“Sometimes I feel like I’m crazy,” I tell Eddie, the owner and senior burgerman as I, the world’s richest minimum wage employee, slap that meat on the grill. The initial burst of grease which sizzles in explosive evaporation is loud enough to make Eddie pause before responding.

“Sometimez you feel like you’re crazy?” he repeats. “Yea. Sometimez I feel like that, too,” he agrees. “About you, that iz.” And then he laughs this kind of hacking laugh, a greasy laugh.

Such is the respect I’ve earned after one day on the job at Eddie’s Burger Nirvana, which is more like a purgatory (Eat the burger, feel the purge). In pre-Katrina New Orleans, it’s a typical New Orleans-style hamburger joint, dirty and dark--a tavern without the alcohol. The delicate remnants of flies sit on the dusty windowsills like small houses of cards, their ash-like fragility undisturbed by the generations who have eaten here. The indirect sunlight that makes its way past the overhanging aluminum porch and through filmy windows that have never been cleaned is the principal means of illumination. Several fluorescents flicker and buzz with impotence overhead; laziness is the only thing preventing replacement with new bulbs that I’m sure would last years. The counter is usual counter height and then some, a plexiglass strip hazed with sprinkled grease comes up an additional foot or so along its entire length. There’s music on the juke that is some sort of dreadful bluesy, country-and-western infidelity crap. It seems just as greasy as the air in the place, the type of music that would make any reasonable person ask, “Now who in the hell played that?” And all the patrons seem reasonable, so I blame Eddie, who, after all, owns the juke box. Over the counter I watch him shuckin’ and jivin’ to his selection. I can see him through that atomized grease that is both on the plexiglass as well as hanging unsettled in maiden flight above it.

I’m sure all of these people eat here every day, even though it’s on Tulane Avenue, a wide thin-laned thoroughfare of suspect proprietorships. Along this street are merchants who cater to the students from the medical schools, as well as to the patients who let them learn. It is a street where these victims and victors are both regarded as equals, because they each ring the same bells on the cash registers. The cash register at Eddie’s Burger Nirvana is off limits to me, as this is my first day. Eddie studies me with suspicion; after all, anyone who says he feels like he’s crazy shouldn’t have his fingers in the money. He keeps his eye on me.

Does this make me nervous? No. Do I really care at all? Not really. I certainly don’t need to impress Eddie. But I do need this job because I want to talk to someone. If I blow it, I get another simp job. In a while, that is. Is Eddie good to talk to? I really don’t care about that either. He doesn’t have to listen. And he doesn’t even have to talk back, except that when he does it’s hysterical, because he’s got this weird lisp that sounds like all of his Ss are Zs.

The reason I sometimes feel like I’m crazy is because I’ve always found it easy to slip-slide around. As a matter of fact, I’ve always found it easy to do all kinds of wonderful things with my body. Everything but leave it, that is.

“That’s not so easy,” I explain to Eddie. “I’d like to be able to pull that off without having a heart attack or something so dramatic.”

“Pleaze,” begs Eddie, “not here, anyway. You’ll have all theze sztudent doctorz hoppin’ on you and then hoppin’ the ticket, and there’ll go my cazsh flow.” And he hacks out another greasy laugh. He’s a wiry guy who’s probably only a little older than me, but whose world has made him look a lot older.

He’s kind of yellow all over. It’s hard to tell whether his color is a perennial layer of permagrease, one very large nicotine stain, or an illness which makes me wonder if anyone should really eat here. The medical students all look him over pretty good when they come in. Especially the Tulane ones, who seem a bit nerdier than the LSU medical students. The hair on his head sticks out from under his logo’d hat, the official Eddie’s Burger Nirvana hat that has the picture of a saint with a sizzling burger where the halo should be. Eddie’s hair is yellowish like the rest of him, so it’s hard to tell where his skin ends and his scalp begins along that continuum of waxen, sallow color that is his body, the final resting place of years of airborne grease droplets and exhaled nicotine.

“Number eight!” he shouts to the audience of carnivores seated at long wooden tables which always sport the latest editions of graffiti carved into them. (Are there that many people walking around here carrying knives?) The tightly scheduled lunch hour crowd is getting nervous, each of them at one time or another checking a watch for the feasibility of eating at all. Number eight is a relieved young woman who snatches her tray away to her table and begins eating before even settling into her seat.

“Keep your hat on, pleaze,” Eddie commands me, having caught me in the act of stuffing it into my back pocket.

“Come on, Eddie, what are you afraid of, the Board of Health?” I challenge him. There is applause from those waiting.

“Az long az you’re here,” he tells me, you’re in my world--and I zay keep the hat on. Bezidez, you look better with it on, especially if you pull it over your face.” He makes the adjustment for me by grabbing the visor portion of the cap and tugging downward. More applause, this time from the Eddie fans. I can smell the hair of the employee before me, which explains my expression when I free my face back up by positioning the cap properly.

“These guys are great!” comes out from somewhere in the crowd.

“I’m also working on the ability to have my whole life flash in front of my eyes without actually dying,” I continue in resumed soliloquy, finally having shaken off the smell of the cap.

“Oh, pleaze,” he says again, completely blowing me off. I guess this is appropriate, for as the owner of the Burger Nirvana who pays minimum wage, he’s seen and talked to all types.

“No, really, flash right there right in front of me, like a total read out--a spit out--of a computer.”

“YeaYouRight,” he says.

“So what if I’m organic,” I insist, “I should be able to do it, damn it!”

“YeaYouRight,” he says again, and then, “number ten!” he announces. “Come on down!” He laughs again.

“Hey Eddie, what hoppen’ to nummer nine?” asks a policeman, a large Hispanic New Orleans cop.

“Number nine, number nine,” Eddie mumbles as his eyes dart back and forth taking inventory of the patties on the grill. “Waz that the well done?” he asks back, as if meat there were actually cooked to order.

“It wasn’t a hamburger,” the officer says curtly from behind police sunglasses, “it’s a dog, and yea, I expect it should be done well.” Standing behind the counter Eddie’s eyes keep searching. They ultimately leave the grill and spot the cooked hot dog, still steaming, on the dirty floor. He reaches down to pick it up.

“Good thing it fell on the paper,” he says, feigning relief as he prepares it on the bun. He shoots me a wink.

“Yep,” I say to Eddie, “that was well done, alright.”

“Here,” he offers the policeman, who is standing in front of number ten. I check the floors for more: all clear. Eddie wipes something off of his forearm by sliding it across his dirty apron and then looks up for the source. His eyes, which almost seem yellow themselves, finally rest upon me as the culprit. My gaping mouth indicts me, cocked suspiciously as it is, in the apex of a full yawn.

“If you feel a little warm sprinkle of moisture from God knows where, that’s probably me discharging the duct of my salivary gland.”

“Jezuz Gawd!” he shouts.

“Yes, really,” I boast proudly, “I can do that!” Eddie doesn’t seem pleased with my talent. He rubs his forearm even more vigorously against his apron, darkening the job-related color on his skin even more. “Eddie, I can do all kinds of things. I can, for instance, blow air up my nasolacrimal tubes to puff up my eyelids like a frog.

“Now don’t do that,” he requests nervously in front of all of these people. I do it anyway.

“It’s great for scaring the hell out of little kids,” I announce, snapping around to present to him Man-frog.

“Oh I bet,” Eddie answers, grossed out and turning back to his sizzling burgers. I hand number eleven his meal, my eyelids still inflated, but leaking somewhat as they open a bit so that I can see.

“That’s a great frog,” the male medical student who is number eleven says to me. He leans over the counter to stare, his white coat loaded and heavy, decorated with all kinds of doctor things--stethoscope, little rubber hammers, and that rubber tubing which particularly frightens me.

“Isn’t it great, really? That’s what I’m trying to convince this guy of,” I tell the future doctor who is number eleven. “I can do all kinds of things with my body. Do you know I make over ninety different mouth noises.”

“So what’s, say, number sixty-three?” he asks me, lingering with his tray.”

“Aw, no,” Eddies demands, getting a little aggravated.

“Come on Eddie, this guy’s great.”

“How did you know my name, fella?” Eddie’s about ready for number eleven to take a seat.

“This is Eddie’s Burger Nirvana, right? I’ve got to figure you’re not Nirvana.” And with that he returns to his table to eat.

“No, that’s me,” I joke, bringing Eddie back to his famous laugh. “You’ve got to have control of your body,” I continue, “to do all of these things--real easy--just relax and assume control. Relax and assume--that’s the key. If you try to take control, forget it. You’ll hardly be able to crack every knuckle or any other joint--like I can, by the way--including my neck, back, and hips. Like to hear it?”

“Zertainly not,” Eddie answers me. I plant my feet firmly on the floor and slowly tilt to let out a rapid fire cracking sound from my spine. A small group applauds at the medical students’ table in front. Eddie looks at them with disapproval.

All of this introduction is wasted on Eddie the owner and senior burgerman. It’s not till around closing time when things are settled down and it’s just he and I cleaning up that I can tell him about the real story of assuming control, raising my tale from the crude and rude of manipulated bodily fluids and orificial sound effects to that of the ultimate relaxing and assuming control: sliding.

As thrilled as I’ve always been with myself about this talent, I’ve nevertheless tried to be very careful about sliding lately because of a particular mishap, a certain misfortune, that begins my story. You see, I’ve been sliding almost daily in my life, avoiding even the most trivial untoward development in my day to day existence.

“Zo just where in the hell do ya zlide to?” Eddie asks. We’re each using a giant wet cloth, each starting at either end of the condiment counter, the plan to meet in the middle with everything clean.

“I really don’t know,” I answer. “Maybe I slide to other dimensions. Maybe I have the ability to unify those four aggravating universal forces, way ahead of all of those egg-heads.”

“Huh?”

“Yea,” I say out loud to myself, “maybe gravity, weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism all come together in me! What an honor! What a push!” Eddie has stopped wiping, now just looking at me in all of my excitement. I now focus on him and hold out my arms as if this were so elementary: “What a sliiiide.”

“What an azzhole,” he adds, continuing his wiping up. This may be true, I concede privately. For anyone who can slide like me will undoubtedly do it for gain. I struggle with the philosophical question that if all assholes are selfish, does it necessarily follow that all selfish people are assholes? I make everyday choices, like everyone does, and based on these choices my future is changed. But unlike everyone else, if I don’t like the future that a choice has determined, I can slide and find myself in a world where the effects of my choice are different. And I know that’s selfish, because I land where everyone and everything else is just a little altered. But, really, isn’t it true that what they don’t know won’t hurt them? Especially if they have no knowledge of what might have been? Why should I have to be the one to suffer with the knowledge of what might have been? I can be in what might have been before it’s too late. It’s never too late for me.

“Maybe I go into science-fiction time warps, Eddie.”

“Maybe you do, Ebe, maybe you really do.” He rolls his eyes with his comment.

“If so, though, it’s only a few seconds this way or that. Kind of like deja vu for an instant before the feeling pops and here I am, all caught up, in a place slightly different. Who knows where I slide to? And who cares?”

“Not me.”

“As long as it successfully takes me to that different place which is slightly different enough for me.”

To my advantage, of course. Which is why I’m a lazy-ass worth 2.54 mill’ at age twenty-two. Ha! Five figures for every orifice sound effect I can make. And I do know how to spend it, that’s for sure. I do take life fairly easy. Don’t get me wrong--I’ve seen the value in education and worked for my degree and all that. But I’ve also never seen the harm in self-indulgence. After all, I did have the most lavish and popular dorm room in school. And that felt good, I don’t mind admitting. I know I’m selfish. I just don’t see the harm.

Alright, I know that selfishness is a stage we all go through; and alright, I know that true maturity means getting past that stage; and yes, some people don’t get past that stage because some people can’t. But there are people who choose not to get past it--people who know better and won’t because they don’t have to.

Like me. I do know better, and I also know it’s better for me not to put anyone before me. Love? That does make me re-think this at times. For I’m told that love implicitly defines your self-assigned status as second. Or if you have a child, third--Oh God! My greed node is throbbing at the thought. I make myself think about baseball when maturing thoughts like these try to lead me into decent temptations. Not that I’m a bad guy. I’m really not. I haven’t hurt anyone, on purpose, that I know of. I just haven’t put anything back into the world, that’s all. One day perhaps I will, if I can see any real important reason to. But I’m young. I’ve got a lot of time to mature if and when the time comes, or when the right world comes. Or if the right love comes. In the meantime, if the dice come up snake eyes, I slide the few times until I see my number. And if the winning raffle ticket isn’t mine, I slide thousands of times until I’m in the world where I’m the one collecting.

So if I’m so stinking rich, how come I applied for work in the Burger Nirvana? Because I don’t just want to talk to someone, I need to talk to someone. And talk I do, to which Eddie can testify. I like to get a job simple enough so that I can do the work while concentrating on my conversation. I’ve done a bunch of little jobs--jobs that always deal with the public. They never last long, but I get to talk to someone, anyone, from time to time. This is the way I dip-stick my sanity. If I ever were to stop sliding and stay put, I could really get to know people, and I wouldn’t have to satisfy this need by circuitous employment schemes. But then, since I wouldn’t be sliding, I wouldn’t have to talk about it, either. I guess it’s a lonely honor I have, being able to slide.

And the simpler the job, the safer it is to blab away about this, for people like Eddie don’t care if I seem deluded. I’m affluent, thanks to sliding, and I can turn in a resignation when I get bored with these types of adventures, or if the work turns out to be hard at all. I couldn’t tell any of this to people like my bankers, though. If they were to hear me go on about sliding, I’d be labeled crazy, and the next thing to happen would be some financial advisor of mine would find a way to finagle my money away from me.

So what is this sliding business? A transition to a slightly different reality, that’s what. And apparently for my sole benefit. That’s at least what I try to get Eddie to grasp. When I do what I call sliding there are slight, subtle alterations in the world around me: the color of a chair, the spelling of a brand name, the extra point on the score that helps me beat the spread.

“And let’s not forget that conversion of a fifth card that gives me my royal flush,” I further clarify to him as he empties the cash register with the sounds of clicks, drawers, and bells. “It’s interesting, it’s fun, it’s profitable. Yes, Eddie, when you add a math degree plus a love for gambling plus my talent, you always come up with the right answer. Because if the random changes don’t suit me, I just slide again. No problem.”

“I really don’t follow you, Ebe,” he admits, still going through his little list of tasks to close down for the evening.

“It’s just this thing about me that I can do. I just relax; I just assume. Then I slide. And when I do, I’m in a different world, changed ever so slightly.”

“You mean that I might change?” he asks.

“Yes!”

“Do I feel thiz, and if I do, am I az crazy az you?” His laugh is a little more tired now. I ignore his editorial comment and answer him.

“You can’t notice, because you’re a different person. I mean you’re still an Eddie-type guy, but your name may be slightly different. Like you might be Freddy.”

“I don’t think zo,” he declares.

“And you might own an ice cream store instead. As a matter of fact,” I reflect, “I think I might have worked for you for about a week when you were Freddy and you did own an ice cream store. I don’t know, I’ve done this so many times, and so briefly each time, that it’s hard to remember everything. Anyway, in a different world you might drive a different car, you might not smoke--”

“Haven’t had one in almozt two hourz.”

“--And you might not be so yellow.”

“I’m not yellow!” he shouts at me, offended at my remark. “It’z theze lightz. They’re fluorezzent. They may look white but they zshine yellowizsh to keep out the bugz.” His Z’s are now more spread out, making me think he’s always about to sneeze. “Zee! You’re pretty yellow, too, under theze lightz,” he goes on in further defense.

“Not as yellow as you, Eddie.”

“Yea, well, that’z becauze you’re a...” he pauses. “Hey, what are you--a wop? a spic? kraut?--what?”

(I do not know.)

“Alright, Eddie, calm down. All I know is I slide to a slightly different world. A different you, but the same me. It’s like there are countless worlds that I can move along, each world unaware of the others. They’re all lined up like layers that I travel along and through. They all exist at the same time. I myself don’t change, but I take advantage of the changes that I come to. I can do this whenever I want. I don’t have any control as to what type of world I go to, though; it’s just a little randomly different.”

Actually, in my private reflections I’ve come to realize that what I do is engage in a willful act of passivity, even if that doesn’t make much sense. It’s an active firing of those parts of my brain that lazily surround and thereby obtund the primitive amphibian parts.

“Maybe I have an extra gland or something--I don’t know,” I tell him, not wanting to complicate my explanation. Eddie sniffs the air in mock search for something malodorous from an extra gland. This time I laugh.

What I do know is that I am keenly aware of all of the separately working parts of my brain. I can perceive all of their job descriptions as they are at work. I don’t just have my mind steering around my body as this vague consortium of shared and crossed-over responsibilities affecting the whole. I feel the different parts. They are segregated. I mean they still all work together to get my body from one self-serving place to another; my ice cream cone doesn’t hit me in my forehead instead of my mouth or anything like that. But I can perceive the different parts’ separate contributions.

“It’s kind of like understanding how government really works,” I go on as we now tackle the floor with mops from opposite corners.

“Reg’lar gov’ment...or Louisiana gov’ment,” he wants to know.

“No, real government,” I clarify. “Like understanding how the federal government really works. You know, understanding it with the separated branches and further subdivisions, instead of just sitting around like a big stupe waiting for the tax refund to come in.” I guess that’s a bad example I give Eddie, because all I do the majority of my time is play around and wait for the dividends to come in. And I don’t even pay taxes.

“I am different,” I conclude to him, “in that I can distinguish the separate workings of all of the parts of my brain while they’re all working. I don’t just let my mind meander through life with that simple singular momentum, that unity of purpose that’s as dull-witted as some anvil. When I push this mop--”

“Which you can keep doing any time you want,” he interjects.

“When I move it around on the floor, I’m not just pushing a pole around,” I say excitedly. “I’m feeling the left side of my brain firing off the messages to my right arm’s muscles and the right side of my brain firing off to my left arm’s countering action. I’m feeling the returning sparks to the back of my head where I can really enjoy the coordination fizzling around up there from all of this. I’m aroused by the cross-over traffic of impulses that tie it all together. You have no idea how thrilling even so simple an act as mopping--”

“Ztop,” he says, holding up his hand, “before you go and have a wet dream about it.”

“When my brain thinks,” I tell him, catching my breath, “I can hear stereo--I hear all of the instruments and where they’re coming from. Put simply, your brain’s monophonic.”

“You put that zimply?” he asks, surprised.

“Like I said, maybe I have an extra gland or something.” He pauses in his duty, leaning against the mop handle.

“Ebe--you underzstand your brain so well and all, all of the different partz--do we add that to all of your other talentz?”

“Like sliding?” I ask, still pushing my mop.

“Yea.”

“It’s not a different talent. It’s what makes sliding possible.”

“Oh,” he says as he starts pushing his mop again, even though I know he is choosing not to even try to understand.

And I’ve long known that it is important to appreciate how I can sense all of the different workings of my brain if I want to understand sliding. For there is one area of my brain I just can’t seem to connect to, to feel, and I point this out to my temporary boss. That mysterious area is that ancient primitive patch of gray matter around which evolution has wrapped convolutions so as to laugh at the amphibian. It is the deepest part of the mind, the first stuff that the modern brain covered up so that we could finally crawl out of the sludge and leave the reptilian thoughts behind. That mysterious area that I can’t taste is padlocked. We are all separated from those first thoughts that are locked inside of us all. I figure it would be pretty neat stuff to relate to that part, to finally feel my whole brain, my whole existence. But all I can do is sense it in sort of a dull, distant way, like hearing dangerous gales--some sort of ill wind--safely behind a locked door. I pity Eddie, because this is the only monophonic part of my brain, so I can imagine how his whole head must feel all of the time.

I guess those original thoughts are imprisoned for good reason, because even I, the guy who can do so many wonderful things with his body, can’t touch them. Original thoughts must be original sin, for there is anatomy, with that passive barrier--the locked door--that forbids penetration, holding them as fast in my brain as mental Velcro. That passive cerebral area is by its very position a physical buffer for those ancient, savage drives--drives successfully submerged in the cold-hearted, senseless, and Godless realms where they belong. And just as I can perceive all of the separate workings of my brain, I also sense this protection, this locked door. In fact--and I think this may be the actual thing that sliding is all about--I have somehow learned to turbo this buffer, to super-charge this passive area. I go on explaining to Eddie; I’m not quitting with him now.

“Just as a 700 pound man can crush you by passively sitting on you, so also he can render you two-dimensional by actively jumping up and down on your already crushed body. And no amount of reptilian hate and desire for vengeance will help you flip him over your very flattened shoulder.” Eddie’s lost.

I explain to him that feeling the presence of that passive buffer that so adequately (“Like my 700 pound man,” I repeat) and so completely buffers those hateful, antediluvian areas--those scaly areas which had originated before reason, before sense, or before God--makes me different.

“Everyone else just takes this cushion, like the rest of the brain, for granted,” I inform him.

“I know I do,” he indicates with a tone that implies he’s quite comfortable not noticing the important job this area of his brain is doing, not noticing his own civilization.

“Not me,” I fire back. “I can really feel it there, working hard in its passive role, just like the huffin’ and puffin’ of a sedentary whale of a man.” I pause to mull this over. “I just can’t feel what’s under that fat man. And believe me I’ve tried.”

“I really do believe you, Ebe,” he says with a chuckle as we tackle the day’s debris on the grill.

“No, I mean I’ve really tried. And I continue to do so. I’ve always worked on out-of-body experiences to try.”

“You don’t zay.”

“And I’ve done meditation to try.”

“No zshit--I’m really fazzinated.”

“I’ve plugged away at it for the longest time. But meditation’s not the answer.”

“Get on a tranzit buz, Ebe, if ya wanna zee the animal in uz all,” he blurts, laughter converting to a coughing attack.

“I don’t know, Eddie. I just can’t reach the amphibian.”

“If you do, do zomething for me, will ya?” he sputters, trying to harness his throat.

“Sure, Eddie, like what?” I ask.

“Would you zap the fliez in here with your tongue?” he says. This is his punch line just as the coughing is receding from his previous remark. He laughs at his own joke, resurrecting his smoker’s revenge.

“One way not to reach this savage area, Eddie, is to slide, for that seems to put it in its place even more solidly.”

“I’m zure it doez, Ebe.”

“Don’t you see? Like when I said I can turbo-charge that passive buffer. The one thing I can do is make the fat man get up. I can make him jump up and down on that reptile that is in us all. And this isn’t making my modern brain’s shield engage in an active enterprise; it’s actually firing up the passivity of the barrier to a higher level of suppression, which move me farther away from the primitive thinking in us all. It makes my brain even more snooty in its regard for the uncivilized areas.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Eddie, that’s the trick! That’s the perspective I uniquely attain. It’s all perspective, after all. And that’s when things change. I slide when I do this, when I relax and assume control over this part of my mind in a way that no one else can. And then of course things are different! I’ve repressed the worst of humanity even more. I’ve increased my distance. Perspective! Of course the world seems a little different to me. It is different after I do this. And I don’t complain.” We’re finished with the grill at this point, and we both straighten up from hunched attention to our scraping and look at each other. I lower my voice for effect. “I know,” I whisper, “that if I can ever brush that fat man aside, get to that primeval sensorium, really feel it and meet the reptile in us all, then I know that’s when I’ll finally know the real me, the total me, the me in total perspective. Until that time, however,” I say with an arriving smile, “I can still enjoy myself. And if I’m not enjoying myself...”

“Poof,” Eddie jumps in, “you’re in a different plaze. Zslightly, right?”

“Yes,” I answer, “and my bookie pays.”

“Maybe you have theze spezial brain wavez or zomething,” he offers politely, obviously having heard something somewhere about this.

“Alpha waves.”

“Yea, thoze,” again politely. He raises an eyebrow. “Are you zsure you’re not getting closer to your reptile instead of puzhing it away?”

“That’s ridiculous, Eddie. The world gets better—for me, that is—not worse. This ability is evolution, not devolution.”

“Whatever that means,” he says.

“Well,” I respond to his politeness, “if all that’s not as clear an explanation as you would want, that’s as close as you’re going to get. For I’m not quite sure how much clearer I am on this. I know I relax; I know I assume. And then I know that it happens and I do it to get richer.” I’m on Eddie’s tail his whole way to the front of his shop where he is locking up. The traffic on Tulane Avenue is already funneling in from the business district.

“Ebe.”

“Yes?”

“Relax and azzume and get richer, right?”

“Eddie, I didn’t know you were interested.”

“Yea, well how about relaxing tomorrow and azzuming you don’t work here anymore. And I hope you do get richer when you do it.” He isn’t angry or anything, but tired; he’s just been talked to, to death. I can appreciate that; after all, I only did it for me. I’m really not trying to start another religion or cult with deep frying disciples.

I accept his offer and shake hands wearing a smile.

“Nothing perzonal, Ebe?”

“Sure,” I answer sincerely. He hesitates before he lets go of my hand. He’s a good guy.

“Look, why don’t you juzt work zort of every few dayz or fill in every now and then.” I reaffirm the handshake, approving. “Good,” he says. Happier now, he snaps around and begins walking away from his business and his ex-employee, fat and grease sensors--if they were to exist--certainly going off, as I would imagine them, right and left along his route.

The walk back to my apartment building gets ritzier and ritzier as I travel along, making my grease-spattered attire less appropriate as I make my way there. I live in a fancy-schmancy condo near Riverwalk. Normally I’d call a cab to my swank residence, but I prefer to walk. This is unusual for me, because I’m usually so slothful. But I’m on a “sliding” introspection roll and don’t mind the extra time for thinking on my way back.

I think about slipping, which is when sliding happens accidentally. I suppose there are some moods I can be in when I accidentally slip. I would be in a reverie, for instance, and then I’d do something very physiologic like, say, sneezing. And when those little white flashy lights in my vision would die out, I’d notice that my slacks were a different cut. But I’ve gotten much better at preventing that sort of thing, and nowadays the slides are almost always volitional.

I’ve always slid; I must have even been doing it as a baby. I imagine I’ve been through thousands of worlds by now--passed through countless layers of reality all stacked up. Carelessly, thoughtlessly, and selfishly. (I remember at one time becoming unreasonably terrified when I had supposed that the opposite might be happening: that I might not be sliding unchanged into a slightly different world around me at all, but that I might be changing ever so slightly in a world that was stable. But then I figured, what’s the difference? The panic ceased.)

I’ve often tried to recall the very first slide in my memory. There are a lot of silly times when as a kid I’d do something like slide to change the flavor of a Life Saver when the very next one in the pack would be like the one in my mouth in my new world, and then at supper I’d hear my dad complain about that damn Democrat in the White House instead of that damn Republican from the night before.

Most of my childhood was like that, slides as trivial occurrences: paying rent on Baltic Avenue instead of on Boardwalk; catching that fly ball in front of the guys instead of having it fall right through my hands; having that bottle stop spinning to point at me and Judy Mullen instead of at me and flatty Patty Dalton. But in searching my memory, I do remember the first significant time I slid.

I must have been about six or seven, before Monopoly, little leagues, and spin the bottle. I was out in my back yard pretending I was getting shot and killed when I took a fall that was part of the routine. Unfortunately, I tore up my right knee with a broken beer bottle that lay hidden in the grass. There was blood everywhere. My dad came rushing out when he heard the screaming. Mom was waddling right behind him. It must have been on a Saturday or Sunday, because they were both home. Dad sent my mom back into the house to get a dish towel to wrap my knee tightly. She was back in no time, and my dad helped me up after applying it to the place that was bleeding. I remember he picked up the broken beer bottle. He hated alcoholic drinks in every possible way, and he showed his disgust when he slammed the jagged bottle into a wheelbarrow where he had been throwing the weeds from his gardening.

“Now how did a beer bottle get into our back yard?” he asked. He looked at the high wooden fence that faced the street and figured it out. “Damn kids!” he said angrily, and wouldn’t you know it, another bottle came humming over the fence. Dad went crazy, bulleting to the fence and hopping to see over it, to catch a license plate. It was a pretty funny scene now that I look back on it, but I was too busy crying to see any humor in it back then. So I slid.

I remember falling on my rear end hard, my legs no longer able to support me.

“Hurry up,” my dad called out to my mom. “Here, help me get him up--I think it’s broken.”

He was right. Usually my slides benefitted me, but this one turned a simple laceration into a simple fracture. The difference in pain was my first memorable lesson in sliding: It can always be worse! That’s why, even at that young age, I knew not to slide again. I dared not slide again. I’d take my medicine with the situation as it was.

We drove down to a hospital, and all I could remember was how badly it hurt. I don’t remember which hospital, except that it must have been one of the big ones, because after the Emergency Room doctor had finished with the tetanus shot and leg cast we had to go up several floors for some reason. There had been some talk about establishing me with a pediatrician in the Pediatrics Clinic. I remember my father complaining about this to my mother, protesting about how much this had cost already. And then when they realized we had taken the wrong elevator, he really went wild. We had followed someone’s advice and taken the elevator in the wrong wing of the building. Instead of going up the tower that held the clinics, we were stopping at each floor of the hospital itself. I can remember the doors opening to a nurses’ station each time, with the resultant curious stares from whomever was stationed there wondering why we weren’t getting off. Apparently some wise guy had punched all of the buttons when we entered on the second floor, and we had no choice but to take the scenic tour of every floor before we would be able to go back down. My dad’s mood was contagious, and my mother began puffing in exasperation each time the doors began to open.

But then the doors opened to the floor that has this whole episode so ingrained in my memory. It was immediately apparent that this was the pediatrics floor of the hospital, because all of the walls of the nurses’ station had cartoon animals frolicking with no regard to the seriousness of the diseases there. I remember a lot of wailing out, both a man’s and a woman’s voice. Suddenly, they appeared out of nowhere, catching up with the bawling we were hearing. Looking back, I guess they were fairly young, although at the time I lumped them into the “grown-up” category. The grief that emanated forth was powerful enough to make us retreat backwards into the elevator car as they stumbled in. The anguished sirens they made were as eerie as the visceral howl from a bedeviled dog. There were no words spoken, just the horrifying sounds of their other-worldly torments and my parents’ wide-eyed yielding. Words were unnecessary. I instinctively knew their child had just died.

We were invisible to them in their unearthly despair, and they fell back against the side of the elevator wall, slithering down. It couldn’t get any worse than this, I remember thinking in a panic. It was my first introduction to real death, and the loss to these people made trivial any mere cessation of breathing or sentience. It was also my first introduction to real hate, for these two hated what had happened, and when the screaming continued, so did I. I began to shake. My throat tightened to the point that I began wheezing. I felt my heart pounding wildly. The elevator became so claustrophobic. My mother and father were affected, too. My mother raised a nervous arm to reach out to either one of them, but her intention faltered because of the very weight of the horror. She withdrew her hand, knowing that nothing, nothing at all, ever, could stop this pain. When she recoiled away, my father put his own arm around her as if to protect her from their suffering; but when he did, when my mother was secure in his embrace, they both began sobbing, too, seeing what happens to people after the most feared nightmare comes true. In the small confines of the closed elevator the young couple’s laments were shattering. Their outburst was a railing out against hopelessness. Deafening, it was the only reaction possible to the worst thing that could ever possibly happen.

I slid.

My cast was suddenly gone, replaced only by some bandages over a lesser laceration; but the couple’s shrieks continued. I slid again. The numbers of the elevator only went up to twelve instead of fifteen. Then nine instead of twelve. The man and woman were still uncontrollably bereaved. My mother made another attempt to offer solace, but she was such a mess by that time that her gesture was pathetic. I made more slides. Clothing changed, the linoleum of the elevator floor changed, and my bandages changed. But death still hung unchanged in the air. The sobs were pacemaking my heart and I became desperate. I was too young to realize that sliding to another world, another layer of all of total existence, where their child was alive, merely meant that I went to that world, insinuating myself in a cast of all new characters. This couple and their loss would remain behind with their sorrows. I would be the lucky one, not them. I would be the one to escape their distress, not them. I would be presented with the new parents, so lucky in their own ignorance; lucky in a world wherein they brought their child to the doctor maybe a day earlier, or held his hand that time crossing the street, or warned her not to play with matches. I would replace whatever pop-up interchangeable phantom was in my place before I went there. And another such creature would replace the vacuum I left when I went off searching for the parents of a child who squeaked by.

The elevator fell silent. There were hopeful smiles on the couple who were now holding hands in their union rather than bouncing off of the elevator walls in their outrage. There was still plenty of concern, but here now was optimism. They knew there would be a recovery. And when the elevator door opened to the floor they wanted, it was like a tomb had opened again--like someone had risen from the dead. The opening doors gave birth to the joy of good expectations. I was too young to think anything other than I had done a God-like thing for them. And that felt good. Now I know better. Now I know I did it for me and not for them. But it still feels good now, anyway.

This whole episode, my earliest profound memory of a slide, has always been a mixed-bag memory for me, because although I still have warm feelings about the illusion of giving those parents back their child, there is still some awareness of loss for me. I could have sworn my mother was pregnant before we went to the hospital. I can’t really remember clearly, but I surely thought I remember her belly bigger before and flat after. That’s the troubling gap in my memory about this first important slide that I recall. I surely hope it wasn’t the case, like the Lord takes a life to give a life. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Or did I taketh away?

I guess it really doesn’t matter. Bad things could still be happening in New Orleans while someone eats pasta in Rome. Bad things could still be happening in a New Orleans I left behind while I eat a burger at Eddie’s in a New Orleans I slide to. The difference between that someone in Rome and me at Eddie’s is I have the perspective because of the extra distance I can put between the reptile and the rest of my civilized mind. I’m not handicapped like everyone else who tries in vain to focus without being able to distance themselves like I can, the resulting blur blinding them into a linear track of one reality till they die. And just as events in both New Orleans and Rome are self-contained on the same planet, so all differing circumstances are gathered together in the multi-layered collection of realities I get to travel through. If the Lord taketh away in one layer, the other layers make it O.K. That guy in Rome may be a trans-Atlantic traveler, but I’m a trans-totality tourist taking in the sights. And in this capacity I have slid through thousands of layers during my young lifetime so far.

These thousands of layers have ultimately brought me to the layer which now begins my tale. Maybe next time I drop in Eddie will want to hear it, because it does involve a girl, and he does seem the type to be interested in girl stories. Maybe not.

I’ve been in this layer almost a month, probably longer than I’ve ever stopped before. This is because the previous time something happened that really scared me. It used to be that in sliding to another layer the difference around me would be subtle and fairly random. Like if I were waiting for a bus, regardless of Eddie’s advice, I’d slide into a world where the schedule read the next bus was in two minutes and not twenty. I mean, I’d slide just to save eighteen minutes. I’d go through maybe ten or fifteen layers really fast, watching the schedule disintegrate and reappear with the changing times flashing until--whaddayaknow--here was the bus. At the same time, the wall the schedule was on would flip from green to red to brown and so on. (Once I did this for almost twenty minutes before the schedule suited me, and if I had just stuck with the original, I would have only had to wait ten minutes. That was before I got rich. Now I take taxis.)

Lately, though, I’ve noticed that the changes actually seemed to be related from layer to layer. The wall, for instance, would get uglier each layer, meaning that I wasn’t just sliding into a random-version world but a next world. This meant direction. This realization was a little frightening but really didn’t stop me. After all, there was money to be made waiting for the right universe.

For instance, one layer I spent a weekend at a craps table in Las Vegas with bets on the line, sliding over and over to watch the just-landed dice ultimately switch to a pay-off. My bets lay on the table unchanged: I guess I was the constant.

“You see, Ana, I’m the constant. The world changes around me,” I told her last layer, which is where I should have stayed. I was so stupid.

She was a wonderful girl, the type I knew would be eternally youthful, animated with untouchable impish sexuality that created the type of a tantalizing desire that would ultimately excite me into rash acts. She probably qualified as my first real girlfriend. It seems kind of weird to say anything is real to me, I guess, the way I pass on when something is the slightest bit irritating or uncomfortable. But she was very real. We met and hit it off beautifully. But my way of life punished me when I treated her like just another one of my replaceable gambles.

“You see, Ana, I’m the constant. The world changes around me...” And then I slid to see if Ana would be slightly altered enough to want to go to bed with me. She altered alright--right out the door, someone not all that much in love with me back. So that’s why I’ve been stuck in this layer for so long, which has bored me out of my mind enough to get another stupid job just to talk someone’s ears off. I stay in this layer because I want to try to win her back naturally. Imagine that! I’m afraid if I were to slide again, things would get even worse, and she may be someone who couldn’t even give a hoot about me. And right now, I figure I have at least a hoot.

