The Bend of the World

By the middle of March the city had forgotten about flying saucers; Mary Tremone had reneged on her deal with Kantsky and announced her intention to contest the mayoral primary; the head of the local Blue Cross/Blue Shield turned up drunk and belligerent at the home of his wife’s lover and proceeded to smash all of the first-floor windows with a tire iron before the cops arrived. The Trib had done a person-of-interest interview with Helen Witold, a New York artist who now called Pittsburgh home. What’s your biggest phobia? Reptiles. Favorite food? Bad coffee, embarrassingly. Artist? Hogarth, or Rothko. One thing you can’t live without? A mirror. I’d pretty much decided that whatever I’d seen that night on Mount Washington had largely been the effect of too much drinking and an ill-advised cocktail of drugs. Lauren Sara was still pissed at me for blowing her off after the opera. It had been an emergency, I’d argued, but she’d only grudgingly accepted. Not for the first time in my life, I felt that I’d serially overindulged and let myself be caught in the undertow of my best friend’s weirdness. And all I wanted was to swim parallel to the shore until the outrushing current released me and let the waves bear me back onto the sand. But it’s hard, you know, to do what you know you’re supposed to do when it would be so easy to float away.

When we were about fourteen—I could pretend to remember exactly, but memory is the most statistical of all our senses and sentiments; that is to say, the greater the specificity, the lesser the confidence level—my father acquired, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, one of the early Sony Handycams. He may have brought it to the beach that year, but I doubt it. It sat in his study, perpetually charging for a few months, before Johnny noticed it and decided that we should make a movie.

We dutifully set out to write a script, but discovered that writing scripts was boring, and decided that we would rely on improvisation within the confines of the hazy story we’d talked out. Johnny had two classic, full-head rubber masks: Tor Johnson and a gorilla. I don’t know where he got them; they weren’t relics of Halloweens past or anything like that; he dug them out of a closetful of his and his brother Ben’s old toys and kid’s books, but the masks were too big and too real to realistically date from that earlier epoch of childhood. Ben had gone off to college that year or the year before and couldn’t be consulted. We suspected they might have belonged to Johnny’s Pap, who was an indiscriminate collector of odd things, although not, to our knowledge, of costumes.

In any case, we had these two masks, and that seemed sufficient for a movie, and we knew that the movie would be called Hunting for Headless and would follow a man on his quest for a deranged mutant killer named Headless. In retrospect it’s hard to say exactly what we were thinking: Headless, as a character, was defined by nothing so much as the fact that he was a rubber Tor Johnson head; he was the opposite of headless; but that sort of error of logic and continuity didn’t really trouble us at the time.

We needed only a forest and at least one other member in our cast and crew, so we recruited our friend Billy Drake, who’d overheard us planning principal photography in the cafeteria and bought his way into the picture with the promise of extensive camping gear and expertise. All that remained was to convince my parents to let me go, which I did by eliding the fact that, while Johnny’s Pap was going to drive us up to the mountains, near Ligonier, he was only planning to drop us off. My parents had met Pap a few times, and since he dipped and spoke with a southwestern PA accent and wore a camouflage army jacket, I suppose they assumed he was an outdoorsman and a hunter and all that. It’s worth mentioning that my mother was originally from Cambria County and should have known better, but college and medical school and marriage to my father and self-will had almost entirely eradicated her Appalachian good sense, and she and my dad both thought Pap was 100 percent authentic. He was 100 percent authentic, all right, just not authentically what they thought he was. I don’t think he’d touched a gun since Korea, and the closest he came to camping was falling asleep in his shed while working late on his invention.

Nevertheless, Pap took the essentially anarchic view of childhood that still prevailed in the woodier parts of the state, beyond its enclaves of money and urbanity. He saw nothing wrong with dropping us off on a state route roadside somewhere on Chestnut Ridge. We had some maps, and he told us to meet him at the Main Square in Ligonier at eleven the next morning. He also told us that the state had been reintroducing mountain lions into the woods around. They don’t like fire, apparently, he told us, and they smell like piss. He was hunched over the wheel of his old Bronco. Johnny rode shotgun.

What kind of piss? I asked. Time around Pap was a license to swear and talk a language that was thoroughly discouraged in my home.

How the hell should I know what kind of piss? he said. Panther piss. I don’t imagine you get a lot of other animals pissing on a panther.

He also told us to keep an eye out for any bigfoots. Billy laughed, and Pappy said, What’s so goddamn funny? and Billy said, There’s no such thing as bigfoot.

I’ve seen bigfoots as surely as you see me right now. They used to get in my trash when me and Mona lived down in Fayette County back when I worked for the coke company. Rootin around in there and making a mess. Plus I’ve done extensive research on the subject. They are highly prevalent in this area. They smell like rotten eggs, and sometimes—he raised an eye to the rearview mirror—they will attempt to mate with a human female. His eye wandered toward Billy, who had long blond hair and the features of a Grecian youth. So keep an eye out, hot dogs, Pappy said.

Billy had claimed to know of a bat cave in the area. His family, like mine, was from the rich part of Sewickley, and they had a cottage in Ligonier. This cottage had six bedrooms, but never mind. In his telling, he knew the wild terrain of the area like back of his hand; he’d actually used that cliché, which should have been a clue to the truth. Close your eyes and describe the back of your hand. The closest you’ll get is that it looks like a hand. We tromped around in the woods for a while, with Johnny occasionally pulling out the camera to shoot randomly through the trees. What the fuck are you doing? I asked him. Establishing shots, he told me. This was before Steadicam and all that. I told him that shooting while we walked was stupid. It’s going to look like shit, I said. It’s going to be all shaky.

Don’t worry, he told me. I have a very steady camera hand.

We never found the cave, but we eventually found a little rock outcrop beside a small creek that seemed a promising spot to set up camp. Billy’s tent, which belonged on the side of Everest, proved too complicated for us to set up, so we left it in a heap of struts and blue fabric. Johnny had snuck a couple of bottles of whiskey into his bag, and Billy had something that he said was weed. The weed was doubtful, but the Jack Daniel’s was real, and after taking a few slugs each, we filmed some scenes. Headless (me), running through the woods. Johnny, dressed in camouflage, examining broken twigs and footprints. This creature, he said, this monster must be stopped before it rapes again.

What do you mean, rapes? I asked him between shots. I thought he was a murderer. We had already filmed several scenes of me killing Billy with, I thought, professional-level conviction.

He rapes before he kills, Johnny said. Like in Deliverance.

I’d never seen Deliverance, but it was the sort of movie that every teenage boy had heard about. Johnny had seen everything, because of Ben.

That’s stupid, I said. That’s fucking dumb. Why would he even want to have sex with a person? He’s not even supposed to be human.

Bigfoots haves sex with people according to Johnny’s crazy granddad, Billy said.

Shut up, Billy, Johnny told him. If bigfoot rapes anyone, it’s going to be you.

Whatever, Billy said.

The climactic scene was supposed to be a clifftop fight between Headless and Johnny, with both ultimately plunging to their doom. Billy, who’d been stuck on camera duty but for his death scenes, got pissed that he wasn’t getting more screen time. You’ll get producer credit, Johnny told him.

Fuck you, Johnny. I want to be in the movie.

There’s no role for you, Johnny said. What would you even do?

I don’t know. Maybe I could, like, put on the ape mask and become the hunter’s sidekick.

That’s fucking stupid. He doesn’t have a sidekick.

Then I could be, like, a wise forest creature who helps the hunter track down Headless.

We could do that, I said, mostly because I was getting sick of the movie. Also, guys, it’s getting dark, and we should get back to the camp and build a fire before it does.

First of all, you’re not going to play Targivad, the Wise Monkey of the Forest, or whatever, Johnny said. And second of all, Morrison, don’t worry. I have excellent night vision.

Targivad, I said. Where’d you come up with that?

Or whatever, Johnny said.

But we did go back. We managed to get a fire started. We managed to burn some hot dogs. Why did your Pap call us hot dogs? I asked Johnny.

I don’t know, Johnny said. He’s Pap.

We got drunk.

I threw up in the creek.

I was in my sleeping bag.

My head was spinning.

I remember drifting in and out of sleep; I remember the stars moving overhead through the trees; I remember that I’d worried that I’d be scared sleeping out in the woods like that, which I’d never done before, but I wasn’t scared; it was as if I could feel myself, many years later, remembering that I hadn’t been scared; I could hear everything in that immense darkness; I heard rustling and whispering; I heard Billy say, No, man, come on; I heard Billy say, Well, okay, I guess; I slept; I woke. We walked back to the state road and down to Ligonier, where we sat in the pretty square. Pap picked us up at eleven and took us to a diner before we drove back to the city. He looked me in the eyes and said, You look like you tied one on last night, hot dog.

What? I said.

He tipped his thumb toward his mouth and made a clicking sound. You’d better have some coffee, he said.

Coffee is gross, I told him.

He chuckled. Lots of things seem gross at first. Try it. Which I did, and I found, to my surprise, that the bitterness was pleasant even in my dry mouth.

I realized after he’d dropped me off at home that Johnny and Billy hadn’t spoken, hadn’t even looked at each other, for that entire day.

Another Monday. As had been promised, I’d received a call from Karla and gone off to Human Resources, a Strasbourg in Global Solutions’ medieval landscape, a free city at the crossroads of all the trade routes, with its own weird culture and amalgam language. I hadn’t been in HR since I’d first been hired. My colleagues, those who used their health plans and considered their retirements, were up here all the time filling out mysterious forms and pestering about reimbursements or withholdings or the rising cost of a monthly parking pass in the basement garage, but I thought the place was a bit spooky, full of hushed, confidential voices and bowls of candy and women who came and left the office in white tennis shoes.

Karla was the director of HR and by reputation a bitter, distrustful harpy who spent her hours nursing an evil resentment at not being considered a part of senior staff despite running her own department. I suspected this was more a reflection of the way my coworkers imagined that they would have felt in her position, because I sort of liked her. She wore her hair in an extraordinary crown of tiny braids, and her neck and wrists bore an impressive overabundance of bracelets and necklaces. You probably don’t remember me, I said. Peter Morrison.

Oh, you, she said. She waved her hand and her bracelets clanked. Come on in, Mystery Man.

She had me sign a series of forms. I asked her if I should read them. They all say keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told, she said. Also, they teach you the secret handshake, the passwords, and how to operate the decoder ring. Really? I said. No, she told me, but they do say that you’re an at-will employee and that either you or Global Solutions, its others, owners, licensees, assignees, and subsidiaries can, at any point, without cause or notice, terminate the agreement.

Termination upon the occurrence of certain other events, I said, principally to myself.

What? No, she said. There are no events. It means keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told, or they’ll fire your ass. Now sign this. It’s your status update form.

