MISS SINGULARITY

__________

SHE’D MENTIONED SUICIDE to the therapist, but not in any real serious kind of way. The only time Lani told anyone she was seriously thinking of killing herself was at school, in detention, in a text message to her friend Bron.

Outside, the spring was prissily insistent. The Northern California sunlight, Lani thought, was adamant about its detestable cheeriness. Through the classroom window she could see yellow flowers on the hill above San Jose Hills High School. Butter-colored daffodils, green-green grass, spotless blue sky, sunlight like a little kid who’d just thought of being sunlight: Lani found it all quite sinister and deceptive.

Thnk gonna kill mself soon 4 real, she messaged to Bron, on the little coffin-shaped cell phone. (Why do you think she’d picked this phone?)

Detent ovr n 14 min then freedom Bron replied, thumbing away on his own.

Mr. Gornblatt, supervising afterschool detention, didn’t seem to notice or care about the cell phones, though theoretically they could be confiscated. He wasn’t one of those teachers who got off on confiscating things—it was too much trouble. A chunky math teacher with a slightly crooked toupee, Gornblatt was sitting at his desk leafing through a National Geographic. He stopped on a photo page and stared, swallowing. It was hard to be sure at this angle but Lani suspected Gornblatt was looking at the topless aborigine women like some breathless sixth grader—and it was truly gross.

No serious not kddng maybe fri day 2 die, she messaged. She had to send and go to a new screen pretty often. Maybe not see u … yer dad pick u up rt after schl.

She glanced at Bron. Felt some satisfaction seeing he was staring at her; she’d managed to shock him. Then she felt kind of bad about making him worry.

He scratched at the soul patch under his lip, giving her that owlish look that meant, What the fuck? He was proud of that tenuous black soul patch against his doughy skin; he’d had to fight to convince the school to let him have that and the shaved head. His thick lips—not too thick, really, kind of cute—were pierced on the right side by two studs, top and bottom. They clacked, very softly, when his lips came together: he liked that. Like her, he wore all black; hers was fringed with blood-red lace. They were two of four Unapologetic Goths at the school, as Bron called them. UGs—he relished pronouncing it ughs. The school had nurtured various pseudo-Goths and semi-Goths but only four UGs.

U cant he messaged.

Y?

Tell u after schl my dad can just wait

But it was her dad who came after school, which was a surprise; Bron’s dad didn’t show, which was not a surprise. Bron’s dad, a sometime-Harley salesman, was maybe on a drinking binge again, in which case his family’s weekend camping trip to Lake Tahoe would be put off because his dad was “feeling under the weather”. Bron wouldn’t mind, or wouldn’t admit minding; he professed to hate the idea of vacation with his family. Probably both did hate it and didn’t. She knew that feeling.

So they were blinking in the sunlight in front of the school and Bron only got as far as, “Lani, you’re so full of shit, and you’re not going to do that. Abjectly true: you will not do it.” Abjectly true was a phrase he’d coined, and frequently traded in. “Your friends are, like, going to be fucked without you, and there’s a Death Club concert in three weeks and I have a ticket for you, a free fucking ticket, hello—?”

She looked at him with studied pity. “Concerts …” She shook her head. She was beginning to be sorry she’d told him. But then again maybe she wanted him to talk her out of it? She wasn’t sure.

That’s when her dad showed up. He was a tall, tanned man, with a small sharp nose contrasting a firm jaw, amused blue eyes. He was quite fit, dressed in a golf shirt and jeans and tasseled loafers with no socks. He was not the usual picture of a physicist; he didn’t need glasses and his graying brown hair was only a little tousled. He played golf, pretty badly, and he jogged, and he liked to swim in the sun. But he was a physicist, all right: sometimes, at the pool, he talked about Einstein’s insight on the sailboat watching light in the water.

“Hiya kid,” he said, as he always did.

“What’re you doing here? I don’t need a ride, Dad.”

“That’s so touching, the way you greet your old man.” But he didn’t say it like he was really hurt. She’d never seen him show he was really hurt. She’d never seen him show much but a kind of surfacey joviality, and mild irritation. Sometimes he’d show her a little affection, sort of like the affection her older brother had given his gerbil. Her brother Albert hadn’t wanted the gerbil but his therapist said he should have a pet. Albert was in college now and they pretty much never heard from him.

Her dad looked at Bron. “Hey Bron, what’s up?”

“Not a whole lot, Mr. Burnside.”

He smiled thinly. “Just chillin’ at the skizzy?”

Lani winced. Bron said, “Yeah. The skizzy. Chillin, at.”

Her dad considered the two of them. She cringed at what he might say next. She wasn’t wrong. “You’re kind of the odd couple, you two—except for the matching clothes. Lani, tall and skinny …” He looked at Bron who was short and chunky.

“We’re not ‘a couple’, Dad,” she said. “You’re hurting Bron’s reputation.”

“We’re a couple of somethings,” Bron said. He looked like he was a long ways away, in his mind; she was afraid he was trying to think of a way to talk to her dad about what she’d text messaged. Maybe he’d just blurt out, Your daughter’s threatening suicide, dude. That wouldn’t be like Bron—but he might think it was an emergency.

“So are we going somewhere?” she asked her dad, to get away from Bron before he could say anything.

Dad nodded, taking his car keys out of his pants pocket. “Yeah. Let’s go. You’re coming to the lab with me. Your … We’ll talk about it on the way.”

She waggled her fingers in an ironic goodbye at Bron; he stuck his thumb and little finger out from his fist by his ear in a “call me” handsign and she nodded as she followed her dad to the BMW.

Her dad looked at a butcher-paper sign under the school windows that the pep squad had made up. It said VOTE FOR MISTER AND MISS POPULARITY MAY 1!!!

Dad looked at her. She knew he was thinking about making a joke and she knew pretty much what it was. Something about how she should run for Miss Popularity. She saw it in his face when he thought better of it.

“IT’S SUCH BULLSHIT to do it just because ‘oh, the therapist recommends it’,” Lani said.

“But if we don’t try it and you, I don’t know, run off with the circus or something because you’re depressed,” Dad said, driving up the hill to the lab, “then we’ll say ‘Hell, we shoulda tried something, anything, and now she’s marrying Boffo the clown’.”

“That’s funny.”

“You used to think my sense of humor was funny. But now you’re a teenager. When I was a teenager I thought my dad was, I don’t know, Hitler’s long lost son. We got to be pretty good friends later, after I realized that Republicans aren’t actually fascists.”

She remembered the way Granddad had looked at Dad when he made excuses about not going to see Grandma in the hospice, and she didn’t think they ever got to be “pretty good friends”.

“I miss Granddad,” she said.

You never knew, Granddad might be listening, if that afterlife stuff was true. She’d seen a show about Near Death Experiences. She doubted if it was real. It was probably all oxygen starvation. But maybe.

“I miss him too,” he said. She could tell it was work for him to say that.