Ana and I met on a beach in Pensacola, Florida, one afternoon in early June. I was lying on my blanket which was actually a large beach towel. I had my ice chest on my right and my boombox on my left. Both of these were heavy metal affairs that proved I had been doing this a long time--long before the convenience of plastic and styrofoam had entered beach fashion. With me right in the middle, this was, of course, the Holy Trinity of sun worship that had given me all of the sanctifying grace I’d ever need. My skin was collecting ultraviolet while my money market collected interest.

Even though the summer was young, it was already pretty hot there on the Gulf coast that day. The beach was its usual beautiful strip of sand--the rolled-out white carpet for the rehearsed bodies which now played their ambulatory parts so well in slight fabric and lotions. The same salty wind struck both my ears at once, the rush losing for me any sense of auditory proprioception. This made the world monophonic. My boombox was stereo, but of course this was wasted on me here on the beach, because whatever song leaked through the pulsed blowing wind buzzed only as a tinny rhythm in the background.

Even though my sunglasses were purported to be filters, they were nevertheless feeble shields against the nuclear fusion which shined so powerfully that day from above. The resulting glare overexposed my view which I surrounded in a squinty frame of fissured eyelids. The sunglasses were the type that lets you spy on people without them being able to see your eyes, so if I’d slide and gawk at the differences, no one could tell, assuming my sunglasses were a constant, too. You have to remember, life and sliding were still great at this point. This was before anything had been seen as deteriorating to any great extent. I was just enjoying lying around with my blunted sense organs, basking, watching the girls and guys go by. Mainly the girls, though.

The guys I’d kind of look at with scorn, because of this considerable talent of mine that no one else had. Being able to travel from world to world, merely at will, leaving the rest behind to be replaced by others, gave me this feeling of superiority that made me look at the guys that way. The girls escaped my pompous contempt, because, after all, they were girls, and girls were great!

Of course, I know I wasn’t regarded much by the guys. I was a just-about-ideal-body-weight sort of person, wearing last year’s Sears style in bathing suit. It wasn’t that I was cheap. Hell, no, I’ve always chosen first class. It’s just that I had no taste, except for all of my great wads of money, which usually was as much of a fashion statement as I needed to make.

But I hoped that the girls would regard me, because I really wasn’t bad looking. Even in last year’s swimwear. And even though my great green wads were not obvious in this setting, I fancied myself as emanating a certain presence that having a lot of money makes one imagine.

Then I saw this one girl who was almost fabulous. She approached from my left and followed in the train of beach traffic that was passing in review. I say almost fabulous, because although she was perfect right there and then, I saw by her bone structure that everything was the slightest bit wrong. She seemed to have some of those big-boned Mediterranean genes that were hard to identify readily in her because, after all, she was a sweet young thing; but you knew when it was time for babies she was going to spread and be stocky.

At times, when feeling out of character, fantasizing dangerously decent thoughts, I’ve toyed with the idea of settling down with the family kind; and that body was made for reproduction. As a matter of fact, I envisioned the pleasure of reproducing with her without delay. And her body, almost fabulous with genetic warning signals for the future--well, that’s what they made sliding for.

As I eyed her approaching, I slid dozens of times to hone her shape. She didn’t need much, you understand, but I got things just about perfect in my hedonistic, chauvinistic sort of way, being the type of guy that I am. And of course that wasn’t good enough. I kept going until I realized Miss Perfect Body was slipping away, like seeing the perfect focus of a single lens reflex camera come and go as you rack in and out. In the end I finally stopped when she had gotten back to almost fabulous.

She had come very close to me by this time with her skimpy white bikini that was in enticing opposition to her darkened body which listed back and forth in that just-so sauntering way that the beach tugged at her hips to do. She was simply beautiful. She had dark blonde hair, eyes of some color other than brown (I really couldn’t tell with my shades on), and a good figure on a sturdy, strong body. Her face contrasted with the solidity of her frame like a beacon of innocence. She wore this sad little smile that almost made me love her on sight. I found myself suddenly desperate for any type of an introduction. I removed my sunglasses.

Green. Her eyes were deeply green. They were these playful smiley-type eyes that gave her face an inviting appearance. I found this helpful as I worked up my nerve.

“Excuse me, got a light?” I asked her as she neared me, almost too late. It was a forced question and it was awkward coming out, as if I were asking her for information that was really none of my damn business.

“Sorry,” she responded, “I don’t smoke.” It wasn’t a bothered, casting off-type response, but she still did little more than glance.

“That’s O.K.,” I said, “I don’t smoke either.” She then looked at me, obviously puzzled. She was still walking, but slowing to give some slack for this to play out.

“Then why do you need a light?” she asked. Her confusion distracted her from her escape with the pedestrian movement. She stopped just off to my right side, facing me, eclipsing the afternoon sun so that beams of sunshine seemed to radiate from her. It was a majestic effect, and her companions were underworld shadows compared to this starlight being that chose to accept my existence. They moved on, the monophonic wind and glaring brightness camouflaging their friend’s abduction.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I apologized, “did I say ‘light?’ I meant ‘fight.’ Do you ever fight?”

“Me?” she asked, with a little smile indicating readiness to play along. She apparently noticed the moving twilight she was able to control over my body and purposefully positioned herself to render me blinded in her rays. “No, I never fight,” she declared.

“Good,” I said, putting my sunglasses back on. “Then I’d like to meet you. Rudolph. Rudolph Eber.” I lifted myself to a sitting position and stuck out my sandy hand for a shake, but I held it such that I shadowed my own face so that I could see hers clearly. She considered the offer, but hesitated, feigning caution.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Not so fast. What about you? Do you fight?”

“No, never,” I said hurriedly. “I’m a pussycat.” I withdrew my hand, not in resignation, but so as to use it to pivot myself into a more comfortable posture on my towel. Now more relaxed, I cajoled her. “I’m easy as hell to get along with. Go ahead, do something irritating. Better yet, just haul off and hit me. I bet I won’t even get mad.” She started to laugh. “C’mon, go ahead,” I insisted teasingly. “It’ll prove it.”

She drew her hand back just like a girl would. I swear, she was so cute, all poised to playfully hit me with one of those little lady slaps.

Bam!

She got me good! I hadn’t felt a slap like that since the first grade when Sister Ann let me have it for talking in line and I slid over and over until she was a “Man oh man!” I shouted, clutching my face. My sunglasses were a heap of useless frames that dangled twisted from one ear.

“You’re not mad, are you?” she asked.

“No, no, no, of course not. Man oh man!” I rubbed my face hard, because it needed it.

“Good,” she laughed. “You see, from now on you’ll think of me whenever you get slapped in the face again.”

“Oh, there won’t be a next time, I assure you,” I assured her. “I’ll never ask for it again.”

“O.K.,” she said, now sitting next to me, having kicked sand all over my beach towel getting into that position. “You pass,” she said in congratulations. “You never fight--I believe you.” She then stuck out her own hand and I suddenly shielded my head in exaggerated panic. When I opened two fingers to let an eye peep through, she still had her hand out, offering introduction. I shook hands with her.

“Ana,” she said.

“Hello, Ana,” I replied. She was beautiful, I thought; she was great.

She was almost fabulous, which is all someone needs to be.

We ate burgers that evening which were no match, grease-wise, for the ones at Eddie’s Burger Nirvana. We were at a fast food joint which was an empty place that relied heavily on spring break for most of its net income. It was on the main stretch of highway that serviced the strip of beach which was the collegian’s real reason for a Pensacola. As the plump young woman was preparing to walk our orders over to us, one of the burgers fell behind the counter.

“Oh, it’s a good thing it fell on the paper,” I heard her say. We originally ordered the hamburgers cooked differently but got them alike--technique d’Eddie--and neither was what either of us had ordered. Mine had some dirt flecks seen on the mustard. We were in beachthink, though, so none of this mattered.

“I think that’s great that you’re from New Orleans, too,” I said.

“Yea, me too,” she agreed. “Of course,” she continued, “I don’t know where I’ll end up. But my aunt’s not antsy about me staying with her till I decide.”

“No pun intended?” I quipped. Ana laughed. We each bit into our sandwiches, but mine squirted grease on her neck. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I offered, running around the table to stand behind her. I matted her dry with my shredded paper napkin.

“No, no, that’s really O.K.,” she comforted me back in my time of embarrassment. “Really, I’m wearing a bathing suit!” And she laughed again. By this time, I was still hovering over her in my aborted task of drying her neck. I just kept my hands on it, caressed the nape, which she liked. With one finger, I pivoted her chin upward and lowered my head to kiss her. She received me warmly, but not passionately. She welcomed the expression, then playfully pushed me away.

“Go. Finish your meat thing,” she urged. I returned to my seat as I was told. We both smiled at each other as we ate, and in fact had knocked down most of our burgers before we spoke again.

“Your parents?” I asked her. “Where are they if you’re living with your aunt?”

“They’re divorced.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, as if in condolence.

“Well it’s not like they’re dead, you know,” she blurted. “They both live in Louisiana. Dad lives in Baton Rouge, Mom in Lafayette.”

“What does he do?” I asked.

“That’s kind of chauvinistic,” she teased me. “What if he doesn’t do anything? What if he’s a bum, and my Mom does it all?”

“Alright,” I submitted, “what does she do?”

“She’s the bum.” Ana laughed, not at her mother, but at herself. “Actually, she’s a sculptor...or fancies herself one. She hasn’t made a nickel yet, but she’s hopeful. My dad’s a retired foot doctor--a legal bum.”

“What does she sculpt?”

“She’s a hold-out from the sixties. You know, driftwood Jonathan Livingston Seagulls, stuff like that.”

“Oh,” I said, not sure of what she said.

“I was born,” she continued, “when my parents were older than they should have been to be new parents. I guess they had accepted being permanently childless for a long time before I surprised them. Really screwed up everything for them. I was a mistake.”

“Best mistake they ever made,” I complimented.

“Thanks. That’s sweet.” She sipped some of her cola from the straw jammed into the plastic top of her cup. “I always wonder who I would have been if they had had me earlier. Yea, yea, I know--I wouldn’t be the same person and all that. But I sometimes pretend that I could be the same person, just a different version at the right time. Right for them, I mean. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe they’d still be together, who knows?”

“I wouldn’t change a single thing,” I said to her as an authority.

“And your parents?” she asked me. “Were they luckier?”

“They’re dead,” I proclaimed a little too seriously.

“Now I’m sorry,” she said, slightly offended by my bushwhacking change in tone.

“No, Ana, I’m the one who’s sorry--for snapping at you. It’s just that I’m an orphan, and I really don’t want to talk about that right now. Some other time, O.K.?”

“Sure,” she agreed, eager to re-establish the good cheer.

“Good,” I said, making it unanimous. Now I slurped my drink until the sound got louder, indicating I had slurped it dry. “Ana, how about staying with me?”

“Tonight?” she asked, as if this night were any worse or better than any other night.

“The whole time we’re here. I’ve got one of those twenty-five-dollar-a-night things right up the highway. It’s got a microwave and a VCR. We can cook up some popcorn and rent a movie.” She eyed me suspiciously. “Aw, c’mon,” I nagged, “I won’t let that little kiss give me the wrong idea.”

“Oh, I don’t mind if you get the wrong idea. I don’t even mind if it’s the right idea. I just don’t want you acting on it.”

“Boyfriend, huh? You have a boyfriend.”

“No. I want to make sure you can be a friend,” she explained.

“Before what?” I asked. She raised her finger.

“No ideas, O.K.?” she repeated.

“Done,” I agreed, taking her finger and shaking it like it were a whole hand. She seemed pleased.

We had only covered half a mile or so in our travels this whole time, so it was now noticeable to both of us that we needed transportation. She needed to get back to her acquaintances’ hotel to get her things, and then we had to make it back to my place.

“Where’s your car?” she asked me.

“I don’t have one.”

“So how did you get here?”

“I flew. Took commuter service to an airport here, then got to my motel by taxi.”

“What do you do?”

“I slide,” I answered, which was the truth. I was taking my best shot at telling her about me. If she were to think me crazy, no amount of time would ever make it any easier.

“You mean you drift. You’re a drifter?” she asked, her invested opinion of me crashing into the worst fears of ruthless, killer hitch-hiker realities. It was as if I had driven up to her on a corner and offered her some candy. I thought fast to remedy the worried look on her face.

“No, I slide. I’m taking it easy after graduating. Taking a break. Just slidin’. Just relaxin’.” She still wasn’t quite so sure.

“Maybe this is a bad idea,” she started.

“Maybe you should trust your instincts, which say to trust me,” I said kindly, holding her hand.

She turned out to be the trusting type, or maybe just a good judge of character, because we spent the next few days together after that. After getting her things that night, she never again rendezvoused with her beach party while she was with me, as these were merely acquaintances she had ridden down with. That first night we both fell asleep on the pull-out sofa during a love story movie we had rented (her choice). We were both so exhausted since we had walked all that evening to get her things and then had walked back to my motel. We probably covered a couple of miles on foot that night, but it went quickly for me because of her. We traveled the highway in bathing suits. This was O.K., though, because this was Pensacola in the summer.

My motel on the highway that ran along the Gulf, The Dune something, was a sandy-carpet affair appointed in chipped Formica and a spineless mattress which she accepted the next night to my exclusion. The fold-away sofa attacked me at night with spring ends that cut through the sheets. I awoke each morning with the beach reflecting early sunlight into my eyes. I could then assess the coil wounds that made me wonder when was the last time I had a tetanus shot. Of course, being an epicurean of the tackiest ilk, I would’ve preferred my morning injuries had been from fingernails on my back. It was my disappointment that all we had was good, clean fun and no more, which just about drove me crazy, because I realized that I wasn’t going to fulfill my fantasy and be reproducing with her anytime soon. Just as incompletely as she had eclipsed the sun at our introduction, so too this beach relationship did not reach totality; for we ate, we drank, we tanned, and we rocked out to my dinosaur boombox. And that was about all.

Oh, yes, and we talked. We talked while we fried in our tanning batters, having the lazy luxury of discussing nothing pertinent. The beach fosters this theme of unimportance, with bills and rent and schedules buried deeply under whatever spot we choose to plant our behinds. Throughout this interchange wherein we held court on the esoteric truths of life which people who don’t stop to smell the flowers miss because they’re much too busy to waste very much time in a sand-saddle imprinted on the planet by gravity—during these entertaining rap sessions I spent quite a bit of time planning how I might accurately talk to her about me—that is, who I are in these many worlds that I’ve passed through. We talked of political necessities. We talked of religious attitudes and theological possibilities. We discussed the physics of possible models for an afterlife. I hadn’t discussed so extensively all of these loose fictional ends from the wondering part of my brain since I had been trapped with my “big brother” in his room at the fraternity house with his private keg of beer one night. He had said it was only a half-keg. It was more than enough. I’m a half-full sort of guy.

Ana was prettier.

She was easy to corral into profound “what if” subjects, but she was so interesting in her clarity of perceptions that at times I found myself inattentive of my plan of approaching her with the real me. She was a lot more interactive than Eddie, to be sure. Finally, somewhere in all of this force-feeding of intellectual candy came my opportunity.

And so, sharing my beach towel and the Florida sun, we ultimately talked of sliding. She had failed to make the connection with my awkward first attempt to introduce her to the idea over burgers that first night, so to my relief, this outlandish conjecture provoked neither ridicule nor recognition. She seemed just as genuinely interested in this type of theoretical speculation as she had seemed stimulated by our other conversations. I used the proper segue to present it, just as I had for all of the other philosophical possibilities we had spent hours talking about.

“That would be very sad,” she surmised of sliding.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because. One would have no friends.”

I could have cried right there in front of her.

An overwhelming emotion of sadness took me by surprise, stunned that I had never really cared deeply about this before. I stifled my tears, those strangers to me, because after all she was still theorizing. But she was quite right. I had no friends.

To Ana, sliding was just one of the subjects we dissected. Of course, to me it was the only reality. I emotionally rescued myself by realizing that it was to my utter delight that her only reality was back in New Orleans, where I also lived. She was staying there with her aunt only as long as it would take her to find an apartment of her own.

“I keep putting off the decision to move out so that I can go to the beach,” Ana said to me.

“Why?” I asked.

“Escape. You don’t have to make any decisions on the beach. Everything’s done for you. The tide flows in and out, the sun comes up and goes down, the breeze blows around over your head, and your skin gets tan automatically as you just sit and do nothing worthwhile.” She held out her arms to present me with the beach.

“The only reason this isn’t Heaven,” she announced, “is they have all of these other bodies around.”

She had finished two years of college at UNO pursuing a marketing degree, but this summer she refused to take any summer classes.

“And I might even skip next fall, too,” she grumbled. “I can earn some money for myself to finance a Yoko lifestyle for a little while.”

“Yoko lifestyle?” I asked, whatever that was.

“Yeah, you know,” she explained. “Just like John and Yoko--all the home movies you see of them, they’re just playing. They play and skip and hug and kiss. They write ‘I LOVE U’ in the sand and just play in their love. Now that’s the life.”

“So where’s this John going to figure in? You’re just going to be a Yoko solo?”

“That’s all I can afford. Look, Rudolph—God! I can’t believe I know someone named ‘Rudolph’—John and Yoko were filthy rich. I can only afford to do this one person at a time, and that’s just until the money runs out.”

“I’m filthy rich, too,” I told her. “Can I apply for the other position with you?” She eyed me skeptically.

“How filthy rich?” she challenged me.

“Disgustingly and vilely filthy rich,” I answered. She looked even more skeptical.

“So just what is it that you do?”

“I slide.”

And that was how I met Ana last layer.

No longer just one of the possible fictional scenarios of metaphysics, I now spoke of sliding in the first person. She didn’t even flinch. I spoke of my gambling successes, the victories of my personal decisions, and my prowess in my investment portfolios. She was fascinated especially by the latter as this was her area of study in college. Otherwise, she would have had no frame of reference with which to humor her curiosity, doubtful as the subject was.

This fascination of hers really excited me on all levels, if you know what I mean. Seeing my beautiful and up to now forbidden friend engrossed in me, in my life as I know it, was stimulating me in all kinds of places. I went on and on. She seemed to eat it all up, perhaps buying it, or perhaps only attending to the respect my intensity deserved.

“And do you have any friends?” she asked me. This time I did cry. She held me, stroking my hair and head.

“If I stay put I will, finally,” I said tearfully.

We had a strange day after that. We felt really close to each other. She never really said if she accepted any of this. I hoped that she did, and she did nothing to dissuade my hope. But she avoided the subject altogether until that night as we shared coffee after a wonderful Italian dinner. Everything had all gone so well until...

“So you see, Ana, I guess I’m the constant,” I told her. And then—I can’t believe it—for sex! I did that stupid thing that did not end well. My gamble had not paid off. I had invested poorly.

And that was how I lost Ana last layer. Actually, it was this layer. I had moved on, and so had this layer’s version of Ana right out of the door, not at all fascinated, engrossed, or even attending to my opening come-on line for her here.

So this layer? What am I left with now, besides a semi-open invitation to pitch in at the Burger Nirvana?

It’s pretty strange here:

They make their Rs backwards. This is the first dyslexic layer I’ve slid to. Of course, trying to act “normal” here, I get careless and make my Rs backward to these folks (but normal to me)—and I’m the one called dyslexic! They say hot for cold and cold for hot—at least the way I’m used to it. And there’s this thing in Paris called an Eiffel Tower. First layer I’ve seen it. It certainly is beautiful though—have to admit. And that’s about all of the big changes I’ve seen—except for the people.

The alterations in them--well, what the hell! They’ve taken a turn for the slightly less attractive. Don’t get me wrong. There are beautiful people here, just less of them. Just last layer there were a lot more beautiful people per unit population, I swear it. Of course I was one of them, and I remain so even here, thank God. I’ve been told that I remind people of this actor or that rock star, but those famous people have always changed while I’ve stayed the same, meaning that I’ve kept looking like different people to others. Fortunately, the differing people of different layers I remind people of are usually, like I said, the beautiful people.

I’ve got brown hair and blue eyes, am slightly taller than the average guy, and I have a dark complexion. I’m slightly lean. On my face are a few streaks of subtly darker pigment, almost like something divine has cut a swath of distinction there. It is not unattractive; on the contrary, it has always added character. I’ve heard it said that birthmarks are the reminders of some mortal blow from a past life. If that’s true, then I sometimes picture myself in a past existence in life-or-death combat with a noble beast of some sort, who of course is always personified with all of the virtuous attributes of myself and is therefore worthy of so admirable an opponent as myself.

But I guess I’ve gotten off of the subject. As I was saying, most of the people here seem to have taken a turn for the slightly less attractive. Even Ana changed slightly for the worse. A subtle bump in her nose—still a knock-out for sure, but noticeably deteriorated. And it may be my imagination, but I’d swear that there’s less sparkle in those smiley green eyes of hers.

(God, I hope she doesn’t read this. That’s another thing. I don’t know how this story, as written down, will read if I start sliding again. By the time it’s finished, it may be a lot different. Maybe I should finish it, slide all over and pick out the best draft. For all I know, someone’s reading it right now.)

More about this layer:

The people here do some pretty crazy things with their children. Like having a bra on the hood to keep the bugs from getting smashed on the car, while carting their kids around without seat belts, not worried about them getting smashed. The children are religiously instructed to actually fear their God but to blindly love their country. There is a generation gap—always has been, as I understand it.

And people here are generally uglier.

I could go on and on. Generally, you see, this layer seems to have been another deterioration. To tell you the truth, besides the thing with Ava (Ana’s name here), I’m kind of scared to slide on because of the degeneration. What if it got even worse?

Slide back? –Never been able to do it intentionally. I can slide, as I explained to Eddie, but I’ve never intentionally gone in a direction before; so I had better be careful, you see, ’cause I have to live here, or there, too.

More about me:

I actually have just finished college. I went to LSU and majored in Mathematics. At one point there I tried to major in History, but the subject matter would change every time I’d slide. Anyway, I did college. Look, you have to remember, sliding is almost instantaneous. I had to do all of my regular living while I existed. That means grade school, high school, and college. It just so happens that at graduation I slid about forty times until I was summa cum laude.

But I wasn’t the one who had changed, remember? So that means that as a random general deterioration, people around me, comparatively, are stupider here.

Back to my fears:

There must be a final layer where everyone is incredibly stupid, horrendously ugly, and shamelessly nonsensical. And I don’t want to go there. This layer is about as close as I want to get. But that final layer of my onion-universe, “the peel,” as I call it, must be down the road somewhere.

So my fun’s over, you think. Well, not exactly. If the peel is out there one way, then there must be a really great layer (“the core”?) back the other way.

But toward the core, wouldn’t I be uglier and stupider? Comparatively, that is. I really don’t know which would be worse. Is it more exhilarating to be a stud or to be surrounded by them? A genius or be the only one who isn’t? I linger in this layer, considering whether I’ll ever slide again and risk whatever chance I have for Ava’s affections; and risk ugly; risk stupid.

And risk direction.

New Orleans is a pretty nice place, except for the humidity, aka, the wall that it is. It is thick, I suppose, to carry the sound waves better, which so effortlessly causes music to flow to anyone who would simply care to listen. And the food’s so good it’ll kill you. After graduation from LSU in Baton Rouge I just had to come back here, even though this is where the series of fortuitous slides had brought me anyway. Of course, since I was orphaned before I finished college, I’ve pretty much been on my own since then, which is when I began going hog wild and making the bulk of my money.

Ava is a true southern belle. In contrast to my first sighting of Ana’s beach-gait, Ava can be seen gliding like she’s rolling on wheels. She says she is still my friend. “Platonic,” she calls it. I’m extremely fortunate that I’ve recouped that much after my blunder. But platonic is still a far cry from what might have been.

Damn!

She also says I’m a little harmlessly nuts—just enough to be entertaining. She doesn’t even come close to accepting my premise. Even when she saw my bank balance.

“If you ‘slide’ right here,” she asked me one evening over coffee (after an Italian dinner, which makes me think of Ana), “will I be an Ava who has two sugars in my coffee?”

“Maybe,” I answered. “But I’d rather just get you the extra sugar.” She laughed as I reached over to the other table. As I did, I wondered that if I slid, might I be back with Ana. Dangerous thinking, of course. I suppressed those chemicals in my brain that made me think like that.

“And if you slide, I’ll automatically have plastic surgery for this bump in my nose?” she asked, her way of showing irritation for a careless observation to her earlier in the evening.

“No, no; that resolution would mean I’ll be in a layer where you never had that bump.”

“Well do it,” she commanded, her serious tone part of her tease.

“Hey sure, but maybe I’ll continue in ‘the direction,’ and you’ll have a wart on your nose with hair coming out of it.”

“Stay put,” she commanded again with slightly less tease.

“Of course you won’t mind, because you would have been used to it, being the person you had been.” My words offered no comfort.

That’s about as far as we talked about sliding. The rest of the conversation was the usual boy-girl stuff, and I made no further progress in slide acceptance the rest of the date. Last layer, as Ana, I think she actually believed me. She was even interested in slide theory. You know, could she slide with me if we embraced while I slid—things like that.

And I slid into this layer hoping for a submitting Ana, so I tried a line.

“We’d be able to slide together, Ana, only at simultaneous orgasm,” I joked. That was the blunder.

But the slide was to this lousy layer. As the new Ava, she got offended and walked out—well, you already know about that. I told her I was just kidding, but it was to no avail. So now I’m unrequited, she’s got a bump on her nose, and we are, as she says, platonic. Hell, why didn’t I try that line on the layer we were in? Some summa cum laude!

Let me tell you something else that I think I’ve figured out about this sliding business. Forget the onion for a minute. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a big reality bowl. I slid back and forth from world to world on the bottom of this bowl all of my life. Being on the bottom of the bowl, there wasn’t much slope to my rolling around, so I figure things don’t change very much. But every now and then I get some momentum, I guess, and slide up one side a little too far where things get extreme, like here. I’m pushed up the side and there’s a different perspective, be it backwards Rs or subtle nose bumps. I’m really probably safe to slide again and roll back to the level, stable, reasonable bottom of the bowl, where bumps are harder to find and lovers are receptive. I figure I seek, like most things in physics, a stable layer, and that something powerful must have given me the momentum to scale up an ugly side—a direction—of my reality bowl.

Do you want to know what I think it was? I think it was love, that’s what. I wanted Ana, had to have her, and was ready to slide around in my bowl just to slide around on her. So why did love take me to a worse place where people are uglier, Eddie’s is greasier, and where the very person I crave, now Ava, is denied me as a crucial difference? Not to mention that appropriate phallic symbol in Paris which as far as I’m concerned represents my desire refused.

That settles it, I’m sliding. I will control my lust and therefore roll back to bowl bottom—no momentum—get out of this stupid layer. That’s the plan, now that I arrive at my apartment building after a therapeutic day of myself pounding away at poor Eddie and my feet pounding away at the pavement from Burger Nirvana to here. Yes, I will slide.

But first I’ll have an ice hot beer.

THIS BOOK IS FINISHED. I WILL BE UPLOADING CHAPTERS PIECEMEAL, AWAITING FEEDBACK. FEEL FREE! THANKS.

Sounded pretty determined, didn’t I? I chickened out.

I have another platonic date with Ava. I’m lucky she’ll see me at all, but for all I know, maybe she’ll warm up. Maybe I’ll just have to win her the hard, old fashioned way. Reality bowls and rolling back notwithstanding, I couldn’t face her with hairy nose warts. I know that sounds terrible, but what do you expect from a guy who comes from layers where the people are prettier than the people here.

Oh, yea, my name. Ralph. Ralph Ebe. That’s what it was, anyway, before the layer when I became summa cum laude. My diploma went on to read Rudolph Eber. I was Rudolph for quite a while, through several layers. Like when I met Ana. Now it’s changed again. That’s one of the things that does change regarding me. My name—always some slight variation. But I feel like Ralph Ebe because the lettering has generally hovered about all the same letters all of my slippery life. Rudolph Eber, Raul Hebert, Ralston Evans, Alfred Baier, Roddy Eden, and Ralph Ede—these names interspersed among many others, often recurring in different layers.

“Call me Ralph, then,” I had finally told Ana when I had first met her on the beach last layer, before I knew her as Ava. I had introduced myself as Rudolph, my current name at the time, but she never could take the name seriously. Before we had finished our beach vacation together she was calling me Ralph, thank goodness.

Drives me crazy. I swear, you really do have to have the intellect of a summa cum laude to manage this aggravation with the names. Then, when she was the new Ava, I called her by the old layer’s name, Ana, when I made my orgasm crack. She not only considered me crude, but she also thought I was thinking of another woman when I said it. Actually, I guess that was true. Way to go, Rupert, or whoever I was.

I am in my apartment, a bit uglier of a place I might add, getting ready for my platonic date with this Ava. In prior layers it was a structure that kept up with the nicer developments in the area. But now I seem to live in a high rent, beige brick, high-rise apartment building that was built sometime after art deco but before latter twentieth century imagination. Or perhaps in this slightly uglier world this now represents imagination. That’s going to be rather depressing when I write the rent check. Getting worse is the same as getting less, and getting less for the same money is, with sliding, an inflation I hadn’t bargained for. This was even more of an incentive to stay put.

My building is on the Mississippi River, adjacent to a development called Riverwalk. This is a touristy thing still done up right, so it’s still nice to look at, whether right in it or up in my apartment looking down. From my den window I can see the curve of the river, a corner of water where boats downriver hang a right and upriver hang a left. From any of my bedrooms I can hear the tugs blow away under the direction of the bar pilots, and I occasionally get a chance to hear the calliope on the paddlewheeler. My dinette has French doors that open to a little balcony guarded by wrought iron railing. The balcony looks out over the river, toward the curve, the tugs, and the bridge. I often daydream out there to the buoyed enterprises floating toward their fulfillment.

Even though I live alone, the three bedrooms in my place all have beds. No one of them has ever been my favorite, as the random rotations have all averaged out. I guess I just like the change. There’s the manly oak set in the largest of the three rooms, where I go when I just want to sleep my ass off, to furiously rack out. Then there’s the gigawatt experiment in primary colors, the bedroom suite of startling clashes where I lie awake able to see all of the colors even in the dark because they’re so bright. This is where I go on those insomniac nights when I just want my mind to race, when I can’t sleep because I want to work very hard at thinking about very serious things. And lastly is the sissy room of French provincial, a make-believe style I’ve always found so frivolous and silly that nothing serious could ever be done there. This is the room where I always bring my dates. This is the room I always attempt my out-of-body experiences. (Because I notice slide-invoked changes in my home from time to time, I suppose the whole place has taken on a make-believe sort of ambiance.) Without question, though, with apologies to Marie Antoinette, the French provincial still takes the cake.

Between the room of manly oak and the room of primary colors is the bathroom I use in preparing myself for Ava. As I primp I keep catching my eye on the reflection in the mirror, a bank shot that allows me to look out of the door and be visually snagged by those crazy colors from my thinking room. It’s distracting, like trying to watch a game when there’s some wise guy on the other side of the stadium bouncing the sun off of a mirror. Of course in this layer the colors are slightly muted, now compromised to just outrageous.

Yes, I find myself thinking, that is the room where I must bring Ava when the variegated time comes. She is to get the shouting colors of this world. I now know I’ll never be able to sleep in the pansy room again. I could never be able to look her in the eye or in any other part of her anatomy among the fluff of French provincial. I’m even tempted to brick in the doorway that leads to all of that inane bland furniture, sealing in forever all of the memories of women abused by my whimsy and total lack of emotional investment. Not that I’d do it, but Ava certainly would deserve that symbolic gesture, because I am no longer whimsy-driven.

Especially if I could get that far with her.

I shave slowly, regarding my face as I think she might. I see my imagined faults as well as my imagined good points, even as a beautiful person in an uglier world. This Ava is part of this uglier world, so I strain to be critical. It is, of course, a strain, and God knows I’d hate to get a hernia or something like that. So I wisely judge myself only up to a point, because I must draw the line somewhere.

I have the television on. Even over running faucet water I can hear it clearly, as the den is situated almost equidistantly from every other room in the apartment.

“I survived the holocaust,” it says, “the true account of outlasting a war gone crazy, Sunday night at eight.”

“Now what the hell is that?” I ask myself out loud. “A war gone crazy?” Aren’t all wars kind of crazy anyway? I think. It’s bad enough even with rules and Lucerne conventions. And what holocaust? I’ve read science fiction about the possible future nuclear holocaust. Apocolyptic dystopias. This announcer talks like it has happened. C’mon, it didn’t happen here, not even on uglier Earth. As a matter of fact, I’ve never been in a layer where it had even come close. Or did it?

This is why I got my degree in mathematics. Rules in Base Ten don’t change when I slide, except that layer where Base Five was the standard. I could barely keep up with that. But even if math is generally inflexible, history always changes when I slide. A sickly realization dawned on me that history could also get uglier. Holocaust? I would ask Ava tonight.

She picks me up by honking the horn. I hear her on the first toot because I’m waiting in the lobby of my building, which is not much more than a foyer buffering the front entrance from elevator doors. I oblige her car horn by getting into her white Chevrolet, a sensible four-door sedan, and by going to whatever place she has once again chosen.

I just can’t seem to have any control as to where I’m taken anymore.

New Orleans suburbs are confusing, and her restaurant selection is in an area where I’m lost. She drives me to somewhere across the river. It was her choice, and so she should be happy. Am I happy? She doesn’t have to be so pushy, I whine to myself. Complaints, Ralph? I ask myself. No way. I have a feeling for her which I suspect is love; and whatever small-minded resentment I may have for her assuming the choice of restaurants, that feeling just about makes everything alright. Of course it does, and it should forever.

When we get out of the car, I walk to her to hold her hand. She accepts, which is encouraging. She’s dressed in a casual yellow sundress that is open in the back and so shows off her bronze shoulders beautifully. She looks so wonderful that I’m glad I wore a sport coat, even if I skipped the tie. The restaurant is a Mom and Pop place that has a surf-and-turf menu written on a chalkboard.

She orders the sensible low fat seafood special. I enjoy the addition of plaque to my coronary arteries as I savor my medium-rare butter-ladled selection. She sits so beautifully at her task as she is poised even while eating. I’m glib and droll and interesting in my conversation, as I’ve had practice on Ana before her. And what of Ana? Is it fair to find love in Ava which was defined via Ana? Perhaps the on-going (as we speak) plaque has contributed to some senility as I decline the challenge of a messy, philosophical, and private dilemma that can do nothing but introduce guilt somewhere along the line—an emotion, I’m proud to boast, I successfully avoid.

I ask her about the nuclear holocaust after dinner, because I have to keep straight.

“There’s been no nuclear war, Ralph,” she tells me over her caramel custard dessert. “Just the two atomic bombs on Japan.”

“Two! Really, Ava, just the one.”

“Some cum laude.”

“Summa cum laude,” I correct her.

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” she argues, “the two atomic bombs.”

“Nagasaki? God, it took two to convince those people!”

“You know, you’re carrying this layer business a little too far, what with this subtle selective ignorance of events. Please, Ralph, I’m worried about you and tired of the charade.” She’s suddenly quiet and not having any fun. I can tell. After all, I have caused the same people to stop having the same fun so many of the same times that I can be a real drag. Just ask Eddie at Burger Nirvana.

“Just one more question, please,” I ask, holding her hand to anchor her to my needs. Her other hand fiddles with a fork, manipulating a sugar pack on the tablecloth. After I almost conclude that she has ignored me, she speaks to me with that sad little smile that for some reason draws me to her, has drawn me to Ana before her, and would surely draw me to the rest of “her kind” elsewhere.

“No. Not another question. Let’s go.” Now she’s just sad; there is no more smile. “Check please,” she calls out coldly to any waiter. My needs are resented, and so we go after I pay. She drives me back to my place and gives me a Dear John peck while we’re still both sitting in her idling car, indicating to me she won’t be accompanying me, that there won’t be any lingering drop-off, that I can just bail out right there without my parachute. The air conditioner’s running, protecting us from the thick nighttime humidity, and she makes no move to shut off the engine and lower the window. It is clear that I’m invited to leave. When I do, she gives me an apparently final message.

“I hope you can start acting right—or actually stop acting,” she says as I close the passenger door behind me. She opens the window.

“Or what?” I ask her, being careful to sound concerned, not threatening. She puts the window back up, leaving me stranded without an answer. I am truly falling without my parachute. Or what? I repeat to myself. Or you’ll never see me again? Or you’re not going to see me again, anyway, even if I do stop?