It listed my new title as Associate Director, Special Planning and Projects.

What’s an associate director? I said. Do we have those?

We do now, I guess. I try to tell them that the paperwork is a pain. We get audited, and they want to know where these titles come from. I tell them, don’t ask me, I only work here.

The salary is wrong, I said. I’d read down the form. It said eighty-five.

You’re damn right it’s wrong. A thirty percent raise? We’re supposed to be on a one percent annual right now.

No, I said. I mean, they told me a bigger number.

I’m sure they did. Was it Bates? That fool is supposed to be the chief financial officer, but I swear to Jesus he only understands one, two, and many. Every time he offers someone a promotion, he says one thing, and then he tells me something else. Let me be straight with you: the lower number is always the right number, so you can go upstairs and ask him if you want, or you can just sign off and I’ll get the raise into your next paycheck. Makes no difference to me.

I should just sign off, then.

Yes, she said. You should.

On the way out the door, she called me back. Hey, Mystery Man, she said.

Yeah?

I’ve seen this company go through one bullshit IPO and two private equity sales, she said. Bool-shit, she pronounced it, for emphasis. Let me give you some advice. Getting noticed is never the right strategy.

We’re not getting sold, I said.

She laughed. Nice try, she said. Maybe they won’t fire your ass after all. But please. I was born at night, but not last night.

Still, I had no idea what my new job was. That in itself was no big change. I contemplated calling Bates or Sylvia Georges, but they were not the sort of people that my sort of employee just phoned or emailed on a Monday morning. Instead, I called Mark. I had his business card, after all, and it listed a phone number. His voice said, Hi, you’ve reached Mark Danner. I’ll be traveling abroad this week and will return on April first. I’m available by email, or leave me a message, and I’ll call you back. I tried to write him an email, but I discovered that I didn’t know what I wanted to ask him. So I went back to doing what I’d been doing, which wasn’t much, and I figured that at some point, someone would tell me what it was that I was supposed to do instead.

I did bump into Leonard that week. Disconcertingly, I was down on twenty-three. I’d just come out of the restroom, heedlessly, since no one was ever around down there, and I nearly ran into him. He’d been texting or otherwise reading something on his phone. We both regarded each other suspiciously for a moment. Finally I said, Leonard. What? he said. You think you’re the only dude who’s ever gotta pinch one out at work? Jesus, I said with a laugh. Listen, he said, tell me straight up: Did they can you? Can me? I said. No, why? You got called upstairs. Marcy said they canned you. She said you got the nastygram this morning. Marcy’s full of shit. Shit, man, I know that. So you’re good? I’m good, I said.

He seemed relieved, and it gratified me. I liked Leonard. By the way, he said, I told my girl about your little close encounter.

Oh, man, I said. Really? I told you not to say anything.

Man, a successful relationship don’t have secrets.

Seriously?

She told me to tell you don’t worry. The UFOs, they got nothing to do with the end of the world. They’re a CMU thing.

Like the university?

Yeah, military, man. Psyops. Intelligence shit.

Well, that’s reassuring, sort of, I said.

Is it? I guess so. Personally, I’d take the goddamn aliens over the goddamn Nazis.

Nazis? I said.

Yeah, who do you think designed that shit? It was all back in the fifties or whatever, after the war. Some CIA dude and this German scientist they brought over to work at Carnegie Tech. I thought you were supposed to be into all this.

My friend is, I said.

Yeah, he said. Your friend. Whatever, my man. And then, whistling, he went into the bathroom and turned the latch in the door.

I’d also been visiting Johnny in the hospital, trying to piece together his little chemical walkabout. I mentioned the three a.m. phone call; I mentioned that he may have called Derek as well. Well, what had happened is that Johnny had reread Fourth River, Fifth Dimension. The psychic adept, it said in chapter fourteen,

has long been viewed by many cultures and societies as possessing the unique ability to see the future. There is a notion of time that dominates in our technologically advanced civilization. It imagines time in geographic terms. Thus the psychic has, in effect, sharper eyesight than the rest of us. In fact, time’s higher dimensionality cannot be visualized in three-dimensional terms, and the psychic does not see into the future so much as he momentarily substitutes it for his present. Scientifically speaking, psychics are able to transform their internal time equation, thereby deriving different time-point-slopes from various points along the time curve. Truly understanding these functions requires highly advanced mathematics that we will not delve into here. Suffice it to say that the psychic “dials in” on different times through a calculitic-arithmetical process in the mind-computer. He or she is quite literally able to remember the future and convey it via quantum tunneling into the past, creating what an electrical expert would call a Feedback Loop. Technical details, for those so inclined, are included in Appendix C.

The Project sought to enhance these abilities via chemical-cortical stimulation. Many supposedly primitive peoples (e.g., Aboriginal Dream Time) have a far more sophisticated understanding of the nature of the personal time index and have used traditional shamanic techniques and rituals to transcend present-index and participate in the holistic continuum of the time function. These techniques and rituals often involve a chemical component. Contemporary science has synthesized some of these miracle molecules, for instance DMT, the so-called “death particle,” as well as creating powerful dissociative anesthetics such as Ketamine. While prior Top Secret experimentation (viz. MKUltra) focused on the mind-control effects of the so-called classical hallucinogens (“serotonergic psychedelics”), the Project sought to tie mind control to time control via the recombinant properties of the tryptamines and the NMDA receptor antagonist family.

You got the sense, reading these books, that there was just an insufficient amount of truth in the world, that the neat parsing of probability and possibility down to the merely actual was just such a drag that the author had to admit every strand of improbable and impossible narrative to the tale as a hedge against the disappointing thinness and paucity of the real reality.

So you never quite got a hold on what they were trying to accomplish, really; or, you got the feeling that they were trying to accomplish everything—a new age or the end of the world or something in between. But there was a curiously self-effacing quality to the story, too. All these secret agents and psychics and UFOlogists leveraging their vast, secret power toward some odd end that, at last, had nothing to do with them at all.

Well, Johnny reasoned, I just happen to have some MXE, and I’ve got plenty of dextromethorphan hydrobromide cough syrup. Might as well give it a shot.

Johnny’s strategy was to ride the methoxetamine through a few stages of mild dissociation before augmenting it with enough Robitussin to achieve the fourth plateau and to see where that left him vis-à-vis his personal time index, but the first intramuscular dose of MXE caused him to miscalculate the second dose, and he forgot the precise nature and exact goal of his psychonautical voyage and ended up doing what he usually did when he was fucked up, which was to sit at his computer in his underwear, drink beer, and play Panzer General II.

It seemed to him that he needed to keep injecting the anesthetics to ease the pain of improperly healed battle wounds, the many scars of many past campaigns.

And, although the Allied advances on the Western Front appeared like they would overwhelm his positions, he found himself walking along a snowy wooded path with the Führer and Keitel and a number of senior aides. The boughs of the fir trees drooped under the weight of the snow. The sunlight was distant and gray. Keitel tried to tell the Reichskanzler that it was necessary to regroup and retrench. The Allies had no stomach for prolonged combat, but they had superior armor. And what do you think, Generaloberst? Hitler asked Johnny. Mein Führer, Johnny said, clasping his hands behind his back, I have allies in England who are awaiting my word. Upon receiving my orders, they will mount a crushing civil uprising that will cripple the will of the Anglo-Americans. Yes, said Hitler, soon England will be ours. Um, excuse me, said Keitel, did you order this pizza? Your neighbor downstairs let me in. Tell that Jew Mussolini he’s next, said Johnny. He motioned to one of his aides. Give Keitel his money, he said. The aide, a chunky young officer who moved, nevertheless, with a certain feline grace through the snow, handed Keitel a crumpled ten and some ones. The Führer knelt in the snow and picked up a stone. Mein Gott! he cried. Do you see this? Do you know what this is? Yes, Johnny said. Yes, mein Führer! It is the Fist of Odin. Call your allies, said Hitler. The tide is turning. So Johnny called his fascist allies in London. Herr Morrison, he said. The line was poor, but serviceable. Morrison, the tide is turning. Hm, said Morrison, that insufferable British prick, I think I’ve heard that before. The fist of Odin! Johnny cried. Yeah, said Morrison. Bloody jolly goody well. I’ve got to toodle off and Winston my boot in the Pringle lift. THE TIDE IS TURNING! Johnny called, but the line was cut, and the enemy was advancing.

The walls were collapsing. The Generaloberstabsarzt came into his quarters with a syringe. Generaloberst, he said, this is prepared for you, should it come to that. Death with honor, Johnny said, and he stuck the needle into his ass cheek. The Generaloberstabsarzt, a heavy man, almost as fat as Göring, stroked Johnny’s cheek as he fell back onto his bed. He touched his chest, and then set his hand on Johnny’s thigh. How about a hand scan? he said.

Okay, said Johnny.

Relax, the surgeon said. I’m a doctor.

Am I dead? Johnny asked him.

For the time being, the doctor told him.

My throat hurts, he said.

Here, said the doctor. Try some of this cough syrup.

When he woke up, he was in his apartment. The ceiling fan whose blades were stained black at the leading edges from all those passages through the dusty air went around. He was on the couch. Anton was curled on his chest. There were several used syringes on the coffee table, some beers, an empty bottle of Robitussin DM. Squiggles went round and round on his computer screen on the desk across the room. Oh God, he said. A steady, dull pain thudded rhythmically in his head. No, not a pain. The door. He pulled on a T-shirt and answered it. A being—not a man, precisely, but not not a man, either, taller somehow and more birdlike, a high peaked chest that stuck far out in front of the rest of its body, a suggestion of wings, though it had no wings, the suggestion of another eye on its face, though there was no extra eye. He—he seemed like a he, anyway—was wearing a white apron with Masonic insignia, or possible bloodstains, or possibly both, and he bore in his huge hands a huge white book from which emanated the smell of burning flesh.

Delivery, the creature said.

Oh God, said Johnny. Oh God, oh God, who are you?

I’m the deliveryman.

You’re Calsutmoran?

Yes, the angel boomed, and he swept past Johnny into the apartment. I am Calsutmoran, a Seraph of the Lord Crown Ein Sof, borne out of the Pleroma in the flying Ophanim, bearing unto you the Book of Judgment and the Book of Life.

Oh shit, Johnny said.

Oh shit indeed, said Calsutmoran.

Did you come out of the hollow earth? Johnny asked.

Do I look like I came out of the hollow earth? trumpeted the angel.

Well, said Johnny, honestly? Kinda.

Calsutmoran tossed the book on the coffee table and sank into the couch. LeVay hopped on next to him and nuzzled his fingers. You know, Calsutmoran said, that’s what I fucking hate about you people. It’s the subtle racism. You think we all look alike, don’t you?

