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,&