“There she goes again,” I murmur as I wait for the dreary elevator in the just about dreary lobby of my “approaching dreary” building.

I lie awake defensively in my clothes for the longest time in my color-splash room until I’m ready to sleep. My emotions splash along with the colors of the room as I’m awash in the circuitous passions of rejection and endeavor, love and anger. Still not bothering to change out of my clothes, I then move to the manly oak ensemble, climb into the bed there and sleep in the hardest way possible.

I rest.

The next morning I go to a bookstore on Canal Street and buy Survey of History, by J. Bartels, Ph.D. You see, I’ve done this before from time to time, because as I have changed layers, the very book in front of me would change. This would help me keep abreast so as to function in society. Of course I learned early in my college career not to slide after cramming all night for finals. Guaranteed F—take it from the sliding scholar. And your professor thinks you’re crazy out of your mind. Unless, of course, it’s Math, which doesn’t ever change, Base Five notwithstanding, which is why I was able to pursue my degree.

I have the donuts and milk in front of me on my dinette table and begin my Survey. I’ve opened the French doors to the balcony so that I can hear the noises of the river and catch the morning sun. I look in the index under Nagasaki. It is true. Those bastards in charge allowed their people another nuking—even had three days to consider it. Holy shit—this is really bad. It is ugly. Twice as ugly as the single bombing the last layer where those Japanese were convinced after the Enola Gay.

I stop and close the book to think about this. God! I have to go back the other way. I have to go back to the reasonable bottom of my reality bowl. I need entropy. I don’t want any more momentum.

I’m more upset than I thought I’d be. Not that more people were killed: it’s hard enough to relate to that! But that people in charge allowed it to happen. And what about the United States? I mean if one bomb couldn’t convince them, I would figure an endless series of bombs might not either. How did Harvey S. Trueman not figure that bomb number two might only be the one before number three? And so on. Were there “and-so-ons” in the next layers up the bowl? Hell, last layer the U.S. didn’t even have a bomb number two.

Goodness, I have to get out of this.

Now what is this holocaust business?

I read aghast. Never have I been so sorry to quest for knowledge. One page out of a thousand that shakes the whole regrettable book.

I spend a long day catching up with this world. From time to time I open the refrigerator and nibble on the bachelor stock. I try to nap occasionally, but end up sitting at the dinette table with my Survey. I find it very lonely without Ava, and by eight o’clock that evening I am bored with atrocities, catastrophes, and historical blunders. I try sleeping but do it poorly, even surrounded by my oak. I dream of better worlds, and this is what makes me sleep so poorly. Ironically, the more pleasant realms of my sleep constitute the nightmare, because they are just dreams, and when I awake, the worse world awaits. It is a night of tossing and turning and upheavals.

When I wake up the following morning, I finally decide to shower and shave. I go out to a favorite, less convenient bookstore on Magazine Street which sits in the corner of a building that otherwise is occupied by a neighborhood supermarket. It is a dingy little store that does most of its book business in newspapers and comic books. The place is crammed obscenely in paper such that one can only imagine what a show there would be if the place were to go up in flames. In spite of my barren cupboard, I dismiss the supermarket and attend to my morbid curiosity here. I pick up copies of a Jewish girl’s diary and of some German post-war trials of the crimes against humanity—Hey! Surprise—a conscience in this stinking place. These are recommended by the employee there. He is a zitty young kid, about sixteen, who has to be a jerk, being he is so nonchalant about this subject that has me so noticeably distraught.

I spend yet another two days locked up in my apartment perusing, skipping around, and getting scared to fucking death because I’m living in this world.

God, I have to get out of here!

Ultimately, I snap back in and, to prove it, use the telephone coherently. I use it to call Ava. But having snapped back in affords me no protection, because I snap back out when her phone answers.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your holocaust?” I ask this as if she herself is responsible, or at least an accessory for maintaining silence about it—a crime of omission.

“Excuse me?” demands her puzzled aunt. There is silence from both of us. Finally, her aunt assumes correctly and calls for Ava to come to the phone. There is some muffling of the mouth piece from her end, apparently her aunt warning Ava of my agitation.

“What’s the excitement, Ralph?” Ava asks, heeding her aunt’s advisory.

“Oh, just six million Jews, a few million Russians; a million here, a million there!” I pause, but my tone does not improve. “Experiments, Ava! Shall I tell you about the experiments!” Before she hangs up on me, she hears me pause in silence, and then she hears the crying—O.K., shameless sobbing—through the receiver covered by my hand.

It’s a shot relationship, it’s a shot day, it’s a shot world.

I sleep for twenty-six hours, soundly in part of me but tumultuously in another part. I awake several times to find I’ve moved from oak bedroom to color bedroom and back again. At one point I awake and, still half inundated by sleep, I attempt as I have in the past an out-of-body experience. I feel or pretend to feel myself rise heavily an inch or two above my body but slam back down into oak decor. To drift along the ceiling; to rise above the physical bounds of this and of all Earths; to exist as a floating bird, gliding with the total perspective of all of the unimportance below me.

Then wide awake, the widest awake I’ve been my whole life, I go back to Eddie and his Burger Nirvana. I don’t have to, you understand. I just do it so I can be involved in something that depends in not the slightest way on historical knowledge.

As I flap the burger on the grill, Eddie the owner and senior burgerman tells me, “People who do not know hiztory are doomed to repeat it.”

I get this the very first day back on the job. I come back to this moronic place to distract myself and we end up talking about history. And it’s bad enough this history here had to be dealt with at all, but all the worse is a bore of yore hacking out his own versions even more destructively than his spatula technique serves up the patties.

“Yea,” Eddie starts, but only after a quick look around at all of his customers, “firzt time a nigger got zo close to being the Prezident.”

Great, I think to myself, Eddie’s a “niggerer.”

“He was just in the primaries,” I say back, knowing even from last layer how close the candidate had gotten.

“Yea, but you got zome people—even white—took him zeriouzly. Zee, boy, I know hiztory factz, and I know that after the Zivil War, when niggerz took over temporarily, thingz turned to zshit till we took over again. You can’t turn a cannibal into a politician—he’ll eat you alive.” He stops to laugh to himself when he discovers that he accidentally made a joke. A joke about a cannibal? I couldn’t know, as I was not familiar with the word.

“Now I know ending zslavery waz right,” he continues, “but too much power too zoon, well...”

“Slavery?” I have no idea of what he speaks.

“Right, zslavery, and Yeow!” he hollers as a grease bleb lands on his arm, adding a mottled addition to his yellow layering. “Hey, Ebe—do you think you can do thiz zslide zstuff zo there aren’t any other people around exzept people like uz?” He laughs louder and louder the more he sees I am offended.

I quit the workers of the world expeditiously and am quite fulfilled as a bon vivant. And I am thankful that I am unable to look up slavery as my Survey of History is now history.

And that other word, “cannibal.” From the inference, I think I’ll just skip that, too, and embrace the ignorant, blissful way.

A Bon vivant is hard to detest, or so I find out when Ava calls me back. Enough is enough is her tone; getting down to the bottom of this is her attitude.

“Fact,” she reports to me, “you’re a summa cum laude. Fact: you have never heard of the holocaust or Nagasaki. Fact: you’re moved to tears over forty years later, and I can’t explain that unless your sliding is for real. For you, anyway. Of course I don’t buy it, but let’s talk.”

“Tell me what a cannibal is, first,” I request.

“When I come over. Bye.”

I don’t wait long.

Her Chevrolet drives up a few minutes later. Even from six floors up, I recognize her squeaky brakes from our “platonic” date. (Her car used to be a Ford when her brakes were full and her nose was bumpless. Fewer bumps with Fords, I think to myself—could there be a marketing premise here I could cash in on?) After an uncomfortable, fidgety period of time, what used to be a doorbell now sounds as a raspy buzzer. Upon opening the door, I get a Hello Ralph peck on the cheek. She firmly takes my hand and silently leads me into my own apartment. She maintains her hush which convinces me that she will choose her first words very carefully. Now we’re sitting in the den of my apartment, and I’m a little embarrassed because it is a little less tastefully done since my last slide.

“Pretty tacky,” her first words say of my plastic lamp shade covers.

“They weren’t here last layer,” I tell her in my defense.

Ava smiles with pity, her sympathetic eyes tenderly regarding me.

“I’m going to speak with you assuming all of this is true. Of course it’s not,” she adds to dash my hopeful glint, “but it will help me appreciate who you are, how you think. I’m attracted to you—”

She is! To me!

“—and I find you interesting, and...”

“You were downright in love with me last time.”

“Last layer.”

“Right. I think you were, anyway,” I qualify.

“Right,” she shoots back, her eyebrows cocked in investigative position, her eyes now in rivet. “So what happened?” she asks.

“I couldn’t have you—I mean her, and at a crucial moment I slid, hoping to put the icing on the cake, affection-wise.”

“And?” she asks.

“Things went the other way; you’re now just a friend with a bump on your nose.”

“Was she a stupid girl, Ralph?” she asks, rubbing her nose as if controlled unknowingly by a post-hypnotic suggestion.

“I don’t know what you mean.” And I do not. Stupid to reject my affection? If so, am I brash to take her question as announcement that she is smarter, that she will be mine?

“I mean did she buy all of this crap about layers and sliding?” she continues, planting me firmly on square one once again.

“I don’t think she is stupid,” I answer. I stare into her eyes. “She is you.”

“Oh, yes, me,” she echoes. “But the girl who you wanted to be affectionate with was stupid—I mean believing you and all,” she is careful to point out again for the sake of emphasis. I suspect that this is beginning to sound a lot like teasing.

“Actually,” I tell her, with every intention of creating whatever jealousy she might be capable of, “she was lovely. A lot like you...except for the bump, of course.”

“That bump again,” she says fretfully. “Was she better without it?” She poses the question, although sarcastically, as if she expected an answer. I pause and brace myself. “For your information,” she insists, “I’ve had this bump all of my life. It’s just a gentle rise of the bone—a fashionable prominence—and not dromedary, for goodness sake. You keep talking like it defines my whole essence. Forget the fricking bump! O.K.?” I can’t tell if she is angry or just being cute. But she stops and calms herself, making me respect her indignation. I just wait.

“You know,” she continues, “I could have feelings for you, perhaps, but this way of life you swear is true is just too big of a road block. I just can’t have any type of progressing relationship with a crazy person.”

“What’s my only chance?” I ask.

“Denial versus proof. And if you deny it all now, I’ve got to wonder why you put on this elaborate act anyway. Wait,” she says, stopping to realize a conclusion, “the fact that you did put on this elaborate act is too troubling to accept, and you’re out. So I guess it’s proof, buddy boy, which I’ve got to figure is pretty much impossible.”

“And you don’t believe me anyway.”

“That’s right. So I sit here, unbelieving, ready to leave forever, either because you’re crazy, or twisted and conniving, but with my open mind.”

“I suppose that’s about as open as your mind will be,” I surmise.

“That’s right again,” she says, with her arms on the armrests of the unlovely chair, her right foot tapping.

“I guess the pressure’s on,” I say, stalling in my inability to work any convincing magic.

(Now I know there’s the potential for a relationship here; there have to be some common threads among the layers. She liked me a whole lot when she was Ana. And I still like her here, because, after all, I don’t change. In fact, I know I even love her—I think. So this is all-or-none time. I could slide, hoping she would be madly in love with me as Eva, Alana, or whatever her name would be then, but I doubt it. And even if she would, I might not, depending on her, love the new Miss Right in return. And considering the direction my sliding has been in, we’d probably hate each other and I’d be stuck in a world with three nuked Japanese cities each with a half-life identical to Strontium-90, several American civil wars, or who knows what else. At least here, small pox is still eradicated.

So sliding is out. That means charm. All-or-none charm. I have to have her want to accept my situation, and not dispel it before I have a chance to convince her.)

“Well?” she asks.

Silently I rise, as if my number had been called. I fix my eyes on her and lean forward to show my intention of walking over to her, testing the water. She stares back, keenly interested in how I might resolve the unresolvable. I begin toward her and she still is motionless, neither inviting nor recoiling. When I’m close enough, as if this had been my plan all along, I lean over and kiss her on her lips. No one is more surprised by my actions than me. And then I consider her own actions. It is an unrejected kiss.

Some challenge.

Her coyness was an elaborate act of her own, and I, the summa cum laude, fell for it. My all-or-none gamble went my way: having risked the oblivion of none, I celebrate the joy of all. And for the first time in my slippery life I share my body with someone I love.

We are led by a path of least resistance into my multicolored bedroom. It waits very naturally for us. We fall onto the bed as one, entangled in a squirming mass of fumbling limbs that reflexly work together to disrobe the two separated people we used to be. It’s hot and heavy and everything I thought it would be with her.

And then it happens.

I’m so enthralled that I spontaneously slide several times; but she doesn’t appear to alter. I am complimented to say that she herself is so enthralled she never notices the several physical shivers that punctuate our lovemaking, changing my world who knows how and frankly, who cares, since she seems to remain with me, unchanged throughout. A constant?

Impossible. Just seems so. I catch myself. I’m new to actual love-sex, and I falter: I’m sliding to have sex with many different women—God! Why am I doing this? Selfish bastard! I hate myself—she feels so incredible. They feel so incredible? Still she seems so unalterably consistent in her movements with me. But I’m sure the reality is that I’m experiencing them all—Anas, Avas, Evas, the rest—as I travel. I’m sure. I hate me for doing this, but isn’t that the real me? Isn’t that what I would have wanted before tonight? I take. Guilt creeps in.

In this strange, new role of lovemaking instead of mere sexmaking, I know that I am cheating my true feelings—turning it back into just sex. We both breathe heavily with our efforts. Drops of my perspiration fall on her. Her eyes are closed tightly from her pleasures. She doesn’t appear to change as I slide. And wouldn’t that be incredible!

Why not! I want her, not them. I love her. She’s given herself to me, given her love to me—it’s a personal, intimate gift from a single individual. I want her here, not left behind. Why did I slide? I can’t believe it! I hate myself, I love her. Why can’t she stay the same! I push and push, both physically within her passionate vise and metaphysically along the layers—with her attached. It’s a ridiculous fantasy so I can suppress my feelings of wickedness over the sliding I did to heighten the sensation of my male pleasure in this romp. I push more. I imagine that as I slide I catapult her along with me—the same Ava with the same me, in the same sex, into the different worlds. But that doesn’t help because there’s a different guilt.

How dare I enjoy fantasizing about displacing someone from the world where she belongs? But isn’t it commendable that I get a bigger thrill from the idea of remaining with this same girl I love instead of having sex with many different women, like I’m actually doing? Greedy son of a bitch!

I fantasize, hope, and need to have her still with me, but I know it’s just a wish. I can’t undo what I did, and sliding is a violation of the monogamous devotion that love now explains so well to me. As we cling to each other so ferociously, interdigitating everywhere, we tense up, our bodies rigid but drifting around on each other because of the cool perspiration that is a film between us. We glide on this frictionless film like there’s no gravity, except for the mutual attraction two bodies have in space. And then there’s that final quiver. She opens her eyes to me at this moment. I struggle to keep the one-woman illusion going, but it’s a stretch. And then my concentration dissolves. I’m out of control and I slip. Selfish bastard!

The different colors burst in my bedroom at our sexual peak, the technicolor of our affections stated in a polychromatic experience that night. All of the primary colors in the room have faded to clashing pastels, then coordinated composites in this celebration. Ultimately that night—our eyes closed—and all—faded to black.

The next morning, as I lay in bed beside her, I studied her. She didn’t seem any different. Same blond hair, same smooth skin. Her nose had the same gentle rise of the bone—that same “fashionable prominence.” I rolled onto my back, staring at the ceiling, and I wondered what the rest of her would be like when she woke up. The morning light made the windows glow, and like the first rays upon an irregular horizon, dawn cast a jigsaw puzzle interplay of light and shadow on new defects in the ceiling paint. What was once a gaily colored and trimmed bedroom was now gray with an old and bad paint job. It seemed my sliding had continued in the same direction. I checked her out again.

I became very frightened. I lay still, supine, naked and vulnerable; and then I trembled.

I found some relief in that Ava hadn’t seemed to change in any noticeable way, unless she were to turn out to be a real ignoramus when she awoke. My cavalier sliding that enhanced my intimacy may have taken a considerable toll on my life as I didn’t know what world I was in, or whether Ava (her name?) could even read. Or speak English.

Changing my world who knows how and, frankly, who cares…

Now I cared. I continued to lay still in my progressing terror, afraid to look at the clock which I hoped still had twelve numbers.

She, this person next to me, slept so beautifully, her breaths calming my fears with the feminine lift of her chest. This very motion seemed so maternal that I could feel so very safe even in a deteriorated world. But once again I regarded the ceiling; once again I lapsed into a vague daydream of doom.

After a while I could sense this person was awake and staring at me. I kept my head still but moved my eyes hard to the side to look at her unchanged green irises. I didn’t know who I was going to meet here. Perhaps someone unchanged. Certainly this was a different person. Certainly, as always, I was the constant and I slid alone. I’ve always slid alone. The fantasy of bringing her along with me, however, was a bewitching conflict that tugged for my attention even as this person stared back at me.

“You grind your teeth a lot in your sleep,” she finally said when I resumed my ceiling watch. She placed her hand on my face, petting and stroking my cheek.

Not only English, I thought, but grammatically correct at that, so thank you, God.

“That’s my TM joint that makes me grind,” I responded. “My bite’s supposed to be off or something like that. A dentist said I should worry about it when I start getting headaches.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I can make at least ten different sound effects by grinding my teeth,” I added. She made no comment. She seemed truly unchanged. The room, on the other hand, was a mess. How come, I wondered, if I didn’t change—if I didn’t become a slob, then why did the surroundings cared for by me change as if a slob lived here? Just who was I that I replaced? Ah, the mysteries of life as I know it.

Ava kissed me hard and got out of bed. Yes, I could love her here. An Ava walked out of a worse bedroom than an Ava had been taken to the night before, and then I heard her freshening up in the bathroom. She wasn’t appalled by the pigsty, probably—certainly—because this was the new Ava, unshocked by a typical room in a worse world. Could I still wish she were unchanged in spite of her non-plussed affect? Could I still fantasize this without feeling stupid? I considered the comfort of stupidity.

I continued to lie quietly, dreading what my Survey of History might describe, this reference companion probably still retrievable from the trash can. Ava had been out of the room several minutes before I heard her pop on the television in the den. Soon I could know my whereabouts, so I strained to listen to this electronic blabbermouth that couldn’t keep a secret. From my bedroom, though, the sound of the TV wasn’t much more than background noise, so I gave up trying to catch any intelligible clues. I dressed from the selection of quite ordinary and actually unfashionable clothes in my closet. When Ava came back into my bedroom, the TV was off again, this window to a new world slammed shut.

“Hi,” I greeted her hopefully, but her face was pale. To my shock, she had been shocked.

“There is a charity for abused children,” she said feebly. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. And there was a murder in Gentilly last night.” She faced me, arms outstretched, helpless. I almost expected stigmata as she stood, motionless, feeling the pain that was out there, dying because of the sins in this world.

So I had taken her with me! I did this. I was no longer alone—and just in time, for I felt we had traveled to a place where I didn’t want to be alone.

“Well,” I said attempting comfort, but in fear myself, “a city this size—you’ve got to expect that occasionally.” I privately remembered a layer a long time ago where taking of life was considered senseless and very rare, most of the killing confined to the occasional outburst of a war. I had hoped that I had not gotten to a layer where murder happened any more than rarely—or even occasionally. I said it to convince myself as much as her: In a city this size, you’ve got to expect that sort of thing.

“There has been at least one killing a day since the new year and this is June!” she exclaimed, suddenly animated. She had never been summa cum anything, but she was by no means slow to catch on, her only noticeable deterioration since I had met her being the unmentionable on her nose. Her apparent and surprising non-deteriorated mental prowess further reinforced the new reality, which was the old her.

No “What’s-this-world-coming-to?” line. She looked at me and firmly, too. “What world have I come to?” she asked instead.

Honestly, I didn’t even know what world I had come to. I was pretty much shocked myself. Imagine! Murders daily. Child abuse! In all fairness to her, though, I was used to surprise, to rolling with the punches, even though the punches were getting harder. Of course, when I thought back on the different worlds I’ve been through, I now knew that I must have been a fool not to notice the worsening of things that was happening in my life before I ever noticed uglier walls for bus schedules.

I rapidly experienced a most unpleasant realization:

The plights of my family had been just that, I had thought. Life had stayed pretty much the same for me in my family, in spite of my countless slides through childhood, high school, and college. The changes, as I’ve explained before, were seemingly random. My parents and I had good times, but there were bad times, too. I had just figured every family has its share of bad times.

I had watched my father’s drinking get worse as I slid my way through life. First there was the happy socialite that he was, never afraid to use camaraderie as an excuse to enjoy a little drink with the fellas at College Inn. Then there was the guy who needed a drink after work. After that, as I slid here and there, there was the alcoholic who never left Parkway Tavern. Finally, there was the guy who killed himself on a repeat DWI excursion, having wedged his car firmly into one of the ancient oaks on St. Charles Avenue.

I also had watched, now it seemed, my mother’s happy way of life turn cynical. And not just because of my father’s drinking. She developed one bad habit after another.

For example, I remember one time I slid at a high school football game just to have my school win. The rules didn’t seem to change all that much, but the score certainly did. The Blue Jays soundly trounced the Cavaliers that night. We partied hard after that victory, and I especially enjoyed myself, having left the losers back a few slides earlier. The priests were not invited to share the beer with us on the lakefront levee that evening, and the clandestine celebration went on to become a new tradition at our school. When I returned home later that night, I saw that my Mom was still waiting up for me.

We lived uptown on Nashville Avenue. This was a town-within-a-town two-way street that was flanked heavily with old New Orleans mossy oaks. It was the type of street that urged you to open up the windows to hear the night, but of course the insects made this impossible, jailing everyone in air conditioned seclusion. In our house our air conditioner was not a very efficient deodorizer, for upon entering through a back door to the laundry room I immediately smelled the cigarette smoke that at first made me think we had company. Imagine my surprise when I saw my own mother puffing away.

“Since when did you start smoking?” I asked her.

“Oh, I’ve always enjoyed an occasional cigarette. You’ve just never noticed,” she replied.

Sounded reasonable to me.

Then, as the Jays excelled toward the state football championship, she became a smoking fiend—even puffing between bites at supper.

And then she developed her cancer by the time I was a college sophomore. She had half of her lungs whacked out at Hotel Dieu Hospital as her introduction to the pain she’d experience the rest of her life, however long that might have turned out to be. And she wasn’t a very good sport about it.

Of course, she rode with my Dad in the car that night.

My siblings didn’t exist, thanks to me: it was my choice to have none. Once, when I was in grade school, my mother asked me if I’d like to have a little brother or sister to share my parents with, to share good times, to share myself. “Hell, no,” was my obvious answer.

Even though I gyrated in solo providence, waiting for all things to come to me, I still had to do living; so I kept shifting around, jockeying for the luck, never having noticed till this very uneasy moment that I may have forged new worlds only to see those who loved me suffer more.

And so as a college student, oblivious—as well as an orphaned only child, I began enacting my wily plans of sliding for dollars and for perfect receptive bodies. The sinking feeling I had now, I realized, was that the worlds had begun to worsen for me a long time ago, before stupid me had realized it. They had begun to worsen by presenting to me new, subtly changed versions of the people I had loved the most, but whose plights I had noticed the least as being the wake of my own cruise through selfish fortuity. This unwelcome perception slugged me like an invited slap in the face, and so I thought of Ana on the beach. And that made me think of the slap in the face to Ava here which was the pain of displacement—a pillaging violation of her existential stability. So I now grieved for both of them, for there had been two assaults: on Ava, displaced unchanged into a changed world; and on Ana, subtly altered because of my careless careening through layers, my affection for her now extended to Ava, which was, of course, my deprivation of the original I had seen that day on the beach. In what important ways, I wondered, had she changed?

But then again, you either love someone or you don’t. At least that’s the way I figured it. If you fall in love with someone and they change, do you then not love them? If they grow, do you then not love them? Isn’t love all or none? Isn’t that what “for better and for worse” means?

So I may have really blown it, changing the first girl I had fallen in love with. But wasn’t I really in love with all of the girls that are her? This rationalization may have mitigated my regrets of misconduct regarding her, but it would do nothing for her feelings. And it would do nothing to restore the childhood I most certainly should have had, raised by the parents I should have had.

As I faced one who was lucky enough, perhaps, not to be the progressively inferior one she had apparently replaced here, but also who was unlucky enough to not be where she belonged, I was caught off balance. Used to rolling with the punches? Hell, I felt my Mom and Dad slug me from places where he had never drank and she had never smoked.

And being off balance, I found it difficult to be sensitive to Ava’s disruption here. I would have had to exponentially compound my own feelings of the current culture shock of murders and child abuse and the like to appreciate her feeling of derailment. She was, after all, on her maiden voyage.

As hard as I tried for her, I continued to be insensitive to these feelings of derailment. And just when I thought I could overcome my sudden grief over my family and deal with her, I realized that Ava had slid! Had slid, had derailed, with me! Synchronously, unchanged, and incarcerated in the same berth as mine.

For the doubting Thomas, it seemed she had her proof.

“Let’s sit and talk,” I urged her, feeling I could explain everything; feeling I could confide my guilt for hooking her, feeling I could seek her comfort for the guilt I had regarding my parents.

“I really don’t think so!” she shouted. She was furious. Her voice wavered with uncertainty. “You give me the creeps. I’m leaving, going home where I’ll discover that there’s been a fluky five or six months of crime, and I just hadn’t noticed.”

She stormed out of my life once again, refusing to accept the certainty. The front door slammed so hard that the doorjamb cracked. I didn’t pursue her. She would eventually be back for rescue, even though I could offer none except in companionship. She wouldn’t have to worry about coming back to me if I were the last man on Earth; she’d have to come back because I might be the best man on this Earth. The world had deteriorated further, and I knew I was going to hate this world even more than the last one I was in. And I would wait for her in a terrible place rather than hope for someone different in a better one. I felt the feelings I had for her. I know that sounds redundant, but these feelings were swimming around me and through me. They blessed me here.

How many times had I slid? I asked myself. Tens? Hundreds? How had I taken Ava with me? Or had she independently slid? Does anyone in love slide spontaneously with the physiologic exertion known as sexual intercourse? Does being in love allow one to relax and assume to the degree that that impasse deep in the brain, the one that keeps the reptile down, far exceeds its duties, like my proverbial turbo-charged fat man jumping up and down? In this way, further suppressing the selfishness that lies there, does love, the opposite of selfishness, better us by inserting that increase in distance from that primitive selfish area? And does adding to that the physiologic exertion of orgasm, like the sneeze in my accidental slides (my slips), cause lovers in love to slide? Was that what it took for Homo quisque to slide, what I’ve always asexually done effortlessly? No, that couldn’t have been right. I mean I’ve never heard of lovers confused by calling each other different names. (Well, actually, I have heard of that, with the most angry of reactions--take it from me.)

No! This talent must have been up to now uniquely mine. Now I had a resentful companion. How had she hooked on? Was it safe to let her out of my sight? What if she began sliding without me? I’ll be left behind with her ghost, and the real Ava—her true existence—will be careening onward to whatever God-forbidden realms there are down the line.

I spent the next twenty-four hours holed up alone in my apartment, surveying my Survey of History and listening to TV. Actually, history hadn’t changed that much. Armstrong and not Grisolm had stepped upon the moon in 1969, behind schedule due to some fire in an early Apollo training disaster. John Kennedy had been assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and not Sirhan Sirhan. And there had been a few other assassinations. Lincoln, for instance, had been done in by a John Wilkes Boothe and not by spinal meningitis. The people of Switzerland speak German, Italian, and French instead of Suisse. Surprisingly, those are the only big changes I could spot in my Survey in such a limited amount of time.

What really blew me away were the commonplace changes I heard on TV. The amount of crime was astounding. Murder, rape, and beatings abounded. Cruelty to animals was here. Guns were legal here in the United States of America (not “of North America”). Drugs, well...drugs; that was self-explanatory.

I’ve done this before: dozed here and there, getting up only to read my Survey. At one point I made cereal and poured milk with a carton that had a child’s picture on it and which described his disappearance and vital statistics. I suppose it was the best picture a wax carton could depict. He was a frail child, gentle-looking in his eyes. I stared into his picture, trying to construct his tragedy in my mind. I didn’t think things could get this bad. I didn’t think cruelty had continued into the twentieth century here. I fantasized being his daddy on the joyous day he would be returned unharmed. There were no complicating subplots with wives or siblings. It was a simple fantasy: I’m up late reading on the Thank God day he came back. I hear some noise in the kitchen, and I know he has gone there for a middle-of-the-night glass of water. I walk in and hold him hard. “I’m glad you’re back,” my fantasy has me telling him in an embrace that just won’t quit.

The nice thing about a terrible world is that it feels so good when it stops hurting.

Environmental destructploitation (a word here?) had continued into modern times. World War II, formerly a struggle of national forces, included a holocaust in this layer worse than the one I had read about a few days earlier when Ava had been coy. Can you believe that? A worse holocaust. The genocide involved, well...forget it.

Now I knew what a cannibal was. Now I knew what anti-personnel bombs were. Now I learned about gulags, goon squads, and drug gangs. Now I’ve been introduced to Stalins, Amins, and Custers. When Ava gets a load of this, I thought...

If all of this sounds familiar, or not at all unusual, then be ashamed, for this is obviously where you are, where you feel comfortable.

“Are you comfortable now, Abby?” the psychiatric nurse had asked her, as I was to learn later, along with the rest of the story which I now offer with acceptable narrative liberties. Abby had insisted her name was Ava at the time of her emergency medical admission. What self-assurance!

“Good,” the nurse said, surmising that she was very comfortable. By this time the medicine had finally reached therapeutic levels. She closed Abby’s strong door, expecting her patient not to alter her week-long routine—napping with the help of the medicine until her afternoon session with the psychiatrist.

“This world sucks,” Abby would always start.

“‘Life is hard and then you die,’ is a bumper sticker I’ve seen on cars,” Dr. Landry responded. “I’m there for all of those people who are in between.” He paused for a moment and then continued when she hadn’t continued herself. “Psychiatry has made considerable progress in finding out what’s wrong. It just hasn’t done much to fix it.”

“That’s why the drugs?” she asked him.

“That’s why the drugs,” he responded. And then there was another pause which seemed more uncomfortable for him than for her. “I’d surely like to get to first base here,” he continued again, “and find out what’s wrong. Won’t you help me?”

“No,” she responded. “You can’t help yourselves, much less me. I’m the one who’s normal; your world is the thing that’s crazy. I can’t cope with your crazy world, so I’m the one who gets drugged. You, on the other hand, accept this madness in your world, and you’re the one who’s rational. Is that what sane is?” she asked. “Just acceptance? Submission? Resignation?”

“And your world?” he asked her right back, eyes unblinking through his black-framed, thick-lens glasses.

“In my world your eyes would probably be twenty-twenty.”

He then removed his glasses to make her feel more at ease.

“Oh, put ’em back on,” she scoffed. “My world has the crime rate of the moon. Children only disappear when it’s time for a bath. Terrorism happens only in Edgar Allen Poe books and used car lots. The last serial killer was Herod, for Christ’s sake!”

“And Christ? Did he die on a cross in your world?”

“Damn you,” she seethed, without a reasonable rebuttal.

The nurse, meanwhile, in another part of the hospital, had briefed the on-coming nurse with an on-service summary:

“This twenty-one year old white female was brought here by her aunt with whom she lived. The admitting chief complaint was, ‘She just can’t cope.’ The aunt had never been close to her as the patient had resided with her only temporarily until she was to find her own accommodations. The aunt stated that she was the only relative the patient had who still lived in New Orleans. She further stated that the patient was completely untroubled—normal—until a week ago when she returned home after an all-night date completely dissatisfied with the world. She watched television news, continuously applauding the efforts of ecology groups, anti-drug campaigns, SPCA’s, and so on. At the same time, she expressed frustration that these groups even had to exist. She alternately cheered and cried, but the crying was always the longer. The aunt quoted her as saying, ‘This world’s for the birds—I’ve got to get out,’ which she interpreted as suicidal rhetoric, called her family doctor, and took her here at his direction. Dr. Landry had agreed she posed a threat to herself and the diagnosis was depression with suicidal precautions instituted.

“During the course of her admission, it has become apparent that she in fact has had no thought-out scheme for committing suicide but expressed the delusion that she could just travel back to her world where there weren’t these awful problems. She has been improving on anti-depressants.”

Ultimately, all of this became known to me, of course, when I became involved again with Ava/Abby.

“Abby” indeed had improved in attitude. She steadfastly had refused to accept the world and her new name in it, but did learn to cope. And coping seemed the consummate parameter of sanity here. She never had talked of sliding to Dr. Landry, but he had learned enough to know that someone named Ralph had single-handedly distorted her world from a thing of beauty to a viper pit. Technically, I suppose, he was right. He just couldn’t realize the true circumstances but instead had surmised that this Ralph character had some cult leader-type effect on her. He used the word Svengali.

After a period of time, when she was no longer considered a threat to herself, she was allowed a discharge. Into my care, I might add. Boy, that really irked the shrink. You should’ve seen the stink-eye I got from the guy. But she was oriented, not a threat, and legally free. Her aunt, a real timid type, refused to accept her at home.

And so Abby/Ava asked for me. It was a phone call I half-expected.

“Take me back, Ralph,” she asked when I went to pick her up with her own car. She wasn’t angry, probably thanks to the anti-depressants. She was acting sort of like I had broken her Grandma’s antique heirloom vase or something: Everything would be O.K. if she could just get the pieces glued back together again.

At first there was a cool distance. We began by planning to spend the next couple of weeks living together in my apartment. She needed some place to land, and I would do. We went to her aunt’s house for a lot of her clothes, during which time she had been warned to watch out for me. She was wise to have me wait for her outside.

“Remember Charles Manson,” she had been warned.

“Who’s that?” she asked me as she began sorting out her clothes on my sofa. It was an overcast New Orleans afternoon, so I flipped on the ceiling lights for her to see better. There was a lot of clanging involved since she had brought her clothes over on their hangers.

“Manson, Manson...I don’t know,” I responded. “I’ve heard the name. Can’t be good. I think he killed someone.”

“I’m sure he must have,” she quipped back. “So did this guy Jim Jones, I guess,” she continued. “That’s the other guy my aunt said you might be like. You did change my world, you know.” She paused, musing. “Jimmy Jones—such a happy little name.”

“Ava,” I said.

“Please, call me Abby,” she announced. She gazed at me with assurance, and her tone was one of direction, purpose, in her life.

“You’ve landed here, then, after all?” I asked her, sharing condolences for her former name.

“When in Reme...” she surrendered.

“Actually, Rome,” I corrected. The six hills of Rome were now seven, named after the other suckler of the wolf, and home of, now, the Roman Catholic Church.

“O.K. I was just going to say, ‘When in Reme, get reamed out as the Remans do.’ Of course the new name ruins my pun.”

“Abby?”

“Yes?”

“Call me Rocky.” She laughed, and this was good to see.

“Rocky. That’s great.”

As I said, it was good to see some genuine good humor on her face again, for this gentle face from a gentler world had been nothing but a troubled face in this troubled world.

“Well, Rocky, what do we do now?” Having accomplished nothing, she let the clothes and hangers fall back unsorted on the sofa. After having hauled them all up to my apartment, we were ready for a break.

We sat down at the dinette table, discolored more than I’d ever noticed, and I poured coffee cups for both of us from the pot I had carried over from the kitchen counter. Under the top of the table were drawers. Instinctively I opened the one by me, the one over my lap, and I retrieved the ash tray, matches, and cigarette pack. I pounded the cigarette pack against the palm of one hand to extrude a cigarette. I pulled it out, put it into my mouth, and fingered a second one to offer Abby.

“Cigarette?” I suggested.

“Yes, thanks,” she answered as if this were just what she needed. She reached her hand across the small, square, ugly table, and had hardly had a pincer grasp of the offering when suddenly she dropped it along with her jaw. But my cigarette hit the table before hers.

“We don’t smoke!” we exclaimed simultaneously.

“This is quite disturbing,” she said to me, newly rattled. “I thought you said the only thing that changes is our names.”

“Yes, because names are how the world, old or new, perceives us and—”

“No, I mean, now we smoke.”