Well, said Johnny.

What’s with all the needles?

I’ve been injecting methoxetamine and ketamine.

You think I can get some of that?

You want some of my drugs?

I’m off. Why the fuck not? You got any beers? I don’t need a needle, though. I only insufflate. I’m not a needles guy.

I’ve got beer.

Oh, and listen, I’m going to need you to make a list of who lives and who dies.

Everyone?

Yeah, sorry.

Okay.

Johnny fell asleep in the middle of the C’s. When he woke, Calsutmoran was playing Wolfenstein 3D on his computer. Best first-person shooter ever, he said.

Yeah, Johnny, I said after he’d recounted his version of all this. I’m pretty sure that that was me. Like really.

You’re Calsutmoran?

No, I said. I mean, you called me. I’m your fascist ally. Who’s Calsutmoran?

You sure are, he said, and not without a measure of affection. He was due to be released the next morning. He was off the IV and eating solid food, but he was pale, paler than usual, and he seemed shrunken and dry, like an apple that’s been sitting uneaten in the fruit bowl for a week too long. How did I even know how to use the phone?

I’m not sure you really did. I mean, you seemed to forget. Also, you kept rhyming. It was annoying.

Hm. I don’t remember rhyming. Man. I was pretty convinced that I was actually fighting World War II. Fucking RPGs. They get into your head. I was also really convinced that Calsutmoran—the DXM angel, by the way, which you should know—came to visit me and judge me for my sins. Although that may have been the pizza guy. I’m pretty sure I kept ordering pizzas.

I’m really not familiar with Calsutmoran.

Google that shit, he said. He’s like, oh, an androgynous emissary from another dimension who’s often reported by people returning from a fourth-plateau dex experience. I’m pretty sure that’s how I ended up at the museum.

An angel took you?

No, Morrison. Christ. I took the 54. God only knows how. I remember being really worried that the driver wouldn’t take reichsmarks.

I laughed. I had to. What else would I do? Exact change, I barked. Johnny laughed, too.

Oh man, he said. When those cops came to get me, I swear to God they were Asgardian warriors coming across the rainbow bridge on their goddamn white horses. I guess that was probably just the squad car.

I guess, I said.

Well. He shrugged and sipped at a little plastic cup of orange juice on the tray beside his bed. All’s well that ends well, I guess.

And I probably should have disagreed, should have given him the you’re-fucking-up-your-life route, but I just said, Yeah, and then I sat and watched TV with him until he fell asleep, mouth open, about halfway through an episode of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel.

At work, people had somehow become aware of my new role, whatever that was, and I found myself suddenly copied on a new volume of internal emails. They were mostly disputes between the Solve Teams and IT, or between finance and purchasing, and I couldn’t figure out why my name kept appearing on the cc lists until I mentioned it to Mark, who’d returned from wherever he’d been traveling and seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging out at my desk and taking me to lunch. They perceive your power, he told me. They see you as an avatar of the higher powers around here. When Joe Blow emails Jane Doe to tell her that his motherfucking network printer still won’t scan to email, he includes your name to let her know that Others Are Being Informed.

Jesus, really? I said.

You never copied the mothership to let some dick know you mean business? Christ, Pete, what are you, like, moral or something? Self-possessed? I think I’ve found a gem in you. I think you understand the power of discretion.

Thanks, but I really don’t feel especially powerful, I said.

Shit, son, Mark said, you’re locked and loaded. What you really ought to do is start randomly responding. One-sentence emails. Has this been resolved? and that sort of thing. It will scare the shit out of everyone, and enhance your reputation as a stone-cold fucker. Huh, I said.

Set phasers on You’re Fired, he said.

I’ve never fired anyone.

We all gotta lose our cherry sometime, Mark told me. By the way, what are you doing on Friday? Helen and I are having a little dinner thing. Bring that cute hippie of yours. What’s her name?

Lauren Sara.

She’s probably a vegan or some shit.

Sometimes, I said. She’s currently pescatarian.

Dairy?

Yes. Usually.

Let me give you some advice. Never date a woman with dietary restrictions. Eating disorders are negotiable, especially if she’s got dental. Oh, on an unrelated note, there’s going to be a series of emails going around that say don’t talk to the press about the merger. I’ve had them phrased in the most blandly unthreatening language possible, all very in the interest of easing the transition period and in order to speak in one consistent voice we ask that you refrain, etc. So of course everyone will freak the fuck out. Anyway, my point is, you should feel free to ignore this. If you should feel like anonymousing around.

I don’t really talk to the press, I said. I don’t think I know any press. I don’t think the press is very interested in me.

He shook his head in wonder. Pete, he said.

Yes?

Never mind. You hungry? Let’s go grab some lunch. How do you feel about titty bars?

Really? I said.

Christ, don’t tell me you’re that sophisticated. Blush has a midget. And a decent Reuben, if you can believe it. Similarly priced, too.

When he was sufficiently recovered from his hospital stay—surprised to find that more than a week had passed, so maybe there was something to this time travel thing after all—Johnny took the bus over to East Liberty to visit Mustafah Elijah, the One True Prophet and sole proprietor of the Universal Synagogue of the Antinomian Demiurge as well as Elijah’s Afrikan Shop for the Body, Mind, and Spirit. There were a few women browsing dresses and beads in the front, and the usual dreadlocked clerk reading a High Times behind the jewelry case. The cover read, Federal Government Dope: the FDA’s Secret Stash. The store always smelled like incense and something slightly fetid: not rotten, but a little overripe. Hey, Scooty, Johnny said. Is the rabbi around?

Scooty pointed toward the back.

Johnny went through the doorway and down the two steps into the back room, which was overflowing with tables and bookshelves full of conspiracy tracts and trade sci-fi and old VHS documentaries and newspapers and magazines and cassette tapes on every shelf and every available surface. A young white woman with tangled hair and feather earrings and a full-sleeve tattoo of tigers and birds was crouching at a low shelf paging through a glossy exposé on chemtrails. Is this shit for real? she asked Elijah. Girl, he barked, you want to live in a dream world forever?

Uncle! Johnny said.

Nephew! Elijah answered. They bumped fists. What’s happening? You look skinny. For you.

I died and was reborn.

No shit? Well, that’ll take it out of a man. I been going to spinning. You ought to see those Shadyside bitches when I roll up. Ahahaha. You died, huh? How’d you do that?

Powerful drugs.

Hoo, Nephew. You got to watch that shit. I keep telling you. You know what Isaiah had to say about it: Woe to those who get up early to pursue intoxicating liquor; who stay up late at night, until wine inflames them. Sounds like you got a little taste of Sheol. Your ass will end up among the Rephaim.

Aren’t the Rephaim giants?

They’re giants and they’re dead motherfuckers. Anyway, you ain’t so small yourself, Nephew.

Yeah, but I’m surprisingly graceful.

Shit, underwater maybe.

The white girl said, Excuse, how much is this book?

Elijah glowered at her. What’s it say on the price tag?

There’s no tag.

It’s six dollars. With the white person discount, it’s ten dollars.

Um, sorry, how much?

Ten. Dollars.

Oh, okay, that’s cool. Do you take debit cards?

Elijah looked at Johnny, like, can you believe this shit? He turned back to the girl. Do I take debit cards? he said. Do I take Confederate currency? Do I invite the FBI to my house to watch me take a shit? Hey, Scooty! he called out to the front room. Do we take debit cards?

Does a nigger tan? Scooty said.

Jesus, the girl said. Sorry.

Get the fuck out of here, Elijah said. This ain’t a goddamn sideshow. I’m not here to entertain your ass.

Sorry, she said again.

Take the book, Elijah said. Go on. Take it. For free. Maybe your ass will learn something.

Oh, said the girl. Are you sure?

Fuck, no, I’m not sure. Leave the book. Use the door, he said, which she did.

Jesus, Uncle, said Johnny, you’re a real fucking salesman. Your customer service is top notch.

Fuck you, Nephew. I’m a model of fucking customer service. This is a customer-centric business. Your ass is always right. He glared. Johnny started laughing. Elijah held on to his frown for another second and started laughing as well. He reshelved the book. So, Nephew, what can I do you for?

Well, you know Winston Pringle?

Pittsburgh Project. Writer dude. Yeah. Why?

I need a connect.

Nephew, didn’t I just tell you to lay off the goddam needle? You’ve got to purify your body, son.

What are you talking about? Johnny said.

What are you talking about?

Well, do you, like, know how I can get in touch with him? Like through his publisher or something?

Why the fuck would you go through his publisher? I told you I know the man.

Like, know him know him? said Johnny.

Yeah, said Elijah. Like know him know him. What the fuck, you think I mean I’m familiar with his oeuvre? You know that motherfucker’s crazy, right?

Holy shit, really? Oh man. That’s awesome. How do you know him?

His fat ass lives out in Wilmerding. He comes into the store sometimes. Don’t like to pay for nothing neither. I’m surprised you never met him. He’s a goddamn substitute teacher. You know, his real name is Wilhelm Zollen. I mean, supposedly his real name. Doctor Wilhelm Zollen. He teaches chemistry, if you know what I mean.

No. Wait, what do you mean?

What the fuck do you think I mean? The fat pervert sells drugs, my man. He’s the goddamn Timothy Leary of the Mon Valley, except he’s fat, insane, and a fag.

I’m a fag, said Johnny.

There’s fags and there’s fags, Nephew.

True enough, said Johnny.

After a week of waiting for the good doctor to stroll through the doors of Elijah’s store, which he did, according to Elijah, no more than once or twice a year anyway, Johnny decided that he could do no worse than spend a fruitless day in the Monongahela Valley, so he bused downtown and transferred to the 69 and took the long ride through the East End and the bombed-out remains of Wilkinsburg and the fleeting prosperity on the border of Forest Hills and through Turtle Creek and over the same actual and eponymous creek into the borough of Wilmerding, population two thousand one hundred and some odd thing. According to Wikipedia, there were just over a thousand households in exactly one square kilometer. Someone, Johnny figured, must know the man.

And, mirabile dictu, as soon as Johnny stepped off the bus on Commerce Street beside the small park and next to the Allegheny Housing Authority office and below the bluff on which sat the Romanesque pile of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company headquarters, wherein, according to Winston Pringle, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla had performed a series of Gnostic-Cathar sex magic rituals to divert the fire energies of the hollow earth through the subterranean ley lines of Allegheny County, thereby inculcating the fire element that birthed the Satanic Industries, whose sheer Vulcanic force weakened the liminal boundaries between this world and the next, thus setting the stage for the Deep Government’s Pittsburgh Project, through which psychically sensitive children, including Pringle himself, were broken down via the processes of ritual satanic-sexual abuse into subservient subpersonality psychic operators who might, one day, at the culmination of years of research and effort, complete this greatest magical working that the world had ever known by actually dissipating the barrier energies that held one reality apart from the next and the next and the next, collapsing the Quantum Matrix and enabling the Secret Powers of the World to pick and choose among the infinitude of potential realities and in doing so achieve ultimate, inexorable, and godlike power—just there, at the bus stop, because, I imagine, Johnny must have looked a little confused, unsure, precisely, of where to go, an old guy smoking a cigarette in a wheelchair decorated with American flag decals, who looked for the remaining life of him as if he had no intention of ever leaving that spot on the sidewalk, took one look at Johnny, spat on the pavement, and said, Well, I guess you’re here lookin for the witchy-poo.

