.

That's all I'll say. That's all I wanted to say.

* * *

"If you don't know," she asked, honestly curious now, "what do you do? How do you go about being the host?" It occurred to her that she had no idea what time it was. That was the problem with night, ten looked the same as two in the morning, unless you lived in the Arctic or something. When it got brighter out, she would know that she'd be up for too long. Damn, and she had to go to work tomorrow too. But there were questions inside of her that kept coming forth, like those magicians that couldn't stop the foam balls from popping out of their mouth.

"I just . . . I just keep doing what I'm doing . . ." Tristian said, looking briefly confused. At least he was leaning against the counter now, and not pacing. That was definitely a relief. "Apparently that's all I really can do . . . if there's trouble, it . . . somehow it finds me."

"What kind of trouble?" The way his voice sounded, it didn't seem that he would be called upon to fix toilets and the like.

"Ah, the first time . . . when I met the, ah, Agents . . ." he inhaled sharply through his teeth, reached behind him for the coffee cup. It was no doubt cold by now, but he just held it in both hands and stared at his reflection in the opaque liquid. Maybe he was watching memories. "They teleported me to a city that's past Pluto . . ." and he said it much the same way she would state I took the bus across town this morning. She had never thought she would hear the word teleport used in casual conversation, at least not with its usual meaning. "I'm not really sure why, but right after I . . . I got there the city was attacked by . . . other aliens and I was caught in the middle, I had to fight, I . . ." he had closed his eyes now. His hands were absolutely still. She could have balanced glass figurines on the edges of the cup. "The city, it was carved in an asteroid and so there was tunnels burrowed throughout it . . . it was fairly cramped and I remember the smell, it was hard to classify, if rust were rotting meat, maybe . . ." he stopped, his mouth in a tight line. "It doesn't matter," he continued, "because in those tunnels I ran into something, it was killing the people who lived there, they were invading all over the place but I just saw one, it . . . it looked like something out of a nightmare, all tentacles and bug eyes and . . . it kept roaring, in the tunnels the roar was almost this, this physical thing, I could feel it in my bones, I . . ." he brought the cup up to his face but didn't drink. A second later he lowered it again. Maybe he was just looking for his reflection, trying to convince himself that he still existed. "It had . . . six tentacles and three of them had bodies wrapped up in them . . . one was missing its head, the thing, the alien it took a bite out of one of the corpses while I stood there, I remember it had a mouth like a bottomless pit and these giant teeth and its face was covered in blood, just in splotches, like some weird skin condition . . . and one of the bodies was still twitching. I remember that." His voice was level, betraying only the required emotion. She wondered how many times he had gone through this event, in an effort to commit every detail to memory. She'd heard the tone before, when she was a kid and she used to sneak out of bed and cling to the stairs, listening to her father sit and talk with his buddies over drinks late into the night, especially when more than one beer was tucked into their systems and the talk turned toward Vietnam. Tristian's voice contained the same resolute shock. "I had been running from . . . from something else and so I couldn't go back the way I came and while I was standing there it, it saw me and it let out this . . . bellow and it just rushed me, it was so big I didn't think anything could move that fast but it did and . . . and I . . ." A hint of dark humor streaked his face briefly. "Well, I'm still here, right? So you can probably guess what I did. What I had to do." The angry slit cut across her memory again. The joke she had wanted to make before, about a certain movie, was gone now. She knew perfectly well what the object was for and what he could use it for.

"Tristian . . ." she said, beginning to stand up, not even really sure why, maybe to give him a hug, maybe just to touch him, to remind him that he existed. He looked so withdrawn, like he always did when things ended. One of the last times she had seen him, at his grandparents' anniversary party, held in the basement of a restaurant, she had somehow managed to convince him to dance, to actually get on the floor with the rest of the goofier members of the family. He, of course, managed to throw just about everyone off the beat. Later, when the party was finished and everyone was leaving, she went down the stairs to make sure that she hadn't forgotten anything. Halfway down she saw him, standing in the center of the empty room, alone, his hands in his pockets. As she watched he began to pace, in slow measured strides, his eyes darting back and forth across the room. He might have been retracing the steps of everyone who had been there, replaying the memories at his own speed. There had been a tired, spent look to him. She could still hear the sound of his footsteps in that hollow place, and even though the sound followed her back up the stairs, for some odd reason she expected that at any second the sound might disappear and with it, Tristian as well. The loneliness was in him then, but she choose to walk away, not wanting to face it. But it was different now. She wanted to help.

But he was obsidian, smooth and reflective, revealing the flaws only when the light struck him at the right angle. Waving a hand dismissively, he motioned for her to sit down, to keep away from him. "Don't worry, I'm okay . . . really I am," and he smiled, as if the act might add fragile credibility to his statement. She didn't believe, but she couldn't assault it either. "I survived and . . . and it got better from there. It always does." He flashed a quiet grin at her, taut but still natural on the fringes. "So do you think I've gone crazy? I don't think we've had a real lunatic in the family for a few generations, we could be due."

"I don't think it's you," she said softly, resting her chin in her hand and propping her elbow on the table. "No, I think I believe you, it's just . . ." she narrowed her eyes. "Why you? Why is this happening to you?"

"Just lucky I guess," he said with another dry laugh. "I wish I knew for sure, from what I'm told . . ." and he didn't elaborate on who might have told him, ". . . it has to be someone and, ah, this time it wound up being me."

"You, hm," she said. God, she was getting tired. The coffee had done nothing for her. Tristian seemed as wired as ever, she wondered if that was a side effect of whatever he was, whether he even slept anymore. That would be nice. Eight hours a day extra. A free day every three days. What would you do with all that extra time? Live, she supposed, too tired to think of anything more complicated. People would figure out something. They always did. "So when you say it has to be someone . . . you're the only person like . . . like that, in the whole world?"

Tristian snorted with what might have been cynical amusement. "The world? The Universe, actually . . ." and the concept was so large her brain couldn't wrap around it. "There's really only one at a time, apparently, and this time, out of the trillions upon untold trillions of people in the Universe . . . it's me."

"It's a kind of luck," she said with a cheery smile.

"Better than being hit by a meteor, I suppose," he replied, frowning briefly. "Though only time will tell, I guess, which is the preferable fate." He sighed, twisting his head to the side, not looking at her. "It's not all bad," he said, his eyes facing the darkened living room. It wasn't clear who he was speaking to. She didn't dare look over there. The bedroom was that way and a silent signal was tapping her on the shoulder already, courtesy of her brain's internal clock. "I wanted to think that way, at first, because I was all covered in blood . . ." it was a memory reciting itself, unfiltered and pure. She couldn't listen to this. It was too personal. "There were symbols splattered on the stone walls in blood and I couldn't tell if they were part of some alien language, or just random splatters. That's the danger of this Universe, you want to read into things, you want to think it's all connected . . . but too often it's just random, it's just meaningless. And nothing makes any sense, and it's not terrible, it's just the way things are. We don't think about, but when you do, you can't stop." There was a subtle intensity to his voice, a hushed fever to his words. "And you don't want to accept it, you don't want to come to terms with it, but at the end of the . . . the day, there's nothing you can do. And even if it doesn't make you feel any better, it's still good to keep in mind." He was talking to himself. He had already left her place, retreated back into his own world.

Then, abruptly, his gaze darted back to her. For a fleeting moment, Tristian appeared otherworldly, the kind of man who would leave the planet to have crazy adventures. "I kept running, I didn't know where I was going. Dark shapes rushed past me, chittering, going in the opposite direction. I slipped on things that might have been entrails and eyes. I thought I was in a terrible dream, and I was going to die there. So I kept running. I kept going up . . . and then . . ."

He broke off suddenly, stared at her for another second without speaking and then without warning strode off to her left, toward the living room. The dark, draped shadows swallowed him easily enough and he entered without hesitation.

Her eyes followed his blurred passage, not comprehending at all what the point was. A self-guided tour? Deep inside her living room, she heard a faint rustling and the creaking of furnature.
"After a while, I did the only thing I could," his voice drifted out to her, a radio station desperately clutching a lonely frequency for fear of being disrupted entirely. "I stopped. I stopped. And I want to show you why."

Silence spread easily, liquid poured from an overflowing container.

"Come in here," he asked, nearly begged. "Please, I just want . . . please." He was out of words apparently, trying to coast on emotion. It had never been his strong point, he had never wanted to give anyone the key, the codes. He was nothing but pure sound now, his body diminished, withdrawn, vanished. There was nothing to grasp, or follow. Just the sound. "I don't know how to show you. I'm not sure how to try. Just . . . please."