The road wound up, around the highest hill of the San Jose Hills district, on one of the ragged outer fringes of Silicon Valley.

Lani and her Mom and Dad lived in the two-year-old Hillview Hideaway gated tract home complex, which was just now below and behind the car. She didn’t turn to look at it when they spiraled around the hill again, the tract laid out under them. When she was a little girl, if she’d seen her neighborhood from above she’d have wanted to pick out her own house from the others: Hard to do in a housing tract. Now she was reluctant to look at the development at all, especially from up here: depression had levels of discomfort, and some things made it an ache. But she could see the walled tract in her mind anyway: a rat’s maze of identical houses; now and then a tiny stunted little tree planted in barkdust. No wonder Mom was into that Shiatsu massage guy—you’d have to have an affair just so you knew you were alive, down there. She wondered, for about the fiftieth time, if Dad knew.

She felt the pit open up in her—it was just like a trap door opening—and felt the suction from it, the vacuum drawing her downward. She’d been teetering on the edge of it all day. She felt the inner plunge, and her stomach recoiled in nausea when they took a hairpin turn. Staring at the snaky road seemed to make it worse, so she looked out over the valley, beyond the Hideaway tracts.

Blue-gray smog blurred the vineyards to the west and the sun flared from the tangled Silicon Valley freeways to the south—freeways ribboning between endless Wal-Marts and Costcos and malls; patches of green residential areas.

It was like a great stovetop, to her then. It wasn’t a very hot day but somehow every place she looked at was something being cooked, and people were the main recipe ingredient. Something, somewhere, was cooking up their souls for consumption. The Something used Time as its heating element, and when people finally gave up and became a kind of suburban zombie, they were finished being cooked, and the Something consumed their souls. Sometimes the Something aged them first before it ate them; sometimes it heated them up too fast and burned them. She thought of her friend Justin who was drooling on himself in a long-term care place.

Justin had been on the down side of manic depression for a long, long time, before the pill salad, and his dad kicking him out for hitting his sister—half an hour later his dad, regretting it, had gone out driving to find him but Justin had gone to San Francisco and somebody had given him some methedrine and the needle. He’d gotten HIV from that one shot and when it was diagnosed ten months later he took that double handful of random stuff from the bathroom cabinet … and it fried his brain.

She wasn’t going to try to kill herself, like Justin; she was going to do it right. She was going to be smart about it like the Romans. Like the Hemlock Society. Justin panicked. That was stupid. You had to ease your way out …

But sometimes she just wanted it all to stop—quick. Trying to tell people how she felt seemed so hopeless—like now, her dad was rattling away next to her. She could try—she could break in, yell at him, You’re so all up in your own self, you’re all about playing the game really well and you only get excited by science and I remember when you said that when people like Justin die it’s just “natural selection in action” well fuck you, he was my friend and no matter if you say you love me I never believe it, you’re always so distant about it and why do you think my brother never comes around and why do you think Mom is like making moo-cow eyes at that Shiatsu guy because you abandoned her emotionally and—

But if she did say that out loud everything would just get even worse; he’d get all chilly and analytical and defensive and he’d double her trips to the therapist—that nodding, smiling, puppetlike therapist Mary who made Lani’s blood run cold—and make her go on medication or something, like it was all in her imagination. And she’d tried Prozac, it made her feel like she was in a bottle, in no pain but all distant from things. Maybe it’d turned her into what Dad was.

If she tried to really honestly talk to the therapist, the woman just tried to convince her that she was wrong, that her view of the world was unfair—but that was so irrelevant. It didn’t matter if she was mistaken, if it was all she could see.

And if she tried to talk to her mom, if she told her how she really felt, Mom’d get mad, like Lani was blaming her parents, like she was saying they’d fucked up the world. But she didn’t blame them—not really. They were clueless, is all. Everybody got to a point where they realized their parents were clueless and so were they. But you couldn’t make them understand that—“Mom, it’s like we’re all so clueless, it’s all meaningless. People pretend they know what they’re alive for and what the point is but they don’t. They’re just trying to keep from screaming.” And Mom would say that was “just drama,” she’d refuse to get that—refuse to even try to understand it.

Lani wanted to say: You don’t have to agree but if you could just feel it too, feel what she felt … even for a moment …

That was the point: you couldn’t make anyone understand, really, except a few friends like Bron and Lucinda. They’d kept her going this far. But even they would say there were reasons to live. The world had adventure, it had friends, it had art …

She shook her head. The world? Look closer. It was like the world was this vain sickly old woman who didn’t realize she was about to die, insisted she was still twenty-five, and you just wanted to hold up a mirror and say Look at what you are, accept it and let go! Just die!

Only the world wouldn’t die. So the people in it had to die to get away from it.

She wanted to show her Mom and Dad and that educated idiot Mary the therapist what it really looked like, in Lani’s World. Somehow that was the only way to communicate: get them into your world. And that was impossible. You can’t put two worlds in one space. That was the whole point: everyone was isolated. They had some indirect contact with other people, but really they lived and died alone.

She looked at the traffic down below her on the freeway under the hill and saw hundreds, thousands of vehicles, each with a driver in their own personal daydream, their own impenetrable personal world, not thinking about being just another little metal box moving on an asphalt ribbon. They were all looking for some kind of comfortable equilibrium, which was the best you could hope for in the long run. And it was so … meaningless. It just went on and on and then you dribbled your life away like Grandma in the hospice, some sullen stranger cleaning the poop off you every day as you tried to remember your husband’s name. Maybe that’s when this feeling had started—when she’d gone to visit Grandma towards the end. How could you look Alzheimer’s in the eye and think that life was meaningful?

She looked at the sky and its blue seemed to part for her, revealing itself as but a thin veil over the black aching emptiness between the planets; the remote stars. Matter spinning out there, burning, cooling, seeking its own state of dull equilibrium, as her dad had told her. Just a lot of empty process in the midst of infinitely empty space, headed for the fulfillment of the steady state theory or the heat-death theory, or … what difference did it make how the universe ended? What was one human life in all this—or even on the Earth? One human life was a single bubble in a cauldron on that stovetop. The bubble rose from the bottom of the heated pot, made a brief journey to the surface; there was a moment of seething and then it popped, was sucked away by the Something, and was gone to be replaced by another bubble. No two exactly alike—yet they were all alike. Meaningless. Like Ernest Hemingway had said in that story she’d done the report on for English: Nada, nada … and nada.

And what’d Hemingway done, in the end? Blown his brains out. Had the good sense to be efficient about it. No time to think, just a clicking sound and then …

“We’re here,” Dad said, driving into the parking lot of Silicon Quanta Labs, at the very top of the hill. “Anyway, your therapist, that Mary what’s-her-name, says you need to spend more time with me, says maybe if you understand my work more you’ll relate to me, maybe even stop with the suicidal imagery … And I have to work late today, so …”

She looked at him. What was he talking about? How did he know? “Stop with what … imagery?”