“Or have always in this world,” I added.

“Rocky, we have changed. We’re smokers.”

“Not anymore. I just quit.” I grinned, but saw her disapproval, as my attitude was a little too flippant for her.

“Listen, I’m just about ready to cope and a new twist hits. You’re not helping.”

“What can I do?” I asked. “I guess I’ve just been kind of numbed by the changes. I’ll tell you one thing, though—I sure would like a cigarette.” I reached for one again.

“Light that thing up and I’ll slap your face off,” she warned. And I thought of Ana on a Pensacola beach. If she had been holding back that time, I would be a dead man this time.

“O.K., O.K.” And for the first real time in my life I quit smoking, even if I quit before I had even started. “You realize, of course,” I said, “that now we’re going to gain weight.” She punched me in the shoulder.

Smoking, drugs, and obsessive eating: my forbidden indulgences. I had outlawed them a long time ago as a safeguard, because I’m the type who’s always given in to what I’ve wanted. Always. That’s me. But there always had to be limits, too. I’ve cautioned myself never to breach my limits by picking up addictive behavior, like smoking or gluttony. This was because I knew, being the type of self-gratifying guy that I was, that I’d be a sucker for nicotine to the same horrible end like my mother. Or I’d over-eat without restraint, another addictive behavior that would do me in. I knew that deep down inside me was a big fat guy who would gladly cast me aside on his way out. Hell, he’d kill me to get out.

Alcohol, on the other hand, I could always handle. Abby spoke again, accusingly.

“Wearing ugly clothes in a terrible world, with a psychiatric record, and now fat, too, because I just quit smoking when I didn’t even smoke. Thanks, Rock, you’ve changed my life.”

“Rocky,” I corrected her. She punched me in the same shoulder again. So I disjointed it. That’s one of the things I can do—a most dreadful sight. I moaned invitingly for her sympathy, but she knew I was able to do this and just told me to stop it.

“When’s your appointment for the CT scan?” I asked as I slipped the ball back into its socket.

“Forget it,” she snapped. “Forget the CT scan.”

“Aw, c’mon, you’ve got to do it or they’re going to come looking for you.”

“Why? I don’t have a brain tumor. I’ve got you instead.”

“They don’t know that. Humor them. Just do it, have it come out as normal, act complacent, and then they’ll discharge you from their care altogether.”

“I...don’t...want...to go into a big machine,” she said emphatically. “And Dr. Landry said it was just a good idea. And psychiatrists never have good ideas. Just their patients do. And they get drugged.”

“Well, it’s a better idea than shock therapy. So let’s do this ‘good idea.’”

“My appointment with him is tomorrow; I’ll try to wiggle out of that stupid scan by acting so disgustingly complacent that I’ll suggest this Manson guy should be rehabilitated. And if he does let me out of it, that’s O.K. with you?”

“Sure. I just want us to go our own merry way without interference.”

“Our merry way...”

“Well, whatever way, I’d like to put us back—I don’t know how. But I surely can’t press on with the “locals” of this society after us in all of the bad ways of this bad world or in even worse ways of worse worlds.”

“There aren’t going to be worse worlds, are there?” she reminded me.

“Of course not.” And the subject dropped, along with our shoes, which foretold that even at this early afternoon hour we were settling in for the evening.

It was surprising that during our first night back together there arose the first inkling that we wanted to re-engage in the trail-blazing venture known as sex. It turned out to be her idea and I was glad for that, for I didn’t dare be the aggressor. When it was time for bed, she chose the bedroom with the oak furniture, as the colorfest meant bad memories. It was clear that I was invited. We both needed it, so we snuggled together, feeling for each other both emotionally as well as physically. It was a time of gentle caresses. We lay on the bed fully clothed, holding each other for dear life.

“How do we do it without sliding?” she whispered. She felt so good. It was a dream re-dreamed come true.

“I’m the one who slid. You just hooked on...oh, I didn’t mean for that to sound nasty.”

“I didn’t take that the wrong way,” she said softly.

“I just won’t slide,” I continued. “I’ll just enjoy it for the unidimensional experience that it is.”

“Do you think you can live with the disappointment?” she asked, and it took me a split second before I guessed she hadn’t really taken that the wrong way either.

“I’m teasing,” she said, so that I could be certain.

“We’re O.K.,” I said, referring back to the dangers of risking sex again, “unless you’ve learned to slide, too.”

“No,” she answered, holding me more tightly, intertwining her legs with mine.

It was a pretty safe deal, but to take absolutely no chance at all meant no sex at all, and at this point abstinence was out of the question, as I wasn’t thinking with my brain.

No walls changed colors. Even in this unhappy world there was some happiness that night, I thought. And that just about made it alright about this place.

When we awoke the next morning we snuck our eyes open to search around for any telltale signs of deterioration. The already merciless New Orleans summer sun blasted through green-and-blue-striped curtains that aspired to being opaque, but which didn’t stand a chance. Our temperature inside was tolerable at the expense of the compressor already running continually for the day. It was almost comfortable in this world of also-rans: nearly ample bed, just about clean room, almost safe world.

And it was almost time to get up. We both lay on our backs, naked, in full view of the other’s body atop the conservative white sheets of the almost imaginative oak decor. We were darting our eyes everywhere except toward each other’s face, both of us frightened we’d see sudden acne or scars looking back. We lay in morning panic, the price we paid for evening pleasure. With great bravery, I ventured out into the danger of direct vision. My eyes met with hers and hers with mine.

I gasped at who I saw looking back. She seemed to do the same. Petrified, we heaved out whimpering denials of our predicament as we clawed away from each other, the two of us slinking to either side of the bed. I misjudged slightly and hit the wooden floor with a thud. Hit it hard. This knocked some sense into me, especially when I heard her laughing at my maneuver. My head popped up again over the side of the bed.

We weren’t different. We had just exposed each of ourselves to morning face. My hair was disheveled, giving me that sort of crazy look. Her make-up was smeared and her hair was worse than mine, so I naturally had seen wilderwoman.

We broke out in warm smiles when we each saw the other relieved by the same old face gazing in return, even if unkempt. I rubbed my knee which had taken the brunt of the impact. Coping with the pain, I pivoted my way back into bed next to her.

“We did it,” she whispered, “we had safe sex.”

“Yes,” I said and beamed back at her as the clouding of my panic-vision lifted to see her beautiful face still unchanged under the old mascara and blush. Her green eyes never closed the whole time she kissed me on my stubbly cheek, my eyes similarly checking her out—just to be sure. Such was the insurance of a wide-eyed kiss. She then sat up briskly, ready to get out of bed. I myself could have stayed there all day, which was always one of my famous, reasonable options; she finally arose first, me being the typical lazy man that I was. I just lay there, regarding her lines, poise, and naked beauty. She made no effort to drape herself in anything but just continued out of my bedroom door, down the hall, and then out of sight. It reminded me of Ana’s promenade when I had first seen her on the beach, except that this was in reverse. I enjoyed this aspect just as much. A moment after she was hidden from my ogleview, I heard the shower water begin. I could also hear the grating turns of the alternating rusty faucets as the temperature was adjusted, occasionally accented by a clanging pipe in the wall behind my headboard.

As she returned, one hand dripping water from satisfactory warmth assessment, she put on an impatient frown.

“Are you going to join me in the shower, or what?” she asked. When one is dating, I’ve always postulated, one is always ready for co-ed showering. It is the very nature of dirty people with dirty minds.

I held her hand, the wet one; and so we walked side-by-side. This made our stroll to the bathroom somewhat awkward, as the width of the paneled dark hall hardly afforded the breadth of two people at the same time. As we entered the small, ceramic-tiled bathroom, the steam had already converted it into a misty world. This was very strange, because although all I may have looked like to her was me, my features somewhat hazy through the humidity, she on the other hand could have been any of the Anas/Avas/Abbys. I strained to look at her through our cloud for the reassuring nose I had grown to depend on. But then I pretended for a moment, as if seeing—as if about to shower with—Ana, my first encounter with the girl of my dreams. I suppressed this infidelity as I reached for Abby and held her. She nudged me out of my embrace with her, which suggested our move to the tub that was the floor for our shower. We were mindful of our step, because the tub, although modern, did not have a textured bottom. The water was perfect.

Cleaned and overcleaned in frothy foolishness and fun, we practiced safe sex again until the hot water failed. At that point, the cold shower did what it did best.

We each carefully stepped out, helping the other.

“That was fun,” she said to me.

“Yea, it really was. Good, clean fun, yessiree. Boy, you know, I think I’m already dirty again.”

“Get dressed,” she commanded. She grabbed my hand and led me back to the bedroom.

We dressed together. The clothes were almost stylish. She wore a beige blouse and a skirt of red and brown plaid. I was reduced to wearing a silly orange jump suit with a long zipper down the front. It wasn’t flight school surplus, either—it was fashion!

“Abby?” I called to her softly.

“Yes, Ace,” she answered, regarding my attire. Her response was sharply articulated, which was in contrast to my gentle tone. She snapped to attention and saluted. “What time does your sortie leave, sir?” I looked myself over, up and down, unable to deny the paramilitary theme. I stifled my amusement, even though I realized she was a pretty funny girl.

“What—” I said, running my hand on the zipper from my neck to my crotch, “Is my flyyyyyyyy open?” I laughed at my own joke as she walked toward me and embraced me. I could tell that she loved that I made her laugh, too.

“What was it, baby?” she finally addressed me seriously, whispering into my ear. “What did you want to tell me?”

“I’d like to go with you to Dr. Landry’s.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she warned. She pulled a little away from my ear to look into my eyes as she spoke. “You saw the look he gave you. You know how he must feel about you, leading me astray as you have.”

“Well, then I think it’s about time he learned to accept me. We don’t know how long you’re going to be tied up with this business, and I think I should start, at the very beginning, to go with you. Unless, of course,” I paused for the effect of caution, “you wish to go anywhere in this world alone.” She looked back at me. I knew by her expression that I had made my point.

“You’re right. Of course,” she agreed, “I don’t want to go anywhere here alone.”

We took Abby’s car, now a green Volvo station wagon. The luggage rack carried mysterious cargo that was covered with a dusty brown tarp. Abby said she wasn’t interested in what lay under it, for she feared the embarrassment of what her former self here might be hauling around. It was strung up pretty well, preventing me from stealing a peak, since we were rushed for time.

Dr. Landry’s office was in the hospital itself. St. Luke’s was a monstrously large urban place, a multi-storied collection of haphazardly connected wards, halls, and storage areas. In past layers it was more colorful, friendlier. But this was distasteful, like bad medicine. By standing there and looking right up its front you could tell which parts were added to which parts at different times by the differing gray scales of its components; parts added not as merciful expansions, but as begrudged catch-up necessity. It must have loomed ten stories over Claiborne Avenue, surrounded, like a noose, by a fortuitous superimposition of several overlying near-miss interstate ramps. Claiborne Avenue was a good place to put this hospital, because this street, known as “crack-up alley,” was famous for its car wreck rate. St. Luke’s, I’m sure here, as in past worlds, boasted one of the largest trauma centers in the Southeast.

But this version was also an anachronism, as it still held psychiatric rooms in a hospital center which was mainly for illnesses of the body. The psychiatric service here had apparently not yet followed the chic wave of progress by isolating itself in specialized suburban centers that grew beautiful trees as well as beautiful minds that. I guess that’s just the way it was in this world.

“O.K.,” she rehearsed out loud for my benefit, “I was depressed because you and I broke up, and then I externalized my disappointment with you to the whole world. How’s that sound?”

“How the hell do I know?” I said. “But I think shrinks love all of that talk about externalizing and projecting stuff onto others and all. Hell, try it. The worst thing he could do is make you take that scan.”

The tarp flapped in the wind as we drove. I was the one doing the driving. On the right side of the road I might add. That was different but do-able. Her calm from her careful rehearsal slowly became replaced by anxiety, I could tell.

“Relax,” I said, trying to reassure her, but my careless lapse in concentration was corrected when I jerked the wheel, remembering to stay right. For some time we were on Tulane Avenue going the opposite way from where we really wanted to go, because now with this “keep right” reticulation we were trapped in a “No Left Turn” impasse which the street had become. Ultimately I was able to reverse direction and seek St. Luke’s the awkward way with a series of right turns. I then was able to take my left when I cut across from a side street. It was interesting to see how Tulane Avenue had changed with my most recent slides. What used to be a Cinerama theater was now the Pussy Willow XXX Skin Flick Movie House. Even Eddie’s Burger Nirvana had changed. We passed it as we were getting closer to the turn onto Claiborne that I needed. I even saw him silhouetted through the window as we went by. It was still called “Nirvana,” but I had to figure it had been demoted in quality to at least beef limbo. Once on Claiborne, it was easy to approach the hospital—all that was needed was to aim for it. Landing there was a bit more difficult. I began and then continued to circumnavigate St. Luke’s, getting closer and closer to it each time. At one point I found myself in Colosseum traffic when I was ferreted away from the hospital toward the Superdome. It too wore grays in disagreement with its more varied hues I’ve known.

“Oh, that scan,” she grumbled. She looked up at the stoic stadium that was different to her as well. “I just want to get this finished. I want to restart life again, even here.”

This surprised me.

“Why, Abby,” I said teasingly, all flattered with myself. She squeezed my hand, which told me I was right to feel flattered.

“You can’t park here,” said the ruddy man in the black uniform who had approached us only as far as he had needed so as to be heard. He then turned away again.

“Well, why not?” I asked him, shouting from my car window. He stopped, somewhat aggravated, and then he resumed his walk back our way.

“Why not? I’ll tell you why not,” he said. I could tell by his temperament that he had been out in the sun all morning. “It’s because these places are reserved.”

“Reserved?” I asked. This was strange. I had never heard of such a thing, except for the President—people like that.

“That’s right, reserved. The doctors have to be assured they can park. Don’t you think they gotta park?”

“Sure,” I agreed, “but...”

“Rocky,” Abby suggested, “when in Reme...”

“Rome,” I corrected. “O.K., O.K., we’ll move.”

“Then thank you,” said the man. Had he been slightly more curt, I might have even thought he was being sarcastic. Now tightly nestled into adjacent St. Luke’s traffic, I drove around the block of the hospital for a few minutes until I found a parking place that seemed to go unchallenged. On the wall above the parking places we shared with other lucky patrons was a sign which read, PLEASE LOCK YOUR CAR—NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR STOLEN GOODS. “This is indeed a terrible world,” I said out loud to myself. Abby just tightened her grip on my hand in response to my observation.

“Cope,” she said. “That’s what the sane do here.”

We entered this large building via a main lobby entrance. We passed dry and overgrown former reflecting pools to get there.

Finally there were colors: I could still see that volunteerism was alive and well by noting the red and white of the Candy-Stripers. Also, we walked this somewhat friendly entrance until we found a green colored trail on the wall that read PSYCHIATRY. It was jammed together with stripes of other colors and other disciplines, but soon travelled on alone by itself as we followed its path to Dr. Landry’s clinic.

Just before opening the door, Abby gave me one last squeeze of her hand, and I returned the good-luck gesture. Upon entering the waiting area together, we stood there awkwardly, eyeing all of the possibilities for seating arrangements. I looked for any two chairs which were not near anyone looking too terribly crazy. I spotted two such seats for us and led her to them. Although the multicolored plastic chairs in this room were situated along the periphery such that all there could observe all there, I stared at nothing. I felt like I was on an elevator and was crowded much too closely with people I really didn’t wish to be near, looking at the closed doors as the floors clicked away bringing me closer to escape from this telepathic claustrophobia.

We sat for the longest time. I couldn’t believe we actually had an appointment and that we were made to wait this long. Especially in a doctor’s office. I checked the clock on the wall and sputtered when I realized forty minutes had gone by. Abby was dutifully quiet the whole time and shushed me with each of my exasperations.

“You’re the one who insisted I come, remember?” she whispered with a retributional I-told-you-so.

She was right, so I clammed up. We sat there only another additional moment when a nurse finally opened the door to invite Abby into the area beyond it.

“I’d like to come, too,” I said.

“Oh, this isn’t for the visit with Dr. Landry yet,” the nurse informed me. “This is for the urine and blood work.” She said this loudly enough for everyone to take notice. This is when I first saw all of them: I took notice that everyone took notice. Abby too, so she blushed. Now she was the one sputtering. All eyes remained fixed on her, eyes that we were sure were trying to imagine her bodily fluids in lascivious rituals. She reddened more deeply in her embarrassment. Next she dealt with the surprise of having to actually render such effects.

“Urine and blood,” she murmured to me in prosecution. “Great.” She reluctantly arose and walked toward the nurse who stood at the door of a long hallway. All of the eyes followed until the door closed behind them, leaving me alone to sit out there with, I guess, these nuts of all kinds. Imagine that! I was in this terrible world that was nuts itself and sat in a confined area with the people this world considered nuts. I’d be lucky if I didn’t get mauled—didn’t get my skin ripped off just for the fun of it. I surely hoped these fruitcakes had been taking their medicine. Anyway, I was sure Dr. Landry would find out Abby hadn’t taken hers after getting a look at the urine and blood.

(“That’s not all you haven’t been taking,” he would later say to her when we would ultimately be sitting together in front of his desk in his office.)

Out in the waiting room, I finally studied my fellow detainees. There were three middle-aged men, an elderly woman, and a young girl. It was terrible of me, but I fantasized horrifying scenarios for each of the men based on their unusual facial mannerisms and defects. Man number one had obviously been rejected by the very last woman in New Orleans before perching himself atop St. Louis Cathedral to pick off many of the others who had previously spurned him. Yes, those military tattoos told me he knew how to deliver those rounds. Man number two had obviously stabbed his mother several times because of an overcooked steak. Man number three either had killed several children or was considering it. I stopped, embarrassed by my violent imagination. Was I beginning to fit in here? Actually, not here. Certainly those crimes wouldn’t be appropriate, I guessed, for several more layers. I looked at the young girl, possibly sixteen or seventeen, pretty with black hair, brown eyes, and dressed all in black. Her brooding eyes met mine. Her wrists identified her as a cutter.

“How come you’re here?” she asked me from across the waiting room. The three middle-aged men flipped through magazine pages impatiently. The elderly woman just stared at me with a look of generalized objection.

“My girlfriend’s here,” I replied.

“Oh,” she responded. “How come she’s here?”

“She couldn’t cope with all of the terrible things in the world—but she’s much better now.”

“Oh,” she said again.

“And you?” I asked back.

“I’m troubled youth,” she answered.

“So what’s troubling you?”

“No. I’m not a troubled youth. I am troubled youth. I am one of the terrible things in your girlfriend’s world.”

“Troubled youth? Is that like being an angry young man?” I asked.

“I’m not angry. The world just sucks,” she proclaimed. Could this be another slider?

“Exactly,” I agreed to her commentary on macrocosmic suction. “Do you ever slide to different worlds?” It was a bold question, but I just had to know. In any case, they were all disturbed people here, and so boldness and outrageousness would get lost in the background.

“Yes, I slide to different worlds, but only when I do shit,” she answered.

“You do shit, do you?” This was not aesthetic. A sweet young thing, troubled notwithstanding, coprophagic?

“You know...shit,” she explained. “My drugs.”

“Oh, drugs.” Why was I relieved? “Why do you do drugs?”

“I told you. Because the world sucks.”

“Yea, but they already give you drugs here for that.”

“Not like my drugs, Mister.”

“Sounds like, then, this is an attitude problem,” I suggested naively, but boy this ticked her off.

“Up your ass, Mr. Attitude! Mr. Parent! Where’d you get your clothes, anyway? A rummage sale?”

“At least my clothes have color,” I responded.

“Black is my color,” she snapped, ever so right.

“Leave him alone, you little ingrate witch,” said the elderly woman whose face I now noticed had one side sagging. “Look at all those fancy black clothes. You’re probably a devil-worshipper, huh?”

Holy Topeka! Devil-worshipping, I thought. That was the most obscene concept I had ever heard of.

“Hey,” the girl shouted, “don’t knock anything till you know what you’re talking about.”

Jesus, I thought.

Things were beginning to get kind of rowdy as a different nurse slid open a window that looked somewhat like a confessional window. She cast a silencing glance that mysteriously made both the young girl and the old woman look into their laps, seemingly in penance.

“Are you...Rocky?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I answered, eyes wide to accept direction.

“Please walk through the door and join Miss Bentley.” That was Abby, formerly Ana Brand, formerly Ava Brantly, now Abby Bentley.

“Bye, Rocky,” the troubled youth said sarcastically with a sneer just for me when I opened the door as instructed. I stopped just long enough to give a parting shot.

“So, Morticia or whatever your name is, when you go to confession at devil worship, do you, like, have to confess all of the good things you’ve done?”

“There’s good and bad in everything,” she snapped back, almost rehearsed. “It’s the people who assign the categories, and most of them aren’t really qualified.”

“What?” I said incredulously.

“Of course it don’t make no sense,” butted in the old woman with the sagging face, “she takes drugs.”

“Good and bad drugs, I suppose.” Then, “Actually, black is the absence of color—the absence of anything. And you wear it well.” This was my final gesture to the girl before closing the door to her and to her raised middle finger. I was led down a paneled hall to a room where Abby was sitting. Her chair was one of two in front of the desk of Dr. Landry, who wasn’t there yet.

“How was it?” I asked.

“Urination I’m used to,” she complained. “Blood-letting is still a little awkward for me.” She made a face that alluded to her stomach. “I feel a little queasy, a little nauseated. I guess it was the blood.” I reached for her hand and then held it all the while as we sat in our two matching chairs at the desk. She was quiet during this time, probably just suffering from her queasiness. Her hand was a little clammy.

“I found the waiting room a little ill-tempered,” I said.

“You didn’t meet the woman drawing the blood,” she answered, pressing her hand against the Band-Aid on the bend of her arm.

Dr. Landry was very proud of his desk, it seemed. It was wood of some soft, light brown variety and spotlessly clean, not a misplaced paper in sight. The desk calendar that served as blotter sat unblotted. To the right of it was the black multi-line telephone, a couple of the buttons blinking gratuitously as they always seem to be doing on multi-line telephones. To the left of the large central calendar was a jointed double picture frame. I reached over Abby to grab it.

“Rocky! Don’t!” she cautioned. Undaunted, I looked at both of the five-by-sevens in it. In one was a picture of an attractive brunette woman’s face. She wore kind of a perfect model’s smile, her hair was picture-perfect, and the lighting was perfect as well, indicating a professional photographer’s work. Dr. Landry’s subject, captured in this way, was probably just as perfect in this picture as the face that had originally come with the frame. The other picture was definitely a snapshot. It was Dr. Landry, falling to the autumnal leafy ground under the weight of four of (apparently) his laughing children, all boys.

“Dr. Landry doesn’t seem to live in such a terrible world, does he?” Abby asked rhetorically, hopefully. I replaced the double picture frame on the desk. We sat quietly.

He finally came in about ten minutes later. This was the first time I was able to get a good look at him. I had only seen him briefly when Abby had been discharged that time. The discharge was to my care, so it was, for him, under doubtful circumstances. Now, however, he looked more accepting. He was a light-skinned man, tall—about six-two—and his demeanor was learned: he sat behind his desk and cupped his authoritative hands together on his calendar mat and studied us with dark eyes through his thick glasses. We waited for him to start.

“I saw you once when Abby had been discharged, Mr. Reber,” he finally said after a time. Mr. Reber—that was me. “So you’re her Svengali.”

“Hardly,” I answered, whatever a Svengali was, which I figured couldn’t be nice. My tone wasn’t threatening or defensive—more or less an amused tone. A nice tone. An un-Svengali tone.

Abby gave her rehearsed speech:

“I know living life, as it is, is tough, and that things are always changing. But Ralph—I mean Rocky—well, I owe him an apology. I guess I kind of made it sound like he was the cause of my thought disorder; but Dr. Landry, it was me.”

Hell, I was convinced, the way she used her hands when she spoke. I made myself look contrite. Dr. Landry leaned back in his tall, leather swivel chair, interested to hear more. She continued.

“If anything, he’s helped me see things right. I’m better, really. I don’t think I need that brain scan.”

Dr. Landry just looked at both of us, his fingers intertwined in a prayer-like gesture on his desk top. He was apparently holding back something. Finally he began.

“You’ve apparently been feeling so good about things that that’s why you stopped taking your anti-depressant.

“Is that O.K.?” Abby asked guiltily. “I must tell you I’m spiritual, religious, and put my faith in God.” She was good.

“The anti-depressants aren’t all you stopped taking,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked, worried.

“You know, Abby,” he circumvented, “you’re right. This world does suck.” I thought of Miss Black-out in the waiting room. “So you’re religious,” he said. She was taken aback somewhat by this sudden stab into personal territory. She obviously thought her comment would be just the icing on the cake.

“I guess everyone is a little bit,” she replied.

He paused, looked up, and then sighed. His eyes drifted slowly back down to meet hers, but focused on a point way past her. He then spoke to this distant point of convergence. I imagined that he was looking down all of the layers through all of the Abbys who were in his line of fire.

“I’ve never been able to figure out why there are so many terrible things in this world—I mean, if you’re religious. A wonderful God, I would think...” He had trouble expressing these thoughts. “...how could He allow so many terrible things. I don’t know if I have the answer, but I’ve certainly rationalized a way to look at it. I think that perhaps most people don’t see the truly beautiful things happening or co-existing alongside the terrible things. I think they all balance out. I think that maybe all of the things in this world, the good and the bad, are both important and unimportant at the same time. That’s the only way I can reconcile the possible existence of a benevolent supreme being along with the malevolence He seems to ignore. Otherwise, I’d have to be an atheist. I’m glad you have such faith.”

Abby’s case must have had a big impact on him. It must have made him do some thinking, for he certainly waxed philosophical.

“Maybe every bad thing has a good version of itself elsewhere,” I said, “and every good thing has a bad version, and all of that balances out.”

“Maybe so,” he said, humoring what he obviously felt was a naïve observation compared to his own uncommon introspection. “Well,” he said, the parallax suddenly snapping off, his eyes focusing on Abby, “I’m a psychiatrist—what do I know? We’re all supposed to be crazy anyway, right? Never met another psychiatrist who wasn’t.” He paused for a chuckle that never came. “I guess I try to make some sense out of this world whenever I know someone’s going to bring another child into it.”

Suddenly this was a world, exploding into existence like from the Big Bang itself. A world I couldn’t cope with.

“You see, Abby, besides discontinuing your psychotropic medication, you also stopped your birth control pills.”

I almost slid right there and then, but only the thought of triplets stopped me. So I only slid off of the chair. Abby’s question put her an immediate second, ranking herself behind baby in importance:

“Could the baby have been affected by the medicine I was given?” she asked, coolly nondisjointed by the news.

“You did stop taking it. The exposure you had would have been very close to the time of implantation. I frankly doubt that the fetus had any exposure. Of course, if you were to have any doubts, you could always terminate the pregnancy.”

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

“You could have an abortion,” he explained.

“I know what terminating a pregnancy is,” she said coldly.

“I could schedule it,” he offered.

“Does your hospital know you talk like this?” She became angry, only her amazement keeping her anger somewhat subdued. “You could lose your license for this.”

“For what?”

“For arranging an abortion, that’s what,” I interjected.

“Did you happen to miss Roe vs. Wade, Mr. Reber?” he asked me.

(Roe vs. Wade, I later learned from my Survey, was a landmark case of the Supreme Court in which a woman who was pregnant won the right to electively terminate her pregnancy, legalizing abortion. For this particular woman, by the way, the decision came too late for her to take advantage of it for her own personal plight, for she went on to have the baby. After the birth, she, as a previous birth-mother, went on to champion her feeling that she should have been able to have aborted her unwanted child at that time. It is unknown to me how the child, almost an ex-fetus, now ex-unwanted, ultimately felt about the whole thing.)

The conversation was indicative that we were in a world where women had this choice. Coming from a world where this had been taboo, like it had been (we would find out) in Dr. Landry’s world only decades or so earlier, we had to do some articulate square dancing to avoid looking to the psychiatrist like we weren’t in culture shock and that Abby was coping. We weren’t that successful. We both thought we had gotten good at looking unstartled in the midst of startling things, but pregnancy (for me)...and abortion (for Abby)...well...

“What’s the big deal?” Landry added, perplexed. “You’ve already had one abortion according to the history your aunt gave when you were admitted.”

Well, hey! I’m a sport, I thought. When in Rome, instead of in Reme...

Not Abby. At this point, she kind of deteriorated to the point that made Dr. Landry want his scan. Telling her that the person she was here, before she had gotten here, had had an abortion created a face she wore which easily showed a sudden self-love/self-hate conflict that eroded her self-worth. It was an expression of helplessness to retaliate, of confusion as to whom to retaliate against.

“I don’t want you to have a CAT scan, of course, being pregnant,” he said. He now assumed that she had no thoughts of termination. “A safer scan for the fetus would be the Magnetic Resonance Imager.”

“An MRI…” she asked in blank monotone.”

“Yes.” He then went on to explain it. And then he went on to schedule it.

The drive home was kind of tense. Not because she was pregnant, but because I started all of this crap about how we were in this world now and should think about things the way things are thought about here if we were to fit in, even if it meant as alien a concept as abortion. I said all of this partly to make her feel better about this Abby’s past history and partly because I meant it, because I really was a sport, because when in Rome...

“Where should we draw the line,” she asked, “to fit in this world.

Well! Good point. “I cope until I couldn’t cope anymore,” I answered, “and that was where I draw my line.” The lines in the roadway, on the other hand, were meant to keep me on the right side, and I responded to them with the necessary swerves.

When we parked in the lot at my apartment building, I noticed that the tarp was gone from the roof of the wagon. There were just some cut ropes which had been the fasteners. Abby went on ahead of me, actually sort of ignoring me. I looked above the car. The luggage rack was metal, slightly rusted, causing it to buckle against the top a bit. A couple of leaflets were caught in the space created by this warping, leading me to believe this was the cargo. Apparently the former Abby here was involved in some sort of political activities. I removed one of the leaflets, battered a bit from the wind of our returning home. It was actually a small placard announcing a speaking engagement for one Thomas Greally. He was described as “an Exclusionist to set our times right again.”

An Exclusionist? I asked myself. Couldn’t be good. I removed the few remaining pieces of propaganda and stashed them into a nearby trash can. I entered the elevator reluctantly, aiming for my apartment sheepishly; I knew Abby was in a mood. When I walked in, she didn’t even look up from the dinette table from where she was reading. She was reading my book, my Survey.

As she spent the rest of the afternoon with it, I spent my afternoon and into the evening napping, a prisoner of the distance between us. We went to bed together, but still—distance. That evening she fell asleep very quickly, but I lay awake for hours, thanks to my napping earlier. We were in the French provincial bedroom—she had retired there without explanation, and I had obediently followed her. She tossed and turned all that night; I know, because I was awake for most of it. Finally, when my time came, I was comatose.

That night she had a terrible dream. She woke up screaming and then began beating me—fists in the head in my dead sleep, flailing arms, the whole lot. She was hurting me.

“Stop!” I shouted in hypnotic confusion. The pelting continued. What was happening? I had no perspective, halfway between sleep and awake, floundering to make sense while being beaten.

“You!” she shouted back. “You bastard! You’re the one who can go to Hell!”

I was wrapped in sheets, having turned in my sleep many times in the same direction accidentally creating a papoose restraint, a sitting duck for her punches, clawing, and grasps. I felt every knuckle that hit my head and every slap to my face. I fought at my swaddling bed linens ferociously and finally succeeded in getting my arms free from my concentric handicap. I encircled Abby’s tornado of arms and locked her in.

“Abby, please,” I strained.

“No, no,” she cried, trying to cast me off. She had dreamed she had the baby, a very beautiful one. “So beautiful,” she said angrily. She couldn’t hit me, so she struck me with her words. “So beautiful, in fact, that I forced myself into that piece-of-shit Dr. Landry’s office and spit him while I presented my child to him.” She calmed a little. “That showed him.”

There is a frail beauty in nurturing. And especially frail is the nurturing between mother and child. I could feel something, this nurturing as it would turn out, when I clasped her, stifling her flying fists. And her dream showed me the violent desperation that can result from this exquisite frailty being violated, a delicate strength that always lays unsnapped and wary, guarded with a mammalian trigger finger. And I loved her so much upon hearing of her dream, and I loved also our unborn child so much. She could tell. Sportsmanship was dead.

“Long live our child,” I said lovingly, and this made everything alright for her. It was me she began to nurture, cooing to my bruises.

“‘Look at the beauty,’ I told him. ‘Look at the perfection.’ And he just sat there, oblivious. ‘Look at the uninterrupted process, my own continuation forever. You see,’ I told him, trying to make him appreciate the miracle, ‘I’ve reproduced.’ I was triumphant, but he just laughed.”

“It was just a dream,” I consoled her. “I’m here with you all the way.”

“He called me stupid. Actually, he said ‘styupid.’ He got up from his big chair behind his big desk, but they got smaller as he got bigger. He grew more menacing, which I guess was the actual aspect that was larger than life. And then he laughed louder, showing pointed teeth—y’know like in vampire movies.”

“Just a dream. Just a dream.”

“No wait. I think this is important. You need to hear this.”

“O.K., sure.”

“Suddenly, the weight of my baby in my arms was gone. And then I heard a slam on the floor. Dr. Landry stomped his foot hard on the dirty wooden floor at the same time as the thud that fired through my heart. It added a scary uncertainty to the sound, like when phoney wrestlers stomp on the mat to embellish the sound of a body slam. I screamed.”

“I remember.”

“I could hardly bring myself to look at what lay at my feet.”

“Please, Abby, just a dream.”

“And then he laughed even louder at the whole scene, staring holes through me the whole time, daring me to look down. I did, I looked down. I forced myself. I braced myself for horror, for a sickening sight.”

“Please, sweetie, stop.”

“No. I looked,” she cried. She rolled over on her back, looking blankly at the ceiling.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.

“There’s nothing to tell. There was nothing there! There was no baby!”

“Well, there is,” I reassured her.

“No baby, Rocky, like there had never been one.” She paused, sniffled. “Like there had never been one.”

“Well, there is,” I repeated.

“Our baby was gone. Then there was this clairvoyance, a merciless insight that told me what happened. Our baby was aborted in this world, after all. It survived only in the worlds it went on to exist in—the very nasty direction you say we’re going in.” Staring emptily at the ceiling all this time, she now turned to look me in the eye. “And somewhere at the end of the line we have inadvertently sent our child sliding to Hell.”

“That’s crazy. A crazy dream. Reality is what’s now. And what’s now is we’re together, all three of us.” She smiled and then hugged me firmly.

The next morning, purged of her doubts in me, I heard her singing, almost under her breath, as she dressed from her dismal wardrobe:

Rocky and Abby sitting in a tree

K-I-S-S-I-N-G

First comes Mellaril

After we’re a pair

Then Dr. Landry and

Pre-natal care.

It was like nothing unusual had happened earlier in the middle of the night. She was so happy to still be pregnant after one day. She cruised through a light cereal breakfast, and then we enjoyed each other’s company on the way to the big magnet test.

Well I was ready to marry her right there and then, her so happy and all. It was me! I thought. I made this difference. I encompassed all that she was and was to be, and I likewise was enchanted by all of the future joys that we would grow into together. I could sense a whole life yet to be shared and having been shared, too. After that dream she felt complemented in her life by me—more than just support; almost a feeling of joint vindication, of victory in a world with a lot of losers. There was no more anger over being hijacked here; this world was now family—child in tow.

The world we stepped out into.

The red tape in this layer was some red. I will spare you the needless drudgery it would take to tell the story of how we finally made it into the area that was to be our green room for the big show known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Abby made a joke, saying she was kind of curious as to why the cars from the parking lot weren’t stuck to the side of this little square building that held all of this magnetism.

“How come, smart guy?”

“Do you expect someone who became summa cum laude by sliding to where everyone was stupider to know everything?”

I mentioned green room. I swear, it was just like that, like we were getting ready to go on stage or on a talk show. They even had this guy come in to “warm us up.” We all introduced ourselves.

The guy was really husky, in his forties. Almost overweight but not. Like I said, husky. A more pleasing face, though, I’ve never seen on a husky guy, and his voice matched. His was a baby-face, although distinguished at the same time. He certainly was a very nice antithesis to a very lousy world. We both seemed attracted to him in a building that had its own magnetism.