She didn't know what he was saying. She had no idea what he was asking. No more words emerged from the shadows, she couldn't even see the darker contrast of his thin frame, a line drawn on the dark. He didn't say anything else, it was quite possible he wasn't going to.

Slipping quietly out of her chair, she padded toward the darkness, and without hesitation, slid inside.

* * *

Trying to remember the last time you saw someone is a dicey affair. When you want to look back, events get in the way, obscuring the view.

It was a birthday party, maybe. Of an aunt or uncle, perhaps. The house was large and it didn't belong to the person that the party was in honor of. Outside, he stood on the deck alone and watched two squirrels chase each other. One was smaller than the other. Details stuck to him like darts and he never dared to pull any out for fear that he couldn't handle the loss.

They were playing pool in the game room. He could hear the regular clack of the balls as he worked with way down the hall. Voices mingled. Unintelligible. There had been four of them in there, family members all. No. Not all. Her boyfriend. Or someone else's? He could never keep track. His parents were in another part of the house. Or they had left. He wasn't sure, they had come separately and never kept track of each other anymore. A sign of growing old?

There was no door to the room, just an open entryway. He stopped just short of it, near a heating vent on the floor. Details, again. Details. He couldn't walk past the room, for some reason he didn't want anyone to see him. He wanted to be a ghost in the house, a ghost in a life, wandering his intangible way with bordering walls his only source for direction. The thought of people paying attention to him gave him the disgusting sense of a second skin made entirely of scum, a dirty, slithery thing that scraped its slippery way against him every time he moved. He couldn't escape it.

So he stood against the wall, just outside the gathering, listening to the physical noise of kinetic motion and trying to distinguish the voices. He could have been quite content there, letting his mind go, sliding in between the lines of conversation.

It took him a minute to realize they were discussing him.

* * *

". . . and the problem is, after a while, you don't know if you actually, you know, like them, or even love them, because of who they are and the kind of person that they are or . . . or if you're just responding to, you know, their attention, so I don't know if I'm just, if I'm just reflecting his love for me and pretending that I'm satisfied with that or if . . . or if I'm generating it myself . . . and I don't know and I keep wondering if it matters, because he's not an asshole or anything and if someone loves you, isn't that enough, isn't that what everyone wants . . . but it's supposed to be mutual and if all he's feeling is just me rechanneling what he feels for . . . for me, then what good am I doing him, or me . . . I'm not giving, I'm just taking and I'm doing it with a lie and . . . that's not me but . . . what if that's the best you can hope for, what if that's as good as you can get and the real thing, it just doesn't exist, except in stories and delusions and I'm throwing away the closest I'll ever get to the real thing for . . . for something that doesn't really exist and if I do, it . . . I don't want to be alone, that's, I guess that's what I'm saying, I'm afraid of being alone and I'm afraid of being lonely and I'm afraid the fear is making me desperate . . ."

Scenes from phone conversations that will never occur, 2003

* * *

Tristian was bracing himself against her couch, one knee sunk deep into the center cushion and the other foot resting on the floor. He had moved one of the curtains aside and was staring out the window behind the couch. Her apartment was several floors up and maybe near the same levels as the streetlamps. Ambient lighting from somewhere made him more outline than man, his features were completely obscured, washed away, made blank.

"What am I looking at here, Tristian?" she demanded. "All I see is dark and I can see that every time I close my eyes." She tried to keep her tone jocular but he had always been vague in his motivations and apparently that trait had become amplified. Maybe he was trying to scare her, to chase her away. It wouldn't work. Family grew distant but never completely detached.

He seemed to shudder at the sound of her voice and with gentle motion turned toward her. Frail, pale light made his eyes liquid.

"I'm just looking . . . out," he said, his voice a sigh.

She went over and sat next to him then, resting her crossed arms on the back of the couch, putting both her knees on the cushion. Tristian was pointing but not at anything in particular, just pulling her attention to the outside, to the world, to the places above the world.

Her apartment was one of the higher buildings in the area, although not the highest. The two buildings across the street were nearly as high and in the dark they rose like monoliths before her eyes. Arcing over them was the sky, an abyss poured over their heads. The air was cloudless and clear.

"When I . . . ran from the . . . from the fight," her cousin said, his voice nearly inaudible even though she was right next to him, "I really didn't know where I was going . . . the tunnels were built in the asteroid itself, they just sort of hollowed it out but there's . . . there's also an upper city that was constructed on the surface, I don't know if it's a class thing or, or what but . . . they covered over that part with a clear dome, I guess and when I came out I . . . there was nothing stopping me from seeing . . ." his eyes tell the rest of the story.The stars were out tonight. They'd broken through the darkness and the only way she could think was in cliches. Dewdrop jewels, holes punched in the firmament, old photographs reaching out but never touching. There's so many. On the street there was never any reason to look up, with the buildings pressing down on you from all sides, blotting out everything but concrete. And in her home she never thought to look out her window, as sad as that was. Her television was directly behind her. She tried to think about what that said about her.
"They twinkle here because of the pollution," Tristian said, his voice sounding more confidant, the topic putting him on steadier ground. "But out there . . . there's nothing between you and them and . . . they don't flicker or glimmer, they just shine. And everything, it's a hundred times clearer, you think the sky here at night is black it's . . . it's frightening, you forget what color is."

"And that's what you saw?" she asked, for some reason keeping her voice low. "When you left the, ah, tunnels? All the stars and everything?"
"Yes," he hissed. "Below me was ragged, bloody, ugly death and the stars . . . it's cold and distant and lifeless but there's a kind of beauty in it, you realize how small you are, it could just swallow you and . . . and that would be okay."

The hushed reverence to his voice gave her chills. Even as close as they were, the gap between their experiences could swallow her entire life whole and still leave plenty of room for whatever else followed her down. And this had been waiting for Tristian his entire life, waiting for him to reach it? She had never known her cousin, not in any way that mattered. But he had never known himself either and that mystery was all that propelled him sometimes.
"Did you find us at all?" she heard herself asking. It was a giddy question for a woman too tired for the emotion. "I mean, I heard the sun's just a brighter star but were you able to see, you know, Earth at all . . ."

A smile made a fleeting impression on his face. "Everything looks different out there, nothing is where it's supposed to be." He shifted, rested his chin on his arms. "I tried," he continued, "I don't know why, I was panicking and afraid of being killed at any second but I guess I just . . ." he paused, and she suspected the thought was too personal to speak outloud. "I couldn't find it, not even the sun. I didn't even know where to start looking. I'm better now, ah, better at finding the stars, that is."

"That's good, Tristian," she said, patting him on the arm. "We'll make a real space cadet out of you yet." She tried to picture him in a Buck Rogers type costume, all flying belt and ray gun and it just wasn't possible. Clinging reflective silver wouldn't be his color.

His arm shook with what might have been laughter, although he made no sound. "I just wanted to let you know that it's not all terrible out there, no matter what I make it sound like. I've . . . already I've seen a lot of unpleasant, nasty things but it's just . . . there's just more of everything out there . . ." there was a rising tension to his voice.

"I know, Tristian, I know . . ." she told him, physically stuffing a yawn back down her throat. One of the places slightly down the street was a bank with a neon clock set in its sign. The numbers were blurred but she didn't think it was a time she wanted to see.

". . . and when it's bad, it's worse than anything you can imagine here," he said to her, or maybe to no one at all, "but when you do run into something, into beauty, it's richer than anything I'll ever know and it . . . it makes it worth it, I guess." He shrugged. His eyes were clear, and sad. "I tell myself that it does. For a second, I feel like things make sense."

As solemn as he was, she couldn't help but smile. "You have to take me out there with you someday . . . I could use some more sense in my life."
"It never lasts," he told her, almost mournfully, staring out into the night. She could only judge his expression by inference.

"Isn't once all you need, though?" she asked him, twisting to stare directly at him. He watched her with his peripheral vision, unwilling to turn away. "Because once you've felt it, even if it's just one time, even if everything just makes sense for a little bit . . . you know it's out there, that it's possible and it exists and . . . you can have it again, if you're patient enough."

"And are you? Patient enough?"

"I think so," she said immediately. Tristian said nothing she tilted her to the side for a moment to think about it further. "But actually, to be honest, probably not." She grinned at him through the dark. "I'm like everyone else, I want all the answers now. You're the last of a dying breed, I'm afraid, Tristian."

Glancing at her, he sniffed sharply, and began to laugh quietly. It was a faraway, curious sound.

* * *

". . . seen Tristian around at all? I swear, he's becoming more like a mime every time I see him . . ."

They don't talk to him. They talk about him. It worked out to be the same thing.

"I think he's getting less sociable as he gets older, at least when he was a kid he used to talk at least, even if he didn't make any sense . . ."