“From your poetry,” he said, as they got out of the car. The sun was so bright up here, on top of the hill; heat thudding in waves from the asphalt. “On that website.” Looking at his watch. “Your mom showed me—well, actually, Justin’s mom sent it to your mom. Justin’s sister saw it. I told your mom you’re too smart for … to try what Justin did. You’re just letting off some steam, but you know Mom—she’s pretty dramatic.”

“You guys read my poetry?”

“What are you being so outraged for? You put it up online! That never seemed like a public space to you? And you put your name to it!” He smiled crookedly at her and recited, “Death come, death numb, numb me like the bite of an arachnid so I cannot feel being eaten alive … Vivid stuff! Imaginative! Melodramatic yes—but hey, I was a teenager too. I remember when I was taken with Stranger in a Strange Land and your granddad thought Heinlein was a cult leader or something …”

“My poem was at a site that only a few people are supposed to know about and it’s … not really public, I mean …”

God, he could make her feel stupid sometimes …

The little Filipino security guard, steeped in boredom, waved them through the double glass doors and then they were in the coolness of the building. Too hot outside, but too chilly indoors, in these air conditioned, immaculate spaces; this lobby where the abstract art was selected to color coordinate with the furnishings. The elderly secretary at the big horseshoe-shaped desk looked up from a laptop—which she snapped shut as they came in, probably watching a movie on it—and beamed at them. “Oh, Lani … hi! How are ya?” Her smile, as she gave Lani a visitor’s pass, seemed completely unreal, disconnected with the bleakness in her eyes. And Lani saw the old woman in her coffin. It wasn’t precognition, it wasn’t hallucination—it just happened to Lani a lot that she imagined people she met in their coffins. The old woman in her coffin at the funeral home with one or two mourners. An impatient son looking at his watch. Later the coffin slammed shut. Darkness inside …

“Hi … ” Lani managed.

Dad just waved at the receptionist and led the way across the lobby; swiped his card through the scanner, and the door to Research opened for them. She followed him past offices and cubicles, past locked doors reeking of obscure chemicals used in experimental computer chips, to a special elevator that needed to scan the card again before it would take them down to the primary Quanta labs: the ones the stockholders were supposed to get excited about, though the techs hadn’t yet produced anything practical in quantum-computing.

Dad’s lab—she’d been there only once before—reminded her of a big industrial laundry room because it was dominated by a bulky circular machine with a round window in its center. Ranged clunkily around the circular centerpiece were angular solid-state machines, completely arcane to Lani, bright with chrome surfaces, restless with digital readouts ticking over.

Her Dad went muttering to one of the computer work stations set up in the cramped space near the door. “Where the hell is Dinwiddy? He’s supposed to be here. If he’s smoking pot at work again I’ll kick his ass. He fu … he screws up and wanders off every time he does that stuff. I hope you don’t get into pot, you won’t get a goddamn thing done.”

“Stoners are retards.” She said it automatically but she believed it.

“He’s left a program running, too …” Dad muttered, bending over a keyboard.

She approached the wire-clustered machine dominating the room, feeling like Dorothy walking toward the Wizard of Oz: she felt like she was being watched from behind a curtain. The device was some kind of experimental new particle accelerator, for Dad’s quantum physics project—a new kind of collider, supposed to be able to do within its tightly wound coils what the big ones did over miles of tunnels.

Light glittered, multicolored sparks fountaining and sinking back on the other side of the round window. The collider clicked and muttered to itself in a language without words or grammar.

“What the hell’s he been up to?” her dad said, squinting at a Dinwiddy’s notes on a monitor. “He’s not supposed to be running the damn thing when I’m not here … Says he thinks there might be a singularity. Right. He has been smoking something.”

“What’s a ‘singularity’?” she asked. Almost interested.

“Uh … well usually it’s something in astrophysics.” He was barely audible over the chirring, the hissing from the accelerator. “Theoretical point where physical laws break down … supposed to exist in a black hole … Anything you can think can be real there …”

“That’s tight. Break down the laws of physics. Like to do that myself.”

“That’s my girl,” he muttered, poking through a sheaf of papers on Dinwiddy’s desk. “… never mind Miss Popularity—she’s Miss Singularity …”

“You can’t, like, make your own singularity?” She was trying to work out the glimmering shapes forming in the oval, metal and glass spaces within the accelerator. As soon as she thought they were this or that shape, they were some other. “I mean, in a lab?”

“Maybe for a few seconds … Where’d he put that equation? Uh, some people say a singularity could be created with an accelerator if you can get the right balance of matter and antimatter and … ”

His voice trailed off as he tapped at a keyboard. She wasn’t really listening to him anyway. She was staring into the circular window. Putting her hand on the glass. Something inside seemed to be looking back …

She saw a baby inside. A familiar baby: she’d seen it in old, color Kodaks in Mom’s photo album. Then she glimpsed herself as a toddler, on the other side of the glass. Then a two-headed child; one head was herself as a melancholy ten-year-old; the other was herself too, only it was a different ten-year-old Lani—smiling. The two Lanis vanished one into the other and …

“Dad?” she heard herself say.

And there was her dad, inside: a teen in the sixties, with long hair, a headband; Dad as a US Marine in Vietnam, later on. Only he’d never been a US Marine, never been to Vietnam. He’d gotten some kind of college research exemption. But there he was in uniform, carrying an M16, looking scared and alone—and then he was gone and instead of toddlers and dads, there was an eye, just a black eye looking back at her. But it wasn’t an eye, exactly—that was just the description that came to mind because it looked at you, you knew it was aware of you, and it was elliptical, but in fact it was a kind of squeezed tornado of space itself, spinning this way and that: whatever way she wanted. She felt sure of it, at that moment: it was responsive to her.

Oh, she told it, answering a question she never quite heard asked, if only people could see the world I live in. If only two people really could share the same world … then maybe we could find some meaning.

The eye seemed to blink …

“Lani!” Her Dad dragging her back from the accelerator. “Get the hell away from that thing … It’s not shielded for whatever it’s putting out … Dim-witty is what he oughta be called … Come on … ”

He took her by the wrist, drew her out of the lab. She glanced at him. He looked pale, shaken. “There was an eye looking at me from in there,” she said. “Thought I saw pictures, too … of me, and you and …”

“Yeah, you get a lot of Rorschach inkblot effect with all those third-level energetic responses …”

“No, it … never mind.” He wouldn’t believe her. And she was, she had to admit, pretty prone to imagining things. She saw faces in tree trunks, imagined sasquatches in the brush.

“Come on, I’m gonna have to shut down the lab.” Suddenly he stopped at the intersection of two hallways and looked at her. “You feel okay, kid?” She thought she saw real concern in his face. But no—probably not. How likely was that?

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“No nausea, or, uh … dizziness?”

“No.”

“Uh—okay. Well let’s get something to eat. Screw the lab. I missed my lunch. I need a beer and a burger.” He dug out his cell phone, and speed-dialed Dinwiddy, but couldn’t get him on the line.

