THE BODY’S RUIN haunted me. I walked the halls of the hotel with only one thing in mind: The main bar had a supply of twelve-year-old scotch. I checked my watch. Most of the scotch would be gone in about an hour. I hurried my pace. I pocketed the watch, then realized that it wasn’t mine. Mine was on my lapel. This other had to be Sober’s. A shudder ran through me. I couldn’t take it out again to examine.

I turned a corner and found the hallway crowded beyond passage with myself. The congestion was a source of irritation in every convention memory. The hall felt as if it were shrinking. Against the tide I struggled toward the door no more than thirty feet away. Complaints from Youngsters rose out of the crowd as I knocked plates from hands, stepped on toes, and generally pissed everyone off. I swore to myself that I would never come this way again, and looking around me at the young faces, I realized I would keep that promise. So much youth. Why so many? I wondered. When had I returned so often? I tried to think back to last year but couldn’t remember clearly whether there had been this many Youngsters. Party memories were a tinkling of ice in glasses, spilled liquor, fighting over the last scoop of pilaf. But I was almost certain I hadn’t come to the convention that often. Something was off. Had I crossed myself too many times? Had I done something during a blackout? What had changed? Along the back of my mind snuck images of the Body, crumpled at the bottom of the elevator car. Could what had happened in the elevator be related to why no one in this hallway was older than me? Impossible. A coincidence of geography. Elsewhere in the building were Seventy, Screwdriver, and Yellow, all older than me. Others would be here, had to be—I’d only not seen them yet. Right then I needed to see some Elders, even though I hated what they told me of myself. The flab, the laziness, the lack of upkeep—the proof of life. I needed to see them, and I needed to collect my thoughts, find a place to breathe and figure out my next step. That meant the ballroom bar.

At the ballroom entrance, I found a wall of Youngsters fixated on the details of one’s trip through Roman orgies—lies, I knew, not that knowing the truth made the telling of tales any less titillating. I fought through the mass, managed one final boost by launching myself from someone’s calf. This brought back memories of the mysterious charley horse I had carried for the rest of the night during my twenty-third year. Though the apology wouldn’t be remembered, I offered one over my shoulder and opened the ballroom doors.

In the ballroom half the chandeliers were burned out. The uneven power supply turned the remaining bulbs orange and cast an ill light over the room. No one had switched on the music yet. On the dance floor, Youngsters ran in sloppy circles, throwing pretzels and ice cubes at one another. I avoided them and walked across the carpeted area in purposeful strides. No one here younger than me knew about the elevator. Even now Yellow and Screwdriver were putting OUT OF ORDER signs on the subway level. Latecomers would be making rain-soaked entrances from this moment on.

I reached the bar, an ugly scene. When I was a Youngster, the idea of tending bar had held some romantic appeal. For the three years before I turned twenty-four, I worked behind the bar, each of me pouring one for the customers, one for ourselves. Over the years, as I grew to appreciate the customer’s perspective more, I realized what an annoyance the three brats behind the bar were, always snookered well before midnight. Those three years led to the evening’s early lack of twelve-year-old scotch. Those three years also set a pretty heavy pattern in place, which is why so many of the Youngsters were beyond intolerable. Alcohol is a wonderful way to make a repeated evening seem fresh—details get lost in the fuzz, and the anticipated becomes a surprise. As a result I was less than clear on events from most Youngsters’ perspectives, especially as the evening wore on.

I found a clear spot along the bar well away from anyone else. The Bar Brats were arguing about women from earlier epochs, and I knocked on the bar to get their attention. They all wore the same tuxedo, one obtained by the eldest of them and passed backward so that the youngest was the filthiest. He made his way down to me, his hand feeling along the inner edge of the bar, already with a good head start to a blistering hangover. I gave him my order.

His head tipped like that of a bird looking for worms. “Didn’t I just give you one?”

Of course he had. He’d given me all sorts of drinks hours, minutes, moments ago.

I said, “No. You must have me confused with me. Get me something old.”

“Something old?”

“Something aged.” I studied the grain of the bar, thinking only of the elevator’s rushing plunge. “I want to get drunk and enjoy it.”

He shuffled off. “Really. I can’t believe how all you old guys sound so much alike.”