"Yeah, remember when he kept claiming, that time we were at his house, remember he kept telling us that someone with red eyes kept staring at him from his closet?"

"I don't remember that . . ."

"He was like five, so we were like, what? seven? maybe?"

And that was how they put a man together, through words and stories, building a frame that he somehow had to cram himself into, no matter how awkward the fit.
"I don't know, you ask me, he doesn't look like he wants to be here at all . . ."

"See, now you're wrong there, because-"

"What, he's barely eaten and he doesn't talk to anyone . . ."

"Let me finish, I said let me . . ."

"Don't get me wrong, he's nice enough and he's not being a dick or anything, but I mean come on, this is family, you're all his family . . ."

And no matter what broke in the process, he had to fit himself into the boundaries, right? Listening, he felt himself becoming the man that they perceived him to be.

Did it matter, in the end? It was the framework that lived on, long after the space inside had crumbled to dust. History wasn't concerned with the interior.

"Are you going to let me talk? Are you? Or are you just going to keep streamrolling over me?"

"I'm just saying, that's all I'm . . ."

"Oh, Christ, let her talk, for the love . . ."

"You people miss the point . . ."

"So bring it back for us . . ."

"Shush you, shut up . . ."

". . . you think he doesn't want to be here, because he's not, he's not hugging people and dancing around and being all goofy and drinking and all that crap you people say you like to do . . ."

He wanted to be the person that they said he could never be. Instead he sat half formed, shaped by their dueling perceptions. Could a man be molded by committee, his personality determined by democracy. Was it possible to be outvoted by himself?

". . . the thing is though, you're all . . . all of you are overlooking one stupid, simple thing . . ."

"That it's your shot?"

"Yeah, while we're still young . . ."

". . . if he didn't want to be here, he wouldn't be here."

"Wait, what do you mean?"

"He wouldn't come. Just what I said."

The magnets trapped in his bones were all realigning themselves, finding different directions. If he stood here long enough the strain might just pull him apart and he'd be just shards and blood.

"So it's that simple, huh? What makes you so sure?"

"Don't mind me, just, ah, waiting my turn here, nice and patient . . ."

"It is. If you knew him at all, you'd know what I meant. We wouldn't be having this conversation . . ."

"Yeah and it might be someone else's turn, but hey . . ."

And blood and bone were components of a man, but you couldn't mix them together and get a person. A corpse had all the right parts but it didn't make a person anymore than the blocks he used to play with could be made into a house. It was missing what it needed. He had no idea what he had.

"So how is it you know him so well, he's related to all of us you know? What makes you so different? What special insight do you have?"

"I bet that ball might just, maybe it'll . . . oh no, how about that they can't move spontaneously on their own . . . someone needs to hit one . . ."

"Easy, the same one that tells me you read into things too much . . ."

No idea? What he had, he had.

". . . and that he's standing right outside the room. Aren't you, Tristian?"

Had he what idea? No, he had.

* * *

Before her the stars shifted, blurred, performed an impromptu movie impersonation of hyperspace. It was an impressive effect. It was the day catching up with her. A yawn clutched her, took hold and refused to relinquish its grip. She tried to speak through it and found her mouth only stuffed with cotton.

Finally she was able to force a sentence away. Brave soldiers, brave soldiers. "Oh God, I'm sorry Tristian, but I think I'm done, I had to be at work early this morning to get ready for some stupid meeting they postponed anyway and I've just been running around like a nut the whole day and . . ." she was talking without considering that he might not be listening. Figures. A pity if she wasted such a good speech.

"You can see Mars," he whispered, as if the everything she had just said could be boiled into Gee, Tristian, where is Mars? His eyes were locked on something far past her apartment and maybe even the atmosphere. Distant worlds. Her mind was going there quickly, fragmenting as it went. A little longer and there might not be enough spaceship left for a secure dock. "It's right out there, it's bright tonight . . . see it?"

He wasn't listening. He never did when it was convenient for him. Absurd focus, his parents had called it, when he wasn't around. Once, his grandmother had said he was her favorite. To this day she wasn't exactly sure why. Lack of choice? It'll make for strange decisions, especially when such things aren't needed.

So she had to respond, of course. It was only expected. Throwing herself back up so she was situated next to him, she tried to stare out and match the invisible line his pointing finger was making. He was indicating a place between the two apartments right across the street. The two apartments stood silent, apparently unaware that they were being ignored in favor of the emptiness between them. Perhaps they didn't care. Few lights were on at the buildings, several lit squares indicated either activity or paranoia within the rooms. Sometimes the lights created weird patterns, almost seemed to spell out words. Tonight it was all dark.

"I've been there, you know," Tristian said, with almost pathetic insistence. "I've been in cities, things people never knew existed. All our probes and we've missed it all."

She tried to look and focus, but all the stars, they were melting together. Blearily, she tried to figure out which tiny dot she was supposed to be paying attention to, but they were all so small and distant that it was hard to care.

"It's the brightest one," he said, helpfully. "You can spot it really clearly tonight. Earth didn't look as bright, when I was there. Really."

But squinting told her nothing. She tried for one last attempt, tried to separate one tiny glimmer from another, but it was all the same. She lacked his insight. They were all bright dots to her.

A yawn made the decision easy, erased all alternate actions. "I'm sorry, Tristian . . ." Spinning around, she slumped down deeper into the couch, sinking into a space that felt all too cozy. Jesus, was she going to make it to her bed? It was probably bad form to ask Tristian to carry her. "I just don't see it. I'm too tired, maybe. But I just can't see anymore."

Her cousin didn't respond immediately. "Ah, that's . . . that's okay. That's fine." He sounded subdued but her hearing was going as well. "I guess you'll probably want to go to bed, then. I guess."

"Give the lad a prize," she said with a grin, finding the energy to hop off the furniture. Tristian slid off in a more deliberate, boneless fashion. The object bounced against his hip, darker than the darkness itself. Something in her wanted to see it revealed again. There was a magic to his life now, a prestige she couldn't fathom. "But, yeah, I should get some rest." Another yawn was blocked by the back of her hand. "I'm going to be a zombie at work as it is."

"Sorry," Tristian said, almost sounding sincere.

"Yeah, yeah whatever," she responded airily. "But really," she added, looking at him sideways and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, "thanks for coming. Seriously. I never get enough visitors here and . . . it was nice. It really was."

"Thanks," he said, hands in his pockets again, glancing down at the floor. Embarressed, maybe? His voice was shrouded, all textures hidden. "I'm, ah, I'm doing my best to become . . . to act more human, I guess." A sardonic smile might have caught the edge of a shadow. "I, um . . . how am I doing? Am I doing okay?"

"Fantastic," she told him, with a grin. Her bedroom was in the other direction and they were both walking toward the kitchen. The light threw their shadows behind them, bodies slapped into two dimensions. "We might make someone functional out of you yet, hm?"

"Funny, that's what my friends keep telling me," he noted dryly. "Don't let them admit that they're right."

"I won't tell a soul," she said, strolling into the kitchen ahead of him, gathering up her coffee mug even as Tristian moved to the counter where his still laid and snatched it up. They reached the sink together, althoughu she had to stop to empty the pot out and rinse it with water. "So," she said conversationally, as he snuck his cup in to rinse it out, "do any of your friends, do they know about . . ."

"About what this means?" he replied, pointing with an elbow toward the object. Elaborating further would have been wasted words. He took a deep breath anyway, but he was young and had oxygen to spare. "They . . . well, they . . . they know," he said simply. "There was an incident and, ah . . ." he stopped, looked briefly confused, as if he had just been informed of the tangles of his own life. "I think it'll be okay," he finished, the sound of a man reading off a slice of paper that had just been handed to him.

"It tends to be, if you just give it time . . ." and he smiled at her somewhat tightly. A nerve, perhaps, still exposed. She wondered what had happened. She needed a whole new frame of reference to really understand his life.

"Don't worry about washing that out, I'll do it tomorrow," and he dropped it like she had set it on fire with a word. Perhaps people did things like that. New concepts, new concepts. "Jesus, if you break it then I don't have to wash it at all. Careful there."

"Sorry, I . . . sorry," he spat out in slow motion, strangely flustered. This is the guy who goes into space and waves that thing around?

"Don't worry about it," she told him. Weariness was bearing down on her now. If she didn't get to bed soon she wouldn't be waking up for work tomorrow. "Just . . . ah, whatever, I'm going to bed." She smiled up at her cousin, who for a second barely seemed to comprehend what she was saying. "But you take care of yourself, Tristian. And come back and visit."