And dad never did get his assistant on the line. Nor did Dinwiddy ever return to his apartment. No one found Dinwiddy, anywhere. Not ever.

LANI PICKED AT a shrimp salad, trying to decide if she’d imagined what she’d seemed to see in the collider. Dad ate a cheeseburger, every third bite or so speed-dialing to try to reach Dinwiddy on his cell phone. Finally he shook his head, tucked the cell phone away and looked at her as if trying to remember why they were in a restaurant together at this time of day. He seemed to realize he was supposed to talk to her, Dad to daughter here, so he brought up exactly what she wasn’t interested in talking about: how she was doing in school; told her that her sinking grades might not matter to her now but they would later. After that oh-so-surprising comment they had nothing much to say and they got home early … and when they were just getting out of the car, Dad saw Bergman, that longhaired muscular Shiatsu massage guy, rushing out the side garage door, clutching his Birkenstocks in his hand, giving them a whitefaced glance as he jumped onto his Zapbike. Rode off pretty fast.

Dad went into the house and found Mom half undressed, her hair mussed, and she was saying it was just massage and he said then why’s he running out of here and goddamn it, this is a condom, a used condom, the dumbshit’s too damn stupid to take his condom with him, and Mom was bursting into tears, saying Dad hadn’t touched her in so long, and—

An hour later they were talking soberly, quietly, in the kitchen, of divorce. There was no glimmer of reconciliation in their talk. It was all excuses, bitterness, and dismissive finality.

They usually made Lani eat dinner with them but Mom just nodded when Lani asked if she could eat a sandwich in her room—Mom with her frosted golden-brown, spiky-top hair, thatch-hut straight at the sides: a look she’d seen in Cosmo that the movie stars had given up a year or two before; her eyes looked pouchy, her makeup runny. Mom tried to look young, tried too hard, even getting a little nose-stud in one nostril—but now for the first time, looking at her, Lani noticed that faint cheek fuzz that women get after menopause.

Shrugging, Lani went to her room, ate only a couple of bites of the peanut butter sandwich as she booted up her computer. Bron was online too, got a prompt that she was online and Instant-Messaged her.

U OK? Concert?

Still here, she responded. No concert. Dad caught Mom boffing Shiatsu. Divorce now. Not joking.

That’s fucked up, he typed back. Want me 2 come over?

No. Feel like being alone.

Maybe not a good time 2 b alone. Go to concert w/me. Death Club & Desktop Junkies.

Can’t stand 2 b around people. Fucking depressed.

I don’t know if I should tell u this now but somebody will. Justin finally died. 4 real.

Shit. Really?

Really. Today.

But—and she decided it as she typed it—that’s a good thing, that’s what he wanted, it’s finally over 4 him.

Not a good thing 4 his mom. She doted on that dude. U going 2 b OK? Serious! Answer serious. You have friends. Stuff 2 do. You were talking about—

I’m not going 2 commit—

—suicide. You’re not?

She wanted to scare him by saying maybe, maybe not. But she knew that was just to get a reaction, it was selfish, so she typed No.

K i’m going 2 concert. u promise? No suicide 2nite?

I promise.

Concert? concert concert concert! Yeah: concert. Come.

No. g2g. bye.

THE DEPRESSION RAN like crude oil over everything she did, everything she saw and heard and said the rest of the evening—making her think of the old Sisters of Mercy song “Black Planet”. Looking at the news window on the Comcast site—nothing but morbid curiosity, to take in the news—she read about a group of children blown to pieces by American landmines; read about birth defects caused by mercury in fish and about a woman who’d punished her child by making him kill his beloved dog; read about the lives of refugees in Chad. The journalist quoted a young woman as saying, “Why do we live, if we live like this?”

She went to the bathroom and heard her mom in the bedroom next door shout at her dad that he had discouraged her from being an actress, from doing all she ever really wanted to do, and that dream was dead now … dead.

Lani thinking: All she ever really wanted to do? Like raising Albert and me hadn’t meant anything to her …

And Dad shouted back that Mom was just a selfish, stupid woman, and “That sums it up and I’m not going to say anything more to you except through a goddamn lawyer.”

The divorce, her parents’ argument, it was all just part of the same evaluation typing out in Lani’s mind like the print-out from an imaginary computer program: You come from a family of hopelessly selfish people. Projected probability: you’re going to be just like them. Unless you die.

Tucked away in her bedroom, she went to that Goth poetry website and read her poetry and now it seemed so lame, childish as her dad had implied. She went to the forms, highlighted her stuff, hit delete, thinking: If only deleting myself was that simple and painless. And then she looked over at the mirror on her dresser; saw herself hunched like a questionmark over the keyboard, a dreary, wearily angry expression on her face. Her hair looking stringy, hands long and thin and ugly. And she’d thought:

Look at me. God I’m just a fucking human worm.

She looked out the window. The moon was almost full and you could see the face on it—a face so well etched, to her, so definite. But its usual arch expression was shifting now because there were black clouds blowing by, like twisted thin black-silk cloth drawn over the moon so that its expression shifted in the murk: angry, bitter, sadly amused. Nice of the moon to keep her company. When she turned off the desk lamp she saw the moonlight was falling across her bed; the moon would go to bed with her, too.

So she went to bed, lay in moonlight listening on earphones to Monster Magnet’s song “There’s No Way Out of Here”, downloaded from the Internet, and then an album by Nick Cave. The music seemed to create a space that she could bear to be in, a dimension where tragedy was given meaning and perspective and form by art, and it eased her a little. But then she thought about the news, and her parents, and the look Grandma had given her, the last time she’d seen her in the hospice, like she wanted to say Save me!, but she didn’t know, anymore, how to ask for help; a look from the far side of a void.

And Lani made up her mind. It was not Nick Cave’s doing—this was a decision that had been growing in her for a long time: she would kill herself on the following day, without fail. Then maybe her parents would feel something, experience something besides their own stupid worlds; and she wouldn’t have to see people pretend day after day that living was meaningful, and she wouldn’t have to end like Grandma after a life like her mother’s.

Why do we live, if we live like this?

Yes. Tomorrow.

HER EYES SNAPPED open a little after dawn on Saturday morning—which was something that never happened. She usually managed to nestle deep into sleep, to hoard it and mete it out like a miser with pennies, making it last till at least eleven in the morning, or noon, on weekends.

But she was wide awake not long after dawn, convinced that she’d given birth during the night. That’s what the dream had been, anyway, a confused dream of missing periods and sudden pregnancies and babies erupting from her, half a dozen of them, wet runny blueskinned babies crawling about the bed, all tangled up in their umbilici … Though she had never had that kind of sex, just a little oral sex and some fingering, from that guy Corey with the skateboard he didn’t know how to use and breath that smelled like cigarettes and tacos and beer. He’d told everyone, and she hadn’t felt like finding a boyfriend after that.