“Hello, Miss Bentley,” he said in his pleasing voice. “I have your medical chart here.” He sat and paged through it. Abby showed only minor embarrassment over someone else knowing she had been in the nuthouse. At least all this character could know was that she, at one point, just couldn’t cope; she had never admitted sliding to Dr. Landry or to anybody else.

“Is the reason you’re having magnetic resonance and not the CT scan because you’re not going to have another abortion?” he asked as affably as a person could ask. (You have to understand our way of thinking to understand the reaction to this very pleasant gentleman. We came from layers where talk like this meant dead babies and stuff like that. We’d often react inappropriately, the way we’d react to what we’ve been used to.)

“Fuck you,” Abby said to the very pleasant gentleman. She said it fairly pleasantly, though.

Me? I was kind of stunned, I guess, by this reaction. I had only expected disapproval. His reaction to her salutation was even more puzzling.

“Yes, I know the thought of that may seem wrong to you,” he said.

“Sure is,” she answered, not swayed by his pacifying tone.

“Well, let’s just get set up. Here, slip this on and I’ll come back and get you.”

I have to admit, I was ready to “get” her myself as I watched her “slip that on.” I felt guilty—my desiring her like that. With all of this tension, the self-gratifying in me pushed aside any caring and appropriateness, and I didn’t like recognizing how wrong this was. It was almost as if I were getting some perspective on my lecherous inner core. Momentarily rescued by this insight, I dismissed my private lewdness rather than acting upon it, which I almost did, by stroking her waist lustfully in the guise of affection. I kept my restraint private; after all, she was very upset, having been reminded that the “Abby” of this layer had had an abortion.

And where was that Abby? Had she been ducked here or there, like a piston, ready to resume her original position as soon as the space were to be voided again by Ana/Ava/Abby’s sliding on down the line? Or had she been permanently pushed into a direction forever. If so, was she sliding insidiously to a worse layer where even she would be shocked by what she were to find; or to a better layer where she is cruder, stupider, and generally has just a plain ol’ bad attitude? Could this be true of anyone with a bad attitude? Are there then countless people who slide and of them, how many know it?

“One last question, Miss Bentley,” the MRI technician said to her as she lay in state, her North Pole about to meet her South Pole. “You claimed to have not been able to cope with ‘this world’; could this be you’re from another world and kind of pass from one to another?”

I heard him ask her this. How the hell did he know that? Maybe she had mentioned it to someone (each of us thought), prompting nice guy MRI tech to take a poke of fun at her. Maybe he was some closet shrink med school reject showing his morbid curiosity of thought disorder. Regardless, it was none of his damn business, and she apparently wanted to make sure it was not entertained (or entertaining) further.

“No. Just boyfriend problems,” she answered truthfully, in a way.

“Well, then, I guess it’s O.K. to begin the test,” he said as he walked to his console of buttons and screens.

His name was John Fitzsimmons. He had been employed here at least six years, or at least that was the date on his picture ID, whose pin was used to secure it to a cork board to the right of his console. He sat at this control center overlooking the chamber itself through a glass window above it. I stood to his back watching his technocracy in action, but I could see Abby, too.

“Does it hurt?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied, tight-lipped so as not to move.

“Then why are you crying?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, this time moving her lips.

“Please don’t talk to her,” Mr. Fitzsimmons requested.

She realized she might be able to see her baby. From where I could watch, she slowly composed herself throughout the duration of the scan. She actually came to be quite cheerful by its conclusion. The change was dramatic. Her cheer ended abruptly, however, when she was informed of the price she’d have to pay for this thing.

Mr. Fitzsimmons had escorted us down a corridor of many doors that ultimately ended in a cubicle. He had led us to a flat-affect type to arrange payment and lingered, as a courtesy, to make sure we were treated alright.

“How much did you say for this magnet thing!” Abby exclaimed.

“$650.00,” muttered the mutterer, repeating the price. She was a dull-looking woman, non-descript, as dull as this muttering that leaked out of her.

“Well how much was the CAT scan Dr. Lambert made me skip?”

“Landry,” the mutterer corrected, almost distinctly.

“Whoever,” Abby said back.

“The CAT scan is $275.00, the Magnetic Resonance is $650.00.”

“Shit!” she exclaimed. “I told him it didn’t make no difference to me only as long as the cost was the same.”

“It isn’t,” the muttering continued.

She pointed her finger at the mutterer who couldn’t have cared less. “I told him,” she spoke firmly—emphatically—that I’d’ve aborted the goddamn little bastard if it could have saved me this much.”

Huh? On how many levels did this not make sense! And from her! From my Abby! Unless—

I instinctively felt myself for any residual vibrations, which was stupid since doing this was only symbolic. I was checking for sliding. Did I slide? Did I slip? Did I come to the next layer where Abby was...different?

“Why don’t we bill Miss Bentley,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said to the cashier, who passively obliged the suggestion since it immediately made her life simpler. “Uh, Mr. Reber, may I speak to you in private, please?” he asked me.

“Why?” Abby quipped, turning to Mr. Fitzsimmons. “Did you see something on your expensive scan I need to know?”

“Mr. Reber, please,” he urged me.

I looked at Abby and then back at Mr. Fitzsimmons. I motioned it was alright to her with a gesture of my hand as I walked off with him.

“Can’t even get my name right!” she exclaimed to the furniture in the cubicle who was the non-descript woman as she eyed the invoice being prepared. “This pregnancy’s already cost me too much,” I heard her say. “Better set me up with Family Planning. They’ll know what to do.”

Confused, Mr. Fitzsimmons led me into an office; actually, it was another cubicle, even smaller, only large enough for a small desk. We sat across from each other, both our backs up against walls. Before he spoke I noticed his diplomas on the wall: High school—summa cum laude, School of Radiology—the Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen Award for Excellence in Radiological Technology.

Smart guy, I thought. I wondered if my summa cum laude could beat up his summa cum laude? And maybe this pair of summa cum laudes could figure out Abby’s behavior, because I really didn’t remember sliding.

“Why didn’t she tell me?” he demanded. “Why didn’t she let on before getting into the Magnetic Resonance Imager?” He seemed quite disturbed—and guilty, too, with that look on his face like he’d just hit a small dog on the road.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me she was a true exister.” Now what on Earth was this guy yapping about? “Were you, in fact, aware of her capabilities?” he asked.

“Like what?” I answered sarcastically.

“She has the ability to live in many different worlds, you know.”

“Sliding!”

“Sliding?”

“Sliding,” I reiterated. “Going to another layer, slightly different and, judging how things have been lately, slightly more horrible.”

“Yes!” he shouted. “Yes. That’s why a lot of us true existers have stopped here,” he said, “refusing or afraid to go any farther.”

“True exister, true exister—what is a true exister? What are you talking about? Is a true exister a slider?” I asked him.

“I would think so. Most of us prefer the term—”

“‘Most of you’? How many are there? I thought I was alone.”

“Mr. Reber, I thought Miss Bentley was the true exister, or slider, as you call it.”

“No sir, it’s me. She just hooked on for a ride.” I paused. “Unfortunately for her,” I added.

“Hooked on?”

“That’s personal to you, fella, O.K.?”

“Ah, yes,” he said; he knew. “You mean sex.”

“I mean love,” I corrected.

“You mean sex,” he further countercorrected. “Well,” he added with a more conciliatory intonation, “sex plus love, I guess. But you need the exertion. A true exister can take anyone along with orgasm.”

“If they’re in love,” I insisted. He made a face like he didn’t really know. I knew, though. “Oh, God,” I exclaimed, “I can’t believe I’m talking with this total stranger about my orgasms!” Mr. Fitzsimmons suddenly stood up and towered over me, putting his hands on my shoulders, which I guess he felt was necessary for a more assertive and direct address.

“This is important!” he sternly reprimanded me, his voice slightly raised. I knocked his arms away with a single swiping out of my own arms.

“Get your hands off of me, please,” I ordered him. “You’re damn right it’s important—important to me, too,” I said when he fell back into his chair.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

It meant, of course, that I had been right with that crack to Ana that she could slide with me only during climax, the famous comment that started my life of regrets when she became the estranged Ava and then the mental patient Abby. It also explained why Ava had slid with me that night. I wondered if just anyone could slide with love and the physiologic exertion that states it so well.

“But only a true exister can drag someone else along,” he continued, still on his roll. I was getting more irritated by this time, listening to this banter on one level, trying to understand what I had just heard come from Abby on another.

“Explain what just happened, please,” I demanded.

“About your girlfriend’s change of attitude about abortion?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m getting to that. Please have patience.” He sighed, collecting his thoughts.

“All right,” I agreed. He seemed relieved.

“As I was saying, a true exister can take someone along,” he repeated.

“That is, if he or she is in love right back,” I said, loyal to my conviction, perhaps saying things just to make me feel good. My tone was still somewhat harsh. He made that uncertain face again, but he had given me an answer as to whether just anyone can do it.

“A true exister,” he went on further, “may just not notice because people don’t wise up to the danger they put their lovers into until they get to worlds that have really changed.”

“In this direction, you mean.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well I noticed,” I argued. He didn’t answer. “They don’t notice the name changes?” I finally asked.

“Name changes?” he asked.

“Yea. Name changes. My name has changed almost every time.”

“I’ve never noticed before. It’s never happened to me,” he said, now wrinkling his face in puzzlement.

“Aw, c’mon, man, not just your own name, but a lot of people’s names. Some stay the same, but a lot change slightly.”

“I tell you it’s never really happened that I remember.”

“How many layers have you slid through?” I asked him, pressing my point.

“I have truly existed through probably thousands.”

“And no name changes?”

“No.”

“Well then, we haven’t arrived at this layer from the same direction,” I surmised.

“Oh, we’ve come from the same direction,” he explained, “we just haven’t been on the exact same track.”

I was calmer.

I was interested. Not by the challenge of our disagreement in the subtleties of sliding theory, but by the fact that I finally had met another bona fide slider. I had thought I was unique. I mean Abby didn’t count; her ability was acquired, actually parasitic (symbiosed sexually with me). But here was a real one. And he said there were others!

I was beginning to neglect the startling spectacle of Abby’s complete turn-around. This was selfish of me, but this guy was a slider! And this was not only lucky for me, but good for her. I wondered if she should hear any of this; I wondered if there were any chance she was still the person I thought she was. I really didn’t feel any travelling going on for me, but still her ranting and raving made no sense. Maybe the cost bothered her enough to say things just to be outrageous; because she hadn’t really wanted any scan at all, and abortion was certainly out of the question for her.

I knew I had to go get her. I started to leave the cubicle, when Mr. Fitzsimmons objected.

“Where are you going?” he asked me.

“I’m going to get Abby to listen to this. I need to find out if she’s still who I think she is. If so, she’ll be so relieved.”

“And if not?” he asked.

“Then I guess I slid.”

“Don’t,” he said, one hand on my arm, eyes fixed—the whole urgency bit. I didn’t like my premonition.

“Why?” I asked with a worried tone.

“Don’t you see? Don’t you get it?”

“What?”

“You didn’t slide. Think about it. Her acceptance of the concept of abortion. Really, look what her reaction was to the thought before and after the scan. Pro-life to pro-choice or pro-choice to pro-life—doesn’t matter—a couple of hundred dollars can’t change a personal conviction like that.”

“So then how do you figure I didn’t slide, Mr. Fitzsimmons?”

“Because I’m the same, Mr. Reber.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure of anything now.

“No,” he said, “I’m afraid you’re the same, too, for me. It’s her. She accepts the concept now because she fits into this world now. It was the magnetism.”

“You mean the magnet sort of, well, aligned her to fit in?”

“No, no. Your Abby’s gone, Mr. Reber. The truly existing Abby’s gone. Say goodbye to her. The one out there fell back in when your Abby, the interloper, no longer truly existed here.”

I was so stupid!

“So now I’ve got the one who was here to begin with!” I shouted, an uproariously unacceptable reality raining all over me. “The one who has already had one abortion! The one who fits well into this terrible place! The Thomas Greally enthusiast?”

“Yes.”

“So where’s the one I arrived with? My Abby. The real one.”

“This one’s real,” he continued. “Everyone’s real. Except her...” He motioned derisively with his head to the mutterer that stood indifferently at the door. “Yes?” he challenged her, perturbed. Apparently he and the mutterer had had a running animosity for quite a while and now, and with this severe turn of events, he was in no mood to deal with her. By saying this clerk wasn’t real, he threw her the biggest insult people like us could deliver. It was true: she didn’t project the appearance of truly existing anywhere.

“Sign this...” the non-descript woman trailed off. John snatched the invoice from her hand and scribbled on it in a way much harder than necessary. He fired it back at her carelessly, but she was a good catch.

“Like I said,” he started again, re-collecting his thoughts, “everyone’s real.” He stopped until he was sure the mutterer had squirmed away. “It’s just that people like you and me—and now your girlfriend—well, we have the perspective of true existence.” But this didn’t answer my question.

“So again,” I asked more angrily, “where’s the one I arrived with?”

He paused to swallow hard. “She’s continued down this direction,” he finally said. “She’s been pushed along.”

I swallowed harder than he did.

I truly existed, I thought, but up shit’s creek: I have taken this lovely girl and dragged her with me to this God-forsaken layer. I have created circumstances for her that have given her an official psychiatric history. Now the poor pregnant thing has been sent onward to more terrible worlds. And I’m stuck with a seedy version of her in this seedy world.

“I’ve got to go after her,” I said to John Fitzsimmons. “I will slide until I find her. What did that magnet do? Tell me what it did.”

“Why do you think I asked her about it before? This thing is so dangerous to true existers. I ask everybody. I disguise the words, but regardless, something will sound crazy. I make a fool out of myself to try and save that rare person.” He was talking to himself as much as to me, flinging his parallel hands in the air which emphasized his martyrdom.

“O.K., O.K. Lighten up. She faked you out. So what? She thought you were making fun of her or something. We’ve got a runaway slider on the slick track of true existence, so tell me about the magnet so I can go get her.”

Just then Dr. Landry walked in. He couldn’t come in too far, because John and I took up most of the room in the cubicle. “Abby’s out there, Mr. Reber,” the doctor said. “She wants to know what’s going on.” He waited for an answer. He didn’t wait long. I considered Abby’s replacement.

“Shit on her,” was my answer. Dr. Landry was stunned.

“I heard that, you son of a bitch,” she told me, storming in as far as she could. Boy, was this weird: fighting with someone I was in love with elsewhere. I felt involved and detached at the same time, almost like an out-of-body experience—love in an out-of-body experience, hate in an out-of-love experience. I cared and at the same time I didn’t care about her feelings which I was certainly hurting. Now, after a lengthy glare, this Abby, continuing the legacy of Anas and Avas, stormed out. Gone. The old fashioned way.

Dr. Landry just looked at me, still astonished. The loving couple he had seen, so enthralled with the prospect of a child, were acting no less callously to each other than double-crossing comrades in crime. He had heard my profanity directed at her, and then her calling me a son of a bitch.

“I agree with her,” he told me, and then he walked out.

John was angry. “I told you she is real. You may not be in love with that one, but she has feelings, too. She has the right to perceive her existence.”

“Without perspective?” I seethed.

“I’m getting ready to agree with Dr. Landry,” he told me.

Now we were all incensed. And now it was me who put my hand on his arm.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “Please, tell me about this magnet.”

He had stood up with the arrival of Dr. Landry. He now sat back down again and put his elbows on his desk, hands at his chin.

“The magnet lines up all of the atoms in your body North and South. One direction. This is how it can scan. You can’t understand because you didn’t do all of the training I did,” he said, stopping suddenly, again losing some composure.

I thought his explanation was going pretty well, actually. After his fluster, he continued.

“Perfectly safe for everyone except true existers. Sliders, as you put it. With them, it pushes them, and very forcefully, perhaps through many worlds, perhaps thousands.” He paused, almost waiting for a reaction.

I was very quiet, very attentive. This was an acceptable reaction and he resumed.

“I have personally stopped dozens of true existers from this fate, simply because they caught my hint. They realized what I was asking before they had been in the magnet for too long. Once that connection was made, we could confide in each other.”

Dozens of sliders. Could this explain the imbalance in the world between the haves and have-nots? I had certainly gotten to where I was financially because of it.

“So tell me what I should do. Should I just slide away until I find her among a series of doubles? Do I climb into that thing to get the same push? What?”

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“Some technologist you are,” I snapped. “Come on! You won the, uh,” I read his plaque, the “Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen Award for Excellence in Radiological Technology.”

The guilty look of a face about to confess descended on him. “I had to slide dozens of times before I won that at convocation,” he admitted.

This evoked a halfway grin from me, which was about as far as he was going to get in the way of placating me. Still looking guilty about his diploma, and I know what that’s like, he made a quick cryptic phone call, said something about a real one, and then answered, “Maybe,” to whomever he had called. He then hung up and scribbled down an address and phone number.

“Be at my place at eight o’clock,” he said, delivering the note with a slap into my hand. “I’ll have another person there who’s very experienced. Maybe he’ll know.”

Since Abby had the car, I took a bus back to my apartment. I had been good and waited the few minutes for it according to the unchanged schedule. I studied the faces that sat in this old vehicle with me. I wondered what the faces of these people were like in the world Abby had landed in, and this haunted me. Like the skinny man with the dark circles under his eyes. He could be a very bad person, I thought. And then I looked again. No, he really could be a very good person. I studied the others. I turned them all around in my head, but they themselves didn’t change at all.

When I had arrived back at my place I found that the new Abby had been there. She had packed a lot of her things and had taken off with her car. This bird had flown. I painfully survived away the few hours till my meeting with John’s “experienced person.” I lay longingly in French provincial, the last style I had been in with Abby. Eight o’clock couldn’t come fast enough. I rehashed John’s dissertation on sliding, on true existence. I showered in my tub where Abby and I had frothed that morning, and so I missed her. I was ready earlier than I needed to be, but I didn’t want to waste time on the front end. Maybe I’d walk to John’s. I snatched the paper with the address off of the kitchen counter after I had dressed. No more jump suits, or even overalls, I settled for blue jeans and a white cotton dress shirt.

The address was on Burgundy Street in the French Quarter. I could walk it, I supposed, but I had trouble asking my body to do what car engines did better. I hailed a cab outside of my building with no trouble at all. I hadn’t eaten supper, and only now did I notice my hunger. I was too nervous, I agreed with myself, to eat, and getting to John’s early would make more sense.

John’s apartment was fairly far down Burgundy, just a few blocks from Esplanade Avenue. It was typically Vieux Carré, with ironwork, wilting balcony, and weathered weatherboard. I paid the taxi driver, tipping him well. I guess he seemed appreciative.

And so I finally found myself knocking at the door of the address John had given to me. The knocker was weighty and could only be swung against the door slowly, giving my announcement a grim reaper kind of effect. I was let in by a shadow who turned out to be John. I don’t know why this surprised me. Perhaps I expected to be welcomed in by an anonymous swing of the door, to be mesmerized into entering some sort of secret conclave within. But just plain John opened this door and shook my hand. He wore a face of purpose, which drowned out any expression that he was glad to see me. The door, a tall, dark, sticky thing of wood all bolted together with iron, opened into a red brick courtyard that seemed to focus New Orleans humidity. The source of the precipitation, a fountain, recycled water for a few large Koi that swam in a central pond showered by it. We walked around it, and I was led to steps that switched back only one time to a second floor. This is where John’s apartment was. The first floor apartment remained a mystery, because I couldn’t see any access to it, even from the central courtyard. Obviously there was a separate address out on the street.

Once in, he introduced me to an older man in his fifties, comfortably attired in, strangely enough, an orange jump suit. I could tell by his fingernails and jewelry that he only wore the jump suit to be comfortable. This man, however, looked a lot like he could have been my father. I mean a lot like him. He had that type of a resemblance. This had a spooky effect on me, my guilt over my parents hitting me like a slap in the face. Which out of the blue made me think of Ana on the beach.

I would even have said that he looked a lot like me, except that he was much older. In spite of his looking like this, there was still something about this guy that really rubbed me the wrong way—almost repulsed me. To be honest, I couldn’t stand him—and I didn’t even know why. What was even more incredible was that he seemed more disturbed by me then I was by him.

“Mr. Reber...Rocky,” John said to me, “this is my friend, Ralph Ebe.”

“Don’t get any closer!” this Ralph Ebe shouted at me, like the shrieking cartoon woman jumping on a chair when startled by a mouse at her feet.

Well, I was a junior, and this guy with the same name, or same former name, looked like me but older, and I figured...Dad? Dad of this layer, that is, I thought. But wait a minute. Wouldn’t he be Rocky, Sr., and not Ralph Ebe. I couldn’t figure.

“Dad?” I asked out loud.

“No closer!” he shouted. He was serious! The veins on his forehead swelled and every muscle in his body went rigid. This was a very frightened man. John stood between us, as if to break up a fight, and I have to admit I felt like fighting with him. Wasn’t that crazy? I didn’t even know why—just felt like there wasn’t enough room in this town for the both of us. Maybe his atoms were North-South and mine were South-North—who could know?

“I said no closer!” he shouted at me again.

“How can I, you big ass,” I screamed back in a straight line through John’s two ears.

“I’m sorry, Ralph,” John said to him. “I had no idea. I had only heard stories. I’d never expected to be part of this type of thing.”

“What thing?” I demanded.

“There he goes, John—keep him away, please,” he begged, pleaded, and prayed.

That was it. And I didn’t know why.

I went for his throat, and I still didn’t know why. When I touched him on his neck, the very first point of contact of my assault, I got a rush of primitive urges—suicidal urges, actually. Now suicide is often a well thought-out complex of depression, persecution, and martyrdom. I mean it takes even a crazy person prone to it months, often years to reach that point. But I felt it all in this split-second of contact, fully and instantly, without warning.

We both landed on the ground. I arose in my panic and darted out of John’s apartment, Ralph Ebe shrieking in terror, collapsing, then gasping flat on his back. He certainly wasn’t good ol’ Dad. No! He was me from somewhere!

I literally had burst out of John’s apartment onto the dirty street. The cement was wet with the New Orleans humidity and I slipped right onto my left hip. I bounced back up instantly and brushed off gravel and torn material from my jeans as I ran aimlessly in my senseless rage, only by luck retracing my steps the way I had come by taxi earlier. What a workout it must have been, surely my fury burning as many calories as my running. I arrived all sweaty and overheated at the fairly busy intersection of Rampart and Esplanade, the very first I had come across that was on the periphery of his neighborhood. There was a gas station there, one of those self-serve things that I found new since I had arrived in this layer. Luckily there was a taxicab driver pumping gas. I say luckily because a cab on the edge of the lower Quarter was a rarity of mythical proportions.

“Mister,” I called to him. He just looked up at me from his stooped-back position as he pumped his gasoline. I must have been a real sight, all exasperated and fatigued. He hesitated before returning my call to him.

“Yea?” he asked, like it had better be good.

“Can you take me to Riverwalk?” I asked, out of breath, puffing my words. I guess it didn’t come out to nice, being as I was in my suicidal rage.

“That’s all the way across town,” he complained, indignant over my tone. “What, you’re gonna do some shopping, are ya?”

“No, no,” I puffed, “I live in the condos there. Arnold Place on the river.”

“I was just about to get home,” he announced. “I only live a few blocks away.”

“I really need to get home, too,” I said rather desperately.

“Well, that’s your problem, isn’t it?”

“Mister, please,” I implored, “I’ll give you double your fare. I really have to get home.” He just eyed me, enticed. And then he remembered me.

“Wait a sec, pal—you were my fare just a little while ago, weren’t ya?” It was true. I now recognized him as my earlier ride to John’s. And I had tipped him well.

“Yes...yes,” I answered hopefully. “C’mon, whaddaya say?” I waited restlessly for his considered response.

“Whatsa matter, you gotta take medicine or somethin’?” he asked.

“Yea, something like that.”

Yes, I thought, I had to commit suicide, that’s what I needed. I was in no mood to take any more grief from this guy, and quite frankly I didn’t know what would’ve happened had he denied me, because I was still unravelling.

By this time, he was paying at the little window. He leisurely looked back at me, having made me wait and shake an unreasonable amount of time for the verdict.

“Get in,” he said. I did, he did, and we were off.

I perspired profusely in the taxi. And the question was, once again, why was I actually planning my suicide?

Within a few blocks of John’s place my plans to do myself in were brutal and graphic—gun in the mouth, jumping out of this cab into the on-coming and unforgiving traffic, stepping off of a large building. Farther away, the plans mellowed, to “almost” killing myself: plans that could never be serious attempts but would sure make ’em sorry. Make who sorry? By the time I got home, I was prepared to do no more than resign the day and go to bed.

Out of the danger of imminent self-destruction, I repositioned my thoughts. I was all wrong about Ralph Ebe. There wasn’t enough room in this whole layer for the both of me.

The cab driver was obviously annoyed when I didn’t tip him after paying him twice what his meter read. He just looked at me with a sneer.

“What do you expect?” I asked him. “I gave you double, after all.” He rubbed the bills together in one hand, looked at them, and then back at me.

“Yea, right, buddy,” he said snidely. “Get in my cab again, and I’ll give you the ride of your life.”

“Hardly likely,” I retorted under my breath as I walked away from him and approached the entrance of my apartment building. I was finally home. I was finally calm. I took the elevator up without even noticing my movements, entranced by the emotional rushes of the last few minutes. I entered my apartment, glad that my suicidal tendencies were over, since it was six floors up.

With suicide firmly behind me, I called John’s number; he had written it on the same piece of paper as his address. After about a dozen or more rings, he picked up.

“Hello,” he said nervously. In the background I could hear walkie-talkie-like chatter and a lot of commotion.

“John,” I said, “look, I’m really sorry, really. I don’t know what came over me. I know that’s a cliché, but really, it’s—Man! What’s all of that noise? Is everything O.K.? Is Ralph Ebe there still?”

“He’s here,” John said. “The ambulance is taking him to the morgue. The police are here and are waiting for me to finish answering their questions.” His tone was matter-of-fact, the way it was supposed to sound to anyone there who would be paying his conversation attention.

Suicide may have been firmly behind me, but the thought of murder was firming my behind. I tightened all sphincters and nervously hung up on him, I’m sure to his feigned polite goodbyes thereafter.

Oh, shit! I thought. He was dead. What the hell was this? John would certainly send the cops straight my way, I figured. Or would he? His tone was protective in trying to prevent the cops from noticing anyone else’s involvement. But then again, how well did I know this John? He certainly wasn’t a close friend. Do I pack up and leave, I wondered, or do I stay put, or even slide? No. Things were too crazy.

It could always be worse.

I stayed put. I lay on my bed in my color-splash room, waiting for the pounding on my door. I lay there palpitating and waited and waited, my mind whirring in a confused manner, and then in a gradually heavy manner, until I was almost asleep.

Ah, to float along the ceiling.

Of all nights, that night I finally felt success with the mental exercise I routinely performed in that middle zone between wakefulness and dozing, an exercise I did by habit even in this trying time. Perhaps it was this trying time which seemed to give the extra push. I urged and umphed my mind ahead of my body on the way to sleep, being careful to recoil just the right amount from the threshold that would have meant falling asleep. I seemed to leave my resting body and rise higher, buoyed by the thickness of the air which was inundated by turmoil. I couldn’t believe it, finally pulling off what I had tried countless times before. It certainly felt, finally, like a successful out-of-body experience, so I went with it. As I arose, I strained to do the first thing I had always planned to do when success with this was finally mine: look at myself. I turned my head down and saw hubbub around me, and I couldn’t understand why. Certainly I should have been hovering above myself who was alone in his apartment. My vision was cloudy, so I closed my eyes and looked through my eyelids. These, almost as the ultimate lenses, provided me the pervasive vision to perceive with final clarity. The hubbub was clearly seen to be emergency medical technicians working feverishly to save my life. Were the palpitations before I drifted off that costly? There was chest pounding, there was body shocking and jolting, and there were foreign things shoved into all at the feverish pace of urgency.

Just what was the matter with me that deserved this melodrama? Did I maybe really try to commit suicide? I strained again to see any signs of injury on me. I started with the face and saw not mine. It was Ralph Ebe’s. Of course! There were the middle-aged features; there was John, Radiological awards notwithstanding, being of no help whatsoever, fluttering about in everyone’s way. This was John’s apartment and not mine!

You’d think, and I thought it, that my first out-of-body experience would be my own and not someone else’s. For this reason I ruled this a dream and not, in fact, success with metaphysics. I came down with a thud. But the mystery remained as to why I found myself in the French provincial room when I know I had drifted off in the room of colors.

What must have been several hours later the phone jolted me out of a stupor. My alarm clock did not survive my attempt to remove a receiver. In further confusion I ran to the sound of the phone as doorbell, running to the door, swinging it open, expecting the floodlights, expecting the house to be surrounded, expecting police megaphones.

Finally stupid hypnolytic me answered the real phone.

“Rocky?” it asked. It was John. “Rocky, it’s O.K.,” he said.

“You’re not mad? I mean, oh God, I think I killed your friend. I, uh...”

“It’s O.K. The police are gone. They know nothing of you. Come over now. I know it’s late, but we really should—”

“Coming,” I blurted, on my way. This time I phoned a taxi to get there. I only had to wait about ten minutes for him to arrive. And I knew this guy had to be nicer than the last.

“Don’t tell me you again!” I exclaimed to my most recent cabby. “I thought you were on your way home.”

“Sure. That’s when I was only a few blocks away from home,” he said. “Hell, man, I dropped you off and got snagged with fares around here ever since. My radio found me for you, and wouldn’t you know it, I was the only cab in the area. I wonder why. Probably because it seems I’ve revolved my whole night around you.”

“Are you going to take me?” I asked him, trying to be civil.

“Sure,” he said with an evil grin that I didn’t trust.

“How much will it cost to not get ‘the ride of my life’?” I asked him. His smile got wider, the victory his.

“Double plus tip,” he replied. I got in and he took off. This time I tipped him, keeping my end of the bargain, for I didn’t know if I’d come across him again tonight; I didn’t know how long I’d be at John’s and this character might still be in the neighborhood. But after I tipped him I regretted it. Well, it was only money, and I had lots of that.

“Five per cent?” he asked, outraged.

“Ten,” I said back. I offered him a few more dollars, and he snatched them out of my hand.

Once again, I found myself knocking at John’s door. Once again, the knocker struck slowly with the grim reaper effect, so I lightened up the actual strikes to disguise the ominous pounding. John opened the door for me for the second time tonight.

“Come in,” he offered. He looked worn out.

I walked in slowly, expecting to see chalk outlines on the floor. I stood motionless with eyes darting.

“We’re alone,” he said to me.

“Good. You’re not prone to sudden death, are you?” I asked nervously.

“No, no,” he said sadly. “Sit down. Let’s talk.” We sat on opposing floral pattern love seats that were separated by a white marble coffee table. I slumped back and landed my heels on the table. John didn’t seem to mind. With my head resting on the back of the sofa, I could see the ceiling was a good twelve feet high or so, with two fans slowly turning up there in the stratosphere of his home. The window unit I saw was apparently resting between bursts, so the fans made the only noise, but eventually fell silent as my brain faded them out, accommodating them. This made for an uncomfortable silence that he ultimately broke.

“Ralph was a good guy,” he said, “a true exister. A slider” (in deference to me).

“Did I really do it?”

“I think so. I’m not sure. I’ve heard stories from other true existers—accidentally not shoving their local existers out.”

“Out? Or onward one notch.”

“Out. We know that from comparing notes with other true existers.”

“But what about the new Abby? She called Landry ‘Lambert.’ Hadn’t she been somewhere else?”

“Hmmm,” John considered, and then the window unit air conditioner kicked on, making me jump.

“Man, did I have it wrong,” I said to myself out loud.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I thought the world around me changed. I know I had the sense of sliding to different worlds, but I placed the whole new scene around me—in relation to me. But I guess it makes more sense this way.”

“This way?” he asked.

“Yea. The world isn’t changing. It all exists. I accepted one layer at a time. Man! They’re all existing simultaneously, and so are all of the me’s, you’s, and everyone’s. And here I smoke, there I don’t.”

“You probably do want to smoke, don’t you?” he asked me.

I looked at him, goading further enlightenment. “Yea.”

“You’re a non-smoker, but there’s a little bit of the old whoever—his essence, if you will—inundating you.”

“His vibes.”

“Yes, his vibes.”

“And tell me about Ralph Ebe,” I urged. “—my name, you know, about a zillion layers ago.”

“He’s a you,” he explained.

“It’s a very good club,” I said. “Exclusive membership.”

“It’s got one less member now,” he said back, with melancholy rather than humor.

“Sorry,” I offered. My enthusiasm for answers had discarded my solemnity; I regained my mournful tone. “I really can’t explain my feelings of when we were together.” I paused a moment. “What did I do, give him a heart attack? And didn’t you know he was a me?”

“No I didn’t, frankly,” he answered. “Not for sure, anyway. He was older and the difference in age made him look different enough so that I couldn’t be sure until you were side by side.”

“And he’s dead. Why?”

“I don’t know if you gave him a heart attack or what. I know this from stories I’ve heard: When true co-existers come together, very powerful and very strange events occur. But they’re legendarily unpredictable. This time one died.”

“How come I didn’t die?”

“He must have beaten you to it,” John theorized. Now here was a thought, because I was really thinking suicidally before. I had years of crazy hit me in the head in an instant.

(I know it’s impossible to explain this well enough for one to empathize. Did you ever get your ears blocked from a cold and go weeks with blunted hearing until one day your ears pop, and you finally, once again, really hear? I mean the whole world opens up for you, and startled, you say to yourself, “So this is what life has been really like all around me.” Well that’s how I felt, but backwards. The sudden all-encompassing obtundation of suicidal psychosis is an overwhelming experience. I felt it to be so draining because I perceived it as a primitive experience, an impetus that was the most directly opposite counter-reaction to that self-serving, self-indulgent, and self-surviving id that lies in the most primitive and ancient part of the human brain. And then again, maybe I had it backwards. Maybe it was itself that primitive self-serving id. Suicide as the ultimate selfishness. Suicide that is the psychosis that gives the expression “feeling bad” a dimension only God could appreciate.

And where did God fit into all of this, I wondered. Where was God, anyway, when all of these thoughts went tip-toeing through me, by-passing my soul altogether? It was a taste of what existence would be like without the presence of God.

And I didn’t like it.

And was Ralph now with God? He dropped dead before I could commit suicide. Let’s hear it for the benefit of youth. I got farther away and, like my ears after a cold, my psyche popped; and I saw once again how life all around me really was.)

“Ralph was my best friend,” John said, not crying, but almost.

“I am truly sorry.” And I was. I was the right person at the wrong time. I think. Or something like that. “John?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“You said the magnet pushes true existers. But Abby wasn’t a true exister. She had never slid, not till she met me, that is.”

“I don’t know. There are those of us who say everyone, even the versions of us that replace us when we leave, are true existers. They say that they, too, can pass on to the next world but haven’t discovered the talent yet. There are others who say that a true exister can take someone with them if an event that is important enough at the time happens during a slide. This, of course, is a cop-out theory, since how important an event is to someone is certainly subjective. But they say that in this case they are easily susceptible to the ride; that they don’t turn into true existers, but that paths of least resistance are opened for them.” He stopped to organize a conclusion.

“Of course,” he went on, “we know the magnet does this for true existers. I suppose it can do this all the more for someone, true exister or not, whose paths have been not only opened but determined for them. You were sliding in this direction. She got sucked in. The magnet gave her a further push in a direction she was already in.”

“John,” I said, “teach me everything. I miss my Abby. I feel guilty for what happened to her, too, and I need your help. I need direction.”

“I’ll make some coffee,” he said, promising a long night.

John had heard stories of simultaneous existence and the powerful affect vicinity created, but he never knew for sure. He certainly didn’t figure death would be involved.

He had come to know several dozen sliders. He had even organized secret societies with them, had met with them covertly, and had even experimented with some of them. The experiment he told me about was when he and seven others had held hands and slid together. They had prepared themselves psychologically for weeks before doing this stunt. He appeared to grow very serious in preparing to tell the story. It was obviously an episode in his life that meant a great deal to him.

“It was like a séance; it was very exciting, actually,” he said. He put his fresh mug of coffee down on the table. The window unit kicked off, making the room suddenly silent—almost on purpose for an eerie effect. Quiet was a better description, because the “silence” was metered with the metronomic spin of the overhead fans high above us. “We actually said goodbye to each other before doing it...tears and all,” he continued, referring to himself and his gang of seven. “No one counted to three or anything like that. We just looked around at each other, you know, like those three guys in that western, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.’”