"Sure . . . sure, I will," he said and for a second she thought he was patronizing her. "I'm sorry I wasn't all that much fun tonight, I didn't mean-"

"I said don't worry about it," she said, taking his arm. "Sometimes you need someone to listen who isn't a mirror, right? I know how it is. You got it out of your system, next time you'll be the bouncy, wacky kid we all know and love." He smiled at that. His skin was chilled under her hand, like he'd been outside for hours. It vaguely occurred to her that he had never said exactly what the Agents had looked like. That was a strange thought. She was in a strange mood. No filter existed to stop the words. "And bring some friends with you when you come, this place needs more voices." She stepped forward to bump him in the ribs with her elbow. "I'm sure with this new allure about you, you can't keep the ladies away."

"Right," he said with flat humor. "That's why I keep the sword . . . to chase them all away."

"Well don't do that," she told him, in that mock seriousness only severe tiredness could allow. "I don't think I've ever seen you with a girl . . . it's about damn time, you think? You're too nice to be by yourself forever." She poked him in the chest. "Come on, tell me that you've got a nice girl out there . . . come on, look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face."

"I . . ." he matched her gaze for a second and then looked away as if he'd been cut. "There might be . . . this girl and I, we're . . . we don't know yet, but we're working on it . . ." he shrugged, his stance suggesting shame. "It's a start."

"That's great, Tristian," she said, stepping back, feeling the dull ache in her jaw that came from a suppressed yawn. "You have to bring her over here, let me meet her. I want to be the first in the family, I think I deserve the first meeting, right? Don't I deserve that?"

"You're . . . you're right, you do," he said simply, nearly stumbling away from her. This was silly, he wanted a graceful exit and she kept making small talk. There was plenty of time for this later. That's why they invented telephones, right? "First chance I can trick her into coming here, I'll bring her over . . ."

"I'll hold you to it," she warned him with a grin. The yawn burst out again and with it the last of her willpower. "Oh God, I'm done . . ." she managed to recover enough to gather her cousin in a tight hug. He returned it with an equal tightness that she found touching in a strange way. Somehow she'd always felt close to him without really being able to tell if he felt the same way, always figuring by inference, by filling in the spaces that weren't there. "Good night, Tristian, thank you so much for stopping over . . . I'm really glad you did. Take care, okay?"

She felt colder after letting go of him. There was a jagged hesitancy to his movements. He opened the door while still looking at her. The hallway beyond was an amorphous mouth ready to gobble him up. Her mind wasn't making connections anymore, just rendering it all surreal.

Tristian looked at her, looked down, then back at her again. There was a subtle jitteriness in his stance that had to be caffeine derived. No more for you, she silently vowed. How long had he been standing there? Time to go home, Tristian. We all need our rest. It's time to go.

Perhaps he heard her. Who knew what mysterious powers he had now? His lips moved and she thought she had gone deaf or maybe her mind was too slow to catch the words anymore.

But no, he spoke. He said. "Good . . . good-night," said Tristian and with a final glance and without a further word he took a step out the door, went back and went out and was gone. And was gone.

* * *

Her words pulled him into the entryway even as his own actions were tearing him away. He didn't know he would leave shortly after, not until several minutes later and a lifetime further down. Images were a tumbling array of disassociated colors, only assembled with painstaking care later. None of them were facing him, holding the cues with an ease that had to be genetic. He went past the room on desperate skates, feeling her voice render him solid, physical, able to be harmed. He caught a glimpse of her hair, her sweater, not even her face but it didn't matter. He was already wounded, and fleeing. No competition, he couldn't win.

". . . the hell, was that him, was that who I think . . ."

". . . there the whole damn time, I bet, just listening, holy mother of . . ."

He had always wanted to be seen through.

". . . tell me, how the hell did you . . . how did you know he was there . . ."

When it turned out that hadn't been the problem at all.

"Jesus, you people, it was easy . . ."

He was afraid of being seen, by anyone, transparent or otherwise.

". . . you guys just don't look, you just don't know how to look . . ."

Not realizing that it wasn't the worst thing in the world.

". . . his shadow, you idiots, I saw his shadow, in the doorway . . ."

Nor the best thing, but just simply a thing and something that he had to accept.

". . . and he's got this distinctive shadow, it's always the same, no matter where I am I think I'll always know it, it's just one of those things, you know, that just stays with you . . ."

* * *

If her bedroom light hadn't been on she might have just tripped and fallen and fallen asleep right on the floor, which would have made for a stiff awakening.

Moving toward the bed she hazarded a glance at the clock only to look away sharply when it showed her that it was way later than she had wanted it to be. Dammit Tristian, it's a good thing you're family. Well, all she had to do was make it to lunch then she could catch a quick nap and then suffer through the rest of the day. She would just claim she was up all night working on a project. They might just believe that.

The shades were slightly open, letting pale fingers of moonlight seep into the room. She went over to close them, taking a second to look out the window onto the street. Far away the bright lights of a distant skyline, a kingdom tantalizingly out of reach glittered like fallen jewels, closer than the heavens but still too far to touch. Below, the streets were dark and empty. She stared out for longer than she expected, perhaps waiting to see if there was movement. Part of her looked for Tristian but didn't see him of course. Did he drive here? She had never asked. He better not be walking home this late alone. But then, what did he have to worry about? What was going to hurt him? It was so hard for her mind to adjust to all of this, she had stepped into a movie seconds before the script had gone up in flames. Seeing him at the next family gathering was going to be an interesting experience, it was going to take all of her willpower not to say anything about tonight to him. Still, it was nice that he came, she wished he could have stayed longer. The daily grind was just too unexciting these days, she'd have to think about switching jobs soon, move into something a little more interesting. She was living for the weekends these days, at least her friends gave her some respite from the rest of the world. Tristian's world was probably never boring anymore. She wondered how far she could step into it and still remain untouched.

A gaping yawn scattered all of her thoughts and made her head swim. The world blurred and rotated but she brought it back into meager focus quickly. Enough, then. Closing the shades, she took one last look at the sky but the clouds must have moved in. Everything was black and grey and endless. The stars were gone. Oh well, they'd be back tomorrow. Isn't that how it always went? Not like they were going anywhere. The bed looked too inviting for words. She turned the light out, igniting the room with darkness, coating her in nothing. Slipping in, she double checked to make sure that her alarm was set. Morning was going to come all too quickly. She wasn't sure what she liked better, waking up too early but able to lay in bed knowing you didn't have to get up for a few more hours, or simply waking up on time after a nice continuous sleep. To be honest she would have liked to take the day off tomorrow. But that wasn't going to happen.

The pillow was too soft, the sheets too comfortable. Her thoughts melted and crumbled. The clock numbers hovered before her, indistinct, wrapped in cool haze. It didn't matter. There was no time. Exhaustion was claiming her inch by inch. Did Tristian even have a job anymore? Pehaps he ran the Universe. Or tried to outrun the world. His limbs were red bars, cutting cruel slashes in the floor. Clock hands were a knife to the air. Turning and turning but never going anywhere. To be in charge in place. This place was dragging her down to a safe world. To be his voice, painted crimson the walls. Heat without heat. Tristian. Blood and blood and blood and family. Where to go when nobody will take you in. Everybody likes a countdown. We'll turn the lights out, you see. Turning them out with our falling gears. Tumble time tumble. Her eyes were closed. Strike the breathing, find a rhythm. Tristian, you pinwheel like a crystal arc. Body was nowhere, drifting away. Sleep to come, swung like a pirate. To take this spaceship into the silent zone. No escape, Tristian. We'll always find. Sleep. Watch it descend. Down. Down. Down.

With the body disconnect, sleep caves, rushes to fill the empty spaces. Do you. And takes her away, to its fertile grip. Tristian, I. And with a deep breath, she went under. And was gone. And was gone.

* * *

". . . and he's got this distinctive shadow, it's always the same . . ."

* * *

The streets are empty but he's standing there, doing nothing to add to the population. The brisk night wind causes the grass that pokes between the sidewalk cracks to caress his shoes with gentle care. His hands are in his pockets, his eyes focused upwards. Somewhere not too distant a car briefly coughs into sputtering life and quickly fails, getting nothing for the attempt. Down the street, on the corner, a traffic light goes from red to green to yellow to red again, playing for a missing audience. It's a beacon for all the wrong travellers.

He's staring upwards and the streetlamp fails to illuminate him entirely. There's a window capturing his attention and it won't let him go. Gauzy light peeks out from behind billowy coverings. It's too far away for him to reach. On the other corner a shadowed figure stumbles out, spits something pulpy onto the ground and retreats in the same fashion, never speaking a word.