Now she actually sat up and looked at the sheets between her legs for evidence of babies, little bloody footprints or something. She sneered at herself, and lay back down, curled up on her side. Go back to sleep, dumbshit.

Nope. Going back to sleep wasn’t going to happen. She was lying there on her side with her knees vibrating together like she had drunk three cups of espresso. She got up and felt a trickle down her thigh; her period had started. She reflected on how death came to a woman’s womb regularly, twelve times a year unless she was pregnant: the eggs breaking down in crumbling disappointment.

She had bathed the day before; she didn’t feel up to showering now. She wiped her thigh, put in a tampon, put on black jeans, her red high-top tennis shoes, a Lou Reed: The Raven T-shirt, and went out back to feed the big koi in the concrete goldfish pond … And stared. Stared. Then she shook her foot, briskly—one of the fish had crawled onto it, using its new, copper-colored legs.

MRS WEIRBACHT, a widow of sixty-two who lived a block from Lani, had to get up early to be at the synagogue, the Rabbi needed her there at seven because they had the kids coming for Hebrew school at nine, and as she went to the refrigerator, and opened it, took out a carton of milk, she thought about all she had to do at the temple …

The bottom fell out of the carton and milk splashed onto the floor. She had to laugh at that. Have a word with the grocer. But her hands shook as she cleaned up the milk with a great many paper towels, on her hands and knees—as she finished and straightened up she hit her head on a cabinet door that had somehow come open while she was down there. As she looked at it, one hand to her ringing head, the shelves holding the pots up collapsed, and all the pots clattered out. She straightened up, carefully, breathing hard. So, don’t panic, a minor earthquake, maybe?

But she closed her eyes, thinking about when Hillel had his nervous breakdown, the bad week when his father and sister were killed in the bombing in Jerusalem and his son had been arrested for a hit and run; Hillel shouting about everything falling apart, you could put it together but everything would just fall apart, and he’d started smashing the kitchen of their house, then, hammering things with a skillet. Everything would fall apart, no matter what you did …

She felt dizzy, her mouth dry. Decided to get some orange juice. She reached into the fridge, took out a glass quart of orange juice—the bottom fell out of the glass bottle and orange juice splashed all over the floor. Four more containers chose that moment to open in the refrigerator, gushing over the shelves. At exactly the same instant, last night’s garbage disposal grindings erupted from the drain of the kitchen sink, spewing onto the window looking out over the back garden. Where all her plants seemed to have turned black … and the ornate fountain in the garden that Hillel had built was crumbling, falling into a pile of disconnected, nondescript bones.

DARREN J. KENNECK, gay bachelor of forty-seven, resident of Hillview Hideaway, was sitting on his front porch weeping. His roses had all gotten some kind of strange mold or smut on them and they had turned jet black, from blossoms to leaves to stem: uniformly black. They stood up just as before, but they were jet black. But he was weeping for his mother. She had died a month before and he could hear her voice coming from the moist black earth between the black roses, though she was buried way up the freeway at Colma. It was as if she’d crawled from her coffin, through the soil, never coming to the surface, digging like a mole mile after mile from Colma to here, to come up just under the surface of his rose garden. He could see the outline of her body there in the dirt, just faintly, lying there face up; he could hear her voice distinctly.

“It’s … lonely, Darrie,” his mom said. “… it’s lonely. It’s … lonely. It’s … lonely … Darrie …”

MR. RAJI JHURAN, a Sikh, postman for Lani’s neighborhood, adjusted his turban and stepped out of the boxy blue and white US Mail truck, with his satchel over his shoulder—and came to a dead stop, staring up the walk to 1209 Elm Grove. The two front windows of the house were the gigantic eyes of a pretty girl; the door was gone, replaced by the girl’s nose; her lips were where the steps should be; the roof had curved to become her glossy black hair. The woman’s head was as big as the house had been; was sunken past the chin into the Earth; a giant living head that seemed to have been built the way you build a house.

Raji turned and looked down the street. The other houses were not what they should be, either; they’d all changed somehow. And a blizzard of black snow began swirling down through the air.

Raji called out to Guru Nanak, in Hindi, and retreated into the truck. The mail, in sacks behind him, shifted and shuffled as everything typed or written on it was spoken aloud, but softly, just audibly. Dear Mom, I’m not sure when I can come out but if you could send some money, I might be able to pay … Dear Mr. Hingeman, we regret to inform you … A new Visa card is preapproved for Mrs. Elmer Chasburton …

Raji said, in Hindi: “I dream. Lord Nanak, raise me from this dream.” He drove the truck in a careening panic back to the exit at the gates of Hillview Hideaway and the gates were closed and locked in chains that hadn’t been there before: chains of hair, glossy black hair. But trying to force the gates open—with his hands and then with the truck—he soon discovered that the long swatches of shiny black hair were hard as steel. He looked for another way out, thinking to climb the cinderblock walls, but he was afraid to go near them: the wall blocks shifted one on another like teeth grinding when he approached them. His cell phone did not work—or more specifically, it would only call people who did not know him, though they seemed to have his last name: they spoke no Hindi, and one of them said “Raji Jhuran? That’s my grandfather, dude, guy’s dead, stone dead like, what, many years now …”

And he crawled under his truck, covering his head, thinking that he was being punished for coming to live in this bloodless place, this place with no understanding of the sacred. He had come from Punjab to California because this was where the world’s money was kept, but since coming here he’d lain with a woman other than his wife, and now he saw that he must have died—died a mere patit, far short of Khālsā— and he’d been cast into one of the worlds to which you were consigned before you reincarnated, where demons mocked you with your karma, your karma falling like black snow from the heavens … He wept and called to Gobind Singh, begging for forgiveness …

THE KOI WERE crawling out of the pond, on their scaly silver-orange legs, like those ancient fish that walked onto the land, the tetrapods; they were creeping about the edges of the lawn, susurrating and tittering softly, seeming to grin at Lani. Then she noticed the grass itself—jet black. She reached down and plucked at it, thinking it had burned, was ashen and would crumble. But no, it was leathery hard, and it jerked back from her touch.

“Oh shit,” she said. Had someone dosed her with something? She decided that wasn’t the case. It was harder to decide she wasn’t dreaming, especially when she saw that it was snowing flakes of black that vanished on hitting the ground; that the clouds hanging low, nearly low as a ceiling over the neighborhood, were forming very distinctive faces, a crowd of teenage faces looking down at her; she only knew one of them: Justin, who was dead now. She knew somehow that all these other faces were dead kids, too. The cloud faces seemed to be singing something, though she couldn’t hear any words. Their misty heads moved back and forth, like people all singing along to the same song at a concert. The black snow plumed from their mouths instead of music.