I couldn’t recall how much of this was a joke and how much genuine inebriated confusion. The black haze in my memory was thick. Normally I would have tried to make a joke of it, reminded him that we were all “relatives,” which I would have found doubly funny, from both his and my perspective, but at the moment I couldn’t think of anything other than my drink. Before he returned with it, someone joined me at the bar.

“Nice suit, by the way.”

Yellow sat beside me, chewing on his lips like he wanted to keep them from speaking. Before I could think to ask what he wanted, he pointed behind me. Over my shoulder at least a dozen younger selves sat around two tables, heads together, eyes on me. I recalled some particulars I’d whispered about the Suit around those tables. I’d made an impression like a superspy or a private eye on his way to meet a femme fatale. Distracted, I’d made the Entrance and hadn’t even enjoyed it.

The Bar Brats gave Yellow ingratiating, professional smiles. Yellow shooed them off. “Remember, whatever you do, don’t talk in front of Youngsters. They’ve got ears like bats and lips that wouldn’t stay sealed even if you welded them shut.”

“I remember.”

He curled toward me, his voice hissed and hurried. Anyone paying attention would see he was bent low with secrets. “This is difficult for you, for us.”

“You think?” I ran my finger around the rim of my glass until it sang. I didn’t much care for Yellow. He was a bit too good at conspiring.

He said, “How can we still be here? It’s very disturbing.”

“You would know,” I said curtly.

“Ah, yes. In other words, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”

Yellow was agitated. I thought it seemed like he didn’t want to be there, as if he were waiting for the next event, which he knew was more interesting or important.

I said, “Did you have something you wanted to tell me?”

He was staring past me, lost in thought. After a moment his eyes floated back toward mine. “What?”

I finished my drink too quickly and called the Brats for another. The three Youngsters tripped over one another to reach me, as if I had ever, or would ever, tip them for their services. One held the glass, another threw the ice, and the last poured. Some of the whiskey even reached the glass. I thanked them, and they chased one another to the other end of the bar, where they made a show of wiping glasses with a rag. I remembered that they would be whispering to one another about future sexual exploits they had misoverheard.

Yellow leaned in again. “I know some things don’t need to be said, but I’ll say them anyway. All right? First, yes, he’s dead.” His eyes, locked on mine, didn’t move or blink. “Second, yes, everyone older than you knows.”

I sat upright and looked over my shoulder again. Beside two tables filled with chattering-bird youth were four other tables surrounded by ten chairs each, many filled with older selves either eating or talking. A low rumble of conversation echoed from the ceiling. I spotted faces turned toward me. I was being watched. Everyone older than me had recalled that I was having this conversation and had looked up to see how it was going or to relive the moment. Some deeply lined faces nodded at me. One nearly white-haired old man in a Pilgrim doublet and felt hat raised a hand with a thumbs-up for encouragement.

I turned back to Yellow and my drink, suddenly chilled. “What are they expecting me to do?”

Yellow ignored the question. He said, “How’s your nose?”

“What?”

It must have been a line of thought I’d formed in my head years later. “Your nose. Broke it two years ago. Or did you?”

I rubbed the side of my nose, which had not but yet had been broken. I’d stopped the event, but the bump said otherwise.

I said, “Another paradox.”

“Yes. You will die. In … what was he? Six months older than you? A year? Yet you obviously don’t die, as you continue to come to this little wingding for years and years.”

“Why keep coming? My God. How do I survive?”

“I can’t say.”

“Why the hell not?”

The Brats were polishing the bar suspiciously close to us. A reflective spot shone in the low light where one rubbed a rag in a lazy circle. The other two hovered over his shoulder, tried and failed to look interested in the cleaning. Both Yellow and I stopped talking and watched the Brats. When they realized we were onto them, all three coughed into fists and retreated.

I lowered my voice and repeated my question. “If I’m supposed to die but you know how to survive, why the hell not tell me?”

“Because I don’t know. None of us do.” He looked at my drink, almost reverent. “There’s a large black spot, like a cloud, in our heads. I don’t remember much of this party from the next few years.”

“Why?”

Yellow stared past me, no pity in his eyes now, only disgust and judgment. “It’s sitting beside me.”