There's no expression on his face. The wind quietly rustles his hair, as if begging for a reaction. The light shines on, stable, unrelenting. Another minute passes. Back to green again. Nobody moves. The weight shifts to the balls of his feet. Hovers at yellow for a brief second.

Like the air being sucked into a vacuum, the light goes out.

To red.

His face doesn't change. A tightness trickles into his back. He waits for another few seconds, waiting for something improbable to reverse itself. The window stays dark. The signal changes to green. He remains planted, unyielding. Defeat he doesn't know. But there's no enemy. There's no one around. The light's gone out. Out. One more second is all he'll allow.

Then he makes a small, whimpered sound, turns away as sharply as fractured glass and strides to the streets, rapidly and without hesitation, his elongated ghost lingering behind, stretched and turned sickly, but unable to fully escape.

* * *

". . . and no matter where I am I think I'll always know it, it's just one of those things, you know, that just stays with you . . ."

* * *

A mechanism counts the segments with dispassionate precision. Circuits oversee with diffident calm. A predetermined number of segments signals a electronic pulse. The pulse arcs, closes, touches a switch that's too small to be seen. The count starts again.

The numbers on the clock ticked forward one increment. His eyes had gone dry from staring at the face. Seen from too close the numbers threatened to become little more than a collection of short, straight lines, abstract figures devoid of all meaning. Too often he found his eyes drawn to the black spaces between the lines, the shadows cast by the LCD somehow three-dimensional and deeper than anything he could stand. He had to pull himself back. It was all meaninglessness surrounded by the abyss. But that was wrong. He knew it was. It had to be.

He was lying on the bed, still in his clothes. His arms were wrapped around his shoulders, almost hugging himself. The covers were thrown off to the side, skin peeled from muscle. The pale red light of the clock laid bulbous fingers on his face, giving it a wasted, unreal quality. The only sound in the room was his labored breathing, a ruffian forcing violent air into unwilling lungs. He couldn't remember how long he had been here, on his bed. Hours, maybe. But he didn't want it to be hours. Every time he tried to focus on the time, it blurred, wavered, slipped away from him. He was trapped in a void of null-time, but that was only sad illusion. It was stumbling along, and he couldn't stop it.

He tried to keep his breathing to a regular rhythm but it only gave him a reason to count the seconds, a task that caused a tight, hollow feeling in his chest, a chain reaction that led to sharp, rapid breaths, culminating in deep gasping gulps of air, silent pleas for a thing he couldn't name to stop.

When it finally happened, he had let the pressure isolate him so much from the world that he barely noticed. A faint ringing in his ears was the only clue at first, a brief flicker of arclight that registered the same way snow did on a bathroom scale. There was the smell of ancient stardust, a stench scooped from deeptime, followed by the weight of a presence so dense that a teaspoon carelessly dropped might fall through the mantle itself and not stop until it escaped gravity's thrust, somewhere on the other side.

It coated his room like the flash from a camera. It was standing on the other side of his bed. He knew that, without looking. He knew a lot of things now. Voices whispered diverse facts to him with mathemathical fondness. None of that made any difference in this moment. He even knew what it was going to say. He vowed not to listen, as if that might make it less real.

Perhaps he heard it take a short, deep breath, as if nervous. But that made no sense. They didn't breathe. It didn't matter. He wouldn't hear.
"I just wanted to tell you . . ." and that mannered, oddly accented voice cut right through his imposed deafness, ". . . that's it over." The flatness of the tone struck him in the gut.

He responded despite himself. "Over? You mean . . ." and somehow the words forced themselves through the dry tightness of his throat, "you mean she's gone?" What was growing in his gut was threatening to spread into his chest. There was no room. He couldn't keep it all in.

"Yes. Gone." There was a brief pause, as if the man thought he was leaving something out. "I'm sorry."

Something sour tickled the back of his throat, but he clenched his teeth tightly together and clamped his eyes shut, pressing his face into the all too yielding sheets of the bed, trying to shut out the world, turning away from the mocking clock and the silent man, seeking a place where the past was the future, and all the bad things were locked into a place you could never venture and never hope to reach.

* * *

But Tristian knew that place wasn't possible and he had to uncurl himself and reenter the world. It was hard. The tightness in his chest refused to go away, the sensation of his heart being compressed by too many contradicting forces. She's gone. The words were beat into his head by the arms of a tireless man, eager to bludgeon its way into the center of his brain, not caring what he destroyed to get there. She's gone. He couldn't wrap his mind around it. Nothing was real. Even dreams weren't real. Any second now he would dissolve and be nothing more than dust swirling in the wake of a speeding vehicle. That's all life was. Invisible motion. But why couldn't he move now? Dread inertia had taken hold of him and all he could feel was the jagged sickness of fatal words ricocheting inside his body, cutting him with each touch.

Somewhere he found the strength to speak. "How . . . how long ago . . . did it happen?"

"What do you mean?" The voice was distantly curious, asking the question only because it was expected. The man could read him like a ruptured novel, there was no need for words. But it made him ask anyway, because he had to work for his answers, apparently. That was his theory, at least. They never said.

"What are you . . . talking about?" His voice was full of nails, they were scratching his throat. He was tumbling without moving, falling backwards into the man, caught in his subtle gravity.

"Her heart stopped four minutes ago," the man said matter-of-factly, "a minute and a half after that her breathing ceased. A minute ago I witnessed the last spark of brain activity. It was a fragment of a note of a symphony she might have written, had she any musical inclination." The voice wasn't clinical, but it was relentless, laying down the facts with calculated ease. She's gone. That was all he heard. That was all that mattered. "I just wanted you to be more specific, that's all."
"Oh God, shut up . . ." he breathed, shifting his arms to cover his head, realizing that it made no difference. She's gone. "Just, please, just . . . don't make this any harder than it already is."

"That's something that's entirely up to you, I'm afraid," the man replied easily, and Tristian had the sense that somehow, the man was enjoying this. It wasn't any kind of humor he could possibly conceive of, but it might have been amusement all the same.

Make it stop. He didn't know what he was referring to. His stomach wouldn't stop churning and he felt cold and empty. "Oh God," he whispered again, shuddering before he could stop himself. All of a sudden he could feel the weight of the sword at his hip, pulling him down. She's gone. Abruptly, he sat up, swinging his legs so that his feet touched the floor. The loss of contact with the warm sheets caused another chill to course through him. The numbers still hovered tantalizingly before him, even as he ignored them. He didn't care what time it was.

"Did it really happen?" he asked nobody at all, his voice numb. Running quivering hands through his hair, he took another deep breath, feeling his heart beating in a suddenly hollow space. It didn't make sense. This day was wrong. The darkness was textured nothingness, a box adrift in the void. His eyes refused to accomodate to the loss. "Is she really . . ."

"I can take you there, if you want."

The edges of his soul were tingling. "No!" he shouted with a quiet rasp, the effort hurting him more than he realized. "I don't . . . I don't need to see, I just . . ." He rubbed his face with his hands, the skin far too hot and slick. He couldn't be like this. She's gone. He didn't know what else to do. From behind his hands, he tried to bark, "Get an ambulance there. I don't want her to be there like that until . . ." the words almost refused to emerge, "until someone finds her." His voice was too compressed, crumpled and small.

He thought the man would argue. They always seemed to enjoy taunting him through the guise of innocent questions. But instead all he said was, "Very well," and that was that.

Silence reigned for a few seconds. It was torture. His brain wouldn't stay quiet. She's gone. The refrain tried to leave marks but there was nothing to grab onto. He let his arms fall onto his knees and stared straight ahead, trying to find something recognizable in the monochrome darkness before him. It was a chore to breathe.
"Did she suffer?" he asked the man suddenly. He hated the cracked, frayed quality of his voice. He felt constricted, wrapped in a sheathe of air too tight to move, unable to do anything but watch the limitless motions of those around him.

"No . . . not that I'm aware of," the man replied. He paused, perhaps to think about that for a second. "No. I don't believe she did." There was an odd tenderness to his tone. He was so far away. Everyone was just too far away.

Including her. She's gone. Detached, the thought managed to bridge the gap. "That's . . ." Tristian started to say, and didn't finish. "Oh God . . ." he snarled, digging his nails painfully into his palms, the hollow feeling in his stomach growing, a stain threatening to envelop him entirely. "God damn it," he said, his voice breaking at the end until it was nearly a pathetic hiccup of a phrase. She's gone. And she deserved better than this weak-willed mental flailing, but he didn't know what else to do. The ground was constantly shifting, tilting the room beyond repair, and his ribs were converted to shards of jagged glass, stabbing into him with every ragged breath. He had to move. Stagnation would be the end of him. Inertia had a convincing grasp.