“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that one.”

“Sure you are. At the end when the three of them all have guns on the other—you know, the Mexican standoff—well, anyway, you could imagine.”

“Sure,” I said.

“We all knew the proper time to do it, and we just all did it. It was right here in this flat.” John looked around once to point this out to me. “Well, actually, the former flat. I landed here, of course, with things a bit crummier around the place.

“Suddenly,” he said, his voice growing more somber, “and only for an instant, I found myself holding hands with seven mes! Blew me away. At first I thought this was really funny, but I surely was alone in my amusement, because the others were not amused. I looked closer, and the closer I looked, the more frightened I became. They—all these guys who were me—they represented a whole spectrum...” He trailed off, becoming upset. “I saw angelic versions all the way through to some ghoulish self-apparitions.”

As he got into it, John was raising himself up to a crouched position, leaning over the coffee table at me. He now released and sank back down onto his cushioned sofa. He seemed horrified out of his mind even telling me about this. He grew pale. I grew pale. He began to tremble. I began to nervously look around the room with a spinal reflex that jerked me into scouting for dangerous things. A fight-or-flight flowsheet forked a path in my hypothalamus. As my eyes dodged back and forth, my heart began to pound as if his just telling this story would invoke the evil spirits he had conjured up that time.

“I tell you I saw the worst version of me there ever would be.” He looked numbed by what he had just said. He was aghast, which told me that the worst possible thing that could happen to a human being happened to him the day he saw his worst version. His face was white, his eyes were watery, his hands shook worse than the rest of him. It brought me back to that elevator scene I shared with parents of a dead child. After a moment he calmed enough to reach over and take a sip from his coffee without spilling any.

“What happened?” I asked, just as horrified. “If my just bumping into Ralph Ebe, a me from somewhere, caused his death, what happened to eight Johns? Were there guts flying all over the place?” John replaced an empty coffee mug on the table. He stopped, as if to let the whole caffeine load kick in, and after a pregnant pause he went on.

“I was in the middle. To my left were three of my better selves, the most extreme glowing with peace and good will, like Jesus Christ Himself. To my right was decay. The worst one, since we were in a circle to begin with, was left holding hands with the most glorious one. The hate, the loathing, the resentment he thrust out was...it was saddening, that’s it. And it seemed to make the best John sad, too. All of this scene happened in only a few seconds, the whole time I stood frozen with fear.

“Suddenly,” John continued, “the worst one forcefully broke the hand-holding and dug his hands into the best one’s face. The best one screamed horribly. But it wasn’t a scream from pain; it seemed more like a wailing out from sorrow. He was howling, bleeding all over the place, and just standing there taking it—helpless in this anguish of his. By this time, the other two worse versions reached across our broken circle and pulled the others toward them. Our circle’s diameter collapsed into a wildcat melee. I don’t remember too much except that the strikes were real and it hurt so bad I lost my breath and passed out.” John put a finger in a space in the upper right part of his mouth where a bicuspid should have been.

“Was that from that fight?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes,” he answered thoughtfully, fingering the gap in his mouth. Losing teeth has always been a very effective way to dramatize to me the force of a certain ruckus.

“Wow,” I half-whispered. I was his loyal audience at this point.

“When I came to, it was—oh, I was only out for a few seconds, mind you—all of the me’s were gone. There were the seven true existers again, the guys in ‘the club.’ Actually, they were perfect strangers, as they had replaced my friends, since everyone had moved on—had ‘slid.’ And they were plenty scared, too. They didn’t like what they had seen, either. No one said a word; they all just left quietly. I’ve never seen another one of them since.”

“What about Ralph Ebe?” I asked.

“I met him later.”

“But those other guys—they must all live around here, huh?”

“I don’t really know. I didn’t really care to find out so soon after it happened.” He now spoke quietly, fatigued by the story. “I wasn’t ready to compare notes, you know? I will, though. One day I will—trust me, you can count on it.”

“So you found yourself holding hands with seven variations of your friends who were now strangers. They were different than the ones you had slid with.”

“Yes, but confusingly, they were also true existers. No one actually admitted it, but somehow we all just knew this. We could all feel it. This is when I realized there just might be numerous true existers of the same person—a point of great mystery to me. I’m sorry, Rocky, that I can’t explain,” he told me, punctuating his dissertation. “I thought that the older Ralph Ebe might be a co-exister with you because of a similarity of looks, but I wasn’t sure since because of the different names, something I had never encountered before. The age difference didn’t help confirm my suspicions, either. But if true, I know he’d want us to try to slide together as an experiment, including him. You see, he’s also been very interested in co-existence, and when you had walked into my life and seemed a possible co-exister with him, well, I had to call him. His enthusiasm was sanction enough, so I wrote down the address where you and he could meet.

“So Ralph’s angry recoil was not thought out, was it?” I asked.

“No. In fact, he had embraced the whole idea of meeting you. The reaction was a paroxysm and was very much organic, surprising him.”

“As much as my own, um, autoxenophobia—is that a word?—surprised me.

The late Ralph, like myself I learned, was a Bon vivant, living on interest from shrewd slides. Unlike me, he was married and had a child. His wife was a slider, a true exister, also.

“Ralph with his family, and me for all of the obvious reasons, were both afraid to go any farther, discovering what you had discovered.”

“The nasty direction.”

“Yes, the nasty direction. I’m still confused as to why I, or anybody else for that matter, would end up in any direction in particular.”

“You know one time,” I said to him, suddenly remembering an ancient event that was unlocked from its memory padlock by a key that was what John was saying; “Yes, one time—this was so long ago—I got into a fight with this kid—let’s see, what was that guy’s name? I guess that’s not important. Anyway, we were in high school, obviously before I had noticed the bad direction I was in. And we were in this fight. Just kid stuff, you know. And I kept sliding to do better than him in our fight. I kept sliding hoping he’d be hurting more with each punch. And this guy kept shivering like he was cold. And I kept losing the fight more and more.” I stopped to recollect my memory, trying to keep the neurons wired like chasing a dream, before the edges got too fuzzy. “It must be,” I said to myself. “It must be that he was a slider. Of course!”

“But if both of you were sliders,” John offered, “then you both would leave each other with opponents who would not continue sliding. The fact that both of you stood there sliding with each other meant that you were each sliding synchronously with each other.”

“But I was faring worse,” I argued.

“Well someone had to lose that fight. What are you saying?” he asked, missing a point.

“I’m saying that I was sliding down the bad way, but he was going up the good way. We were passing each other.”

“But the problem still remains, why were both of you still seeing each other sliding. One world of tangential contact is all you two should have co-existed in if you are right.”

“Not unless people pass each other in different directions over a continuum of layers,” I rebutted, making up justifications as I went along, but somehow accepting of these possibilities. John thought about this.

“Interesting,” he murmured, “but just conjecture. That would mean two worlds in one. Sorry, I don’t see it.”

Nevertheless, I wondered just where my real high school opponent was now. I wondered if in fact this continuum of tangential contact that crossed the good and bad directions was all of the layers. I wondered if this very layer I was in right now was also a flipped good layer from another perspective—that I had changed; that I was not the constant.

But as John said, “pure conjecture,” and my panic ceased.

I told him my feelings about rolling around in my reality bowl—how around the bottom you could roll around without much change, without much slope to the bowl; but get rolling up one edge and things really change. I explained to him my theories of over-exerting that suppressive barrier to the primitive brain to effect a slide.

“Or maybe,” he added, “there’s something other than putting more distance between ego and id, that is, between the modern and primeval brain. A journey to embrace the soul more directly.”

“You mean become holier?” I asked.

I looked around the room with its chipped paint and settling cracks. “Or away from it. The net result isn’t that much different.”

“Not holier,” he answered, “just better.”

“Like I said, not that much different.”

When I expressed confusion regarding how one person can co-exist as two people at the same time, John knew immediately what I was getting at.

“You’re brainwashed,” he told me. “You’re heavily indoctrinated in this thinking that time and reality is a peg board, that you cannot put a peg in a hole unless you first remove a peg. That if a time traveller steps on a bug a million years ago, he’ll come back to discover the President speaking Chinese.”

He indicated much more eloquently than I could have that such concepts were horseshit. “Let’s use your metaphor of the reality bowl. No matter how much you mix the oil and vinegar, no matter how intricate the patterns of nonsoluble mingling, the bowl stays the same. Reality supersedes time and the materials that course along its weaving.”

“Maybe,” I said, unconvinced.

“A tangential parable, then. The three figures in mythology—Clotho allotted the thread, Lachesis spun it, and Atropos chopped it off. So determined the lives allotted to the poor schmucks in ancient Greece who believed that stuff. I…I vote for the whole spinning wheel—or whatever these three lovelies used—as the important thing, along with the whole ball of yarn.”

And that’s how the whole ball of wax was described to me.

“The science fiction writers,” he further lectured, “are no more qualified to make rules about time and reality than they are to write marriage manuals. The stories on the disaster or impossibility of a person going elsewhere in time and seeing himself are just as much dreamt-up, authored fiction as, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’”

Of course I knew it as, “It was the swiftest of time, it was the most deliberate of times,” but although this was unimportant, it served to remind me, in spite of our communion this evening, that John and I were each from different worlds, countries, and everything else for that matter.

I was disappointed to learn that he did not have all of the answers. In many ways he was as hapless as me.

Into the early morning we discussed the possibility that Ralph may be alive “down the road,” possibly suffering the same fate as my real Abby, i.e., being jettisoned into worlds farther along this terrible direction.

“Once again,” he said, “purely conjecture. But I am certain your Abby is careening deeply.”

“And it’s certainly an emergency.”

“No doubt.”

“John? Would a rational plan be my climbing into that magnet like Abby did, wait for the magnetic field to do its thing, and then hope for the best.”

“Don’t know. Still, were you to jettison off, you still can’t tell me how to get her back. I wouldn’t count on it.”

“I think,” I confessed, “that I’d rather be in a terrible place with the love of my life than meander lonely in this almost awful place.”

“Love in a terrible place may not be so wonderful,” he warned.

“Love in a terrible place,” I countered, “is better than no love at all, anywhere.”

“Or no love at all in a terrible place if you never find her. I’m sure you’ll find out,” he offered, which I took for a yes.

John was excited at the plan not so much to help me out but to learn from yet another one of his experiments. If we were to get back (maybe by climbing into a magnet down there or by God knows what else) and then were able to locate him, could sliding and the direction possibly be controlled? The literature of sliders and sliding was limited to only a few personal letters and was ripe for expansion. I had a personal stake in it. John’s stake was primarily academic, but personally he might gain also if he too could learn to escape this disappointing layer. Who knows, he might even find a truly existing, living best friend named Ralph Ebe.

John had thought that my attending the funeral would be a bad idea but wouldn’t tell me why, besides of course the obvious reason that I was the one who killed the guy. Perhaps he thought my likeness would cause people anxiety. I insisted, though, simply because he was dead only because I didn’t kill myself first.

It took about twenty minutes for the Lakeshore bus to drop me off at the newer cemeteries. It was a no-frills funeral. The lawn chair service was at one of those mausoleum places near the old New Orleans Academy. This section on the parish line of Orleans Parish was a manicured collection of residential subdivisions shielded from the Interstate by this league of funeral establishments. The Interstate connected the central business district to Metairie and then ran on to Baton Rouge. But the dead, an effective buffer, made sure that the rude motor vehicular expressway noise that could wake the dead didn’t go far enough for the suburbanites to be bothered.

One of the interment locales featured a lawn that was a burial place for deceased infants. I found it strange that all of the chairs for an adult’s service were placed in this spot. I arrived unnoticed right after the ritual had started and sat in a chair in the back row. I found it impossible to immediately pay attention to what was going on, because of a reverence for wanting to honor these dead children at our feet. You see, it felt friendly here, all of these little wonderful ghosts cheering the rest of us on.

As was typical, it was impossibly hot and sticky. It was a little after ten in the morning, but the heat and humidity were already peaking. I wore my closet’s best, a leisure suit coat of polyester with clingy slacks to match that made my behind itch the whole time. There were maybe thirty people in the amphitheater arrangement of padded folding chairs that sat in the open grass at the threshold of the expanding graves boundary. Our setting occupied the as yet unsettled graveyard.

I saw the back of a lot of heads and way up at the front was apparently his wife and child. I strained to see the type of woman my co-exister, my co-me, would marry but was thwarted by bad optical physics: someone’s big, fat, stupid head was in the way. The child she held was young, perhaps four or five, and he was squirming pretty good. He was dressed in a tight little red sport coat that apparently had been perfect for him on Easter. It must have seemed to his mother it would do today. She was in a conservatively designed black dress. When everyone arose, I could still see the child better than I could see her. As she placed him from her clutch to a standing position on the ground, I noticed the knobby knees on his skinny legs fold in, dislodging his feet out—the perfect stance for a diagnosis of cerebral palsy.

He maintained his balance by holding onto the slacks of the man standing next to them who turned out to be John. Actually, he was cutting up something awful with chanting over and over in repetitive slurred speech.

“I...want...to go...bye bye,” he incessantly repeated in monotone. His mother would shush him and whisper into his ear, but to no avail. When she re-sat, she lifted him up onto her lap, but he only began squirming again. This went on the whole ceremony. It was a hell of a distraction, I thought, when trying to concentrate on the grief over sending off a late husband.

The eulogy was given by an elderly priest. I think he was Catholic or Anglican or something. He was definitely a legit ecclesiastic, not some barker three-piece-suiter “Jyezus” harper. He stood, confident and smiling, before the casket which hovered suspended on straps over an open grave. What a lucky guy! I thought, to be buried among children. How’d he pull that off? The reverend closed his book which he held in his hand, and he slowly looked at everyone, even me.

“Friends of Ralph Ebe,” he addressed us. “We come here to say good-bye to a wonderful man. A man who took life’s rewards and shared them. A man who took life’s burdens and carried them alone. Why am I not sad when a wonderful man like this is called back by God?” He paused for a moment, almost to the point that his question might not be taken as rhetorical. Just as the congregation began to look uncomfortable, he continued.

“Don’t you think,” he asked, “that that’s the whole reason we’re here? Do you think this is it? This mere seventy or eighty or even more years or so?”

Don’t push your luck, I thought, as the old priest was probably well past seventy himself. He smiled at everyone with a face that had all of the answers. “We’re here to join God, of course. We’re here to live, to be sure; but we’re also here to die. For that is the plan. For living here is what makes us ready to die, to go to God.

“Ralph isn’t gone from us forever,” he surmised. “He’s just gone on to a better place. A place with God.” He now looked to the front row, at Ralph’s wife. “You’ll see him again, I promise. And it will only be in ten or thirty or fifty years or so. That is,” he now whispered, a glint in his eyes, “in just a little while.” He smiled and motioned to the funeral home worker to get ready to crank the handle that would lower Ralph Ebe’s body into the ground.

“He was a man of wealth, to be sure,” Father continued. “He was an important benefactor to Children’s Hospital. Maybe that’s because the tragedy of a child being ‘special’ touched him personally. Maybe because of what he told me one day. He said, ‘Jesus felt children are special.’” The old priest paused. “‘I believe that,’ Ralph went on to tell me. ‘I believe that,’ he said, ‘because their worlds change for them every single day. Every time they turn around the world has a different color, shape, and perspective. And the children use this constant fluctuation to grow, to mature.’” Father smiled at everyone listening, then concluded the eulogy, saying, “A man of means can be buried any way he wants. A man of generosity as Ralph was generous deserves his wonderful, eccentric wish—to be buried with the children who were not lucky enough to survive very long in this world. Did you know that we had to get permission from every single parent of every deceased child buried here to allow him his wish? Did you know that not a single one hesitated? Such was the name of the benefactor, Ralph Ebe, in the broken hearts of parents of deceased children.” He picked up his Bible and opened it to a passage marked by a red ribbon.

“From Matthew 18. At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” And with that the service was ended.

The only living child here, of course, had kept up his distractions all during the priest’s words. Finally, as the homily concluded, John picked him up and walked to the back by me so Mrs. Ebe could dwell on the final moments of the burial. As the coffin was lowered the final feet into the grave, several people in the gathering began weeping. Out loud. To my utter amazement, one of them was me!

I don’t know what came over me. It wasn’t reactive grief. Don’t get me wrong, I feel terrible about what had happened. But it was an inappropriate invading reaction, as alien and as unwelcome as the suicidal psychosis that had affected me before. The little boy, sitting in John’s lap next to me was now groping around, yanking on me in his path. I hardly noticed him as I collapsed into my chair with only enough control to not burst out loud again. Nevertheless, like the most valiant effort in a tear-jerker movie, I trembled my jaw as my eyes glazed heavy with tears and as I felt my sinuses jam. My final maudlin pose had my face in my hands, elbows on my knees, still valiant, still an effort. When I finally opened my burning wet eyes, all of the people were off walking away except for John, Ralph’s little boy, and his widow, who was standing right in front of me. As my eyes slowly moved up her black dress, I ultimately found her eyes had fought the same fight. They were red, wet, and they were my Abby’s, on my Abby’s older face. This is when I gave up and crashed, however inappropriately, tears and nasopharynx washing me away.

Crumbling, I felt her hand on my shoulder—the kind of grip that gives comfort and strength at the same time.

I know now what my feelings were. I was replacing Ralph in this world, settling into the vacuum he had left. I was being born here and, like any newborn, I cried. I was now a part of this world. For the first time in my life, I belonged somewhere. And it was overwhelming. And when she—as midwife—had placed her hand on my shoulder, I was being accepted by this world, by her; and the tears and emotion were outward expressions of catharsis, of resolution, of equilibration. Of delivery. I felt I had a slight hint of how Christ must have felt when He had been welcomed from the cross into His rightful place in His father’s world. I felt I knew what Ralph Ebe embraced as he was welcomed to a better place, shepherded there by the children he chose to be surrounded by for eternity.

And his wife: I was immediately and helplessly in love with this older true-exister-Abby-type who, for a short time before the magnet episode, had co-existed with my Abby, and who now co-existed with the other one who had stormed out of the hospital that day.

And the little crippled, apparently blind, developmentally delayed boy finally managed his hands around my neck, advancing until his arms could hug me no harder. He wriggled with delight at how I felt to him.

“I...want...to go...bye bye...Daddy,” he said to me, misinterpreting my feel as familiar, and I was immediately and helplessly in love with him, too.

He clung tightly to me, surprising his mother, known as, to my surprise, Ava.

“He knows you’re not his Daddy,” she told me in John’s car as we all rode back to her house. “He’s really taken a liking to you.” My God, her voice was Abby’s.

Her house was in one of the very subdivisions bordering the area where the funeral was. I could tell by John’s and Ava’s reactions when it came into their view as we rounded one final corner in John’s Lincoln—a big car, a land yacht. The house was a stucco two-story construction which I found very pleasing, as I had always liked stucco and in fact had hoped to eventually have this type of home myself one day. Actually, it was pseudo-stucco—a look-alike, for real stucco could never make it in the Louisiana humidity without years of regrets and expense.

“Make yourself at home, Rocky,” Ava kindly and softly offered, and I found it easy to do so. We had entered through the large double cut-glass door, through a white marble-floored foyer, into a large den. The first thing I noticed was that this house had been made child-proof. Marble in the foyer, now flagstone in the den, (through the corner of my eye) granite counters in the kitchen—it was a hearty house for hearty goings-on. The built-in shelving in the den was painted an off-white to set off the pastel motif of the walls and leather furniture. The paint on everything, I noticed, was that hard enamel from which one could easily wipe crayon, cola, blood—the usual childrearing fallout. We all sat comfortably on broken-in leather, richly warm sectionals attached together in a soft semi-circle around a clean, cold, inert tropical fireplace. I was still somewhat uneasy as to how Ava’s mood might vacillate in my presence as she went on and on in a self-appointed duty to get me to know her and her late husband.

He and Ava had long since stopped sliding before their marriage, and they had been long married before the pregnancy. She was now a woman in her late forties, and her manner and style made late forties look desirable. Blond hair, green eyes, older.

“My Abby has sure held up well,” I almost caught myself mumbling about her before I remembered this Ava’s separate identity. Hard to do, what with that same bump on her nose and all.

Thanks to a brief, light shower, the afternoon was cooler than the midday scorch Ralph had been buried under. His son, Leslie, was napping. I asked and she answered:

“Leslie was born twelve weeks early,” Ava explained. “Their little brains are very delicate at that time, and he had an intracranial hemorrhage. The oxygen he had to be under made him visually impaired.”

“So he’s not actually blind, then,” I said, looking to be relieved by anything.

“He’s blind legally. He’ll never read. He’s got what is called ‘navigational vision.’” He can get around without bumping into things but can’t look straight at you. The left eye sees only light and dark, the right one with its contact lens can see shapes.

“Contact lens?” I asked.

“He had his eyes’ lenses surgically removed to save the eyes. So I put his contact in every morning and take it out every evening.”

“Is the brain hemorrhage why he’s, uh...?”

“Retarded?” she finished for me.

“Yes.”

“That’s a bad word, isn’t it? We don’t think he’s…that. We think he’s got normal intelligence with a severe learning disability due to the vision. And some gaps, from the bleeding.”

“He won’t tell us,” John added, and Ava smiled at him.

“But he’s doing better all of the time,” she said. “He’s never stopped progressing. You should have seen him a year ago.”

“And the physical therapist feels he could actually walk by next year if he keeps doing well,” John further added.

“And that would be wonderful,” she said to John, smiling a sad smile that started a reverent silence on the subject—a sad smile I’ve seen before.

“I had a dream once,” she finally said softly. “I dreamed I had died, or at least I think that’s what it was, because I went to a place that must have been Heaven.” She paused to swallow, then resumed. “But actually it was like a beach. I’ve always felt weird about beaches,” she said dreamily. “I’ve always felt them to be so final—like the end of the Earth, like the end of existence. Probably why the sailors in the olden days feared falling off the flat Earth. Anyway, I I thought I was in Heaven. It was a beach, and it was so peaceful, too. Just being there I was so restful and happy. No worries, no decisions to be made. I looked for someone to share my happiness with, but all I could see was the back of Les as he sat on a mound of sand up ahead. He had a bathing suit on. I was some distance away and started for him. I could feel the sand between my toes as I walked, just like the tactile feel Les must be grabbing for with his fingers. He often does that. I don’t know if it’s the blindness or some tactile fixation, but his hands are always grabbing things.” She had drifted off-topic, but then caught herself. “I thought to myself,” she continued, “why is he here? He’s not dead like me, unless a part of him is peaking in for my benefit. And how ironic I thought it was that I would be in Heaven and still have to repress the pain that every mother of a handicapped child suffers each day—you know, what could have been. And when I was apparently close enough for him to hear the sand being kicked up by my footsteps, he arose...God! he raised himself straight up, with ease and with perfect balance, revealing a height his sickly growth had always robbed him of. I stopped dead in my tracks. He slowly wheeled his head around, the rest of his body pivoting on two straight, strong legs. As I looked up from his beautiful and powerful limbs to his face, I could see his chest was sculptured and free of all of those nasty chest tube scars he had gotten when he was just born. And I was burned through by his gaze that was fixed fast on me. On his mother. And then he spoke to me—not in that sing-song voice of his, but in the perfect soprano of a normal five-year old.

“‘Mom, I’m glad you’re back,’ he said, like I had just paused a brief time somewhere and gotten back to where I belonged. ‘Me, too,’ I said back and held my firm child. And if this were Heaven, I thought, then this was all I needed.”

She paused again, and then finally she spoke as if another wonderful thought could improve this story even more. “And if this is where Ralph just went, I know this is all he’ll need, and he’s way ahead of me.” John and I just sat, neither wishing to diminish the moment with continuing any type of mundane conversation.

“Hey, Rocky,” she finally spoke, “Look, I know what happened and I don’t blame you for it. My husband and I knew the risk being taken when he went to meet you. We had discussed it. We had accepted the chance that something strange might happen. He always felt that a co-true exister offered a chance to see one’s self from another direction, and that any opportunity that could lead him to learn a way back the other way should be taken aggressively.” She stopped for a moment to consider her next sentence. “True,” she said softly, “I didn’t expect him to die...”

“Ava,” John said, placing a hand on her forearm.

“No, Rocky,” she re-emphasized, “I don’t blame you. I feel nothing negative about you at all. Actually, I can’t explain my feeling toward you yet...very confusing,” she said sternly to the floor, intending to get to the bottom of things. “John has told me of your plan to look for Abby. I’d like to look for Ralph.” She had apparently crossed territory that John had already forbad, for he interrupted.

“Ava, stop,” he told her. “Ralph’s probably dead in all the areas you would go to.”

“I want him back; is that so terrible? And this magnet thing can probably help me.”

“Ava,” I said, “I don’t even know what I’m doing. I know I have to try to find Abby so she can have at least one person sane in whatever insane place she’s gone to. If we’re lucky we maybe can afford to theorize a way back—if we’re lucky.”

“Right, Ava,” John badgered. “And don’t forget Les. You can’t just leave a son behind. He needs you.”

“And he needs Ralph,” she fired back. “He needs his Daddy, and he needs me to find him for him. Don’t you think I’ve thought this thing out? He can stay with you, John; he likes you.”

“Ava,” John warned, “you came here from elsewhere. From a better place. When you leave, another will certainly pop in. And she’ll pop in to raise your son. And I won’t have much to say about it. She may be worse for Les. She may be O.K., but she may be worse.”

“You hide him from her,” Ava said.

“Oh, right,” he shouted back at her, “I’ll kidnap him. I’ll see his pictures on milk cartons in this fucking shit world!”

“John,” I said, startled. I had never heard him use any foul language up till this moment.

“John,” Ava said, too. Even she had never, she said, in all their years of friendship, heard anything like that from him.

“And what are you going to face from your son at the next stop?” he continued unabated, unswayed. “A blinder son? Even more delayed? A vegetable? Ava, it can always be worse.”

John had taken one of my favorite maxims right out of my mouth. She fell silent, apparently defeated. Until...

“Will you at least think about it, John?”

“O.K.,” he patronized her, “I’ll at least think about it.” Yea, right, I thought, thinking for the both of us.

But she believed him and she smiled that sad smile again.

By this time Leslie was stirring from his nap. He crawled into the den, raised himself up by clawing the wall, and leaned against it as he walked to his mother.

“I...have...to make...pee,” he monotoned. He was a beautiful child and such a good sport in this world, for I knew, and I knew his mother knew, that in a world in which I had graduated summa cum laude he was running amuck with the best of ’em.

And that thought almost made it alright about him.

John had wanted to wait until the weekend so that the normal Magnetic Resonance Imager business of patient traffic wouldn’t get in the way of my big send-off. I myself didn’t really much care whether I disrupted any schedules or not as long as I got after my Abby going as soon as possible. Nevertheless, he had to remain so didn’t feel like subjecting himself to getting caught doing anything weird, especially when it came to his occupation. He would be meeting me down at the big magnet place for about ten on Saturday morning and that was that. I didn’t know whether I needed him or not, otherwise I might have just climbed into the thing myself, without his even knowing it. But out of respect for him I decided to do it his way. This gave me some time to while away. About two days.

I wondered what, if anything, might I make the best use of during my stay here that might have some relevance to the layers to come. Actually, I couldn’t think of a single thing. Perhaps, I finally wondered, it might gain me some insight to visit the Abby here. It might help me deal with whatever atrocious versions I might encounter later on. Not that the one here was all that bad, I thought. Certainly not because she would have considered abortion. This freedom of choice was her right here. Just because I didn’t agree with it didn’t mean it was her fault. After all, it was the society that permitted it. I tried to submerge any negative feelings for her with these rationalizations.

The first thing I did was look up her aunt. I had remembered the name from what Abby had told me. I hadn’t actually been out to her place; it was Abby who had come and gone from there several times to get things and so on. I had never joined her on these trips, as I knew her aunt had this cult leader thing against me. I found her name, Marilou Moores, in the phone book. I recognized the street, because it was in a subdivision where all of the streets were named after gemstones. Topaz Street was in West Lakeshore, an area on the lakefront off of Robert E. Lee Boulevard. I figured I had better call first instead of surprising them. Besides, I didn’t fancy driving on the right for a whole half hour of what time I had left here, especially in a borrowed car, if the door were to be slammed in my face on the front end.

I figured Abby would be there in spite of the fact that her aunt had rejected her upon discharge from the hospital earlier: relatives rally to help each other with medical predicaments. Her aunt should help her with pregnancy. Or I guess with an abortion, too, if it were to turn out that way.

I called. Her Aunt Marilou answered.

“Hello,” I said to her, “this is Rocky.” She hung up.

I called again. She answered again, saying hello more cautiously.

“Hello,” once more from me. She hung up again. I gave up trying the telephone, and I certainly was right not to want to drive there and have to deal with the woman.

It was a Thursday morning in the second week of July. Pensacola, about three hours away, was just as hot, but it had a beach. I hoped that this Abby might frequent the beach there like the former one did. If so, I could confront her without her aunt. And even if this Abby wasn’t there, at least I could unwind with my ice chest and boombox. I just hoped that I still liked the music on my tapes.

Since Abby had taken her car when she split, I tried to convince John that I needed to borrow his. He informed me that he needed his transportation for his work, as he often gets called out in the middle of the night for emergencies. But he smoothed it out for me to borrow Ava’s—actually, her late husband’s. It had sat inert since his death, Ava using her own sensible sedan to cart around Les. And so with very little time wasted, I was on the road to Florida with a satchel of tuna sandwiches provided by Ava.

The only car I find more luxurious than the little Mercedes convertible is a cab because it comes with a driver. I was content to suffer the few hours with this red two-seater, though, because I looked so good in it. The late Ralph Ebe had only put eight thousand miles on it, so I felt it was my duty to finish up its breaking in. It was my duty to the Mercedes-Benz company. Until I hit the Florida state line, of course. Some things never change, like the aerial speed traps in that state. Luckily, I drove uneventfully the whole route, being careful to observe all signs, which at times in a slider’s career can be confusing.

By the time I hit Pensacola my hair was streaked back straight, as I had gone the whole way with the top down. There’s not much on this stretch of I-10, not even a lot of fast food, so I just rocked out the whole way to vaguely familiar songs on the stereo and drank colas from my heavy metal ice chest. I stopped at my favorite beach spot, the spot I had been to so many times before. I knew it was a long shot, but I looked for Abby’s Volvo wagon. No luck. Then again, I could easily have missed it, because it was crowded here, even though it was a weekday. I parked parallel to the Gulf and walked the beach a way with my necessary equipment until I found the perfect place for my beach towel. I unfolded it out and then let the wind off of the Gulf cast it out straight as I lowered my hands to rest it onto the sand. I ate the sandwiches which, I was relieved, did not involve rye bread. There were three of them, but I had no trouble finishing them as I was very hungry. Next, the ice chest consummated its mission providing me my can of beer as the chaser to my sandwiches. My boombox, because it was so heavy it sat so securely on my ice chest as I had carried it, was now dug into the sand next to me, rendering an acceptable blare. And so with belly full, throat quenched, and music on, I lay down on my back and loosened my sunglasses so that they rested lightly on the bridge of my nose. This position would have made them comfortable on my face for hours had they not been kicked off by someone’s bare foot, the sprayed sand stinging me in addition to the pound of the heel.

Between the time of my attack and the realization that I’d been attacked was a split-second of goofiness. Stunned, I sprang upright to a sitting position during this split-second. Then I saw my assailant. It was Abby, of course. Who else would attack me on this planet? And it was her kick, of course. And it was my face, of course!

“What’d you do that for?” I shouted at her.

“Because you’re a piece of shit, that’s why!” she shouted back. “You walk off from that scan like you don’t even know me. You got me pregnant, and you knew it. And you just walked off—knowing I was pregnant by you, you son of a bitch. You couldn’t have cared less.”

“Actually, Abby, I—”

“No ‘actually,’” she interrupted. “The way I said it is the only ‘actually’ that actually happened.” And then she began kicking sand on my chest, as that was the highest she could reach with me sitting up. This frustrated her, so she picked up my boombox. This was no mean feat, as its old vintage guaranteed it to be a very heavy burden—the gaudy chrome and steel structure-with-handle that promised to pervert any delicate music that dared tweet or woof. The speakers on it were so large and powerful that occasionally I had trouble with their magnets partially erasing the very tapes I would play. Targeting me with it, she let it fly.

Luckily, it didn’t hit me, because it really could have caused me serious injury. But it hit close. I saw the whole bunch of big batteries bouncing out of it as it somersaulted away. With this she stormed off. I called for her, but she ignored me.

“Wait,” I called out, “come back. Please. The whole reason I came out here was in hopes of finding you. Please stop.” She didn’t. By now, my eyes were stinging from the sand in them, so I couldn’t even follow her if I had wanted. I rushed instead to a pipe at the beach entrance which pointed up to provide a shower. I flooded my eyes to wash them out. By the time I was sighted again, she was out of sight.

I drove back to New Orleans that same day, my mission a failure. How much could I have gained from a rapport with her, anyway, I wondered. To hell with her, I thought. I aimed my borrowed car due west to my apartment and did it in less than the three hours.

When I had returned home, I watched television all the next day. I watched about Israelis hating Arabs, about Arabs hating Israelis. I saw how Iraq had used chemical weapons during an insane war with Iran, and how Iran proudly professed its hate for America. I saw how South Africa treated its majority race, and how ghettos bred hate as group-think for the people socially jailed there. I saw all of these things and wished that the Earth could just stop spinning suddenly, shaking all of the people right off of it, including, I might add, the Abby here.

I saw hints of what had happened in Cambodia years earlier, as well as what had happened in China recently when Democracy reared her beautiful head. And I saw the idiot newscasters include little human interest vignettes, often called “The Lighter Side” of the news or other such folly, as if that could balance the horrors that stained this world. I saw all of this, and I decided that if all of the people would not oblige me by falling off, then I’d do the next best thing and try to leave it myself, if only temporarily.

So that Friday night I decided to try to leave my body again. I remembered how both confused and exhilarated I was at my first possible success the night of Ralph’s demise.

Success? Maybe it was just a dream. Let’s face it, I had had a lot of bad feelings falling off to sleep that night. But it sure felt like it with the floating, the perspective, and the thud when I had returned via my one-point psychic landing, thanks to the telephone.

I chose the oak bedroom. Normally I would have followed protocol and chosen the French provincial for this, since out-of-body experiences fell into the “whimsy” category. But I was dead serious this time. I was going to do it in the “manly” room. I was definitely going to do it.

I lay in bed, serially relaxing my body parts, building up my alpha waves, yet leaving enough volition to urge myself up; and while all of this foreplay took place, I awaited that magical time between wakefulness and sleep from where I had hoped to lift off.

Houston, we have lift-off, I thought to myself after realizing my position—about three feet above my sleeping body.

And this time, it was my own experience!

I went up, up, farther up...striving for the highest places. The higher I went the clearer the perspective. I was ascending in a straight vertical path, never drifting even an inch. To do so, I intuitively realized, would have been sliding, and no thank you.

But I could see the different realities, the different layers back and forth, each with its own airspace straight up, fanning out from the tight Rocky-shaped shaft in which I continued to rise. I saw thousands of these layers in all directions, except that I could feel two major trends.

Off one way was distasteful, increasingly so layer after layer. And I could see my Abby! Thousands, perhaps a million layers down. And she was in a nasty place indeed. On the surface, it seemed quite regular, but in the psyche of the species it was really foul. She was O.K. She was suffering, but she was O.K. And I could see her in an obstetrician’s office, and they could hear the heartbeat. So my son was O.K., too! Son? My God, why did I say that? And the bastard was trying to talk her into an abortion. And she suffered through his reprimands.

Well, I was ready to slide right then! Forget the magnet—I had a way to get right to her with pinpoint accuracy. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Why the hell not? I tried, but I was as tight in my Rocky-shaped shaft as a cookie in a tin. And I saw all of the Abbys down the line toward her layer. And they were all having abortions. And the ones past her layer were doing that also, or worse—Holy Shit! I knew where that direction was heading. I couldn’t quite see the end, but it was there off in the distance; and I got the waves—the wind—from there. I knew then where it all ended in this terrible direction.

At this point I felt death imminent. I looked straight down at my resting body—light years down, it seemed, and saw no reason for alarm.

As I looked back up I caught “the wind” from the apparent end point, and those suicidal feelings began again. Homicidal, too. Anybody or anything, I felt, could push me that far. And I hated myself. God knows why, but God had nothing to do with this. Actually, I felt less of His presence the more I gazed down the line.