The answer sat on the stool on Yellow’s other side. The Drunk. His odor was immense, a mix of alcohol and urine. He was one you didn’t look at or talk to. He was given wide berth in the halls. The Drunk was avoided, misremembered, blamed. I looked at him closely for the first time in years and drew in a sharp breath, which I instantly regretted for the vapors rising from him. Several things I noticed surprised me. His clothes were the same suit I was wearing, redesigned by filth. Under his beard and grime, he wasn’t as old as I’d always thought. He was young, barely older than me. Perhaps only a year or two older.

“God.” I realized what Yellow was leading me to.

“Yes.”

“He’s the survivor?”

“And he doesn’t remember a fucking thing. He’s useless.”

“So what happened? What creates the paradox?”

“Believe me, that’s the major topic of discussion among everyone older than you. That and sex, the fucking perverts.”

No stranger to self-judgment—especially regarding sex, particularly when engaged in the act, coupled or solo—I couldn’t recall such strong admonition. I chanced a glance at Yellow’s downturned mouth. “Does that lovely sweater come with a vow of celibacy?”

I’m sure he wanted to protest, but instead he waited for me to hold up a hand and mutter an apology. I offered it without feeling any genuine remorse, and both of us knew it.

Around the room the age clusters were very pronounced, as if a form of segregation were taking place. Everyone older than me drifted toward one side of the room, away from the door, near the empty stage where a single turntable played music—The Fifth Dimension, mostly. Elders took turns flipping the albums over when they reached the end. When I was in my twenties, the Elders had seemed decrepit, barely there and reeking of their inability to digest the food or drink properly, their clothes more and more worn, more repetitive. I’d avoided them, uncertain at what point I would cross that line into not caring how I presented myself, at what point not combing my hair or arriving in slept-in clothes became preferable to making even the smallest effort. Now, as I sat with Yellow, I was struck by how familiar—how comfortable—they had become.

At the other end clustered younger selves, who as of this moment all struck me as childish, even those in their thirties. Every table was covered with too many glasses of alcohol. My life’s drinking phases were plainly visible: There was my beer table, my fruity-mixed-drink stage. The table nearest me, around which some mid-thirty-year-olds sat, illustrated my current crutch. Straight liquor on the rocks. Glasses of diluted alcohol in shades of golden brown.

Yellow leaned closer to me. “Notice anything?”

It was easy to see now. Impossible to miss, really, and I wondered how it hadn’t occurred to me before. Most everyone older than me was sober. There were a few drinks on a few tables here and there, but they could just as easily have been soda as anything hard. “There’s very little conversation.”

“Actually, there’s quite a lot. But it’s all the same. Constant speculation. Constant attempts to put the pieces together.”

That there were so many Elders hinted at my potential success, but the tired, watery eyes, the skin patched with age spots, the bent backs and dry coughs that echoed my memories of my grandfather—these delivered a sense of inevitable failure. Regardless of outcome, my future was the chatter of birds in a graveyard, the worry of men mourning themselves, a conversation about their pursuits and failures, the sad and sadly sober discussion of my mortality. If there hadn’t been one in my hand, I would have needed a drink. “What have we got so far?”

“Nothing other than that it’s up to you.”

“How many dozens of us, and that’s all we’ve figured out?”

“You’re the last one before it happens. When you come back next year, that’s it. You’re on one side of the event. We’re on the other. We can speculate, but other than that.…”

“But surely you can tell me—”

“We’ve all discussed this quite a bit. I’m afraid we’re going to have to follow our memories’ lead and not let you know what we discussed. It might tip things.”

My fingers tapped the bar. His, too, in the same impatient rhythm.

I said, “That fucking stinks.” What a time for me to suddenly gain some backbone about my own rules. “So when it really matters, when death is on the line, you decide to stick your thumb in your mouth and suck?” A pack of teens howled past, one bumping into me. I reached behind me and pulled a sign off my back. Crude letters spelled LOSER. I crumpled it and tossed it on the bar. “Is it just me?” I asked. “Or were they younger than the Inventor?” It worried me.