But eventually Lani decided she wasn’t dreaming. Especially when Bron showed up, about three minutes later, rushing in her back gate, his eyes feverish, mouth open in an oval like the shape of the collider in Dad’s lab. “My mom was, like, screaming,” he said, rushing up, getting it out between gasps, points of red on his cheeks. He must’ve run all the way here. “She woke me up screaming and she said there were faces in the clouds and the grass was … And the phones aren’t working, none of them, and you can’t get out of the gates, you can’t leave the complex … I thought somebody’d dosed us but we’re all seeing the same fucking stuff!”

They had some discussion about whether or not they could be dreaming the same dream somehow. But finally she said, “No. It’s real. I’ve been sort of expecting something. The singularity didn’t blink—it was winking at me.”

“The what?”

She told him about the lab, and what her Dad had said, and she thought that somehow she’d made a connection with the singularity, and it was making her world real for everyone, externalizing her inner world, and as she said it they were both grinning, because now there was music rising on the air too—a dark dirge-like but somehow triumphant rock music emanating from the new, startlingly large lilies growing along the mossy fences of her backyard, as if their blossoms were those amplifying trumpets on antique crank-up record players. The music sounded sort of like Switchblade Symphony but then again it was sort of like early Nine Inch Nails or maybe Joy Division but then again it was like Christian Death or Ministry, but on the other hand it was more like London After Midnight … or the early Cure … or … .

“Can you make out the words?” Bron asked her, breathless.

“I … no. Well yes …” She listened, repeated: “‘Have you seen my soul … I left it on the subway station … someone has taken it and …’ Uh, I think: ‘left it with freebox clutter in their closet … some semihuman evasion … planning someday to sell it … no one will ever get what it’s worth … ‘ ”

“I didn’t hear any of that at all!” Bron protested. “I heard ‘has the bell finally tolled, has my life measured out its ration … ‘ ”

She shrugged. Thinking that in a way they were the same lyrics.

She and Bron both put out their hands to catch the black snow; and for .3333 of a second each flake was a distinct geometrical shape on their palms, like snowflakes under a microscope, but in onyx black and made out of an intricacy of interlocking death’s heads and skeletal bones—yet no two alike. When you looked close enough you could see the hard, interconnected shapes in the black crystals replicating infinitely, a continuum of the resolutely bleak: infinite cancellation. And then they’d vanish—each going with its own soft sigh. Lani and Bron looked at one another and laughed. All the while the music played, changing from one sonic shape to the next the way colors shifted and overlapped when you turned a prism around and around: there was no one definite song—yet it was all one song.

She and Bron should have been scared, she supposed. But they both felt weightless, as if they’d dropped burdens they hadn’t known they’d carried. They teetered near panic, too, especially when shiny anacondas made of volcano-glass oozed—slithering in ripples to the music that played—along the fence tops, jewel-like eyes flashing as they snapped at the great swooping bats: flying foxes. She felt a spasm of fear at two brief flurries of hail when she saw the hailstones were .22 bullets, still in their casings: ready for a gun.

“Those bats are fucking huge,” Bron said, blinking up at them.

“That’s how big they are in, like, Indonesia,” she muttered vaguely, looking up at the flop-flapping leather wings. “I did a report for biology. They’re flying foxes, actually, biggest kinda bat …”

She was fighting off a wave of panic, as the volcano-glass anacondas all turned to look at her, at once, as if awaiting orders; as a beam of black-light struck down from the clouds and illuminated a coffin-shape forming in the ground nearby; taking shape … opening invitingly …

But the panic and fear were overwhelmed by a rising sense of triumphant belonging. Taking a deep breath, she reflected that this was her creation, and choosing to revel in her new world was a way to survive it; even to thrive in it. Lani only knew that the more she just accepted it, the more it felt increasingly right.

“Yeah—fuck it, it’s mine!” She danced in place, kicking bullets and creeping crickets made of chrome.

Then she had a sudden thought, and ran to check her folks in the house—careful not to open the chattering closets, deciding not to see what was cooing hugely in the bathroom—and found her parents were still asleep, Mom in the bedroom and Dad on the sofa. They’d probably both taken meds to sleep and their slumber seemed a good thing, in view of the feverishly growing bird-of-paradise plants outside the windows: snapping their orange beaks at the symmetrical filigrees of gray-black mold which spread, in seconds, to cover the window glass …

Lani told the snapping flowers outside the window: Stay out there, don’t bother Mom and Dad. They seemed to draw back a little, at this.

Something took wing in Lani like a joyously hungry flying fox as she returned to the back yard, where the music seemed to boom even louder to greet her return, and the faces in the sky swiveled to gaze with somber affection at her.

“Come on, let’s check out the street!” Bron yelled. Laughing—and afraid as he laughed.

They ran to the street out front. Stopped there on the sidewalk, cursing and marveling, gazing at Lani’s own, her very own hot-house world. They noticed the cars first—or what they’d become.

“The cars are all changed,” Bron said, with approval. He’d done an essay for English on how he disliked cars. In their places were black mariahs and hearses, only they all seemed full of water, and swimming things:

Through the windows of the funereal vehicles they could see dark green and red fish, thin and transparent like scarves woven with eyes and gills, and octopi whose upper parts were human skulls, and detached but delicate human hands with black fingernails that pumped along like jellyfish. “You made them into aquariums! And the whole street …”

“It’s like that painting I tried to do,” she said, at last, her voice almost lost in the pounding of her heart, “when I took art from Mr. Yee, and he said it was so, like, muddled, you couldn’t make out a composition.”

“I remember,” Bron said, looking at the intricate vista of eagerly shifting darkness that the street, the whole neighborhood had become. Bron adding in an undertone: “You could tell Mr. Yee wanted to say it was depressing but he didn’t want to be that personal …” He looked at her. “So—even, like, right now—you’re doing this somehow?”

She nodded. “I think … yeah. I am.”

The composition had been poorly formed in her mind, even more muddy on her canvas; but here it was as composed as a Goya, dark yet clearly etched:

The sun was a dead white disk through the heavy, low clouds draped only a few hundred feet above the houses—the pallid teen faces overhead still sulkily blowing out the black blizzard. The lampposts, the telephone poles, the eaves of houses, the little trees, the fences, the cars: everything was fringed, edged with living pennants, thousands of them blowing toward Bron and Lani in the black blizzard wind. It was like the street was deep under water, and the streamers were seaweed clinging thickly to sunken ships. But there: instead of the black crepe was a woman’s hair blowing thickly from a round roof; no, Lani saw, not a roof, it was a woman’s head—some idealization of Lani herself—growing up out of the ground instead of a house, but then again it was a house too, the nose could open, swing back like a door. It did open, showing a red triangle, damp filling like the interior of a gourd. The eyes that were windows turned to look right at them.

“Fuck! Those giant eyes are looking at us!” Bron blurted, sounding scared for the first time.

And all the time the music played, its rhythms interlaced with the living motion of the street: the movement of black streamers, colored-ink fish, translucent anacondas, flitting bats, dimly seen forms chasing one another, tittering, in the quivering shrubs along the mold-laced house-fronts.