What? Johnny said.

Yinz are always comin around looking for all that witchy-poo. Dressed in black and all that shit.

I’m not dressed in black, said Johnny, who was wearing his usual collection of browns.

You might as well be, the man said. Well, go on and ask me.

What am I supposed to ask you?

Ask me how to find the witchy-poo.

Hey, Johnny said, can you tell me how to find the witchy-poo?

Yeah. He lives up the end of Wood Street.

Winston Pringle?

I don’t know his witchy-ass name. I just know he’s up there at all hours, doin who knows what with all the whatchacall.

Right, said Johnny. Well, thanks.

Don’t thank me, boy. I ain’t do you no favors.

Thanks anyway, said Johnny.

He walked away from the Housing Authority and the squat forms of sixties-era Section 8 apartment blocks made of skinny glazed bricks past the Westinghouse mansion and up the hill into a neighborhood of brick and frame houses that recalled the great, gaudy, fifty-year illusion that there ever was a middle class in America, their trim having seen better days, their roofs having seen newer shingles, and as he went on, past the stained church whose front-yard marquee read GUNS, GUILT & GIFTS—the subject, perhaps, of a sermon?—as he went on, the street got steeper and greener, overhung with black walnut and weedy mulberry trees; then he was on Wood Street; it was as if he’d passed through a portal that skipped the fifty intervening miles and deposited him in the first, forested swells of the real Appalachia; the few houses winked in and out of the trees; their foundations were half dug into the steep hillsides and they looked like nothing so much as dogs swimming against a brown river.

At the end of the street, a dead end, there was a gated driveway leading into the woods. The gate looked to have been constructed of the final sales from a dozen different gone-out-of-business hardware stores. There was an old PED XING sign with a single bullet-hole on one of the posts; it had been altered with black paint so that the heads of the adult and child figure were almond-eyed aliens.

The gate wasn’t latched. Johnny pushed it open and walked down the driveway. After a few yards, a very large dog and a very small woman of indeterminate age, somewhere between twenty and sixty, wiry and weatherworn in a pair of sensible jeans, emerged from the trees. The dog loped up to Johnny, who regarded it warily; it stuck its nose in his crotch. Stinky, the woman said; come here, you stinky-stink. The dog obeyed. Hey, Johnny said. I’m looking for Winston Pringle.

Dr. Wilhlem? she said. He’s up at the house. She pointed down the drive.

Can I just go up?

It used to be a free country, she said.

Is that a yes?

It’s not a no. Anyway, it’s not my place. My and stinky-stinky-stinkers here were just stopping in to say hello.

That’s some dog.

He’s a werewolf.

Oh, really?

Not really. He’s just big and stinky. Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Yes, you are. Yes yes you are.

Well, Johnny said. I guess I’ll go up.

I guess you will, she said, and she and the dog went on down the road.

The house was ramshackle, a mess of asphalt shingles and rotten gutters, but still less so than Johnny had expected, given the aesthetic condition of the gate. It reminded him in an odd way of his grandparents’ house; it had the same dimensions, the same roofline, a similar dormer window, and on the far edge of the property there was a large shed. There were some wrecked and useless autos and a derelict school bus without wheels in the clearing.

Pringle answered the door in an apron that read FIST THE COOK. He couldn’t have weighed less than four hundred pounds, but his head and hands were delicate, suggesting a naturally small man grown huge through a dedicated program of excess. He had a rooster’s jowls; he was flushed from the exertion of walking to the door, and the flush contributed to the impression that he was part poultry. Under the apron he wore jeans with an elastic waist, and he was wearing a sweatshirt despite the heat billowing out on a strong draft from inside the house.

I’ve been expecting you, he said. Like his head and hands, his voice was unexpectedly dainty, nasal and a little swallowed, like a birdcall run through a kazoo.

Me? said Johnny.

Pringle squinted and leaned closer. His breath smelled like peanut butter.

Oh, he said. No, not you.

Oh, said Johnny.

I thought you were someone else, said Pringle.

And Johnny, recalling unintentionally a story I’d told him, said, I am someone else.

Which must be some sort of magic phrase that unlocks the universe, because Pringle smiled—an unsettling redeployment of his lips into a sort of deflated parabola—and chuckled and made a sound like a duck that was his version of Well or Uh or Hm or Alors, and he said, Yes, I see that you are. Well, why don’t you come inside and we’ll talk about it?

Awesome, said Johnny. I’m your biggest fan.

Well then, said Pringle, maybe you can help me figure out this Internet thing.

What Internet thing? Johnny asked.

Oh, you know, said Pringle. Just the Internet. In general.

Then Johnny was gone, but I didn’t much notice; Mark kept hauling me to meetings I didn’t really understand or have any business participating in, as well as hauling me to lunchtime strip joints, which I tried to appreciate ironically, but did not. Neither did he, really; he seemed to be trying to convey something to me, some message in a language I couldn’t translate; although I don’t know, maybe he did like it: one afternoon he paid Sassy Cassy, who was the dwarf who worked the early weekday shift, a hundred bucks to slap him across the face. She obliged, and when he righted his head, I saw that she’d split his lip. His tongue touched the blood, and he smiled as if he liked the taste of it.

Then one night Lauren Sara and I were meeting Mark and Helen for dinner. Hey, have you heard from Johnny lately? she asked. She was in the shower, and I was shaving. It was nearly the end of July somehow; the year had only gotten hotter; it had been ninety degrees for a week and felt like Florida.

No, I said. Why do you ask?

It’s like he disappeared, Lauren Sara said.

And it had been longer and deeper than his past benders. Since getting hooked up with Pringle, he’d rapidly effaced most of his online presence. We don’t want our psychotronics mapped onto the Google worldmind, which is, you know, running an algorithm to simulate human consciousness, predicting to the individual level the actions of every human on earth, literally eradicating free will through the power of prediction, he told me. I thought you said he wanted you to teach him how to use the Internet, I said. How to use it, Johnny snapped; not how to be used by it. It was the last time we’d really talked, although I did receive the occasional cryptic text message. His cell phone, at least, still worked. Meeting Pringle was all he could talk about. It’s all true, he told me. The Project, everything. You have to see his research facility. We’re close to a breakthrough, once we get access to the Project’s files in the Westinghouse building. His research facility? I said doubtfully, and Johnny whipped out his phone and showed me some pictures he’d taken. Is that a bathtub? I said. It looks like someone’s basement. It looks like a meth lab. You know, Morrison, fuck off. Whatever happened to you anyway? You see a goddamn UFO; you’re a straight-up witness to the culmination of a decades-long conspiracy; you see it with your own two eyes, and you become more normal. It’s fucking disappointing. Oh, that’s disappointing? I said. I disappoint you? You put yourself in the fucking hospital and maybe almost in jail on a weeklong bender, and then, as soon as you’re back on your feet, you start in with this? I’m fucking worried about you, Johnny. But as soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn’t have, because his voice lost all of its hoarseness and anger and his tone went flat. I’m fine, he said. You’re not fine, I said. You’re far from fine. Morrison, he said, calmly and with a disconcerting lack of affect, I’ve seen things that would melt your mind and freeze-dry your eyes. You’d be on your knees begging for mercy. You. Don’t. Even. Know.

His absence, however, had a surprisingly salutary effect on Lauren Sara and me. Or maybe his absence only happened to coincide with an improvement in our relationship. I suppose that without Johnny around, I felt freer to behave as he’d accused me of behaving: more normally—to behave, in any case, with greater conformity to the ordinary expectation of how a man of my age and income should behave around his girlfriend. In fact, it occurred to me that I was only just beginning to think of Lauren Sara as my girlfriend, even though we’d been seeing each other for the better part of a year.

I was working late a lot. I suddenly had work, or something very much resembling my idea of it. Not long after my promotion, Mark had reappeared in another expensive suit, still wearing a VISITOR badge, and spirited me down to the twenty-third floor, which had been filled, seemingly overnight, with the apparatus of a busy company, and I’d been there ever since. Should I say something to someone? I’d asked him. About what? he said. About, you know, moving offices or whatever. Say, he said, whatever you like. But I hadn’t had anything to say, and that’s what I said.

So anyway, I was working late a lot; a group of Mark-like lawyerish beings from Vandevoort, some American, some British, some Dutch, with a few other Europeans and a South American or two, rotated through the office; they all looked alike to me, as if they’d been grown in the same alien hatchery or bred from the same tub of DNA—the effect was made more unsettling by the fact that they called themselves the V’s; that derived from Vandevoort, obviously, but still. They brought me personnel files, which seemed to me like it might be illegal, and asked me my opinions on such-and-such and so-and-so, and though it made me a little uncomfortable, there was no denying the allure of knowing that the Other Peter made more than Leonard or that, despite his claims to the contrary, the company was not paying for Ted’s MBA. The one woman among them, a thin, beautiful, terrifying Czech named Assia, who smelled like delicate perfume and indelicate European cigarettes, would tell me to call John Boland at the Post-Gazette or Larry Meigel at the Trib to talk on background about the company’s plans to move its global headquarters to Pittsburgh, about the creation of jobs, about the contribution to the local economy. Do we intend to locate the global headquarters in Pittsburgh? I asked. What the fuck does that have to do with anything? she asked. She had a slight Irish accent from doing her graduate work in Dublin. Well, I said, I’m a little uncomfortable lying to these people. Oh Christ, oh fuck me, she said. You’re telling them the current truth, Mark said. I hadn’t even noticed him there; I hadn’t known he’d been listening. The truth is an artifact of the present. It’s time that changes. He put a comforting hand on my shoulder. Assia rolled her eyes and walked away.