With a muffled grunt he tore himself from the web of his own creation, flailing at invisible hornets, nearly tripping, spinning himself around in the process so that he was facing the other man. Nothing in his room looked familiar. He slept here nearly every night and he couldn't recognize any of it. Tristian and the man stared back at each other across the blunted gap of the bed. The man's face was almost lost in the layered shadows, his body ramrod thin, hands tucked casually in his pockets. Something in his eyes both glimmered and absorbed. Tristian didn't need to see any of the man. He knew what he looked like. Every time he saw a mirror, he knew.
"Why did this happen?" he asked hoarsely. "Why did she have to die?" He spoke the words, but it belonged to another, distant man who lurked in bad place, where things like this happened, where people died for no good reason.

"Because life," Agent One said, "is inherently fatal, and-"

"Stop doing that," Tristian snarled, his left arm moving in a sharp, slashing motion. "Stop giving me these . . . direct answers, these pat, one line answers when I'm trying to ask you an . . . an honest question . . ."

"But you're not," Agent One replied with cool certainty. He hadn't moved at all. "Oh, your question may be honest but its intentions aren't." His eyes narrowed slightly, his lips drawn into a tight line. It was all for show. Everything was just theatre to them. "You don't want a direct answer. You want a fantasy response, you want to be reassured that there was some special reason that she had to die, and you want me to tell you that because you're under the mistaken assumption that when I say it, it means something."

The Agent's words gutted Tristian, laying him open to the air. He was unable to speak for nearly a minute, and when he did he was more more subdued, as if he was already tired of fighting. "You told me she was going to die," he said sadly. "That meant something."

"It did because it was true," Agent One told him, his voice strangely gentle. "But I will not tell you untrue things simply to make you feel better." The Agent looked off to the side briefly, raised one hand to his mouth as if stifling a cough. "And you know that. You've become an adult now, you can accept the truth about things."

"And the truth is that she died a meaningless, pointless death?" he asked harshly, his heart sinking even as he spat the words out. He kept picturing her in her bed, eyes closed in sleep, face composed serenely, not breathing at all. She had never known. She would never know. He couldn't stand it. "Her heart just stopped and she died and there was no . . ." he ran a trembling hand through his hair, the strands too gritty, his face coated with a slick weariness, "Jesus Christ, she was my age. . . she was just as healthy as I was, and to just . . ." He let his arms drop in resignation. "And it was pointless. I know what you're saying."

"You keep saying pointless," Agent One said, "as if the only notable deaths are grandiose, bloated things . . ." he shrugged, dismissing the concept, "and you fail to realize that a simple death is just that, a simple thing, no more useless than a sunrise." The Agent peered at him closely, even as Tristian circled around the bed, feeling more and more like a stranger in his own house, his own skin. "Because of what you are . . . what you've become, you tend to define things in terms of their degrees of drama. A heroic, sacrificial death is the only one that has meaning." A smile twitched at the Agent's lips. "To you, at this point, to expire quietly in one's bed is almost a sin. But not everyone wishes to die with an oath on their lips and a bullet in their gut."

"Most people don't wish to die at all," Tristian pointed out coldly. The Agent only returned his hard gaze with a stare of cool detachment, daring Tristian to try and rattle him. But it was useless. This was a thing that willingly stepped into imploding stars.

"Most don't," the Agent admitted calmly, after a minute. "But they eventually do anyway."

She's gone. The thought hit him again, catching him right in the throat, a barbed rapier spilling out all his words, leaving them unspoken and forgotten. He tried to imagine her laugh and when he did, fleetingly, he desperately tried to hold onto it, knowing that one day the sound would fade from his memory completely. "Ah . . . oh God," he gasped, leaning against the same wall the Agent was resting against, his head touching the cool surface, one hand pressed against it, the skin a dirty pale in the darkness. "Oh my God. I was just talking to her a few hours ago and now . . . now she's . . ."

The Agent merely watched him, saying nothing.

Slowly Tristian's gaze shifted to meet the Agent's again. "How long did you know?" he asked softly. "You told me this morning, but . . . but you had to know."

The Agent didn't answer immediately. He sniffed, rubbed his nose with one hand while keeping the other in his pocket. "When you were very young, maybe five years old. It was around Christmastime, it was my first direct visit to your home in some time, several years I think. I had been away, partly because of pressing matters and partly because certain elements were stepping up their observation of you and my being nearby was like a beacon to them."

"The year my mother broke her leg," Tristian said quietly, his eyes staring directly into the featureless wall. "It had to be then. She had to have surgery and everyone came to our house for Christmas that year because she couldn't leave."

"I saw her there . . . she stuck a bow to the back of your shirt when you weren't looking," Agent One noted. "Everyone laughed at you and you noticed and took a swing at her, nothing serious, just kids playing and . . . she jumped up on your couch. I happened to be sitting there, content to observe when . . . I saw she didn't have much time left."

"You saw?"

"The human heart is a . . . finite thing." The Agent seemed somehow uncomfortable with explaining this. Tristian felt the hollow feeling loom within his stomach again. "As you already know. And if you look just right it's possible to see . . . how much is left." The Agent shook his head, apparently bemused by all of this. "To this day I'm not sure what made me look. It's not a habit, trust me. But I saw that there was so much less remaining than there should have been, for someone of her age."
"But why?" Tristian asked, not even putting any effort into the question, already able to mouth the answer even before it entered the air. But answers didn't matter. She's gone.

"I don't know," the Agent replied, predictably. "It's not something I particularly dwelled on . . . I made a mental calculation for when it would run out and stop working entirely and . . . that was it."

"Until this morning," Tristian said numbly. "Until you told me that she was going to die." He kept feeling random stabs of pain into his chest and stomach, the sensantion that his breathing had halted for a split second. Every time he reached out and accepted the reality of the situation, his mind pulled back, afraid of staying that close for too long. She was dead, but he couldn't let her go. Not yet. Not without explanation.

"Yes . . ." the Agent said calmly. "And as it turns out I was only off by ten seconds, in the end." He didn't seem proud, or smug, it was simply a fact, with little extraneous emotion attached to it.

The tone, neutral as it was, still rankled Tristian. "So why didn't you do anything about it?" he asked, knowing he was lashing out unreasonably and not able to stop himself, not really caring either way. Was it because he knew the Agent would merely take the verbal abuse without striking back? Or did he simply need to scream at any target that presented itself, regardless of relevance.

"I did," Agent One said simply, brushing at his sleeve. "I told you about it, and let you decide what to do from there."

Strings tugged at his breathing, wires trying to pull him down. His brain swirled, he'd been awake for far too long. Everything was taking on the hazy, splintered quality of a disintegrating dream. The Agent's voice came at him in lazy waves, bottles bobbing in a viscous ocean that defeated his efforts to reach out and grasp. Maybe he wasn't getting everything. Maybe he missed the part where he was told that she hadn't died. It was all a rumor. All a dream. Every word was screwed up, twisted to mean the wrong things. "Ah . . ." he started to speak, but bit his lip painfully, not wanting to say any more.

The Agent scraped at something under his fingernail. For all Tristian knew, an entire Universe could be trapped there. "And I know it hurts and I know you don't want to believe a single thing I'm going to say . . . but I just want to say I think you did the right thing, going to her." He rubbed his hands together, cracked a single knuckle. It was a gunshot in the silence. "And you're doing the right thing now, not asking the tedious, obvious questions . . . demanding why I didn't heal her or put her in a stasis or go back in time and change history or something equally ridiculous when you know as well as I do that I would not let an innocent die for twenty years if I could do something about it." He shrugged, placing his hands against the wall and staring at his feet. "You know as well as I do, even through your pain, that unpleasant things happen. People die young for no reason."

Tristian gritted his teeth, made a soft sound, air being sucked through a cracked straw. ". . . time . . ." he seemed to mumble.

Without looking up, Agent One raised an eyebrow, "Come again?"

"I said . . . what time?" Tristian suddenly roared, leaping from his spot to stand maybe two paces away from the Agent, who didn't move an inch. "What time am I supposed to die? Can you tell me that?" His words stumbled over each other, a stampede possessed of too much haste. He was outrunning his breath. "Or my friends, can you tell me how much time they have so that when I look at them I can just . . . just count down in my head how much they have left." He spun away from the Agent, putting both hands in his hair, clenching them tightly, as if he might rip his brain from his head. "Ah . . . I can't . . . I can't take this . . . you guys, you find new ways to . . ." he closed his eyes tightly, "it's supposed to be random . . . you're never supposed to know when you die and now you tell me that you know, if you wanted, you know when someone will die, down to the minute?" His voice swelled, threatened to crumple completely. "Why . . . why stop with just her . . . just let me know about everyone so I don't have to wonder anymore . . ." The Agent's face was expressionless, his demeanor completely ignoring Tristian's rigid posture, the quivering of his anger. "Why don't you just do that, if you're going to do anything at all? Huh?" He started to take a step forward, though he really couldn't say why. "Why don't you-"

"You know, I don't think you even want to be content with anything," a hoarse voice called from somewhere behind him. Startled, Tristian spun around to find yet another twin of his sprawled in a wide chair near his bed, one elbow resting on the chair arm, the finger pointing lazily at him. Previously, the bed had been the only major piece of furniture in the room.