She was looking at the house across the street from her parents; an owl big as a Bron perched in the Boltons’ living room, looked out the picture window, turning its head to regard them gravely with big golden eyes; on the television set to one side of the owl was an image that looked like a home movie Dad had taken of Lani at the beach as a child, playing in the sand; she knew somehow it was playing on all the television sets in the neighborhood.

“You see that fucking owl?” Bron said, swaying to the music. He was looking even paler than usual; she could see him vacillating between being scared and exultant. “And Justin in the sky …”

She was past being scared—she had been stoned only a couple of times, and it was like that, you were in the grip of something in your bloodstream just sweeping you along with it.

She saw in her mind’s eye a hillside opening up to show a great cavern with a stream emerging from it, a red stream of her own blood, and she saw herself carried on the stream in a white, carven boat, completely naked, hands uplifted like a priestess—just a picture in her imagination—

Bron pointed the other way down the street, behind her, bursting out: “You’re over there … naked, in a fucking boat!”

She turned and there was the hill that loomed over the housing complex, but now the hillside was literally riven by the cavern; now it spilled rusty fluid on which she rode naked in a boat made of intricately carved ivory … hands lifted in hieratic gesticulation …

She turned to see Bron gaping at the naked Lani priestess in the boat. “Stop looking at that!” Glaring at Bron. He looked hastily away. She turned back in time to see the figure on the boat disappear behind one of the houses—going where, she wondered. What would that version of herself say to her?

She found she was clinging to Bron’s arm as they moved a little farther out into the street, peering down the street toward the woman’s head; taking in the pallid, evil-eyed imps wrestling and burrowing in a garden of black irises, daffodils slowly oozing blood, tulips turned to brass: turned to green-stained metal; seeing a middle aged man she didn’t know, weeping on his porch beside a rose garden gone jet. Across the street from the weeping man a few huddled figures, a family she knew vaguely, peered from behind curtains that opened and closed, opened and closed in slow modulation as if the house were respiring. The faces in the clouds were boiling in and out of clarity; the volcano-glass anacondas snapping up fox-bats only to sprout their wings and take flight like dragons, anacondas with big bat wings … And somehow it all continued to fit together into one deliberately articulated picture …

It seemed to her then that the street’s transmutation was moving in a kind of direction, as leaves and debris are caught up in hurricane wind and blown one way, one way only; it was going somewhere in time, too. It was going to come to a decision of some kind … even as the stunted little trees the contractors had planted began to grow up higher, higher, thicker, extruding Spanish moss, the trees groaning like women in labor as their damp limbs spontaneously populated with screeching, improbable tropical birds, the long ribbons of moss streaming out to follow the crepe fringe. The crepe, the black snow, the purling mist rising from the black lawns, all of it winding together into a kind of tunnel, an oval whirlpool in the air; the shapes on the street twisted one into the next, an owl becoming a raven becoming a burst of black butterflies, swirling into the vortex rotating around the eye in the distance: the eye of the singularity, winking at Lani. And she felt she was going to enter into it with a kind of glorious immolation, a joyfulness like the crash of a dark storm-driven wave bursting into pearls before falling away into the fatal anonymity of the sea …

“Lani—” Bron looked down the street toward his family’s house. “What’s gonna happen to the people here?”

“Oh …” She felt like she was falling asleep, into a dream of glory, some ancient palace, Nefertiti riding a flying sphinx through the night sky. Smoke rising from the temple below—they were greeting her with a sacrifice, which was only right and proper …

“Lani?” Bron’s voice was squeakily urgent now.

She twitched, shivering, coming partway back to herself. “Oh, what’ll happen? The people here—probably end up in another world, have to adjust. New rules. Gone from this place. Some will die … Couldn’t be worse than this place was before, Bron.”

“You kids!” Her dad’s voice, shouting over the music. “Lani, please, oh Christ—come here! You too, Bron! Get over here!”

Lani turned to see her dad, in his bathrobe and T-shirt, gesturing distraughtly from the front door of the house. Lani shook her head. She didn’t want to go to her dad—she wanted him to come to her.

Wobbly and hugging herself, Mom came out on the porch in her nightgown, face stricken—frozen in a silent moan. A translucent anaconda dripped from the roof of the porch, wound itself around her mom, and Mom just stared at it, trembling, as hypnotized as a lamb about to be swallowed. Her dad tugged at the snake, cursing to himself, trying to pull it away from her …

Lani glared at the anaconda. “Let her go!” Obedient to her, it slithered away from Mom, into the shrugging junipers.

Dad looked at Lani, then at the snake’s receding tail, back at Lani, realizing. “It’s Lani … Dinwiddy … she stood too close …”

“Our Lani did this?” Lani’s mother asked, chewing a knuckle, her face squeezed in fear, a struggle to comprehend.

“I think so,” Dad told her. “She was at my lab—I told you about the way the mind can shape things, if …” He shook his head. Too much to explain when he only barely understood himself.

Lani looked at the vortex—a black-hearted celebration calling for its guest of honor …

“What we gonna do now, Lani?” Bron asked, his voice hoarse, almost lost in the growing roar of the increasingly discordant music, the seething of the wind, the cries of frightened people huddled in their houses.

“Lani!” her Mom called, with surprising firmness. “Please baby … stop this thing … stop it … Come back to us.”

But Lani took a step toward the vortex … swaying with the music, though its rhythm was almost lost in its increasing thunder.

“Hey kid …” She turned to see her dad walking up to her. His trembling hands going to her face. “Baby … ” His voice breaking. His eyes wet.

Lani looked at him, and her mom in amazement—and really saw them for the first time in years. Her father and mother both, disclosed, paradoxically, by the darkness of Lani’s world. Somehow it made their inner lives shine out against its backdrop. Its darkness opened theirs to her: she saw their fears, their dilemmas, for a moment laid bare. They were trapped too …

She saw that her father felt things as much as anybody. She could see it in his eyes now, as if those shutters had been thrown open: worry, loneliness, fear … longing. Love.

He just didn’t know how to show it. He was like a man whose limbs had gone numb, called to dance. But he heard the music.

And her mother, at the porch—her arms open now to Lani. Wanting her daughter in her arms, her husband beside her. Really wanting Lani alive and with them. Behind the shutters of her Mom’s eyes there was a light that was more than selfish disappointment—normally nearly impossible to see, but quite real.

Lani let her dad, his gentle hand on her arm, guide her over to Mom. The music seemed to get quieter; some of the restless motion of the street slowed, as if the trees, the streams of black thoughts, the flying anacondas, all waited for Lani; Justin and the other faces in the clouds looking right down at Lani’s house, right at this porch. Waiting for her decision.

“Is this how it is for you, Lani?” her mom asked, voice breaking, looking back at those faces; at the dark life on the street, as Lani came to the porch. Hesitating on the flagstone walk. “It’s really like a … dark storm—all the time?”