Yellow looked after the group with the same concern I felt. “I don’t know.” I could tell he would be following up. “When it matters most is when rules need to be enforced most.” Yellow looked at me with a straight face for a second and then laughed. “I know. Sounds trite.”

I shook my head. “So where do I start?”

“Seventy told me to pass on one piece of advice. Keep an eye on that door.”

His thumb jerked toward a door near the bar, one of the kitchen entrances. I tugged at my drink as Yellow shuffled out of his seat and patted me on the back. “Good luck.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” He was no help. “So I just sit here and stare at the door?”

He started walking toward the stage. The record was skipping, and with increasing panic the Fifth Dimension repeated a promise to fly up and away in a balloon. As I watched Yellow fiddle with the record player, the Drunk took his opportunity to slide one seat closer. By the time I realized he was moving in, it was too late. He had me. His silence and blank stare made me assume he was in the midst of a tremendous blackout. Once he was closer, his eyes regained some focus. He brought a very full glass with him and placed a hand over the mouth, then laid his head down on his hand, as if it were a pillow. I pretended not to see him.

“Not enough women at this thing.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I guess that’s the truth.”

The Drunk smiled up at me. “You have no idea what’s coming.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.” His eyes darkened, sobered for just a moment, and then they closed. When they reopened, they rolled as before. He pointed at the bottle of twelve-year-old whiskey, which was just within reach. “You’ll want to refill the flask.”

I took hold of the bottle. “You would know.”

He chuckled at that. I was surprised at my own revulsion toward him. He was, of course, me. But I’d always stayed away from him, as if he were contagious. Even just the previous year when I’d spoken to him in the hall, it had taken effort. This puzzled me now. I could see through the beard, the dirt. It was my face.

I carefully poured scotch from bottle to flask. It sounded like someone urinating into a cup.

He closed his eyes. “Wake me when she gets here.”

“What? Who?”

At that moment the door beside the bar opened, and in walked a woman. She was tall and pale, a tight red dress hugging her figure and revealing just enough of a tattoo that wound down her left arm—interlocking parrots, nesting, staring, raising their wings. They looked so alive I could practically hear their voices. Brown hair fell around the woman’s face in large curls; green eyes ignored the room. I spilled whiskey over my hand and onto the bar.

The Brats scampered toward me. “Liquor spill, liquor spill.” One of them shouted, “Lick her spiel,” to the amusement of no one.

I put the bottle down and leaned back as the Brats swiped white towels. One knocked into the bottle, which almost toppled over. With deft ability another caught it against his wrist and righted it. They mopped up the spill and squeezed out the towels into tumblers.

I held my flask before me; whiskey dripped onto my suit, and I stared at the woman. Unsure of how I could have missed her during all my previous visits to the hotel, I watched the way she flowed around the tables. She was as incongruous as a flame in an ice cube. Around me packs of teens chased one another with cups of water and utensils. Card games sprouted here and there among the twenty-somethings. Their favorite was a memory game where a younger self sits with a deck, flips up one card after another as Elders try to recall the order. Everyone younger than me was occupied with self-amusement. It suddenly seemed like so much masturbation.

One of the Youngsters behind the bar held out a folded paper to me, soaked with whiskey, ink bleeding through. “Is this yours?”

I took it and read the message through the wet cover, words typed with a dying ribbon: “If it’s dark, I’m gone.”

“No,” I said, and dropped it to the bar to float on the spilled liquor.

“Must be mine,” muttered the Drunk, who fished it out of the tiny puddle and pocketed the note without bothering to read it, a desperate awkwardness in his grasp.

He was focused on the woman, and silent, as were all those older than me. I realized then that Elders had stationed themselves so that they could vicariously relive the vision. Smiles were sprinkled around the tables, and all conversation had ceased.

Seventy followed her into the room. His hand snaked under her tattooed arm and around her waist, comfortable, if somewhat arthritic, and he steered her to a septuagenarian-occupied table in the corner behind the bar. I wondered if I might have hired a nurse. Perhaps not a bad precaution.

The Drunk closed his eyes and sighed as if ready for sleep. “Check out the nose.”

“What? Yes, it’s very attractive.”