Risking a glance backwards, Tristian saw that Agent One had vanished.

"If we didn't tell you," the man continued, "then you would whine and moan that we somehow knew and just kept the information from you." The man rested his head on his hand, casually amused. "So instead we do clue you in and is that good enough? Of course not. You want us to supply you with a laundry list of all the misery in the world . . . why? So you can stare at the wall and torment yourself with something you already knew." Agent Two sat up straight in the chair, both hands flat on the arms. "People die, Tristian. This is not a new thing. They die young, they die old, sometimes they die for no reason at all." He sniffed derisively, hopping up from a sitting position so that he was crouching on the cushion, balanced on the balls of his feet. "So if you want to slit your wrists every night because the idea that people suffer makes you sad inside . . ." he spoke the words with mocking sympathy, "Well, that's a load of crap and we both know it and if anyone is going to bother to tell you that, it might as well be me, you know?"

Tristian didn't answer immediately. Slowly, his movements suggesting a man shot in the gut, he went over to the edge of his bed and sat down. Folding his hands together, he rested his chin on them and stared at the floor. He let a long breath emerge from his body, a man deflating. The shadows rendered his face blank, his features hidden.

"So are you going to give me a hint, at least?" he asked, his voice deadened.

Agent Two tilted his head to one side. "About what? I don't think your team's even in the series this year."

Tristian's gaze flickered up to the Agent, but he let the comment pass, even as the Agent gave him a beatific smile. "No . . . when I'm going to die." Hands still folded together, he let them drop to his knees as he stared directly at the Agent. "I'm sure either you or your brother figured it out at one point, it seems like the kind of thing the two of you would do . . . am I ever going to get fair warning or is it going to come as a surprise, however brief?" It was hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, he felt like he should be coughing up embers, his words clogged with dusky smoke.

Agent Two somehow managed to swear and laugh at the same time. "Christ," he spat, moving so that was perched on one arm of the chair. A second later he shifted his feet so that he was sitting across the chair, both feet against the other arm. "Who the hell tells you these things?" He shook his head in an exasperated fashion. He looked past Tristian, to a place somewhere behind him. "Do you want to explain this, or can I continue?"

"You're doing an adequate job so far . . ." Tristian spun around on the bed to see Agent One floating several feet above the bed, crosslegged, his head only inches from the ceiling. A moment later he uncurled gracefully and moved like a diver toward the floor, feet first. "You've been avoiding your typical scattershot style, which is somewhat heartening. I was beginning to fear you'd completely abandoned lucidity."

Agent Two smirked in response. "I like to think of it as draping myself in metaphor."

"Perhaps. If your metaphor is a tarp." The Agent touched down without bouncing, stuffed his hands into his pockets and stood nearly at attention, feet close together. "So maybe it's best we speak plainly here, for his sake."

"Works for me," Agent Two noted. Shifting his gaze to Tristian, he said, "Tristian, you're being a fool about this."

One leg resting on the bed, Tristian watched the two of them with wary eyes. The two Agents exchanged quick glances, sharing a mutual shrug before directing their attention back to Tristian.

"O-kay," Agent Two said. Taking a second to clear his throat, he added, "Tristian, you're being a damn fool about this."

"I heard you the first time," he answered flatly. "I don't see what I'm-"

"What if the girl got hit by a bus?" Agent Two blurted out, launching himself off the chair to land right in front of Tristian. "What if on the way back home she was mugged and raped and had her throat cut and and she bled out on the sidewalk with strangers tramping through her blood?" Agent Two was pressing forward, his gestures sharp, claw-like things.

"What are you talking about-" Tristian tried to say, sliding backwards onto the bed, flinching away from Agent Two's frantic motions. Agent One merely stood by and watched, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes hooded and hidden.

"Or if she tripped on the stairs and fell down and broke her neck?" Agent Two was bending over Tristian at an impossible angle, his body oddly hinged. "Or even, hey, what if a swarm of meteors hit her apartment a half hour before you got there and leveled the entire building? What then?"

"She'd be dead, then . . . is that what you're saying?" Tristian yelled at the Agent, rushing forward to try and shove him away, only succeeding in nearly falling facefirst into the chair as Agent Two stepped deftly aside. Tristian recovered just as gracefully, his hand involuntarily going for the sword, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet to try and keep his balance. "Is that what you're trying to tell me? Is that it? Because I already know that," he sneered. "She would have died, the same way she did tonight. She'd be just as dead."

"And that's the whole point," Agent One interjected quietly. "She would be just as dead, Tristian. And it wouldn't have mattered what we told you." He paced a few steps to his left and stopped, staring quite fixedly at something on the floor. "You're an intelligent man, Tristian, but like most people when put under stress they tend to narrow their focus substantially. And quite often, they focus on the wrong things."

Tristian looked from one Agent to the other, feeling like he was trapped in one of the rooms where you tried on clothing, where your reflection stared back at you from infinite angles, endlessly condemning. "She died because her heart stopped . . ." he whispered, the muscles around his eyes taut. "Isn't that the only thing that matters? It's the reason she's gone."

"But it could have been something else . . ." Agent Two hissed. "And that's what we're trying to say." With a quick movement he stabbed at Tristian with one finger, poking him right where his heart lay. Tristian's arm was halfway to blocking the motion before the Agent's hand had returned to its original position. "I could tell you, right now, just by looking at your heart that you might live to be ninety five. You might," he added, "if we kept you in a nice clean cage and fed you and washed you and treated you decent . . . sure, your heart would eventually give out at a ripe old age." With one liquid motion he stepped back and sat down, crossing one leg over the other. "I could tell you that," he continued, his voice muted, staring down the bridge of his nose at Tristian, "and it would be a true thing."

Tristian returned the gaze evenly, uneasily. "But that doesn't mean it's going to happen."

Agent Two ventured a thin smile. "You're starting to get it, son."

"So, you're saying, there's a . . . there's a limit to a person," Tristian said, crossing his arms loosely and staring at his knees. He laughed without humor, his lips twitching. "So I guess that brings me back to where I started, right? You never know. You never know when the day is going to come." He sighed, letting out a long exhalation. "I know she's dead, guys, but I don't feel it yet. Every time I try to think of her I'm just . . . I'm just numb . . ." He looked up at the Agents. "We're not supposed to die this young. Not for no reason at all." He lifted up one hand, made a fist, opened it slowly. "It's not going to hit me, not right away. She was my cousin and I only saw her a couple of times a year but . . ." He closed the fist suddenly, tightly. "Just like that," he murmured. "What do you say to a person, when you know it's their last night alive?"

"You tell us," Agent One said, his voice stripped of any archness. "What did you talk about tonight?"

"Just . . . stuff. It was just . . . small talk, that's all." Confusion reigned over his face for the briefest second, barely enough time to leave an impression. "I told her about you guys and I tried to catch up with her and . . . it was like I was racing against this giant, looming clock, and there was a million things I wanted to talk about with her, just stupid, silly things, about her life and my life and in the end, I . . . I barely got to any of it. I couldn't fit it in."

"Did you really think you could?" Agent Two asked.

Tristian thought for a moment before shaking his head sadly. "No. Not without telling her. It wouldn't have been possible." With a muffled grunt he rose to his feet, swinging his arms in loose circles, pacing in a jagged line of his own devising. "I don't know, it . . . it bothers me that we knew each other for, for almost twenty years and there was so much I didn't know. And I'll never know. Not from her."

"And how is that any different from any other death, from any other loss?" Agent One asked quietly, pointedly. He had wandered over to the window but his voice hadn't left the spot where he had previously been standing.

"I thought, hoped that because I had some warning it would be . . . be different somehow, that I could say all the things that you never get to say, all the things that afterwards you regret not mentioning." He stopped pacing, stared at the featureless wall. Agent Two watched him without speaking. Agent One stared out the window, perhaps regarding the back of Tristian's reflection. "But it didn't matter, in the end. She died anyway. It was all lost. Everything we said to each other, is gone."