Lani nodded, and began to sob. “Like this—but worse. This is the way I make it okay. This way it’s a world I can live in.”

Her dad nodded. Voice hoarse, he said: “I see, kid.”

She looked hard at him—and she could see that he really did see. He wasn’t judging her anymore, he wasn’t hiding from her—he was just there, in her world, with her. Lani’s world surrounded him, and he could feel it like weather on his skin. She had captured them both, her mom and dad—captured them and carried them off into the hidden recesses of her life. And for once, they really did see; for long enough, they shared the same world with Lani.

Dad looked down the street. “Dinwiddy was right after all … And you …” He looked at her. “We’re at the wrong end of the scale for this kind of control, sweetheart. Can you let it go?”

Lani closed her eyes. She saw the eye of the singularity behind her closed eyelids staring back at her. It spoke to her somehow, without words or grammar. Telling her that she would never again, in this life, have a chance like the one she was giving up …

“Yes—I’m going to let it go. Send it all away,” she said.

But Bron, standing a little distance away, simply and quite audibly, barked out one sharp syllable: “No!”

He closed his eyes and Lani could feel Bron reaching out—it was as if the singularity had created a kind of field of sensitivity in the air, and she could feel Bron’s life, the energy that shines from every person, and she felt him reaching out and taking control of the singularity …

And she saw him lifted up then—a spike of rock was breaking from the lawn and lifting him up, carrying him higher and higher, so that he was higher than the house, going fifty feet up—until at last that spike of granite, shrugging bits of soil from itself, stopped moving. Purple and green lightning—he was always into that kind of melodrama, from playing Warhammer and Dungeons and Dragons—were issuing from his fingers.

A dog, someone’s lost, gray-muzzled cockapoodle, was running down the sidewalk near the house, scared and confused—and Bron pointed his hand at it and purple-green lightning spat and crackled and the dog was a burnt, writhing, furless dying thing on the sidewalk, whimpering to itself and then going silent.

“Oh God, my God,” Mom muttered, her hand covering her mouth.

“I’m not going to let go of it!” Bron boomed. His voice amplified just exactly the way it would from a microphone and PA system. “You make this thing and give me hope and then you act like you’re going to make it go away, Lani! Well it’s never going away! I feel it now too! I can reach into that thing too! I’m going to build a castle, and take it to another world, and there rule, and anyone who tries to stop me will die—but first I’m going to lay waste to the high school, and anyone who’s in it! The throbbing thing in me is gonna come out and take a shape and run around and be free ’cause I’m fucking sick of it being in me and I want it out, out there, right out there!”

And he opened his hands, held them in front of him, and between them a shape formed, as if partly from his left and partly from his right hand, a sickeningly sticky little homunculus Bron, naked and contorted and clutching itself, like a fetus too long in the womb, twisted by birth defects …

And it grew, bigger and bigger, and stretched out its massive arms and looked for something to kill …

“Bron—don’t—I don’t think you can control it!” Lani yelled. “You’re too pissed off to control it! You’re too—”

But the thing, with its sticky wet leather-crinkled face, hearing Lani, turned toward her, and started down the peak of granite, climbing toward her like King Kong descending a building …

“Grunph!” it said. “Grunph ya!”

Her Dad put his arms around her, looked around for some place for them to run to …

“Bron it’s going to hurt me!” Lani yelled.

Bron’s face twitched then—his eyes widened. “No, wait—not Lani! You come back here, you can’t—”

“YOU SAY I CAN’T! GRUNPH! I’M TIRED OF ‘YOU CAN’T’!” the thing howled, in a scratchy distortion of Bron’s voice. And then it turned in a sudden rage and bounded up the peak of rock. And there it clutched Bron to itself, and put his whole head into its mouth …

Lani closed her eyes and reached out, to take control back. Felt the singularity looking at her—saw it, in her mind’s eye, gazing at her questioningly.

“Yes,” she answered. “I know. Take it away from me. And from Bron. And from here.”

The eye of the void winked at her, once more.

Then the spike of granite sank back into the ground, and the thing clinging to it—with Bron sucked into its rubbery gizzard—ducked its head under its arm and shrank to something the size of a walnut, and slipped into the soil with the shrinking stone blade, and was gone … Bron with it.

Then the street sighed—and surrendered her living daydream. The flying anacondas burst into small flocks of black butterflies, which burst in turn into midges with tiny human faces, which burst into a black mist, which trailed away; the tropical trees shrank back, and melted, their birds taking flight and then becoming blossoms blown on the wind; the faces in the clouds lost definition, and the clouds blew into rags; the color leached back into the plants; the aquarium funeral cars burst open, water gushing out only to instantly evaporate, idiosyncratic fish unthreading, evaporating with it, SUVs and Saturns and Tauruses reasserting their glossy metal shapes; the crepe let go and melted into wisps of fog; the house that was Lani cried out once, a cry of bitter disappointment, then laughed, and crinkled, shriveled like an old gourd, till its rind fell away into dust and the ordinary house was revealed under it: Justin’s house, Lani realized. The blizzard ceased, and the lilies fell silent. The music muted. Near silence …

Sunlight fell warm over the complex, glanced off car windows, glowed in green lawns. Daffodils perfumed the air. But Hillview Hideaway looked strangely cold for all the warmth of the sun; it looked like the maze of cookie-cutter sameness it was.

Lani’s mom looked at their neighborhood, back to normal, shaking her head, still affected by her daughter’s point of view. “It really isn’t that much better this way, is it?”

“I know what you mean,” Dad said, looking around. He put his arm around his wife. She let him do it.

Lani felt sick, lonely, thinking of Bron … But she also thought: I did warn him. I did. Maybe he’s where he wanted to be now.

People came out of their houses and looked around. They looked at Lani. They bunched up, muttering, staring at them. They were joined by the Sikh postman, an old widow from down the street. Staring becoming glaring.

“Uh oh,” Lani said. They knew—maybe the video of her family at the beach, on the TVs. They guessed who was responsible. No one was hurt—she knew that, could feel it—but they’d all been terrified.

“Okay,” Dad said, letting out a long shuddering breath. “I need a lot of time to process this. Let’s sell this place. These people are not going to like us being here. Let’s all … let’s go to the coast, hang at a motel. I’ll call the real estate people tomorrow … So Lani … ”

He looked at Lani. She could see, now, that he really hoped she wanted to go with them. To stay with them. And that they respected her choice.

And she felt … so much lighter now. She’d had a glimpse of possibilities, of the mystery at the heart of the ruthless but energized universe: and the perpetually unfolding heart of that mystery was the very fact of infinite possibilities. After seeing those possibilities, suicide seemed so small and narrow and crabbed a solution to Lani. Suicide was a pitiful little thing: a reeking, cramped broom closet of a choice. So many things could happen …

Her dad looked at her. “You give us another chance? Me and Mom? All of us together? What do you say?”

“I say what the hell,” Lani said. “Let’s see what happens.”