Mark appeared intermittently, always in those slim suits with that sticker on his breast. He was usually trailed by Global Solutions executives or trailing the tall, thin-jawed Dutch execs who came in from Rotterdam. We rarely interacted on these visits, although he’d often flash me a wink and that thin smile that bordered on a sneer without becoming one as he passed, as if he and I were the only two in on some joke or some secret; he liked to come by my office—I had my own office now—at lunchtime bearing soups and sandwiches and chat about nothing in particular as if we were old friends. Sometimes I’d return from a meeting to find him camped at my desk as if it were his own, talking into a cell phone in Spanish or German, a laptop open in front of him. Once I found him this way in the middle of an elaborate French joke that seemed to my poor ear like it had to do with a blow job; he was flipping through a glossy publication. While I sat in my visitor’s chair and waited for him to get off the phone, I picked it up and glanced at the cover. Prepare the Way, it said. It was a Vandevoort Corporate report. Underneath, the now-familiar astrolabe was printed as a pale watermark; over it, a glossy, shadowed image of two fiftyish men whose broad teeth implied prosperity piloting an expensive sailboat off a Maine-like shore and the bright corporate slogan: There for Your Business at the Turn of the Tide.

Around this time I confessed to him that I still had no idea what I was doing. What am I doing? I asked him. I know that sounds completely lame, but seriously, I’m so busy, and I have no idea doing what.

You’re a real materialist, Pete, he told me.

You’re not the first person to say so.

You’re involved in the production of wealth.

I’m involved in answering weird questions and writing complicated emails.

Yes. It’s like alchemy. It’s magic. It takes hundreds of fingers typing thousands of emails to utter the spell that turns lead into gold.

That’s some magic spell, I said, if it turns Global Solutions into gold.

He laughed. That’s the truth, he said.

Are we going to fire people? I asked.

Oh, probably, he said.

Like, a lot of people?

The smell of burning flesh has to reach the heavens, Mark said, and they’re way the fuck up there. The gods of commerce have to smell blood in the water.

You know, I said, you don’t talk like any lawyer I’ve ever met.

I told you, Mark said, I’m not exactly what I seem. On an unrelated note, let’s have dinner again. You and me and the ladies. Maybe we’ll all see another flying saucer.

Sure, I said.

Great, said Mark. Thursday, then. Our place.

Okay.

Speaking of flying saucers, you know, Helen has not been the same since all that. He peered at me, and I felt as if I were being appraised from the inside out.

Huh, I said.

He blinked. Making lots of art, though, he said. Which is good. She needs a hobby. Weird stuff. She’s been having dreams, she told me.

Really, I said.

Strange dreams, he said.

That seems to be going around, I replied.

Is it?

What about you? I said. Sleeping well?

Only when the frailty of this human form compels me. I prefer to be productive.

I would go home after work on the quiet nine o’clock buses. Sometimes Lauren Sara would be at the apartment watching TV or using my computer; sometimes she’d arrive shortly after me, smelling of flux and turpentine. We’d walk over to the Orient Kitchen on Baum and eat fish ball hot pots and jellyfish and fish head soup. Something made us want to eat strangely. We’d drink Tsingtaos with dinner, and then, instead of heading off to the bar or going off separately with our friends, we’d walk back to my apartment. We’d lie in bed with the window open and the fans going, and we’d watch streaming movies on a laptop perched at the foot of the bed until one or both of us fell asleep. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find her kissing my neck. Honey, I have to pee, I’d say. Hurry, she’d say. And I would, so that I could get back before she fell asleep again. I was not sure how any of this happened, but it did.

No, that’s not entirely true. In addition to the whole deal with Johnny, there was the fact that Lauren Sara had noticed how often I’d been searching for Helen Witold online. You have a little crush, she told me. It didn’t seem to bother her. No, I don’t, I said. I’m just interested. That’s a crush, she said. Is it? I said. It’s cute, she told me. Yeah? I said. I didn’t know that you had it in you, she said. Ouch, I said. Come here, she said. And although I’m no expert in affairs or the fascinations that lead us into them, I do know that the one thing missing from almost all the literature on infidelity is the frequent, concurrent effect it has on the principal, preexisting relationship; there must be some truth to the old saw about the rising tide and the whole harbor.

We’d become frequent dinner guests, actually. Mark would text me at eight p.m. on a weeknight to ask if we’d eaten yet. We usually hadn’t. We’d arrive at their place around nine. It won’t surprise you to learn that Mark was an excellent cook. We’d end up in their tall kitchen with its big windows looking out over the Allegheny, drinking wine and watching Mark’s long-handled knife move too fast and too close to his fingers. He had the habit of chopping without looking at his hands, and I never figured out how he managed never to cut himself. His cooking reminded me of Nana’s, actually. Neither of my parents was much use in the kitchen; my mother could roast a chicken with a recipe; my father could grill a steak and make a surprisingly adept omelet; but Nana, before her eyesight and coordination had really started to decline, was ingenious in the kitchen. Among the hostesses of her social set, she was the one who never hired caterers, and when I was a little boy, I can remember standing beside her in her kitchen with a piping bag, helping her to assemble hundreds of little tarts or savory pastries. Mark’s cooking was rarely so dainty, but, like her, he enjoyed odd cuts and greasy little fish and offal. He was a show-off; he’d poach sweetbreads in white wine from a bottle that cost three times as much as any bottle of white wine I’d ever bought, and he seemed to be a carnivore; although he prepared beautiful vegetables and sharp salads of sorrel and frisée, he never seemed to eat them; or, maybe he ate them, but something about the way he ate them gave the impression that he was just pushing them around the plate. He’d served lamb at our first dinner together; he’d frenched the rack himself and just barely seared the outside. His eyes narrowly watched Lauren Sara over the rim of his wineglass as she poked the bloody meat with her knife. He’d served it on purpose. I think she knew it, and she cut a bigger piece than she had to and chewed it deliberately. Wow, she said, this is amazing. Later, he told me perhaps he’d misjudged her.

They lived in a condo in the Strip District in an old industrial building that had been converted into housing for rich people. Their neighbors were a weird mixture of young bankers and aging foundation heads who knew my grandmother. The apartment—Mark didn’t like the word condo, which he said reminded him of cheap vacations on the Gulf Coast—was big and awkward; the architects or developers or whoever put the building back together hadn’t been able to decide if they were lofts or not, and what walls there were seemed reluctant to be there. But the kitchen looked over the water, and the big room for living and dining looked over the Strip and past the convention center’s sailboat roofs to downtown and the sun setting over the Ohio River beyond.

At that first meal, sometime between the lamb and the tarte aux pommes, Mark had begged a cigarette from Lauren Sara and the two of them went off to smoke on a balcony somewhere. Helen was wearing a light sweater cut wide and square around her neck; it showed off her collarbones. During the meal, we’d been chitchatting about work; Lauren Sara was making gentle fun of the undergrads she taught as a graduate assistant; Helen had told us about the first time she’d met Mark. It was at a bar, she said. Of course. In Brooklyn. I know he doesn’t seem like the type to go to Brooklyn. Ha! Mark said. I’m an explorer, a pioneer. Not the type, she said. I’d just come from an absolutely terrible opening. I was with a bunch of friends and we were completely drunk, and I notice this guy, all alone, at the end of the bar. I swear he hadn’t been there a second ago, but now he looks like he’s always been there. He’s wearing a suit, so of course he doesn’t belong, and he’s staring at me, and I think, he either wants to fuck me or murder me, which is totally hot. So I ask my friend Beth [She looked like a Beth, Mark interrupted], Is that guy staring at me? and Beth fucking, she stumbles right over to him and is like, Are you staring at my friend? Do you like her? So eventually I go over, too, and then Beth disappears, and we’re talking and talking, and then it’s last call. And I’m like, should I go home with this guy? He’s had, like, six whiskeys, and I can’t believe he’s not drunk. And then he says, I bet you don’t even remember my name. I say, it’s Mark. Then I’m like, What’s mine? And he says—

Beth, said Mark.

With just the two of us, I didn’t know what to say. Helen poured us both another glass. So, she said. You’re working for Mark now.

Apparently, I said.

Hm, she said.

Hm? I repeated.

Keep one eye open, she said.

I will do that, I told her.

You think you will.

No, really.

I was not quite famous when we met, you know. Now I’m not famous at all.

All those museum types seem to know you, I said. You still get lots of search engine hits.

You’ve checked? she said.

Well, I said.

It’s not the same thing. But you know, when we first started seeing each other, people would meet Mark and say, Oh, you’re Helen Witold’s boyfriend. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. She said, When I was a little girl, I told my dad I wanted to be a famous artist, and he said, Wouldn’t you rather be rich? Can you believe that? All of the men in my life are such dicks.

That sounds like something my mother would say, I said.

She smiled at me. I’m boring you. Don’t tell Mark I called him a dick, please.

No, I said.

I like your girlfriend.

I couldn’t decide if she meant something more by it, so I said, Yeah, she’s all right.

Then she stared at me like she had at the museum the first time we’d met. Her stare was unlike Mark’s, who left you feeling flayed and dissected. It was less as if she were searching for something than hoping to see something she already knew she wouldn’t find, and it was so sad that I had to turn fractionally away again, but it was alluring, too, and it seemed to me then, and still seems to me, that what she suffered was less an absence of love than a surfeit of want and desire. She said, You ought to come over sometime and see what I’m working on. I’m working on some interesting pieces.

Oh? I turned back, and she was still staring.

I’ve been having these really vivid dreams, she said. I’m illustrating them.

And I wanted to ask, What dreams? Describe them to me, but Mark and Lauren Sara were walking back into the room, and Mark was saying, Who wants dessert?

On the way home after the second or third of these dinners, Lauren Sara had commented to me that Helen drank a lot. I said that I hadn’t noticed, but I had; at least, I noticed her wineglass getting refilled more frequently than the rest of ours, and I noticed that she usually had something stronger than wine before dinner, and after. Well, we all drank a fair amount, and I wasn’t really sure that I believed in addiction and alcoholism and all that anyway—I admitted to its existence, but found the categories hard to apply as practical observations about anyone I knew. I did, however, notice that despite the precision machinery of Mark-and-Helen’s host-and-hostess routine, as the evenings lengthened into nights an uneasy energy crept into the room; they never fought, not in front of us, but somehow they often seemed about to. Helen would usually offer us some blow after dinner; Mark always participated, but always seemed slightly aggrieved to participate. Lauren Sara always did a bit, but that girl was immune to the allure. Coke makes me sleepy, she said. Sleepy? I was incredulous. Totally, she said. How is that even possible? I said. She said, I don’t know; maybe just because it’s boring. As for me, I always felt guilty about doing it; I’d been hearing reports here and there that Johnny was in a serious hole; some of the old gang from our early twenties, whom I still ran into at the bars from time to time, had mentioned that Johnny may have propositioned them with offers of extraordinary new drugs that would send you through the wormhole and introduce you to the real Illuminati. But I don’t know, said Paul Rauth, who’d actually lived with Johnny for a few years in college in a disgusting house in Garfield; I just like to get stoned, you know? What with all this, I’d resolved to stay away from drugs, but Helen was so guileless and generous about it. How could you turn her down?