“Not hers. Yours. Don’t forget to check it out.” He took his glass, a swirling mess of brownish gold and ice with a piece of napkin in it, splashed some at his mouth, and then stepped sloppily from his chair. “I gotta run. It’s about to happen, and I want to see how it all goes if I don’t do something about it.”

I’d reclaimed my revulsion of him. He made no sense. Yellow was right. He was useless. After he’d stepped away from the bar, I looked for the woman. She sat at a table with two others, Seventy and one slightly younger, who watched her with wet eyes. She said something inaudible and reached out to stroke his arm. I did, in fact, look at her nose. It sat on her face in just the right place and at just the right angle. She turned back to Seventy. He leaned in close to her, and she gripped his wrist. At first I thought she was tickling his arm but finally realized they were looking at the place on his wrist where Sober had revealed a tattoo. The woman’s eyes were dark and wet, and they seemed near tears. She nodded, he patted her arm, and then he pulled his cuff over what they’d been examining with such tender fingers.

When I could look away, I spotted the Drunk’s glass, napkin bits floating inside. His mumbled exit replayed in my head. Drink lifted almost to my mouth, I froze. I was about to break and not break my nose outside the restroom. That must have been what he’d referred to. I rushed to cross the ballroom to the exit near the restrooms. I stopped halfway, turned in place, and wondered if I was really about to leave a room with a stunning woman I’d never seen before just so I could witness myself do something stupid. At a nearby table, an Elder in a double-breasted tailcoat with wide cuffs and a matching high collar of velvet, looking like a French aristocrat in a low-lit brothel, winked at me and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll watch her for you.”

I knew he would.

Through the crowd beyond the doorway, I could see the Pilaf Brothers and the Nose Savior waiting in the line to the men’s room. I stopped and watched. Pilaf Brothers, first one, then all three, turned to look at me and laughed, eyes full of serious recognition. I’d never noticed that all three of them wore slightly similar ponchos, like gauchos, one clearly still dusty from some South American trail, and I wondered if they rode around as some kind of trio. They put the plates down. They weren’t casual. This wasn’t pleasant. They were burdened by necessity, a gravity to what they did. The air quivered with it. Rice sprinkled the carpet like fleeing maggots.

They walked away, glanced at me over their shoulders, muttered Spanish floating through the air, and I watched now as my slightly younger self debated over the plates. All it would take was the subtle kick. Eyes locked on the sliced almonds on the floor. He was about to do it. For an instant I thought I ought to stop him. My nose would break again, but I would recall the act of stopping what had once happened. In essence I would have three true and parallel memories, and I could barely handle the two I had at the moment. I needed to debate this with someone. Where was the Drunk? All the other Elders were leaving me on my own, but he had been willing to give advice. Repulsive and helpful was better than nothing.

The Savior moved the plate aside. An instant later Nose, wrapped in his red-and-black hanfu, stepped from the bathroom and tripped lightly at the edge of the rug. He wasn’t helped by his wooden sandals. Nose turned and looked over his shoulder. Savior watched him; recognition dawned that he’d spared only the break but not the memory of the pain. I watched his memory twin as he recalled both breaking and not breaking his nose.

At the other end of the hall, a cackle and a shout. “I told you I could barely remember it.” The Drunk. I tried to see him through the swarming Youngsters, could make out only his back as he charged away through the crowd. He’d wanted me here. Something needed to be discovered. He wasn’t simply giving tips, he worked toward a goal. Another game run by another Elder. I stepped forward. The Drunk had suggested I look at the nose. I took hold of Nose’s shoulders.

“Pardon me?” He pulled back a moment, as if I weren’t holding my own face, as if there were something untoward in holding oneself against a wall and grasping for a body part. His skin was slick with sweat, and he smelled like the toilet he’d just thrown up in. His eyes showed he’d been crying. I didn’t recall that, ignored the reasons he might have cried and the reasons I would have forgotten.

“Let me see your nose a moment.”

“Get your hands off me.”

“I don’t want to overstate things, but this could mean life or death.”

He stopped moving, his head at an unnatural angle, a fly in a web, turning turning turning to keep my hands from a solid hold on his cheeks. “Who for?”