I saw the perspective. If I were a true exister, then I saw the true perspective, and I knew your world, reader, the world I was in presently, was about a third of the way toward that terrible end from some midpoint that separates two extremes. And that terrible end, millions of layers down, conjured up in me the destructive emotions that caused the most primitive and oldest area of my brain to predominate—that is, that reptilian remnant we have spent millennia evolving grey matter and convolutions around just to overrule.

There is a certain consummation in feelings that are suicidal and/or homicidal (What’s the difference?). It’s a martyrdom that self-defines fulfillment in a void. Such fulfillment in a void has no competition.

And I was getting angry, too, in that wind; so angry that I was feeling the panic that results from anger without action. I could see all of the versions of me down that direction. My simplest realized faults I saw develop and progressively get blown out of proportion in those persons that were me. My aristocratic tastes here went on to distort into incredible scorn for all that was not to my liking and then on to twist and warp into hatred for all that was not me. Disregard for the certainly non-existent feelings of inanimate objects blurred to include total non-recognition of the feelings of living things: first, the lower animals; then higher up to include all men, women, and children, too; and somewhere off in the distance, toward that most terrible end, probably near that terrible end (possibly at that terrible end), was the soulless vacuum of non-feeling, non-caring for myself. This meant, of course, the ultimate scorn: non-caring for God. I looked back down and wanted to kill the holy body that slept below me. Would that have been murder or suicide, and who cared?

I willed myself heavier. I sucked in mass through pure creation fueled by need. I needed to kill my body below me so that I could survive in this void and feel its fulfillment. I felt the gravity pulling on me as I succeeded in adding weight. The conflicting good will that had originally propped me up began buckling under the pressure. Soon I would reach critical mass and plummet, fists of hate cutting through the distances like hydrofoils, aimed at my open brain that offered itself to whatever wanted in. It was a sitting duck, my brain was, open so as to allow my spirit leave from its entrapment of thought. Open—and vulnerable.

But before my platform of reason popped from the weight of the rage, before I started to race down to something terrible and profitless, I caught another wind. And this wind, like salt poured into a beer, foamed out of me instantly the reptilian’s call for primitive self-awareness and self-statement via the cause and effect of destruction.

I saw in the other direction. Way before where I had graduated with honors. Way before I had originally been born unslid into a doctor’s hands. I recognized most of the layers I had spent any length of time in, as well as saw the ones farther up I had been unlucky enough to have been deprived of. I saw the world of my real parents. I saw the incidental ripples of differences among worlds that had started my mother smoking and my father drinking. I saw quite clearly, because I strained to, the random automobile traffic patterns of the different worlds—the patterns that progressively interweaved into the latticework that coalesced to doom my father to his alcohol-related death as well as the patterns in layers before that would have spared him.

My mother smokes nervously, one cigarette after another goes into her remaining lung as Father weaves conspicuously in his green Riviera. “Slow down,” she says. “Be careful,” she warns.

“Leave me alone!” he shouts at her. “Do you want to do the driving?”

“You’re going too fast,” she tells him.

“Watch this,” he offers, and he accelerates defiantly. She fumbles to buckle her seat belt, but he reaches over with his right hand to interfere, taking her prudence as an insult. She fights back, using her nails.

“Damn you!” he blasts directly at her, and she winces at the smell of old liquor on his breath.

“Please let me!” she begs, and in all of the excitement she starts hacking because of her bronchitis, rendering her helpless in this coughing fit. A car horn Dopplers away past them, making him swerve back with attention. Once the corrective action is established, he attacks the release button on the restraint she has now had the opportunity to engage. She finally casts him off successfully by burning him with her cigarette.

“Stop!” I shouted at them. “Stop it now! You’re the last parents I ever had! Please!”

The impact is off-centered, explosions of shattered clear glass and fragmented red tail light plastic flying away in arcs behind the spinning car. The deathly twirl of the automobile is instantly jammed inert by the next impact, and their bodies are limp and flapping and snapped and flung, springing from the vehicle sloppily, catching the knocks of intervening edges of dash, window frame, and solid oak tree.

I cast my head away, unable to tolerate anymore. When I looked back, my focus stopped some distance short of that terrible layer, where I saw their car stopping obediently at the red light. They hold hands devoutly, and the light turns green to shepherd them safely home.

I rested.

I saw the girls that were Ana/Ava/Abby before I had ever met her. I saw how I met her in those better worlds. And I saw our lives together in those layers, too.

And looking that way, I became light as a feather. Looking that way, the reptile in me fried a scaly death. I had been foolish to seek him out for so long. It was good riddance. I strained to see an endpoint but failed: I was too far over on the wrong side of midline. But I could tell that it was good.

As suicidally murderous as I had felt, I now descended without so much as an attitude problem. On the way down, I cast one last furtive glance into the direction my Abby had been pushed. I saw my final glimpse of her. I saw that she was, unfortunately, still travelling, catapulted choicelessly by the magnet. I knew that worlds were getting worse for her and looked forward to the idea of a rescue. I passed over martyrdom, for I was ready for heroism.

I slept until eight the next morning and found myself rolling out of a bed of French provincial. I didn’t know why. It was just this joke my apartment kept playing on me. I shaved and showered, dressed, and got my ass down to Dr. Landry’s hospital for some coercive magnetism.

I was on time; John was late. Never one to pace a room or sit quietly, I went through my entire repertoire of cracked knuckles including a whole-body’s worth of joints until they were all refractory.

I retraced my memory and remembered—was convinced—that the front steps to the door of the hospital’s lobby were the appointed rendezvous. The traffic on Claiborne rushed back and forth in front of me, heavy trucks at times dropping debris as a result of potholes encountered. I waited very anxiously for a whole fifteen minutes in the heat—just about the limit of the antiperspirant self-indulgent among us—before my “How rude” neurotransmitters made me desert the spot. Blowing out puffs of impatience, I walked into the hospital and followed the dark gray-colored floor tape that tracked a path to Radiology. I had been this route before, but still felt it comforting in my mission to follow the colored guides. I politely waved off senior volunteers who chased me in their duties. A few nuns, apparently noting my determined pace, didn’t even try to ask if I needed directions. At Radiology began another shade of gray—a brighter gray—which took me, once again, down a long hallway with windows on either side, indicating this was merely an interiorized walk to a separate building. This new colored tape was the “MRI” trail, and it led me once more to Magnetic Resonance Imaging. During my walk, I would occasionally encounter a candy-striper, each ready to assist me, but repeatedly discouraged by my tunnel vision; my peripheral vision, on the other hand, would note only the blend of red and white that they wore.

It was Saturday and this section was, as John had predicted, sparsely populated. Rarely did I encounter a generic hospital type doing generic hospital tasks. I finally entered a small waiting area with interlocking chairs up against a wall that faced a counter or nurses’ station. The station was empty as was the waiting area. There were several doors besides the one that led to the magnet. One was to the “green room” where Abby and I had first met John before her scan that time. Another was designated a unisexual restroom. Still another was marked for storage. A metal one, standing out because it was in fact metal, had a sign on it which read, ENTER ONLY WHEN CALLED.

I don’t know why I thought of this, but I chose a friendly memory—a falsetto, drawn-out “Dinner’s ready” type voice which I pretended was calling my name. It was the memory of one of my serial mothers from way back when. It seemed to call warmly to me as much as I seemed to choose it as the excuse to obey the sign. “Coming,” I called, and then I entered, realizing that, even in the face of terrible unknowns, I was certainly still a wise guy.

“C’mon, let’s go; c’mon, let’s go,” I shouted to myself in cadence as I walked through the labyrinth that led right up to, Surprise! –to Ava, Ralph Ebe’s widow.

“Hello, Rocky,” she said, suspiciously chipper.

“Ava, where is he?”

“Don’t know. I’m waiting, too.”

“For what?” I asked.

“Oh, just to see you off.”

The cheery affect was nauseating, reminding me of a wacky sit-com wife about to pull some hare-brained scheme. I became increasingly uneasy, almost like the feeling you’d get when you suspect you might be pushed into a swimming pool. The awkward pause in conversation made her a little uncomfortable, also.

“How was Ralph’s car?” she asked inanely.

“Oh, fine,” I answered. “Thanks for letting me use it.”

“I’m glad I could help out,” she said, speaking again with a superficial air. I reached into my pocket and fished around to pull out the black key from among my own. I handed it to her, but she was reluctant, as if she wanted to be sure I didn’t need it anymore.

“Better take it, really, Ava,” I warned. “I can’t guarantee who’ll be taking it out next if you don’t.” She smiled at me as I placed it in her hand.

“Sorry, guys,” John said as he walked in. “Landry snagged me, asked a lot of questions—Why was I here on Saturday? Anything going on? and the like. So let’s get cracking, ’cause I was real flimsy with my answers.”

“John,” I said with a tone expecting explanation, my finger pointing to Ava.

“Ava said she’d like to watch, unless you have any objections.”

“Me? Hell, no,” I said defensively. After all, John was there, allaying any suspicions. “Where do I get for this?” I asked, ready.

“Get up on this table, just like what you saw before,” he motioned, referring to a gliding affair with tracks and motors. It was a white flatbed on a metal guide, destination North/South. “Here,” he requested, “give me anything metallic on you.” I handed him my belt to eliminate the buckle.

“Do I need to put on a gown or something?” I asked.

“We’re not interested in your radiology; we just want to magnetize you.”

“Oh, right.”

“What about keys, Rocky?”

“No way, John,” I protested, digging my hand back into my pocket to feel them once again. “I may need to get into my apartment where I’m going.” He regarded the thickness of my trousers and pocket material, and he relented.

“Alright, I guess so. Now get up on the table.” I obeyed. I strained to feel the magnetism as I hopped aboard and the trolley began its journey. I guess that was ridiculous—how do you feel magnetism? I lay face up, my head aimed at, apparently, the business end of this whole building.

John began explaining his procedure to an interested Ava from behind his control panel as the motors beneath me continued taking me toward a claustrophobic arch that would soon receive my head. I felt like the victim being inched toward the buzz saw.

I pivoted my neck to see John and Ava discussing the controls quite animatedly when John barked at me.

“Head down,” he sternly instructed.

“O.K., O.K.,” I said.

“Stop talking,” he further reprimanded.

“O.K., O.K.,” I again agreed.

“Music?” he offered.

“Sure, why not,” I answered.

“I said stop talking,” he said again.

By this time, I figured he was goofin’ with the magnet, because I began to hear some irritating popping noises. In the nick of time, my head was in perfect position between two stereo speakers to enjoy the first lush chords of an orchestral arrangement of Claire de lune (if that’s what it’s called here).

“Don’t talk, Rocky; just listen, O.K.?”

I acquiesced by lying absolutely still as my answer. I could feel my keys pressing up against my trousers to escape. And then like a disc jockey on talk-over, John gave me some news with Debussy as a luxurious background.

“I don’t know how important it is to you, but one of the things Landry told me this morning was that Abby, the one left here when your Abby was pushed along...well, she had the abortion yesterday.”

And Debussy began his orchestral refrain.

How important was it?

Truly, that was hard to say. I was not as militant against it as my Abby was. And after all, the one here wasn’t my child, but my pop-up’s child—a Rocky’s child of some sort. That thought was fairly consoling, in an escapist way, to my thwarted fatherhood until I accepted the realization that there would be living versions of my child, or Rudolph’s, or Reggie’s, or whoever’s, elsewhere in several layers. And this one, here, was one of the unlucky ones. This made it almost a shame for the lucky existers elsewhere.

Debussy re-introduced his theme.

I wondered where I was headed, and then I remembered where my head was. Normally I would chuckle to myself over a pun like this, but I was getting pretty scared over where I was going. Was I going to a place where my real Abby would successfully champion her child’s birthright, or would it be such a terrible place as to force her to terminate the pregnancy against her wishes? Or even by her wishes?

Guilt grew as I realized that I cared more for a birth down the line than I did for the aborted pregnancy here. But since guilt is self-destructive, certainly profitless and therefore a phenomenon I forbid, I blocked it from my mind.

“It’s too bad this is just a send-off, and not a proper scan,” John said over the music. “It looks like you have an anomaly deep in your brain. Looks like an extra convolution or something.”

Then Debussy did some weird things. He got a bit funky. I don’t mean the recording became a disco rendition of his work, but that the inherent melody had a contrapuntal kick as a sneaky undertone, growing more menacing until it dominated, and then detonated, devouring it’s prey, now the original submersed theme.

I knew I was sliding—being pushed, actually.

“One thing,” I said to John.

“Make it quick,” he said to me, heard better through the speakers than the speed of sound could carry his actual voice through the air.

“As long as I’m here and all, and you can see extra contusions—”

“Convolutions,” he corrected.

“Yea, those. Well, could you, like, also check to see if I must have rocks in my head.”

“Shut the fuck up, comedian,” he said to me, and I did. “You stupid asshole, you’ve screwed up my test.”

This John was the Welcome Wagon for my new world. I not only shut the fuck up, I got the hell out of that contraption. Ava was nowhere—gone. It was funny how I instinctively looked for her in my peril. Instead, Dr. Landry the shrink was in her place behind the console with John, or whatever his name was here.

“I need that scan, Jim,” Landry told “Jim” angrily.

“You would have had it if he’d’ve kept quiet, the fucker,” Jim responded.

With this no-help retort from a subordinate, the psychiatrist popped his hand on the back of Jim’s head.

And me—I was on my way out.

“Hey, you!” Dr. Landry commanded. “Lie back down.”

Running was the talent of the moment. I dashed, and boy! were they hacked off. There were words said I’d never even heard before.

“Coprosucker bile-wad!” shouted Jim.

“Boveater!” added the psychiatrist to my dust. “Lap-lapper!”

I reversed my path through this one hell of an ugly building. The floor stripe, now black, raced under me like under the front wheel of a departing aircraft. I ultimately made it out to the steps by the entrance. As I darted past, my arm was hooked by someone’s hand that centripetally spun me around. The deafening sirens on the street heightened the frenzy. It was a woman’s hand.

I looked at Ava, the widow, Les’s mom. She stopped spinning in my vision a split-second after I did, and before I could wonder whether it was she or the version of this world, she spoke.

“It’s really me,” she said, truly existing, over the sound of the sirens going by. “Landry caught our John while you were in there, gave him all kinds of grief, and summoned him, along with your ‘version,’ to some security office. I ran off, but then I ran back to the magnet and climbed in. I’ve been waiting an hour.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said, but I wasn’t sorry. “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” I told her, showing obvious irritation with the distraction of the sirens the hospital seemed to attract. I grabbed her hand as we waited to cross the busy street on the green light. Suddenly, we each felt a tremor—I know I did.

“Did you feel that?” I asked her.

“Yes.” The light turned from red to green. I mean I saw it as red, looked at Ava, then regarded the light again and saw it was green.

“Let’s go.”

Wrong! We both nearly got creamed. The driver showed no remorse as his very heavy car whizzed past, the wind assisting in belting us back.

The light had not turned from red (Don’t Walk) to green (Walk), but it had actually turned green (Don’t Walk). We had slid, together, hopefully following an electromagnetic wake that my Abby had made.

The auto horn to my brain had caused a body jolt, and by the time this jolt had receded, we attempted to cross again. Different jolts came back. Cars were changing colors and shapes, their positions altering slightly with each step, with each slide. Damn, we were sliders across the whole half thoroughfare! The types of sirens kept changing, which added a chilling aural enhancement to the surrealism. Our footfall hesitations and worried lurches forward must have looked hysterical to those of the static layers we were passing through; I know we appeared drunk or spastic or something. Which reminded me: she sure needed to do some explaining about what happened to her son when she had decided to come with me. These thoughts popped in and out like prairie dogs as I concentrated on the target practice for cars that the sliding was funneling us into.

We made it to the median, terrified. Ava began to cry and I held her tight.

“It’s just a street,” I told her, my eyes focused on her but my peripheral vision witness to the blurred flickering background that was the series of worlds we were traveling. We were both exhausted, this side of the avenue having taken us a nerve-racking very long minute.

“We’re lucky to be alive,” she exclaimed, out of breath. The magnet was fierce, because I could appreciate we were sliding dozens of times a minute.

“It could always be worse,” I reminded her.

“It’s getting worse!” she said emphatically, attesting to the stroboscopic panorama of altering buildings, changing colors, and wavering hemlines. She dropped to her knees on the cement at the median and became sick. I crouched down to assist, but had nothing to wipe her mouth with.

“Here,” I offered, holding out my sleeved arm so that she could dry her mouth on it.

“No, no,” she refused, finally gaining some stability, her motion sickness abating.

And then it stopped.

Like beating your head against the wall, you truly don’t realize how bad it feels until you stop. Understand this: I’ve always been the one to do the sliding. Sliding’s never been done to me. I’ve always done it once at a time, I might add. That flickering effect is for the birds—like being on LSD. When it had stopped, I felt like I’d gotten off of a boat ride’s worth of seasickness myself. I too felt a brief wave of nausea. I felt fine, though, by the time the lights, in a stationary world, turned again who cared what color.

“Ava?” I asked.

She just shook her head, indicating well-being as she arose to a standing position once again.

“We do have to cross the rest of the street at some point, Ava,” I said to her as I helped her stand.

“I know,” she replied in a depressed tone.

“C’mon, there’s no sliding now; let’s do it.”

“O.K.” She rallied.

We began to lah-dee-dah walk across, hand in hand, terrified that the shimmying might begin at any time, without warning. We placed each step carefully, as if respect for the ground’s tranquility would keep us in some god’s good favor. Except for the first step off of the curb, we started crossing without any paroxysms. The traffic had been coming from the opposite direction than expected and, like all good Yankees on vacation in England, we had had to jump back.

“Look both ways before crossing a street,” I teased her. “Didn’t your Mama teach you that?” Her answer was a mock scornful look as we aimed for the other side. Step by polite step, we slowly made it across to the next safe harbor. From there, we crossed an easier crosswalk to Tulane Avenue, and then walked down a block to put some distance between us and St. Luke’s with its harrowing ambulances.

We agreed on a coffee shop right at hand, “Eddie’s Coffee Heaven,” and walked in. It was a fairly large family place that would be a likely roost for retirees having their morning coffees with cronies. In other words, it seemed like the type of place that experienced no bad crowds, nor would tolerate them. It reeked of settled middle-aged values where there was never a scene, never a tip under fifteen per cent (or over it), never any trouble. In the distance I saw Eddie, my former employer, fussing at some underlings with all of the authority an owner has. At one point he seemed to catch my eye, so I waved at him. He must not have recognized me, however, because my hailing went unnoticed. The place was fairly busy with the normal business of plate-rattling, chair-shuffling, and ice clinking until all ceased in deference to our suddenly noticed presence. Even Eddie noticed us, paralyzed in unfriendly silence—still no recognition.

We had the strangest unexpected feeling—like being the only non-Mormons in Salt Lake City. The sign read, PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF, and so we did. The commotion resumed.

“Why did everyone stop when we walked in?” she whispered as she immediately saw to wiping her mouth clean with a napkin. She made a face attesting to the fact that she had not completely tended to the distaste remaining.

“I don’t know why everyone stopped,” I said. I checked my zipper, then looked around and saw everyone looked the same as us, except for one difference. Everyone had on some type of hat, cap, scarf, or something on their heads. Ava noticed it too.

“Gee,” she said, “we’ve committed a fashion faux pas.” Patrons regarded us from time to time, and the expressions on their faces were not positive. We were definitely not on the same team.

“See that guy over there by the cash register?” I asked her.

“The man in white with all the grease on him?” she said, spotting him.

“Yea, that guy. I used to work for him when he just sold burgers in a joint right here in this spot.” Ava looked around again.

“He certainly has prospered, hasn’t he?”

“He’s the type who would in a worse world,” I responded.

Just when I felt it had been an uncomfortably long time to wait for service, a waitress came up to us. She did not take her pad out of the central pocket of her dirty apron but instead further filled it with her hands, making a stance in front of us. She was a solid woman, one I easily imagined could deliver Steins at the Oktoberfest. She finally spoke.

“No shoes, not hat, no service,” she proclaimed.

Being the smart ass, I opened a napkin and placed in on my head, smiling—just to sort of break the ice, you know.

The open-palmed slap is the one that hurts the most. The fingers give a sting that is supplemental to the blunt thud of the palm. Rings, as in this instance, are particularly luxurious appointments to the whole effect.

“Trouble here?” a sudden policeman said to her.

“Hey, no trouble,” I offered. “Let’s go, Ava.” Ava was most conciliatory and arose as I was speaking. The policeman followed us very, very closely until we were at the door. As a parting shot, he offered a little friendly piece of advice, as policemen are prone to do in any layer.

“Fellah, make it easiest. Get a hat.”

“Yes, officer,” I said. We promptly exited.

With the door closed safely behind us, I clutched my radiating face. “Wow-oh-wow! What a slap.” Ava held my chin to regard the red hand on my cheek.

“Oh, look, you can even see where she was wearing her rings.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said, the hand-shaped welt still tingling.

Everyone had hats. I mean everyone. O.K., so hats were all the rage here. More than that, it was some perverted jingoistic patriotism on display. I eyed the intersection we now considered.

“Ava,” I said, “there are three hat shops right on this corner. Not that they need the business, but I say we need hats.”

Suddenly an elderly hatted gentleman shouted from his passing car, “Get a job! Get a hat!”

The hat shop diagonally across the street on the corner opposite, Hattest Brands Going, meant traversing traffic again. Of the two shops on our side, Love and Hat and Where It’s Hat!, we chose the former simply because it was the closer of the two, and we could dart in without any more abuse for our naked scalps. The glass door rang a bell set to trip at the top of the door jam. The ring, I noted, was muffled somewhat, as I discovered someone had taped a little hat on top of the dome of the ringer.

“Oh, come on,” I smirked to Ava, pointing out the little mascot. There were a few customers in the shop, and there were as many sales persons.

“Best morning,” the man behind the counter said, turning to face us, looking over his cash register as he did. Both Ava and I gasped. The man was Ralph Ebe! Ava’s Ralph, the guy I had sort of killed which had made her a widow. We backed away from him a step in our disbelief and surprise, my being repulsed further by those weird self-antagonistic feelings again. Amazingly, this man showed no recognition on his face, indicating to us that he was a replacement, a pop-up for the space occupied in another world by another Ralph Ebe. Actually, no recognition wouldn’t be exactly accurate. It was, in fact, an expression of recognition, but of an acquaintance, not of a wife, co-parent, best friend, or lover. This person, it would seem, should be married to her version here, a version Ava more than likely replaced. She hoped to discover the truth with her next question. And so, with his face not matching the expected reaction of intimate familiarity, Ava asked.

“Ralph?” she asked. “Aren’t you going to kiss me hello?”

“Are you nuts?” I whispered, as I continued to back away without her until I was up against the door. I began getting shaky, almost like being affected by the panic that results from anger without action. My hands got very cold. The man made a quizzical face, having no idea why she would be so forward.

“Ma’am?” he replied.

“Aren’t you Ralph?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, “Ralph Ebest—the respectablest name in hats, although I’m sure you might disagree.” His pride still eroded through his wondering about her being so brash. Why he was sure Ava might disagree with him made no sense. I was beginning to lose any interest in this turn of events as I was in slipping out of there, for I was starting to plunge deeper into strange feelings again; these feelings I’ve felt before—the kind that strive for resolution, even using someone’s death. As pre-occupied as I was with my own distraught seizure, I still could notice that the gentleman had no unpleasant rumblings himself.

“So where do you live, Mr. Ebest?” Ava asked him. This startled him. To Ava, it was just a question to possibly ascertain any connection he might have with her; to him it was, of course, an inappropriate invasion of privacy.

“Ava,” he said to her, knowing her name. His tone was one of counselling. “First you want to kiss me, and then you wish to find out where I live the best. I don’t know if I should be associating in this way with my competition.”

“Your competition?” she asked him. “What do you mean?”

By this point I couldn’t have cared less about this mysterious exchange, because I couldn’t take it anymore. My heart pounded in my chest. I could feel these palpitations radiating up my neck and down into the center of my belly. I began to sweat. I began to unravel. If I had remained in that shop any longer, I felt, I would certainly be going for his throat.

“Ava!” I shouted. “I’ve got to get out.”

“But a hat. You need a hat.”

“Right now, Ava! I’ll be at the next shop. Get one here, if you must, but I have to go.” I slipped out to the muffled sound of the welcome bell. I spun around the edge of the opened door, and in doing so, spun right out. I leaned against the window, catching my breath and my civility. Calming down, I turned to look at the two of them in there. I watched as Ava chose a little felt ribbon thing for her hair. I waited patiently. After a few more minutes she left with her purchase, to be surprised by me catching her arm as she exited.

“That was important, Rocky,” she complained. “Why did you leave?”

“Because I didn’t want another person dropping dead on me. Remember?” This was cruel of me. She did remember, and I could tell by the face she made. “I’m so sorry, Ava,” I told her, loosening my grip on her arm to that of a caring, sympathetic hold.

“That’s alright,” she said, trying to wipe away the instant tears. “I should have been more considerate. It’s just that I discovered that this isn’t a world I want, if that wasn’t my Ralph.” I got a little annoyed at this point, in spite of her crying.

“I hope you don’t mind if I find out whether this is the world I want?” I asked. She smiled, even with her red eyes.”

“Of course not. We’re in this thing together. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if it turned out to be the same place for both of us?” I felt better immediately. “But oh, look, Rocky,” she cautioned, “you’re on the street without a hat...”

“And that’s not too cool, I know. You’re absolutely right. Let’s go into Where It’s Hat! for me.” We began walking to the next hat store that was only one address away. As we did, she told me she didn’t recognize the money she used to make her purchase.

“I just handed him the bills and let him take what was needed. I felt like an illiterate,” she complained. I pulled out some cash I had on me. The five dollar bill, that is, the one with Lincoln, read $101 instead. The ten, with Hamilton, was a $1,010 bill. I considered this for a moment.

“Wait a minute, don’t worry,” I told her. I have this figured out. “We’re in Base Two here.”

“What?” she asked.

“Base Two.”

“What’s that?”

“Just a different way of counting,” I answered. “But it represents the same thing.” She was still not comforted. “I was a math major; take my word for it. It’s not inflation.”

“That’s a relief,” she said. “And it’s not lire or yen or something like that?”

“Really, it’s good ol’ bucks. Just count on two fingers or leave the money to me.”

By now, we were at the next store, and upon entering we at once noted that this was a much smaller establishment. The sole person there was a woman who stood up from a stooping, head-down position, her face now readily seen as Ava’s face!

So this was the competition!

Ava gasped. I watched nervously as I witnessed familiar emotions swell in her and this time, as well, in the person who was her mirror image. There the two of them stood, face to face, shaking and gasping at each other. It was like dueling bellows, the two of them there, huffing and puffing in terror of each other.

“You bitch!” the woman cried at Ava.

“No!” she fired back, “you bitch! And you witch, too!”

“I wish you were dead,” the woman continued.

“After you—on your way to Hell!” Ava now screamed. The woman ramped up her hyperventilating even more, reaching behind her for a back of a chair for support.

“C’mon, Ava,” I said to her, “let’s get out of here. Quick!”

Suddenly, the woman collapsed. I had hoped it wasn’t death. I grabbed a cap with one hand as I grabbed Ava’s arm with the other and we escaped.

“Rocky,” she exclaimed just outside the shop, “I don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything. Just catch your breath a sec while you sweeten up a little.”

“I don’t know what came over me. I was so hateful—I don’t know why. That woman—she was like me. I wanted to hurt her. Why?”

“I don’t know, but believe me, I know just how you felt.”

“I wasn’t very nice to her...” Ava said in self-blame. “We’ve got to go help her.”

“No way,” I replied. “Do you want to die?” I looked back through the window in the door and saw the woman, dazed, struggling back to her feet. “She’s O.K.,” I reported.

Ava peered in with her own doubts, only to see her distraught double duck behind the counter. With my cap planted squarely on my head, I pulled her the hundred or so feet back to the coffee shop. She was heavy in her resistance, being not quite sure what to do. She was dazed and off balance by her confused emotions.

We entered Eddie’s Coffee Heaven again, and once again we seated ourselves. This time there was no awkward silence to introduce us. My cap, which was a baseball cap, read, “Chicago White Hats.” Ava read it aloud to me.

“I’m not surprised,” I told her. We waited for our waitress again. Ava sighed.

“That was really strange,” she said of her confrontation in the second hat store. “It was like meeting all of the people in the whole world I can’t stand, and they all turn out to be me.”

“That’s exactly what happened to me the night of Ralph’s death,” I told her.

“Yes, I know now,” she said with a new wisdom given a voice. “I understand fully. Before I just thought I understood. Now I really understand. I felt the lethal potential there.”

“That’s best,” we were relieved to hear our waitress say, having reclaimed our table properly attired as we were. Every feature on the woman was as sharp as the pencil she threatened her pad with. Her nose and chin might just as easily have come from the same pencil sharpener. She squinted one eye to aim the other, as if through a scope. She was locked in on target and was ready to engage any shit from anyone. I kept my neck cocked for a quick duck should I see a deft hand flying my way. Just to be on the safe side, I intended to be careful in the way I ordered.

“Are you still serving breakfast?” I asked her.

“Up till the uppity-ippest o’clock,” she answered. Luckily, I spied the advisory in the menu which read, “The Breakfest Breakfast Till 1,011 O’Clock.” Of course, I thought: since this was Base Two, any word of theirs for eleven, or 1,011 here, would be gibberish to us. I translated for Ava.

“Eleven o’clock,” I whispered, pointing to the four-digit time reference.

“No. I said uppity-ippest o’clock,” the waitress reiterated.

“Yes, that’s right,” I said agreeably, figuring it wasn’t half an ip past uppity yet. “We will order now.”

“Yes, sir?” the waitress asked, pad in hand. “Order you best; I’m the readiest you’ll need.”

“Superlative service,” I commented to Ava, who promptly kicked my shin under the table, adding to my injuries. Careful, Rocky, I thought, the message reinforced by Ava’s footwork; diction’s affected here. I tread carefully with my order, eyeing the size of the waitress’s rings. I read from the menu verbatim.

“I’ll take a glass of the orangest juice, the hashest browns, and the breakfest sausage.” She scribbled furiously, the leading stroke popping a small point off of the lead of her very sharp pencil, the trajectory causing it to pop me in the forehead. I let it slide.

“And you,” she said to Ava.

“Uh, I’ll, uh...” she fumbled, “I’ll take the hottest coffee.”

“You’ve got to love it; it’s the best. Thanks the most.” She snapped curtly around and bolted off. Ava and I shared a glance, one of self-congratulation for a conversation well done.

“All of this reminds me,” she said sadly, “of a time when I was still moving from world to world, before I had met Ralph. The point at which I finally noticed ‘the direction’ was when I came upon the world that had had slavery.” She took her eyes off of me and looked past me, unfocused. “It seemed so barbaric to me that human beings would think so worthless other human beings as to put a worth on them.” She paused with a little laugh, her eyes once again snapping back to fix on my eyes. “I guess that doesn’t make much sense.”

“Actually, it does,” I assured her.

“I don’t know. I guess when people didn’t seem important—to others, or even to themselves—that’s the point where I knew I had to stop before it got any worse. And even though slavery had ended over a century earlier, it just showed what the people were capable of.” She rapped her fingers on the tablecloth. She really needed some coffee.

“What made you think of that?” I asked.

“Oh, just looking around. Such a big change. It made me think of my first appreciation of degeneration. When did you first notice things were getting worse?” she asked.

“I saw some deterioration for awhile before it really had dawned on me. In retrospect, I guess it started with my parents. I think I’d still have them today if I hadn’t slid around so much. It’d be nice to hit a layer where they’d be back again.” Now I was the one rapping my fingers, because I really needed some coffee, too. “But I guess I finally noticed in a conscious way, a way that really affected me, when Ava got that bump on her nose.”

“I beg your pardon,” Ava said quizzically.

“No,” I added with a little laugh. “Not you. My girlfriend before she was renamed Abby...after she had replaced Ana.” I stopped and Ava could tell I was looking at the bump on her own nose.

“Oh, stop it,” she blurted. She put her hand on her nose.

“Somehow,” I went on, “this all fits together—you, her...me, him. But I’m afraid it’s a little too complicated for me, even if I do have an extra convolution in my brain or whatever—like John said.”

“I wonder if I have one of those, too,” she said more to herself. Then to me, “Why do you think things are getting worse?” she asked. I could tell by her expression that she had her own pre-conceived ideas but that she was interested in mine.

“I really don’t know, to tell you the truth,” I answered. “I think it could have just as easily gone the other way. I’d like to think it was my exertion with Ava—”

“Who?”

“O.K., with Abby.”

“You mean sex,” she said with a bit of an accusative tone.

“I mean love,” I clarified, wondering why I was always being put on the defensive about this. “Well, whatever. An exertion. I’d like to think it was this exertion that had me make the jump.”

“Like the magnet.”

“Yes, like the magnet.”

“So,” she concluded for me, “you think it was basically a random choice of directions, either good or bad.”

“I guess so. What are your ideas?”

“Well,” she began, “I’m not quite so sure myself. I have to figure all of these worlds co-exist, and we can just cut through. I think that one’s self-serving moves—”

“You mean selfish slides,” I translated.

“Yes. I think that selfish slides put us in a direction, a wave if you will, that can only give us a perspective of the results of our inconsiderate actions, as seen only in realms where these results can be accepted.”

“Or something like that,” I mocked good-naturedly.

“Or something like that,” she agreed with a smile. “It’s like when we slide to profit ourselves in some way, we see the world a little worse off for our actions. To us, it’s just a worse world.”

“You mean we’re not traveling?”

“Oh, we’re traveling alright. I don’t have all the answers, I know.”

“Who would know?”

“Right.” She paused. “Kind of like making yourself look better by making everyone else look bad. That’s kid stuff, I guess, with the bullies and tattle-tales.”

“What about love?” I asked her. “What about sliding for love? Shouldn’t that be considered unselfish? Shouldn’t that take me back the other way.”

“You would think, wouldn’t you,” she answered. “Unless, of course, you started out long before that for just sex.”

“Alright! I admit it. I’m a heathen. O.K.? Is everyone satisfied?” I wasn’t exactly yelling, but my tone was a bit animated.

“Listen,” she comforted, reaching out across the table and touching my hand, “I’m here, too. It’s human nature to do for ourselves. I must have started my direction long, long before I ever noticed. We’re here together now, right?”

“O.K., O.K., I’m not mad,” I reassured her.

“Good.” She thought again about the earlier part of our conversation. “Anyway, like I said, I was stopped dead in my tracks with the slavery thing.”

“When you realized what people there were capable of.”

“Yes,” she said. “They were capable of that.” I could tell she was still amazed.

“Not only of that,” I added, remembering the holocaust, “but capable of much worse. I knew the score with nose bumps and all, but my history book blew me away. It’s was funny how things dawn on you, and then they dawn on you.” I sat with her quietly, still waiting for our order. I kept feeling this thing on my head—oh, yea, I forgot: the ridiculous hat.

“Bothering you, huh?” Ava asked.

“Yes. A stupid device. Actually,” I now whispered, “a stupidest device. Hats are so senseless. And yet, they seem to be so important here, so expected.”

“They are most sensitive here, aren’t they?” she reflected.

“The most,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed, “the most.”

“Ava,” I called to her softly.

“Yes?”

“Why?”

“Why what?” she asked me back.

“Why did you come here?” Before she had a chance to answer, Eddie strolled up to us for a visit. He maneuvered out a chair and plopped down on it, closer to me.

“Well, Ebest, I guess I can talk to you now that you’re decent,” he said.

“Well why the hell didn’t you wave back to me when we first came in?” I demanded.

“Keep your hat on, pal, O.K.? I don’t even wanna know ya without your cover. So where y’at. Still sleazin’?”

“Sliding,” I corrected. It sure was different hearing Eddie talk without all of those Z’s.

“Oh, yea, slidin’,” he laughed, still sporting that grease-layered cough component to the sound. “You always were the craziest.” He reached over and tugged at the visor on my cap. “You sure picked a white trash hat to wear, huh?” He leaned back into his chair again, looked Ava over, and then turned to me. “And this is...”

“I’m Ava,” Ava offered, holding out her hand. This was regrettable, because she was forced to use her only napkin to remedy the soiling that the handshake had caused.

“So what’re you, his mommy dearest?” Eddie asked her.

“Just a friend,” she stated flatly, her eyes fixed on his in that way that indicates something is taken badly.