I even asked Tom about Helen. I’d asked Julian at the gym one evening after he’d kicked my ass at racquetball, but he said he didn’t know. Ask Tom, he said. Your boyfriend sucks, I told him. He laughed and slapped my shoulder and said, Fuck you, Peter. So I dropped Tom an email. Hey Tom, it said, You’re the expert. What’s the deal with Helen Witold?

Even though Tom hated me, I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist (a) showing off his art knowledge, and (b) gossiping.

He wrote back: She used to be a big deal. Saatchi bought a couple things she did in the early 2000s which was crazy because she’s American. She was supposed to be in a Whitney biennial, maybe, too. But then she did all this shitshow crap, probably after she got hooked up with whats-his-name, that asshole you work for. Also maybe she parTied a little too much? Arnovich’s X still reps her in NYC, but I think she’s pretty much over, or anyway, she’s not making anything new.

But I knew that she was making something new. She’d said so. She’d never offered to show me again after that first time, and I’d never figured out how to sneak across the hall to the studio that occupied the other half of their floor. But I’d been dating an artist long enough to recognize the scent of art being made. This seemed hugely significant to me at the time. A little later, when I did actually see it, I recognized immediately that it wasn’t good, although of course I said otherwise. It was the work of someone who’d fallen out of practice, who’d forgotten how to practice, or what practice is. But, as you can imagine, the smell of oil and mineral spirits filled me with intimations of mad genius, and it made me want her even more.

By this time, news of Global Solutions’ pending acquisition by Vandevoort had been reported in the business press and the local papers, and I’d recognized, in these stories, my own words reported back as coming from high-ranking insiders and employees close to the decision-making process. It occurred to me that I was actually embroiled in a conspiracy. Meanwhile, I’d received a series of texts from a number I didn’t recognize that talked about participation by Vandevoort NV in the Holocaust in the Netherlands and in smuggling Jewish scientists to the United States as part of a trilateralist war agenda, but when I tried to call the number, I just got a message that the phone was not in service. I looked up the number online; it was registered to a pay-by-minute company. Johnny, obviously. I tried calling his regular cell, but that had been disconnected, too. Then suddenly the V’s, having asked their questions, written their reports, made their blandly worded, scorched-earth recommendations, departed; the twenty-third-floor hive was gone; the offices mothballed again; the conference rooms locked. I was hauled up to the executive offices on twenty-seven and given a new office, which looked at the ass-end of an air exhaust on the building behind ours. We began firing people and suppliers.

I mean, they blend together; they were all so similar. Like, we’d haul up some poor sucker whose West Virginia company made some tiny part for some incomprehensible gadget for some massive water pump produced by some company that had at some point hired Global Solutions to get them a better deal on expensive thingamajigs. The poor guy would be balding but handsome, with a face that showed a youth spent outdoors and an adulthood of regret at having given that up. The guy would be in a nice but unimpressive suit, and I’d be sitting there with Mark and Sylvia and Swerdlow—John Bates had already been fired; it is with mixed emotions, said the email, that we say goodbye; a visionary and loyal presence at the company; moving on to new challenges and opportunities; yeah yeah; whatever; amen—or, actually, they’d be sitting there at the table, and I’d be wedged on a chair in the back, wondering what I was doing, pretending to take notes or something, and the guy, mustering his most intimidating mien, which maybe even worked with his unions back home, would say, It seems to me that you all are trying to fuck us over. No offense.

Mark would say, None taken. We’re here for frank discussion. Open and honest dialogue.

Swerdlow would say, Don’t worry about my delicate ears. I’m a lawyer. I’ve heard worse.

Sylvia would say something about changing economic realities and a mutually agreeable and fair mechanism for winding down a reorder and compensation schedule in the best interests of all the parties involved.

The guy would shake his head and say, I don’t understand what’s broke here. I don’t see what you’re trying to fix.

Mark would say, As you’re probably aware, Global Solutions is entering a period of transition. We’re seeing increased competition in our sector. The global economy is slowing down. The European crisis isn’t helping. We need to streamline certain aspects of the business.

Do you even work for Global Solutions? the guy would ask, because Mark was still wearing that fucking VISITOR sticker.

Mr. Danner is an important part of our transition process, Swerdlow would say.

You don’t work for them, either. You’re just the goddamn lawyer. No offense.

None taken.

Do any of you work for them? the guy would say. I mean directly.

I do, Sylvia would answer. Peter does.

The secretary, the guy would say, and he’d glare at me. How’s that writing hand doing? But I would never reply. Look, he’d say. Look. What’re we trying to fix here? You’re talking about unilaterally altering a contractual agreement. We don’t see the need. We like things the way they are. You say mutual agreement, but we already agreed to all this. We hashed all this out years ago. None of you was there, so maybe none of you remembers. But I was there and I remember. What’re we trying to fix? Hell, you promised us that this whole thing would make us so rich our damn janitors would retire to Hawaii, and that hasn’t exactly come to pass. Like I said before, I’m not unreasonable. But you’re asking for a concessionary agreement on our part. We’d go up in smoke if we agreed to this.

Well, look, Mark would say, and he’d get this bored expression, the distracted look of a priest who’s said the same liturgy a thousand times before, if you’ll just turn to page seven of your vendor agreement, section three-d, under the heading Termination upon the Occurrence of Certain Other Events . . .

That’s so creepy, Lauren Sara said when I told her about one of these meetings. She’d come over. We’d intended to go out to dinner, I think, but instead we drank a bottle of Brunello that my dad had given me for some reason or other and ordered a pizza and got stoned and watched The Big Lebowski for the hundredth time. I remember that night in particular because it was my weed that we smoked, which was rare, and after one hit Lauren Sara looked at me and said, No way. Is this the K2? Cool. But anyway, I was telling her about one of these negotiations, or whatever they were, and she said, That’s so creepy. It sounds like killing people. Like, and she did her Schwarzenegger impression, You’ve been terminated . . . upon the occurrence of certain other events. Your Arnold sounds like a retarded French homosexual, I told her. You’re a retarded French homosexual, she said.

But if I began to doubt my participation in the bloodletting, it wasn’t until we fired Ted. I mean, I fired him. Mark made me. It’s time, he said. The caterpillar becomes the stone-cold motherfucking killer. Jesus, seriously, I said. He hired me. Come on, Mark said, just the tip. Try it. You’ll like it.

I had, since my promotion, had limited contact with my old coworkers. We occasionally ran into each other in the elevators, and they treated me with a cautious politeness that made me uncomfortable but also, I’m ashamed to admit, filled at least one chamber of my heart with a vain pride, because, not knowing any better at the time, I mistook it for due deference. I was still under the impression that I wasn’t doing anything; my days had a formless, timeless quality; they passed in gusts of calls and emails and presentations and meetings, but I can recall making no decisions, recording no profit, making and doing nothing of any particular note, the difference being that in retrospect I can see the purposelessness and centerlessness as adaptive features of a very particular evolution, which had rendered as vestigial the structures of authority and hierarchy and production and replaced them with something, well, vague, insubstantial, and threatening, something from which no good could arise.

I had, of course, seen people fired, or had heard of it having happened and seen its brief aftermath, but everyone who got fired expected it; they took it with the annoyed forbearance of a person who gets stuck in the rain without an umbrella even though she’d read the forecast that morning. Except, of course, for Ted. Ted had not accepted it. Ted had not accommodated himself to a world in which getting an unexpected summons to an unfamiliar office meant only one thing. Whereas I had, in the same situation, arrived assuming I’d get canned, Ted arrived expecting to be beamed up to the mothership and made a part of the crew.

But as soon as he saw me in my big chair and Mark standing like an evil consigliere behind me and some sublegal functionary with a notepad perched in the corner, his happy round face tightened and his grip tightened on his little monographed organizer. Pete, he said.

Ted, I said. Why don’t you come in and have a seat? It was how I’d heard it done, so it was how I did it.

I’d rather stand, he said.

Well, all right, I said.

Sit the fuck down, said Mark, and Ted did.

I shuffled some papers. Look, Ted, I said. I want you to know how much we’ve valued your contribution to Global Solutions.

Oh Jesus, he said. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus.

Ted, I said. Really. It’s okay.

His head hung. Fuck, he said. Fuck fuck fuck.

Jesus Christ, said Mark. You big fucking crybaby. He hasn’t even fired you yet.

Fuck fuck fuck, said Ted. I could already hear the snot in his nose. I want to tell you that I felt terribly, that I felt as if I couldn’t go through with it, but I felt nothing of the kind.

Ted! I said sharply.

He looked up. Pete, he said. I didn’t expect it from you.

I’m sorry, Ted, I told him, and then I shrugged and put on my best impression of that distracted look I’d seen on Mark’s face a hundred times by then. I’m sorry, Ted, but it is what it is.

That night I picked up Lauren Sara and took her to dinner. We both got drunk and went back to my apartment and I may have pushed her toward the couch as if we were going to fuck then and there. Whoa, she said. Like, what’s gotten into you? You remember Ted? I said. That moron I used to work for. The one who always fucking called me Pete? Yeah, she said. Totally. Well, I said, I got to fire him today. She frowned at me. She sat up. You fired him? Yeah, I said. Why would you fire him? she said. Because he was a worthless piece of shit, I said. Well, sure, I guess, Lauren Sara replied, but what’s that got to do with firing the guy? It’s not like anyone does anything there anyway, right? Fuck, I thought, and then we got stoned and went to sleep.

When I came in the next day, Rick at security told me all about the aftermath. How about that guy from your company? he said. What guy? I asked. The one who wouldn’t leave, he told me; the guy they fired who said he wasn’t going anywhere. He sighed. Poor SOB, he said. We had to go up and haul him out.

Haul him out? I repeated.

Haul him out, Rick said.

Why did you have to haul him out?

Because, like I said, they fired him, and he refused to leave.

Did you catch his name?

Ted, I’m pretty sure.

He was my old boss, I said.

What I don’t get, Rick said, is why anyone would want to stay here. My boss came in and said, Rick, you’re done, I’d be out the door before my seat quit spinning.

You could always just quit, I said.

And give the bastards the pleasure? No way. I intend to sit here doing nothing and taking their money.

I hope you do, Rick. You’re the glue that holds this place together.

He shrugged. Beautiful day, wish you were here, he said.

They fired Kevin and Tim and the Other Peter.

They fired Sylvia.

They promoted Marcy, of all people, to associate director of something to do with the Internet, but she quit.

They even fired Pandu. How could you fire Pandu? I asked Mark. He was the only one worth anything.

Why would I employ one expensive Indian when there are one billion inexpensive ones?

That’s kind of fucked up.

I’m kidding. But seriously, no one is worth anything, especially not due to their position in the old order.