“You, eventually.” The words came out smoothly, doubled by a new paradox I was forming. I was too aware that I hadn’t done this before, too aware that Nose was supposed to be in the ballroom by now, holding a drink and laughing. My investigation was obviously going to be crossing earlier paths. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d be messing with my own head to a large degree. I’d have to learn to live with it. “Me, more immediately.”

“What’s happened?”

“You don’t need details. Let me see your nose.”

He held still in the awkward pose. I became distracted by the parrot pattern in the trim of his robe. I’d forgotten that detail. An inside joke between me and me. Behind me Savior watched, uncertain now whether he might have destroyed some major timeline as a result of moving the dish. He hadn’t chased after the Drunk as I had when I’d been him. Another change.

I looked up Nose’s nose. I examined both sides. “It’s not broken.”

“Why should it be?”

I turned in time to see Savior disappear into the bathroom, hand over his pale face. I rushed past the line after him, ignoring complaints and epithets.

Every stall, urinal, and sink was occupied, as was almost every inch of floor space. I didn’t recall the bathrooms being so full, but of course I had begun avoiding the first-floor restrooms after my thirtieth year, probably just because of this. Youngsters stood shoulder to shoulder, some with drinks. The room smelled of urine and alcohol. A group of obviously young teens stood near the last stall, watching in awe as the over-twenty crowd drank and guffawed at unfunny inside jokes. Other than a lack of music, it was a club scene. Again I worried about why and how teens were there. More immediately, though, I had to reach Savior, who’d managed to sequester himself in the last stall. I followed him, stepped on my own feet several times, heard curses in dead languages I’d forgotten I had learned, and bumped into one elderly version of myself, paunched and pale, who patted my shoulder.

“Good luck. It’s worth it, I think,” he told me.

I gave a false smile and a nod. “You would know.” I shoved my shoulder against the door, and the latch popped under my weight.

“What the hell? Get out of here.”

I stood over Savior as my memory spiraled along a different path. When I’d been his age, I hadn’t run to the bathroom. I’d followed the Drunk, headed to the bar, gotten a drink, even spent a moment talking to Nose. I could recall that this hadn’t happened, even though the act was already done.

I pointed a finger at Savior, more accusingly than I’d intended. “Look, you didn’t mean to do anything wrong. And you didn’t. You just wanted to spare yourself a little pain.”

“That’s right. I just—”

“But it doesn’t work. You’ve changed things. You’ll start calling it a memory paradox soon enough.” As I mentioned them, I ran through a list in my head of the things I’d seen so far that were different from my own memories. “It’s like the kids being here.”

“They shouldn’t be here?”

“Did you come here as a kid?”

“Shit.”

“Someone must have given them a ride, and they’re here, and that’s it.”

“What if we—”

“Don’t even think about trying to stop yourself from doing what you just did.”

“Further complications?”

“Exactly.”

“Shit.” It was his mantra.

“Let me see your nose,” I said.

“All right.”

He was too stunned even to wonder why. I looked it over, and my own mind began to stir. I hadn’t found what I’d expected. His nose was unbroken.

He watched my eyes as my hands fell to my sides. “Is it all right?”

“I don’t know why, but yes.”

“What’s wrong with that? It’s why I moved the plate.”

“I know, but it didn’t work for me.”

“How come?”

I didn’t know. “Shit,” I said.

I stepped out of the stall. Youngsters toe-deep in urine tried to act nonchalant, failed, almost tripped in their attempts to follow me to a mirror. I leaned over the sink and examined my own nose. There, along the right side, was the bump and slight twist. Barely visible, but there. I felt it with both hands. My nose had been broken. When I’d been Savior’s age and moved the plate, I hadn’t spared myself anything. But this Savior had. Somehow he had been spared the break.

The mirror filled with my faces looking over my shoulder, puzzled or smiling, depending on where they fell ahead or behind me on the line of my life. Elders seemed to have arrived like tourists. Questions and admonitions to be quiet flowed around me. I kept my head tilted back and looked at the bridge of my once-broken nose.

One Elder—easily in his sixties, powdered wig and knee-high stockings speaking volumes of an ill-conceived trip through the eighteenth century—joined me at the sink. “Really far out, huh?”

I walked away from the sink. Savior called for me to stop, but I ignored him. Let the Dandy fill him in, or not. I needed to find Seventy.