"Sound never stops travelling, Tristian. It just keeps going, until it's caught and heard again." Agent Two said that. His lips didn't move. Or maybe they did, but that wasn't what he said. The Agents were too heavy for this reality, they were the balls dropped on the rubber sheet, warping everything that was connected. And everything was connected.

"I feel like I wasted both our times," Tristian said to no one at all. His words were condensation on glass, rapidly fading into thin air. "I shouldn't have even been there at all."

"And would you have been there, if you didn't want to go?"

Tristian whirled, searching for the voice. For a moment, it hadn't sounded right.

But Agent One just stared out the window, and if his reflection betrayed a wavery smile, then perhaps the image wasn't true.

Tristian stared at the back of the Agent's head for nearly a minute. Then, with a sigh, he frowned, furrowing his brow as he stared at the floor, saying, "I think you guys should go now. I'm tired and I just want to rest." Did he believe that? He let a second pass, but neither Agent commented. Glancing up, he added, "But, really, I should thank-"

He stopped. The room was empty, except for him. It seemed slightly dimmer, somehow.

He was alone. Turning to the side, he saw that the Agent's chair was still where it had first appeared. Tristian stared at it for a few seconds and then tentatively, curiously, he reached out to touch it.

His fingers barely brushed against it when it collapsed into dark motes, fragments of hard light fading into the shadows, invisible and gone. The space was free again. The room was the way it had always been.

Hands in his pockets, Tristian watched the space, half expecting the furniture to return, his expression tired and wary. A moment later he sniffed, murmured, "About damn time they started listening to me," and turned away from the emptiness.

* * *

Faceup or facedown all he saw was dark. Nothing but endless dark. He eventually decided to lay on his back because it was more comfortable. It made him think that he was staring at the sky, the boundless air and all the places beyond it, to the walls of Universe beyond his imagination, and maybe to a place that existed even past that.

He had been tempted to call her house but he knew what would have happened. The phone would have kept ringing. Forever and ever and ever. He wouldn't have been able to handle that. It was hard enough thinking of her as dead now. Not living. Her voice, silenced. Her smile, erased. Where was she now? Had they taken her away? Her still face, bracketed by flashing red and blue lights, threatening to blind eyes that no longer saw? Did they try and save her, or did they already know it was too late? Tomorrow his mother would tell him and he would have to pretend to be surprised. Maybe he would cry, later, when nobody was around. He didn't see himself doing such things anymore. What did it matter? A few tears did nothing to lubricate the world. You wept, and people died. Faced it with grim determination, and people died. At the end of the long night, she was still dead. All of them were. What was a long life anyway, but just more time to collect idle moments? You got all the important stuff out of the way early and spent the rest of the days just coasting on the old times. In fifty years she would have wanted to be dead. He imagined her face, ageless and still. Decaying, soon. To dust, then. Not a breath to stir it. One by one they'll march by, weeping and she'll suffer in silent decomposition. He'd carry the coffin, probably and she would be lighter than he expected. Of course she would. A life had gone, fluttered to parts unknown. That took the weight with it. He was lighter now, ascending maybe. No, all illusion. Life and death, nothing but a mirage.

What would you have been like, had you lived? Maybe you would have become old and cranky and bitter and when you couldn't hear us we would talk about how much nicer you had been when you were younger and how we weren't sure when you had become so nasty and unpleasant. Once you change, you can't go back. You just change into something else. He'd been different once. Every day he was losing part of himself, somehow. Someone was surgically removing pieces of himself at night. She had complimented him on his coat once and asked him where he had gotten it and he had to admit that he didn't know. Details didn't matter. He didn't think he would get old. He didn't think he'd get the chance. But he would always been older than her. Frozen in time. She was devolving as he laid there. The world was crumbling, the cancer was eating it all away. She would never have wanted to live in a world like that. It was better now, for her not to be here. She could never have been happy. Who decided that? It was part of the plan. There had to be a plan. But the plan hurt. It was sandpaper and it scraped against him and it hurt.
If she had kids, what would they have been like? Girls and boys and boys and girls. An entire branch, withering and dead. When a person dies, a million other lives go with it. Children and grandchildren and beyond. She would have been a great mother. Or a terrible mother. The descending cries of a century's ghosts haunted him. Did she even have a boyfriend? He had forgotten to ask. Did it matter? Would he even cry for her? And when he was with the next girl, would he think of her, when they were curled up in bed? Or would he stuff it into a compartment and toss it in the corner where all the dusty, useless boxes of memories went? The wedding would have been nice. He'd never been to a real family wedding. But it was getting on in years and they were all passing. The family wasn't as big. Cousins and grandchildren and aunts were all dwindling. In the old photographs it was always a crowd. There was so few of them now, to carry on. The parties took up that much less space. They had to work so much harder now to fill up what was left behind. Laughter didn't linger as long, or reverberate as strong. Washed out colors always displayed smiles. What was it like, in those days when everyone was still alive and young and got along? Not like today. These days. Would they even save a seat for her? Probably not. Space was a premium and nothing could be spared. Her spot in the painted was glossed over, changed to the same color as the background. If you don't look too closely you'll never see her. He didn't want to forget and he knew a day would come when he would suddenly realize with cold fear that it had been six months since he had last thought about her. He didn't know who his great-great grandparents were. How many years ago was that? Less than a hundred? That's all it took for the world to erase you. She had no time to be imprinted on a generation and her essence would pass into the wind, wispy and weak. The professor asked the question and no hands were raised. Two hundred years from now it would be like none of them ever existed. Pictures crumble, memories fade, letters wilt. He was losing her now, as he laid there tipped on the edge of sleep. She was draining from him and he couldn't stop the leak.

Where did you go, where this world couldn't hold you anymore? Where had she gone? Everybody wanted to tell him of a special place where all the departed ventured. He couldn't grasp him. He couldn't believe it. Gone was gone. Each body was a unique moment. No repetitions were allowed. Where had she gone? To nowhere. Dissipated, like snow thrown into a tropical night. You couldn't even reconstruct, if you even wanted to. Too much was missing. Too much was crucial. A copy was not the original. Memories were useless, pale, wasted things. But it was all he had. He couldn't let go. He couldn't see.

This death, what was it really? She had felt nothing, had no warning, not as far as he knew. Who ever did? A twinge of pain, a flicker in the vision, a brief moment of lightheadedness. Was that all? Was that all you got? Twenty five years just to end in oblivion. If she were allowed an extra beautiful reaction just for a minute, a brief, scant minute, what would she say. Why me? Maybe. How was I supposed to know? Stupid questions. Before you knew it, the minute would be up. Sleep was taking him down. The same way it had grabbed her. Only it had smothered her and kept her down and never let her come back again. This death, what were you? It was so quick and so sudden and so unpredictable. This life, this death. A candle, burning at both ends, rolling for the end of the table. Would it plummet first or simply melt into a shapeless mass? We don't choose our exit anymore than we choose the entrance. No warning for her. Maybe no warning for him either. What were the chances, of the two of them being taken this fine, brisk night. He tried to gather his thoughts to him, as he slithered down into slumber. Had it been like this? A drowsy pleasant feeling, the world going away, unconsciousness settling? Then nothing. Nothing again. That was the part that tore at him. All sensation lost. You wouldn't know because you had no time to reflect. Trying to imagine death only gave him impressions of sleep. No thought. No movement. It was all gone. It could happen to him. To any of them. All around the world, the lights were going out. He might close his eyes and be done with it entirely. He'd never know. They never said. How long he had. It could be minutes. His head was pounding. She had never known and maybe that had saved her. A switch going off, the power going out. He'd never know that he was gone. Such thoughts were for the living to ponder. To be left behind. In a few hours she'd be getting up for work. Never again. Blood rattled like slow thunder in his ears. He couldn't see. Where did you go, God dammit? Where are you now? I want to see you again, but not soon. Not yet. It's not time. It wasn't time for you but I don't want it to be time for me. Is that selfish? Is it? A few missed breaths and she was gone. If she had been awake, would she have lived? Ah God who knows? Maybe she was awake and died gasping, uncomprehending, not sure how this could have happened. Then darkness. And she'd wonder no more. Watching the world condense itself to the finest point. Why not him? Why not tonight. No. It couldn't be. It was happening. He was going. Away. No. His thoughts, sinking to that nowhere place. No. He couldn't breathe. Any day it could happen. Tonight. No. A second. No. Darkness converge endless. No breath. No. I can't. No. Let myself. No. I'm. No. Not. No. Dead. No!

With a heaving gasp, Tristian sat up in bed, his body hunched over, taking deep breaths, keeping one hand on his heart, listening to it count out the beats in the dark, one by one by one by one.

- MB
March-May 2004
RP

"Such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there."
- the Grateful Dead, "Box of Rain"

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