Jesus Christ, Mark, I said. Are you going to fire everyone? Who’s going to do the work?

The what? he said.

Seriously, I said.

You have to pluck the feathers, he told me, before you can roast the chicken.

The only other one they didn’t fire was Leonard. Leonard, like Marcy, got promoted. Unlike her, he didn’t quit. Assistant director of corporate philanthropy, he told me when we ran into each other at the Starbucks. How about that shit?

We have corporate philanthropy? I said.

He shrugged. Who knew? The European dudes are all into outdoors and the environment and green shit. We’re giving a quarter million to help finish the renovation down at the Point.

Really? The fountain?

I know, right? But shit, I got a raise, so you know, it’s all good.

Well, look, Leonard, I said. Keep an eye out.

Will do, chief, he said. A week later the gift to the Western PA Conservancy was announced. On Friday of that same week, they fired Leonard.

As my company was dismantled, my old friend Johnny had fallen, quite by accident, into productive labor. I found out later, of course. It was an irony, not unappreciated, that the old model of economic productivity, in which the work of human hands, amplified by technology, produced goods to be exchanged for currency, positively flourished in our postproductive age, only it did so underground. Now, as for how we fund our little institute, Pringle had said to Johnny on his third visit. So we sell some drugs, Johnny said. I am sure the idea appealed to him. Drugs? said Pringle. Oh no, not drugs. Research chemicals.

Got it, said Johnny.

I don’t think this was merely a euphemism. Pringle did refer to their customers as test subjects. I suspect that he, and who knows, maybe Johnny, too, believed it to some degree. If there was something gross and unsanitary in all the usual pursuits of an entertaining or numbing or joy-enhancing or ameliorating high, then there was something much more alien and discomfiting in the people who sought out folks like Winston Pringle and the weird, powerful dissociatives that he was peddling. For all the illusions of control and tolerance within which both the most functional and the most degenerate of alcoholics or cokeheads or junkies lived, each, in their own way, in some small but ineradicable portion of their consciousness and conscience, knew that they were pursuing death; knew that they were afloat on the ocean of a flat world, over whose roaring edge was the infinite void; whereas the self-described psychonauts, the dilettantes of higher consciousness, who bragged openly about seeking out the borders and nature and experience of oblivion, they didn’t really believe in it—or they believed it was a thing that could be purchased, a ticket with an open return.

Then one night on our way up to dinner at Mark and Helen’s, we ran into another couple who asked if we knew what floor the party was on. I looked at Lauren Sara. Sorry, she said. Really? I said. Sorry, she said. Pretend to be surprised. It was Saturday night. The following Monday was my thirtieth birthday. Happy birthday, old man, she said, and she kissed me briefly on the lips, and she led me to the elevator.

A bar with champagne. Real champagne. Veuve. People I knew. People I didn’t know. A caterer. Waiters. Derek beside a braided ficus talking to a girl who maybe lived at Lauren Sara’s house. Cocktail tables. All of this in the elevator lobby, before we even got to the door of the apartment. Lauren Sara handing me a flute. Me saying I’m going to need something stronger. The bartender handing me a scotch. A bald man telling a man with a mustache that everything went to shit on the back nine. The possibility of music just audible beneath the sound of voices. Derek saying, Happy birthday, bro, as we walked past. Me asking Lauren Sara, Who’s that girl he’s talking to? That’s Patra. The Greek? Lauren Sara giggling and saying, Shh, she doesn’t know that’s what we call her. A crowded doorway. People pulling cheese and pastries from the dining room table. The kitchen, brightly lit. Mark with a glass of red wine, turning from the two perfect women he was talking to. Was one of them Assia, from Vandevoort? Mark saying, The birthday boy! Someone overhearing and saying, Whose birthday? No one answering. Me shaking Mark’s hand. Me saying, I hope this isn’t all for me. Mark saying, Any excuse to throw a party. Someone asking, Where’s the bathroom? Lauren Sara saying, I’m going to find Tom. Me spotting Julian talking to another banker. Me finishing my drink. Mark handing me a glass of red. The good stuff, he said. Me trying it. Wandering into the living room. Spotting my grandmother on a couch. Saying, Nana? What are you doing here? Nana said, Happy birthday, Junior; you don’t look a day over twenty. Lauren Sara reappearing. Oh, hello Laura, Nana said. Lauren Sara rolling her eyes at me and departing immediately. Some dude telling some other dude something about nonvanilla exercise rights. Why, asked Nana, are people always talking about money? Nana—I laughed—you always talk about money. Only, she said, in the abstract; naming sums is déclassé. Fair enough. What’s new with you? I haven’t seen you in months. No, she said, not since the museum. Nothing is new with me, as you put it. Everything is quite comfortably old. I don’t believe that for a minute, I said. A familiar man in a bright tie passing and saying, Hello, Nanette, and you must be Pete. Nana, after we’d exchanged pleasantries, while the man was walking away, saying with her voice pitched just loud enough for him to hear, that she had no idea, no earthly idea, who that was. Me saying, I think he used to work with Dad. Your mother and father were invited to this little soiree, Nana told me, or so they said. I don’t expect they’ll show up. Not their scene, I said. No, indeed, she said. Derek appearing and saying, You’ve got some swinging-dick friends, Peter; do you know I just saw fucking Kantsky in the library? Derek, I said, this is my grandmother; Nana, my friend Derek. Oh shit, he said. Oh, sorry. Do I appear to be quailing and blanching? Nana said, and sighed. Never get old, she said; you acquire other people’s habits of assuming your own infirmity. Nana, I said, no one assumes your infirmity. They ought to, she said; I could go any day now. Turning to Derek. And who is this fucking Kantsky you mention? Jonah Kantsky, Derek said. He’s the mayor’s chief of staff. Ah, the young mayor, said Nana. Yes, I’d heard there was a Svengali pulling his little strings. I think Svengali was a hypnotist, I said. Yes, yes I know that, she said. Do you know that Trilby was the first play I ever saw on the West End? Absolutely terrible. I suppose your Cousin William thought it I’d enjoy the gothic element. Of course, I was much too young to see the original with Tree. My cousin William? I said. You mean Bill? No, no, she said, your cousin twice removed, I suppose. He was a good bit older than me. His mother was your grandfather’s aunt, his father’s oldest sister. She married some poor benighted minor aristocrat who needed her money. Poor thing; she didn’t get much. I think your great-grandfather thought her heading back to England was a betrayal of the Revolution. Derek said, That’s some family history you’ve got, Mr. Morrison. You have no idea, I said. Come to think of it, I have no idea.

Later, standing in the kitchen with Mark and some business types. Mark holding forth on something or other. Mark draping an arm over my shoulder and saying this guy is a real killer. Me saying I don’t know if that’s the case. Me saying, Hey, where’s Helen, by the way? Mark saying either powdering her nose or passed out somewhere. The business dudes yuk-yukking. Mark’s hand still on my shoulder, his fingers tap-tapping. Excusing myself. Running into Tom and Julian. Have you guys seen Lauren Sara? No, sorry. How about this apartment? said Julian; your buddy Mark, he said; like, whoa. Really? said Tom. I think it’s awfully gaudy. A tray of wine passing. Grabbing another drink. Drinking it quickly. Walking into the library; nearly running into Kantsky walking out. Feeling him stop, assess me, move on without a word. Alone for the first time that evening. Looking at the bookshelves. The usual mix of big biographies and business shit and popular novels and some Shakespeare and a Bible and some detective fiction and a lot of heavy expensive art books and a small section of German titles and a small section of Spanish and Italian and there among the English paperbacks, catching my eye quite by chance, surprising me, frightening me a little bit, Fourth River, Fifth Dimension. Pulling it off the shelf. Opening it randomly. Reading:

the sexually aroused psychic was then lowered into a sensory deprivation chamber full of electrolytic fluids. Once inside, he was able to achieve full-conscious manifesting of his total priapo-orgonic field potential. Thus, the Project achieved a major breakthrough. Although not yet able to physically project ourselves into alternate quantum realities, our psychic operators were able to experience them, although they experienced them as a sort of dream. Their recollection was spotty. We began working on a recording technology that could automatically transform their visions into images on a computer screen.

One unanticipated side effect, however, was the manifestation of silver craft above the testing site. Were they advanced beings? One theory held that they were in fact future versions of the very technology we were working on. They were literally coming back into the past to ensure their own eventuality.

And herein at last the nub of it: suddenly something which had seemed at most, at worst, a hasty sketch now resolving into a more exact copy, and all those weird dreams and portents threatening to start seeming true, and if the party was already making me feel weird, dislocated, out of joint with time, now I felt all the more so. Then hearing someone come into the room and closing the book. Seeing it was Mark and saying, Interesting taste in science fiction, with a grin. Mark saying, Nonfiction. Me laughing. You sound like my friend Johnny, I said. That’s your buddy with the blog? Mark said. Me saying yes but thinking, I don’t think I ever mentioned Johnny’s blog. Mark saying, How’s he doing? Because I’d definitely mentioned his more recent hijinks and the night at the hospital. Mark saying, We tried to invite him, actually, but we never heard back. No surprise, I said. Not well, I said. To be honest, I said, I’m worried about him. He’s an addict, Mark said, and it may have been a question. Sure, I said. I guess. I mean, I don’t know that I believe in addiction, exactly. All deniers are faithful at heart, Mark said. You actually remind me of him sometimes, I said. You two are equally aphoristic. Well, look, he said, having lived with an addict, let me tell you, it’s for real. When did you live with an addict? I said. Seriously? he said.

Looking for Lauren Sara. Bumping into some guy I knew from Global Solutions, whose name I forgot. Promising to talk him up to Mark. Grabbing another scotch. Eating some hors d’oeuvres. Stopping to listen to someone tell a joke. Catching some people doing blow in the guest bedroom. Laughing guiltily. Getting offered a line. Saying no thanks and feeling surprised I’d said no thanks. Seeing Mark maneuvering Assia—it was definitely Assia; I could smell the tobacco across the room—toward a guest bedroom. Following. Standing by the door. Hearing her say, Holy fuck, in her weird accent. Hearing him say, Turn over. Backing away. Hurrying off. Finding Lauren Sara with the Greek in the hallway. Lauren Sara asking, Hey, honey, will you be all right for an hour or so if I take off? Patra needs a ride to the studio and then needs to get over to the South Side. Thinking, Typical, then thinking I only thought that because I was drunk, then thinking that didn’t make it any less accurate. Saying, No problem, in a voice precisely calculated to mean the opposite. Annoyed that she ignored it. Fine, ’bye, I said. Back soon, she said. Wandering once more around the party. Seeing Nana to the elevator. You seem to have fallen in with a thoroughly self-satisfied crowd, she said. How are you getting home? I asked. I’m staying at the Renaissance, she said. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning in town. What for? I asked. On Sunday? I said. I’m a good customer, she replied. Then, having sent her down, seeing Jennifer Swerdlow lumbering through the crowd with a bottle of beer and a plateful of meats, I ducked, without thinking, through the nearest door.

Well, what went down was that I stumbled into Helen’s studio. It was the size of their whole rambling apartment, but without any walls or dividers except for a few concrete pillars here and there, the skeleton of the building itself. The walls were brick; the windows on the narrower side overlooked the river directly, while the long wall of them looked northeast along the water toward the Thirty-first Street Bridge. I mention this only to orient the room; because it was dark outside, the windows were black and mirrored. The floor was poured concrete. There were little sitting areas with the sort of thrift-store furniture that rich people like to buy, which is to say, probably not from a thrift store at all but only designed to look like it. There were a few rugs. There was a big metal drafting table with a stool and an articulated arm lamp. There was expensive track lighting, and on the two big blank walls without windows, there was the art, obsessively repeated, silvery ovals against a star field—abstracted but, to me, unmistakable. The canvases were very large. The room smelled like a recently smoked cigarette. I could hear the muffled party through the walls. I could hear the murmur of the air-conditioned air venting into the room.

Then I heard Helen say, Where’s your pretty girlfriend? I turned around. She was stretched out on a couch across the room from me, her legs crossed at the ankles, her back and body propped up against some pillows, with a cheap plastic bottle of liquor in her hand. She had on a pair of cutoff jeans and a too-large, paint-stained Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt. Several strands of her usually neat hair had escaped in the direction of her eyes. When I walked toward her, I saw a little pile—okay, not such a little pile—of powder on the glass table beside her.

She left, I said.

Seems to be a theme, she said. She wasn’t slurring, but she picked her way around the words carefully, as if they were the last solid footing on a narrow ledge.

She’s coming back.

Oh, is she?

She is.

Then I stood there and she sat there and neither of us said anything. It occurred to me that it was the first time I’d been alone with her since the first night we’d met. It occurred to me that I did not, in fact, know this woman. It occurred to me that I was very drunk. It occurred to me that she was very drunk, but nevertheless holding on to me with an amused, distant, almost dissipated smile, which reminded me so much of Mark that I imagined she’d subconsciously copied it from him. What’s so funny? I asked.

Circumstances, she said.

Why didn’t you come to my party? I asked.

I’m having my own party, she said. Would you like some?

Okay, I said.

Besides, she said, while I helped myself, who says it’s your party?

It happens to coincide with my birthday, I told her.

Maybe it’s the other way around, she told me.

My birthday predates the party, I said, and I handed her the straw.

That’s one way of looking at it, she said. She pinched her nose.

I said, I like your paintings.

They’re shit, she said.

No, I replied. I don’t think so.

You just recognize the source material, she told me.

We’ve still never talked about that, I said.

She smiled again, but this time a little sadly. About the aliens? she said. No, maybe not.

To be fair, I said, they might not be aliens. They might be from another dimension.

Oh, another dimension?

Is that funny? I said. How about: another reality?

Another reality? That’s funny. There’s no other reality.

You don’t think? I think there might be a lot of them.

I think you’ll find, she said, that they’re all the same reality from a different perspective.

You’ve given it some thought.

Believe me, Helen said, I could use another reality.

Why’s that?

I’m not overly fond of this one.

Maybe you should hitch a ride, I said, and I gestured toward a painting.

Oh no. I’ve had enough of aliens. And other realities.

What do you mean? I asked.

Let me ask you a question, she said.

Okay, I said.

Do you like working for Mark?

I don’t really work for him, technically speaking.

I wasn’t technically speaking.

I don’t know, I said. Sure. I guess.

You should keep an eye out, she said.

Haha, I said. Everyone keeps saying that. My best friend’s grandfather used to say it.

Keep an eye out?

Yeah. He was a cool guy. He was always trying to build a perpetual motion machine in the shed.

Never worked?

No. The perpetual was always the problem.

She took a long drink. She stared past me at the paintings. I used to be so skilled, she said. I was really good.

I really don’t think they’re bad at all, I said. I like them.

You’re sweet, she said. Shit taste, but sweet.

Um, thanks, I said.

You remind me of a boy I used to date, she told me.

That’s funny, I said. You remind me of a girl I used to date.

What happened?

To the girl? She broke up with me.

Why?

Infidelity.

We’re two peas in a pod, she said.

You cheated on him, too? I said.

No, she said. Not him.

I couldn’t tell you which one of us started it, which willed it to happen, or how it came about. I can only tell you that, like the material universe itself, it was defined by the probability of it happening until it did happen; then all those caroming quanta collapsed and it was real, and, like reality, it was defined by the necessity of its own being. We did not, it turned out, need a sexually aroused psychic to choose our ideal reality; or maybe that was the joke; maybe in another room she didn’t touch my hand and I didn’t touch her face and it all went very differently; maybe the whole Project was an ornate description of what we did every day. And maybe we shouldn’t have, but we did.

Then I went back to the party, and she went back to her drink.

The following Tuesday, Mark came into my office with lunch. While we were eating, I noticed him looking at me as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. What? I said.

Oh, nothing, he said.

Hey, I said, you’re not wearing your badge.

My badge?

I’ve never seen you here without a visitor sticker.

Oh, that, he said. I’m no longer a visitor. He paused. Technically speaking, he said, and he narrowed his eyes a bit.

You’re not? I said.

No, he said. You’ve been assimilated. It’s going to be announced tomorrow, but the papers are signed and sealed.

Huh, I said. So what happens now?

We extol the virtues of the dearly departed, and then we bury the body.

Has anyone ever told you that you have a violent mind?

Pff. I abhor violence.

I saw you kick the shit out of a guy the first time we met. You paid a stripper to bust your lip.

Jus ad bellum.

I sighed and shook my head. What was the point? I asked.

Of what?

Why did you buy us? What was it for? I can’t exactly see how anyone expected to make money in the deal.

I never asked. Some of us made money. You made money. I made money.

But, I said.

Look, you’re trying to find a narrative where none exists. A corporation is not a person. The gods don’t oblige us with motives, but they sometimes reward obedience with good fortune.

I’m not sure I’d call a corporation a god, I said.

Of course it is. Created by man and superior to him. Magnificent in its infinite amplification of his flaws and powers. The very definition of a god.

So, what, does that make us priests? I said.

No, no. Avatars. Emissaries.

Angels, I offered.

Blow, Peter, Mark said. Blow.

You’ve been waiting to use that one. I laughed. But it’s Gabriel.

Is it? Speaking of which, and while we’re on the subject of transcendent amorality, Mark said, and then I knew what was coming.

Before you say anything— I began.

I trust, he said, that a good time was had by all.

Things sort of just happened.

His smile showed his sharp teeth. He crossed his legs. His eyes flicked across me, and I felt like a mouse in the presence of a bored cat, frightened, too, by the apparent absence of anger in his predation. I think it’s interesting, he said, that you find it easier to ascribe the absence of willful motive to yourself than to some big company. I’m not sure what that says about you. He shrugged. Frankly, I’m not sure what you expected to get out of it. Other than the obvious, of course, for which there were plenty of other drunken whores at the party.

He said it flippantly, and although I had no right to be, it made me angry. I said, I’m not sure I was trying to get anything out of it.

Well, that I really can’t understand.

Well, and I’m not defending myself, but it’s not like it was some transaction.

Of course it was. What do you fail to understand about its fundamentally transactional nature? You had a quid and she had a quo.

Mark, I said, I wasn’t trying to get anything. I really am sorry, but I really wasn’t, not any more than you are.

He closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose and shook his head and then said, But I am trying to get something.

You know what I mean.

No, he said. I mean literally. She’s the coinage of the realm; appearances are a kind of currency. I need someone like her. She’s of immense practical value. She’s a passport to a portion of society. Unlike you, Mr. Morrison, unlike her, I wasn’t born into this world. He sighed. What she does with herself when she’s off the clock is her fucking business, but the position carries certain requirements that do not include getting wasted in the dark when there’s a company event. So the next time you want to fuck my drunk girlfriend, Morrison, he said, and then he stood up, jumped to his feet, snatched the laptop off my desk, and hurled it past my head and against the wall, where it snapped and fell like a bird against a window, do it on your own fucking time. Understand?

And quite suddenly, I was afraid that I did. I only nodded.

I’ll send someone up from IT, he said over his shoulder as he left and slammed the door.

That night while I was sitting at home feeling the faint first tug of nausea, I heard the key in the door, and was surprised to see Johnny lumbering through with a huge rucksack and sleeping bag, which he deposited on my living room floor. Morrison, he said; I need to crash here tonight.

When did I give you a key? I asked.

You used to keep a spare in the kitchen.

I still keep a spare in the kitchen.

Not for about three years, he said. I borrowed it.

Johnny, I said, I haven’t seen you in months, and why do you need to crash here?

There’s someone in my apartment, he said. I think it might be a squatter, but I didn’t have the heart to kick him out. He seems to be feeding the cats, anyway. Plus, I’m on my way out of town.

Yes, I said. You appear to be. Where are you going?

The Knotty Pine.

I’m sorry?

It’s an old lodge in the state game lands up past Kittanning. One of Dr. Wilhelm’s associates owns it. We’re planning a happening. You ought to come. Have you got any eggs, by the way? I’m starving.

Yes, I have eggs. I followed him into the kitchen. A happening? I said.

Our own little Bohemian Grove. Art, music, revelry, and satanic rituals.

I’ll pass, I said.

You’re such a conformo. Where do you keep that faggy salt that I like?

Cupboard to your right. Johnny, what the fuck have you been doing?

I’ve been exploring the limits of human consciousness. When I died—

I’m sorry, I said, when you what?

When I died, before you found me in the hospital, an angelic being named Calsutmoran appeared to me in a vision and explained to me that I needed to find Winston Pringle and stop him. I told you.

So you’ve found him.

Yes.

Have you stopped him?

Not yet. I’m, you know, taking temporary advantage of his access to high-quality research chemicals.

Jesus, Johnny.

Just dabbling, he said. This is my life’s work, brother. Pringle is dangerous. The Pittsburgh Project—he’s not some unwilling patsy; he is the project. His whole shtick is a double-fake. I’m on to him. I’m going to stop him before he destroys the world.

You sound crazy, I said.

Don’t worry, I’ve got it all worked out.

Apparently.

You have any beers?

In the fridge.

We sat at the table.

It’s good to see you, I said.

I missed you, too, honey pie, he told me.

I may have made some poor professional choices myself, I said.

Morrison, Johnny said, what have I been telling you?