“Excuuuse me the most,” he said, laughing again. He popped up, saying, “Time’s up, gotta go, here’s Hap.”

“Huh?” we both said simultaneously.

“Aw, it’s just a Channel Four joke. Don’t let the gris-gris getcha. Ha!” He was back at his cash register within seconds, like none of this had ever happened.

“He knows about your different worlds?” Ava asked me.

“Someone I used to talk to. Someone who didn’t matter.”

“One of the little people,” she said, accusingly. “Y’know, worthless.”

“Please, Ava, cut me some slack. I’m a guy, O.K.? I’m a bachelor guy. And I’m a rich bachelor guy who can slide. Please don’t get into my lack of preoccupation with the downtrodden and all that. I’m no different than any other beer-drinking, girl-chasing college student. I’m getting pretty sick and tired of—”

“Stop, please. I’m sorry. It’s just that, you know, having seen the worse worlds go by, I’m a little sensitive to the callousness of people like—”

“Like me!” I interjected.

“No, like Eddie, I guess.” She then smiled at me, about to tease. “Of course, a little humility on your part...” I glared at her, rekindling my original question. I wasn’t going to let something like Eddie’s interruption save her. I raised my eyebrows in expectation. She knew I still wanted her to explain her following me.

“I’ve come for Ralph,” she finally answered. “You’ve come for your Abby, I’ve come for my Ralph. Is that very hard to understand?” She seemed very defensive.

“I knew that. But having a reason and then doing it are two different things. I guess I meant to ask you why did you actually do it. Ava, he may be dead here and all the way down the line, too. And you left your son.”

“We all take risks based on what’s at stake and what can possibly be gained.”

“What about Les? Who’s got him now? If you left him with John your pop-up will cry kidnap.”

“Ralph’s mother has him. She never did like me—I don’t know why. She probably would in the worlds before. Nevertheless, I gave her full written custody, to her utter delight. I knew this would fulfill her wildest dreams. She’s been wanting Les for years. She even asked me about it right before the funeral. Can you believe that?”

“But you’re his mother. How could she have such a crazy wish?”

“She’s always felt he could be rehabilitated better living with her. Her husband, Ralph’s father, owns part of a physical therapy practice. I heard constantly how they could do for him probably better than our private therapist who was coming out to the house. So the nag’s got him and he’ll be quite O.K. I’m happy for him. She’s been my pain, but she’s always been good to Les. And if she never liked me, she’s certainly not going to like my replacement. There’s no way Ralph’s mother would ever give him back. And the papers my replacement will have to deal with are iron-clad.”

“Even if you return?” I asked.

“If I return, it’ll be with Ralph. His mother won’t give him any trouble about returning Les to the both of us.”

“You’re really expecting to get back, aren’t you?”

“Of course. How could I leave my son forever? I must return. I know I will. Call it a mother’s intuition.”

“And with Ralph?”

“Of course. It’s all a package deal—me, Ralph, and getting back to our Les.”

“And if you return without Ralph?” Ava waved her finger back and forth in front of me, showing her resolve that this was out of the question. “Won’t you miss him?” I asked. “Especially if you never get back,” I added.

“She spoke with the half-baked foresight which had inspired her impromptu stow-away mission. “I’ll have him here. ”

“Oh wait, Ava. Big mistake. Not the same. He’s liable to be worse. C’mon, girl, you left your Les behind.”

“I’m sorry, but everything in me as his mother says it’s just temporary. Besides, the one here lost his mother when I popped up. I’ve got immediate responsibility.”

“Ava, didn’t you think this out before you left? We’ve got work to do—a mission for God’s sake. We can’t do it with a child here, possibly more handicapped than Les is.”

“I was kind of hoping,” she said, lips trembling, eyes filling, “that John here...”

“You mean ‘Jim,’” I corrected.

“Yes—that Jim would watch him. He was our friend there, so I figured he’d be our friend here.”

“The guy who told me to ‘shut the fuck up,’” I said; and I said this too loudly, apparently.

“You talkin’ to me?” asked a voice from the next booth. I instinctively covered my cheek.

Suddenly Ava shrieked as my hat proved no resistance to the fist that accordioned my head into my neck.

And then, without warning, we felt ourselves slide.

“Trouble here?” asked my policeman friend with good advice.

“No, no,” I answered with all haste, eyeing the sign that said, in this new sudden layer, ALL OFFENZIVE ACCOUTREMENTZ TO DENY, THE RIGHT, WE REZERVE, TO ZERVE. Eddie’s Z’s were back.

“Yez,” the waitress sneered. “He’z got a hat on, ozzifer.” I looked around and noticed I was suddenly in a hatless world.

“You filth. Get out. Out,” the ozzifer directed. And then if the waitress didn’t slap the ever living hell out of my other cheek.

“You want the next zlap for here or to go?”

“And Zstay out!” shouted Eddie. Good ol’ Eddie.

“Pretty ugly scenes you create,” Ava told me outside.

“Of course, my fault,” I said, turning to her with my whole body. “I wonder how many Japanese cities got nuked here.” I held my throbbing cheek. “I have a stiff neck from the fist behind me and my face feels like it got caught in an applause machine. Not to mention my shin,” I said as I rubbed my leg.

Now she kissed my newest cheek to make it feel better, and it really did feel better. I leaned against the wall of the coffee shop as she healed me and mothered me. She did not pull very far away from my face after her therapeutic kiss, which set into motion the cliché: my eyes answered her gaze, we were drawn, our lips met—you know the bit.

Almost immediately we stopped each other by popping apart; we had frightened each other. It was worse for me, though, because I was in pain and I was frightened. She and I gave traded nervous little laughs. This was really weird. I kissed a woman twice my age. That was weird enough, but this woman who co-truly existed with my Abby—well, I felt Abby when we kissed. God, this was not “kissin’ on another woman,” exactly. Actually, I didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t that. And it wasn’t so bad, either. I felt it, I felt the love.

She did too.

“That was so wonderful,” she said to me after considering her feelings. “It wasn’t like kissing Ralph,” she explained, nearing her face close to mine again, “it was kissing Ralph.”

I gulped.

She smiled and backed away to arm’s length. “Where to?” she asked, doing a poor job of dismissing the whole incident.

“We don’t have any choice. We’ve got to check the Les here, I suppose, right?”

“Right,” she responded, relieved, grateful for my answer.

Standing on the corner of our chameleon street, we discussed some logistics. My eyes nervously darted back and forth to see if the world would suddenly become hatted again, or earringed (God, I hope not), or flatulent, or whatever else. When in Reme, I thought...

A rental car was out. If we thought crossing a street as pedestrians was tough, rolling on wheels at high speeds with big machines trying to avoid all the other big machines would be suicide. But we didn’t particularly fancy walking, either, especially after our pin-ball experiences.

We’d take cabs, my ol’ stomping method. I had expressed some reservations about getting enclosed by a lot of metal with a driver who may suddenly be outraged by my diction, but this did seem safest.

Thankfully, our money had changed with our slides, making what we had on hand Base Ten legal tender.

“First thing,” I suggested, “is to get to my bank to draw out some more cash.”

“Oh, I hate to use yours,” she said. “I’m really well fixed. Let me treat for a while.”

“Forget it—I’m rich, too; I’ve got over a couple million from shrewd sliding myself,” I explained. She was still slightly hesitant, like, “oh-let-me-pay-the-check,” which finally relented with the “if you insist.”

We stood in line at the taxi stand in the next block, and when it was our turn, we hailed one the obviously customary way, the way we saw those before us do: by sticking out our thumbs.

“Whaddaya want?” asked the cabby. “Ride of your life or guaranteed deztination?” I knew this guy. This was my famous cabby, Mr. Doublecharge. His hair was a bit greasier, his face a bit more pockmarked, but it was definitely the same character.

“We’d like guaranteed destination,” answered Ava as we climbed in. I was relieved to see this version of him didn’t seem to recognize me.

“That’ll be exztra, fox,” he advised, head reversed at her, eyeing her legs, a black cigarette (thin cigar?) anchoring one corner of his mouth, the voice coming from the other corner. No hat. I checked my money. Still no longer in base two, thank goodness.

“First National, three lights up,” I directed.

“Ain’t no zuch thing,” he said to me, his pile-driving eyes not leaving her. So my bank had changed names, and so had probably my name. I’d deal with that at the bank when I got there.

“That bank, then, whatever the name,” I further directed.

His head snapped back on straight, and he began driving.

“Lazt Word National Bank,” he said, to himself as well as to us. He cocked the flag on his meter.

“How much you gotz?” he asked.

“About twenty dollars,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Geez, I don’tz know.”

“You don’t know about what?” Ava asked.

“I don’tz know if that’ll getz you that far, what with guaranteed deztination and all.”

“Let us know when you’ve gone as far as the money’ll take us,” I said, solving that problem.

This was a bad world. These people were crazy. People were treated with such a casual disregard for courtesy and decorum. I just knew that I was going to get slapped up again before the end of this ride. I noticed the large high school ring on the driver’s right hand. Yes, it was a bad world.

Before, I had been dismayed by the uglier direction sliding had taken, and then concerned at the often cruel tendencies of the layer I had left behind—my Abby’s launch layer, the magnet layer—with its children on milk cartons, its double nuclear nudge to the Japanese, its holocaust. At least for the most part, most people strove to make it make sense, and some could even, with the mixed bag of loveliness and tragedy, still try to call it a beautiful world.

This direction, though, was getting even worse, as impossible as that seemed. There was cruelty going further down this direction, too. But now was added the murderous quality of senselessness. Wear no hat, get slapped silly. Wear a hat, offend the police—guys with guns! To Protect and to Zerve the hatless.

Senseless responses, senseless cause-and-effect, senseless relationships. And for this reason, I dreaded what Ava might find in her son here. How had her pop-up raised him? I mean it takes tireless hope and the patience of a saint to raise a child—much less one handicapped—where we came from. How might that child have suffered in a place like this? I wondered if Ava had thought these thoughts. Of course she had; after all, she wasn’t a stupid mother. She was a true exister who had been sliding her whole life, too, until stopped in the layer I had met her in, her Ralph Ebe’s layer.

(Because my late co-true exister had been named Ralph Ebe in a layer innumerable layers down from the one I had been named Ralph Ebe in, innumerable layers after I had graduated summa cum laude, I wondered if those two Ralph-Ebe layers, separated by vast expanses of subtle degradation, were related. A layer wormhole? A short cut?)

“Time’z running out on guaranteed deztination, sportz fanz,” the cabby informed us.

“No problem,” I told him, expecting him to let us out at the appropriate endpoint of our cash. He spoke again.

“The only way to makez it work iz to tranzfer the meter to the cheaper mode.”

“Which is...” I cued Ava nervously.

“...ride of our lives,” she finished, as we each went for a door handle on our respective sides.

We had each succeeded in opening the doors a crack before the sudden acceleration slammed them shut and us back into the seat. If I hadn’t been about to die, I’d have appreciated the considerable talent this driver had. When you can cleverly play the clutch, brake, and accelerator in such a way as to make the car buck at sixty miles an hour in downtown traffic, including turns, of which there were too many, then I, while surviving, am impressed.

Thump!

“He waz azking for it,” laughed the driver, referring to the pedestrian foot he had clipped. I spun my head around, wrenching my forgotten stiff neck to see a man hopping mad and shaking his fist. Ava clutched me even more tightly than the car’s clutch was pumped. The car screeched to a halt, a rear bumper of a parked car none the better as it provided the final damper for our landing.

“Ya lucked out, crew,” he said to us, turning and draping his brush-burned elbows over his seat. “Lookz like you gotz the ride of your livez and your deztination. Lookz like my day’z off to a bad start.” It was amazing how the vertebrate long ash still had not fallen off of his cigarette butt during the gravity swings. He winked, and it then did fall cold on Ava’s knee. He snatched the cash as we bailed out.

Last Word National Bank had a revolving door, like my same bank had, but it was beaten up and wooden, not gold-brushed metal like before. We shared the same spinning wedge as we walked in, Ava sure that paying through the nose for guaranteed destination was the way to go from now on. She was developing a little nervous laugh, a tic that I knew didn’t mean she thought anything was funny.

As we lined up, I pulled out my wallet to see how my ID may have changed through the slides. There was my picture, thankfully hatless, with my new name.

Ralph Ebe! Again! Ava eyed it, then held it, and then she looked at me.

“I’m not going to get weird about this,” she said, her Ralph obviously on her mind. “Instead,” she continued, “I’m going to relate to it, appreciate it, even enjoy it. I call you Ralph starting now.”

Who was I to argue. That was my name before. Ava, on the other hand, indicated to me that she had brought no ID with her.

“Just a face without a name in a hatless world,” I teased.

“My name is Ava—always has been.”

“Oh, yea,” I said. “I’m the true exister who changes names.” I considered our trip so far. “It looks like names around you, though, are changing, just like they’ve always changed around for me.”

“Yes,” she realized, “that is tough to keep straight. New for me. You did this to me.”

“All iz in order, Mr. Ebe; come thiz way,” said the smiling blond bank officer (ozzifer), my credentials having been presented to him after waiting our turn in line.

And some line. A queue is a queue, but lately in these layers, there seems to have been a slight breakdown in line etiquette. If you’ve ever been to Italy, you know what I mean. Unlike Italy, however, the bank offered no fine eating. Not even toasters. And, as I was informed, it did not even offer my money.

“What!” I shouted.

“Mr. Ebe, calm down,” said the bank ozzifer.

“I’ll calm down when you give me my money.”

“Trouble here?” a security guard asked, approaching both of us, our position reactively semi-seated at the desk. Ava nudged me hard, reminding me that it was possible to add to my list of injuries.

“Ow!”

“No, sir,” offered Ava to the guard.

“Good,” said the bank ozzifer, stacking a neat deck of correspondence, and then he continued. “Having been lizted PNG, we were, regrettably, forzed to pay you negative interezt.”

“Excuse me?” I asked. “PNG?”

“PNG, Mr. Ebe. Pecunia non grata.”

“Yes?”

“Your money or your businezz, we don’t want.” The ensuing silence was my fault, as the ball was in my court. Finally...

“Why not?”

“An ezplanation we don’t have to give.”

Now this rang a bell, not so much what he had said, but how he had said it. Last layer, the hatted layer, was the superior layer. Everything was the best, the orangest, and so on. Next thing, we were slid into the hatless layer, with all the zs and sentence inversions, like All Offenzive Accoutrementz To Deny, The Right, We Rezerve, To Zerve. I, of course, got clobbered in both. This was, I vowed, to always be an important consideration, especially with the reminder of a security guard, a polizeman, standing near.

“Well, if you don’t want my money or my biz-ness,” I offered, “let’s have it. Hand it over. No problem.

“No problem,” I repeated more loudly, but I smiled stiffly, for the benefit of the guard.

“Well, zir, that’z it juzt,” he stammered, nervous with apology. “If it weren’t for negative interezt, no interezt you’d have at all,” he said, now mustering up a wry tone which made the lyrical quality of the inversions stand out all the more.

“Look, I’ve had about enough—”

“Zit down!” Ava commanded, and then turned to the banker. “Please just explain to us where is the money so we can have it.”

“You zee, I’m afraid we were forzed to pay negative interezt, at a high yield rate.”

“Highezt yieldz in the state,” the guard boasted proudly. The banker continued.

“Over the pazt few weekz, we’ve had to abzorb all of it. It’z our Bank Appreziation Plan your azzountant directed uz to do. Of courze, he getz hiz cut.”

“Of courze! The sleazy baztard!” I had been embezzled.

“You’ll rezeive a bill for the paper work. I azzume you’re at the same addrezz.”

“I think zo,” I answered, investing in the vernacular. “What is the addrezz you have?”

“Arnold Building, Riverzcape.”

“Ah, yez,” I said. Arnold Building. It’z the zame. Well, it certainly waz a pleazure dealing with your bank.”

“Why, thank you,” he told me.

“Just one lazt question,” I said. Ava gave me a “Don’t start” look.

“Yez?”

“If I were to take out a big, fat loan at your larcenouz bank, could I get a negative interezt rate, one that paid me more the longer I kept the money? And could thiz gentleman in the uniform give you hiz gun so that you could do thiz zort of thing properly?”

And the guy slapped me in the head. Real hard. And the guard escorted us out as the crowd of customers gawked. And then he slapped me, too. Damn! And then he kicked my ass.

Ava helped me get up. By this time the boot trooper had revolved back in through the sit-on-this-and-rotating door.

I rubbed my head and Ava rubbed my behind, which was almost worth it.

“I guess this bank has the last word,” she said to me.

“Let’s rob it,” I suggested.

“Let’s not,” she retorted, taking me seriously. “Let’s go to my house here and pick up Les. Then let’s take you home to “Riverscape,” where we can catch some Zs.”

Ava felt that her house hadn’t changed all that much, except for the debilitated landscaping. It had been a short walk from the bus stop where we had been let off. The going on the bus had been slower than taxi, but calmer. This was in spite of the high school kids on the bus, most of whom looked a lot older than me, tossing an ill-chosen classmate around most of the ride. And how bad could it have been if none of the spit had actually landed on us?

The imitation stucco was a bit cracked here and there, but most of the damage was hair-line. This neighborhood near the newer cemeteries seemed a bit more run down than what she had left, but all in all it was still a fairly peaceful suburban setting. All of the underground wiring was now above ground, but this was not obtrusive as it was well hidden among the oaks.

She seemed relieved that her cut glass door was still intact, running her fingers affectionately along the mahogany that framed it. She tried a key, but it didn’t work. It went in but wouldn’t turn. Kind of like us: we came into this world but couldn’t seem to get the tumblers lined up.

“I know a trick, if it still works,” she said anxiously. She walked around the side of the house and stopped at a window.

“This is Leslie’s window,” she said to me, smiling and excited. She cupped her hands over her brow to deglare her voyeurism and peered in. The smile quickly left her face. She straightened up her hunched self and walked back over to me hurriedly.

“There’s nothing in his room,” she blurted, grabbing my arm.

“Or course not. He’s not going to be there,” I reassured her. “Even here, you’re the replacement for the pop-up. She would have arranged for someone to watch him.” I spoke quickly, because she would soon see the holes in my reasoning. Sure the pop-up would make these arrangements if she were to be going off on a big magnet mission like Ava did, but she wouldn’t have been set up for a scan because she was a pop-up.

“So let’s see,” I figured out loud, “who would it be? John, I mean Jim’s out...”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s a completely different room. It’s a study. There’s nothing of his there.” The tone of her voice was still insisting the worst.

“Well here,” I told her, “I’m sure he occupies another room. That’s not that far-fetched where we’ve seen hundreds of changes.”

“We’ll see,” she said as she walked back down the side of the house. She continued past the window she had looked into and walked around a corner to the back of the house. She brushed away some dead rosebush branches that guarded the worn unofficial path, at one point getting snagged on a thorn.

“Ouch,” she yelled, and then it was forgotten, paling in her purpose. I followed without an invitation.

She fumbled with a little stick that was jammed into the tracking in the outside sill of a back window. Removing it allowed her to open it easily since it wasn’t locked. It was one of two aluminum windows that flanked a glass door, the whole wing a plated glass design that faced the back yard.

“This is the trick I was talking about,” she said, feeling lucky about how easily the window opened for her. As she stepped in halfway, she reached out for my hand for steadying. “This window never had a lock to begin with in my world—it carried through here.”

I followed her in, and we found ourselves in a sunlit solarium, heavily furnished with plants which sat on a pink ceramic tile floor.

“Ralph had always meant to get around to installing a lock,” she mused to herself, but out loud for my benefit. She snapped her reverie and began roaming the house, first like she had misplaced her keys, then like a pooch who had heard a suspicious noise. “There’s no evidence of him,” she asserted, beginning to panic. “It’s like he never existed. No pictures—nothing!”

She entered the bathroom in the hall and slammed the door behind her. After a moment, I knocked on the door to see if she was alright. My knock was dull, indicating that it was a solid door, but still I could hear through it that she was brushing her teeth. After a few minutes she came back out with the final distaste of her motion sickness gone.

“I’ll bet you feel better now,” I said, and I knew she did, having been to my share of fraternity parties.

“Really,” she agreed, but I could still see she was plenty worried. “Just kind of weird using someone else’s toothbrush that’s mine,” she muttered as she resumed her search. She walked quickly down the hall until she disappeared into a bedroom. I followed behind her and stopped at the door. She saw a news clipping on a dresser in this, the master bedroom, which listed an obituary of her late husband. I could tell she felt comfortable in this room, but there were also a few distrustful glances indicating that a few of the things were different here and there.

She read the obituary thoughtfully and then made one of those crooked-ended smiles. Next she turned to me and then walked over to hug me, his replacement, and I didn’t feel all that uneasy about it. She hugged me like my Abby might.

“Looks like he didn’t make it here, either,” she said softly in my ear. “I was kind of hoping, since we saw a version of him back with the hats.”

“I’m so sorry, Ava.”

“Don’t apologize. I know he’s somewhere down the line, I just know it.” She dropped her hold and began once again her house-searching frenzy for Les. (I wondered just how the man had died here, since Ava’s Ralph had died at the hands of a true exister sliding accident.)

“Look, Ava,” I explained optimistically, “Les is probably at your mother-in-law’s. After all, that’s who has him where we left.”

“Of course!” she exclaimed, feeling relief for the first time since our unnerving cab ride had ended in front of Last Word National Bank. We walked out of the mahogany-framed, leaded-glass front door and stood on the front brick porch that faced a circular drive. A woman neighbor surprised us both with a “Hi.”

“Oh, hi,” Ava said back, the neighbor several feet away. “That’s Rita,” she whispered to me. Rita walked up the driveway and sincerely smiled in greeting. It was the moment of truth, introduction time, for I was convinced that “Rita” was not her name here. I tried to make the first move, the safest move. So did Ava, unfortunately.

“I’m Rocky,” from me was said simultaneously with, “He’s Ralph,” from her.

This Rita person just looked back and forth, from me to her, and then back to me again. She exhaled a laugh.

“I’m Ralph, but my friends call me Rocky,” I explained. And you?”

“I’m Nita,” she said, sticking out her hand, delighted.

“Nita?” Ava asked.

“Yes?” answered the petite neighbor, assuming Ava sought a favor.

“Uh, Nita, could you give me a ride to Ralph’s mother’s house?” I eyed Ava’s perfectly good car sitting in her carport. It wasn’t a Mercedes anymore, but it was still at least a BMW.

“Rocky’s mother?” she asked, referring to me.

“No, my Ralph’s mother’s,” she clarified. Uh-oh, I thought; invoking a dead person to the widow made Nita nervous.

“Sure, sure, sure,” she oversaid. “Get in my car.”

No Zs. We must have slid again somewhere.

We piled into Nita’s car, a compact that had us crammed into the back seat, as she had the passenger seat filled with racquetball paraphernalia.

“Sorry about the front seat. So your car, what’s the matter with it? Broken down?” she asked Ava as we drove off.

“I’m afraid so,” she answered, obviously not willing to take her perfectly good car out on possibly sliding streets. Not that I was offered the chance to drive, thank goodness.

Now this Nita seemed like a nice girl. She was a newlywed I learned from the ensuing conversation, complete with a few sentence inversions here and there, but still no Zs. She studied Art History at the University of New Orleans. She was married to a Maitre D’ at a fancy French Quarter restaurant and, like I said, seemed very nice. She supposed, and we did nothing to discourage it, that I was a close relative to the late Mr. Ebe, what with the same name and certainly with the resemblance.

“You know where they live, don’t you, Nita?” Ava asked her.

“Oh, sure. A ride I had to give them home the day of the...” she paused with maudlin respect, “funeral.”

“Well, I must say,” I had to say, “you’re a lot nicer than our last driver.”

“Oh?” she responded.

“Yes, a cabby.”

“Oh, the worst they are, huh?” she agreed.

“You’re telling me,” Ava further agreed.

And then nice Nita swerved out of her way to hit someone’s nice little pet—a dog, I think. I couldn’t really turn that quickly to see for sure, with my neck still stiff. Ava screamed.

“Nita!” she shouted to her. “We’ve got to stop and help him—find the owner!”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Nita laughed, turning around briefly to look at Ava. “Oh I tell you, Ava,” (apparently still her name here,) “sometimes you’re such a clown. You act like some of these bleeding hearts who would do the same for the run-over homeless. Don’t you follow Greer?”

Ava and I shared a worried glance. All at once our attention snapped back to the road ahead. We were getting off of the Ponchartrain expressway heading toward Robert E. Lee when some guy in an old brown and rusting pick-up sounded his horn as he swerved in front to cut Nita off. Nita honked repeatedly, heatedly, back at him. By this time he was directly in front of us, and we saw him through his back window raise a middle finger. He sped up, bouncing along the sinking asphalt of West End Boulevard. To my horror, and I saw by Ava’s face that she noticed it, too, there was a young girl, about eight or nine, bouncing around in the bed of the truck.

“You large, sweaty anal cavity, you!” cute little Nita hurled at her tormentor. She raced the engine, nosing up to and dropping back from the man’s apparent daughter, Nita’s closest victim. She placed her car, I know, inches from the downed open hatch which would provide no barrier for the child should the right bump jostle her into the space between truck and preying car. And at this narrow distance she dropped the car into a lower gear so as to frighten the young girl out of her wits. She slammed her thin back against the back of the truck’s cab, plastered there with terror. Her eyes were roaring for forgiveness for whatever infraction her father may have committed. Ava clutched my arm, tightening her grip more and more. I myself went rigid for the little girl. Her father took evasive maneuvers, changing lanes back and forth, tossing his daughter, like loose baggage, onto whatever metal clutch she could find purchase. Nita matched his lane changes, stroke for stroke.

“Nita!” Ava shouted. “Stop! You’re going to kill her.”

“The little twat I’m just scaring, Ava. For not sitting up front and wearing a seat belt, that’s what she gets.”

“Yes, but if anything happens, anything!—she’s going to be tossed out. Please stop.” There was some gravel or rocky debris at the girl’s feet. Desperate, she scooped some up in both her hands and threw it on Nita’s windshield.

“Oh you little pizza-shit!” Nita yelled and gave the accelerator a push. Her car bumped the truck this time, the physics of forty miles an hour affecting the whole interaction of the two such that the girl tumbled our way. Before all kinds of screams could escape from our back seat, we saw the child catch a rope that had been flapping along the side of the truck. Once I realized she was safe, I was coherent enough to plan my jump into the front seat to commandeer the car. Abruptly, however, Nita swerved right onto a quiet residential street, but never slowing during the turn. I saw ahead a pretty collie, lazy-as-can-be lounging in the middle of the road. I shut my eyes.

“Oh, no,” I heard Ava say in anticipation to the upcoming thump. It never came. I opened my eyes and turned as best as I could to see the dog scamper away. It must have been one of those perfect synchronizations, him slipping out after the first set of wheels but before the second set. Ava and I just held hands in the back, each putting nail marks into the other. We rode quietly in fear for any further victims of Nita’s vigilante vehicle, going the few remaining miles after turning onto Robert E. Lee Boulevard. Ultimately, we turned left toward the lake after crossing Bayou St. John and bounced up a steep driveway of Ava’s in-laws. The neighborhood was called Lake Terrace, and it wasn’t very far from the area Abby’s aunt lived in layers before.

“Well, here we are,” Nita said, pulling to a stop. The house was a blond brick ranch style, contemporary for a couple of decades ago, or for now, here.

“Yes, well, I guess we are,” Ava agreed, still bothered. We got out of the car. If all of our adventures had ended right here, it would have been plenty enough exciting for the both of us.

“Hey, girl, whatcha here doing anyway?” she asked Ava. “The old hag I know you never liked.”

“I came to see if my son was here,” she told Nita, avoiding eye contact with her.

“Another child you didn’t tell me you had,” she said. “Well, bye.” And then she pulled off. She rounded the corner out of sight, and a moment later we heard the squeal of car tires, announcing what we were sure was another ridding from society of some sort of burden. Ava grabbed my arm at the sound and then quickly let go. She turned to me at the foot of the walk which led up to the front door.

“Another child?” Ava asked herself while facing me. “What could she have meant by that? Could I have two children?” I could see that this thought excited her.

“No, can’t be. She didn’t know of any second child.”

“I suppose so,” she said, “but…that means there really is at least one, right?”

“I guess,” I agreed. “You have a Les here.” She smiled.

We walked to the front door, and I pushed the button. We heard a dong-ding. There was the sudden sound of a small chirping dog, the kind grannies carry on their bosom to shopping malls. Next was heard the click clack of shoes on a hard floor. It invisibly approached the door and finally stopped.

“Who is it?” a singsong voice behind the door asked.

“Ava,” Ava said to the door. And to me she whispered, “Ol’ lady Ebe wasn’t crazy about me where we came from. No telling what she’d think of me here.”

The door opened slowly and ol’ lady Ebe’s glare gave us our answer. The woman was a seventy-ish gray-haired biddy, thin, with enough hair spray—well, I knew she had done some real damage to the ozone layer that day. She held in her hand a small white box that had a single red button, obviously a remote panic button for the burglar alarm. She stared straight at Ava with that disapproving look only a mother-in-law could give. She didn’t even regard me. Not yet.

“Yes?” she asked sternly. “And what do you want?”

“Is Leslie here?” Ava asked.

“Leslie? Leslie who?” ol’ lady Ebe inquired.

“Ralph’s and my son, Leslie. Your grandchild.”

“We know he had problems,” I suddenly remembered Ava saying to John and me about Les the evening of the funeral, before our journey had begun, “but we were glad to get what we got.”

If anguishing her daily had been wondering what life would’ve been with him normal, the way it should’ve been, his oblivion would blow her away. She halfway would have expected perhaps worsening of his handicaps, but she was unprepared for his absence. This would be the loss of her husband and their only child (the last relic, a sacred re-incarnation of her loved one)—all in one week. Ol’ lady Ebe inadvertently broke the news in her puzzlement.

“Batty, have you gone, Ava? Your son Leslie, the little tiny baby right after birth who out of Intensive Care never made it? So premature…” she trailed off as she noted Ava’s face. “Well, what’d ya expect? Dead he is, really.”

The pallor did not compliment Ava. But whiter was the old woman when she finally, not through courtesy but through curiosity, noticed me. This old mother, having seen all of the stages of her son’s development, apparently saw in me a snapshot of her son in his twenties.

I found this very strange, because she certainly didn’t look like the mother I had had. Then, I had slid so much, and my parents had subtly altered so many times, that I had no valid visage of my folks.

So here we were, Ava blank-faced at ol’ lady Ebe, ol’ lady Ebe blank-faced at me, and me, the only one with any color, looking any which way.

“He is alive,” Ava finally firmly told her, perhaps out of her own defiant motherhood, just to outrank the persnickety grandmotherhood. “Maybe not here, but where I was—a place you’ve never been. And I’ve known that joy, and you haven’t.”

Now the old woman turned to Ava, adding an expression of being overwhelmed to a face that already qualified to exhaust a thesaurus’s whole category of astonishment. Ava’s announcement and my appearance caused her to waver, whereupon she collapsed on her rear, clutching her chest—just gave up the fight against gravity.

We started shouting into the house for help. An elderly man came running, saw the fiasco, and went running back in. He looked enough like a face I knew to probably be Ralph’s father. And I guess mine, in an interdimensionally twisted sort of way.

“Do you know CPR?” Ava asked me with urgency.

“Don’t you sort of beat on her chest?” was my response, fearing I had killed another one.

“Great!” was her response to my response. It was comical. We each crouched down to do anything that might seem the obvious thing to do. We accomplished nothing, of course. I tried to support her head, which tossed itself to and fro, while Ava fanned her with the palm of her hand.

Just then, ol’ man Ebe came running back with some pills and shoved one in her mouth and fiddled with it to get it under her tongue. She was still conscious, but certainly not because of us. She finally came around enough to groan and roll her eyes back into position straight ahead. She cast all of us off, including the old man, and melodramatically faltered as she attempted to stand. She finally succeeded, but used her husband for support.

“Ava,” ol’ man Ebe asked, “who is this?” referring to me. “He looks just like Ralph.”

Nita had given Ava an idea, apparently, and Ava answered, but more directly to the old woman, spite intended. By now she was again alert enough to understand what Ava had in store for her.

“He’s our other child, our secret child—your grandson, the one who made it,” she said scornfully, to get back at them, gypping them out of a hidden grandson all of these years. Ol’ lady Ebe’s comments about Les’ whereabouts had snatched Les away from Ava, and her misdirected anger had targeted the speaker of those cruel words with knee-jerk revenge.

Well, she hurt these old folks badly, I could tell. It made me wonder if she, in fact, was the original Ava who had followed me into the magnet, doing a mean and senseless thing like that; or was she a meaner switcheroo, flipped into her place by a ripple in the magnet’s wake.

We went back to my place. We took an un-air-conditioned bus that we boarded on Robert E. Lee and which we had pretty much to ourselves, except when it had gotten all the way to Canal Street. It was a silent ride on her part, and I didn’t offer any idle chatter, either. We got off when it became crowded, and then we walked the rest of the way. Two miles. For me, it was very hard, but for her it was therapeutic. We walked on and on, our only communication being my grabbing her hand when time to take a turn. There were no slides, no distractions. We were both thinking like crazy.

She wasn’t getting back at those old people for popping her bubble, I realized; she was replacing Les with me and punishing them for her loss at the same time.

Consider this: First I replaced her dead husband. I was able to handle that. Now I was to replace her dead son. Now that was something I really wasn’t keen on, especially because there were some recent signs more than just motherly affection, if you know what I mean. At the time I handled being her husband’s replacement O.K., because to tell you the truth, I was replacing my own Abby, sort of—or at least showing Abby affection through a very qualified surrogate. Anyway, it felt good; and in a real healthy way.

But now it was beginning to smell Oedipal around here, and that made sense, too—even more sense with Ava being twice my age. And I knew she felt these thoughts, too, or versions of them.

Ultimately, we both found ourselves plopping on my living room sofa in my apartment six floors above the street we had walked to get there. We had taken the only working elevator which really wasn’t in such good health. My key had worked, culminating in the door swinging wide to reveal my habitat of this layer. My, how the decor sucked! French provincial had swelled into the general living area, and the furniture was mottled with a bad imitation faux marble paint streak effect.

“There’s no accounting for taste,” I told her. As if summoned there, we both sat back on the sofa, slouched, heads laid back as we officially put to rest our first full day in the wake of the magnet. We rested. At some point, still laid back, we each rotated our heads toward each other, she better than me as I was still stiff and slow to accomplish any type of head movement. She saw my pain as I finally succeeded, and she smiled a sympathetic smile.

She really was beautiful. She was also, well, mature, but not unlike my Abby. Gazing at her, I found enjoyment in embarking on a fantasy. I fantasized a scenario that life had straightened out, that I had found my young, nubile Abby, had married her, had had a wonderful life with her, and that this would be the connubial loveliness I’d be gazing at years from now, united with her, with all of that good living behind us, between us, and in us.

I don’t know what Ava was feeling, but my frame of mind was receptive to an outstretched hand that stroked my red, swollen cheek. I would not resist any caresses. I could not.

“He was a lot like you,” she said softly.

“Your husband?” I asked. “Yes, of course, your husband.” I closed my eyes to receive her flattery.

“He was funny and quick and generous. He loved me like I know you love your Abby. He was good to me my whole married life, like I know you will be good to Abby. And he was pretty, too, like you. I loved him so...I love him. He was a lot like you.” I opened my eyes to accept her kindly expression. “He was a lot of you.”

Her hand still cradled my cheek and, unresisted, moved its stroking down my neck to my chest and finally groped me. I basked in this petting, feelings welling up, brewing, and spilling over.

God, I wanted my Abby, and sitting here was the picture, the feel, the embodiment of my whole life with her to be (having been had). If I could have her, I would have my whole life yet to come with my Abby—the years, the maturing, the striving together, the growing older together, the works. I could have my whole fulfilled yet-to-come life flash before my eyes.

Ava wanted her Ralph. I wondered if she wanted to relive their youth together, driving her lust in the opposite temporal direction from mine. And she wanted Les, too, but this didn’t distort her desire. After all, from her husband she had had her child, and there was sex involved, and here all of these aspects were smeared into one intermingling impetus.

Now I’m not one to graphically describe personal sexual athletics, but this was a session. We had drives that were cosmic which fueled mere physical copulation. Many Earths shook, but no sliding, thank goodness.

Most sex is so inundated with grunts, moans, and whimpering expressions of surrender, that this lovemaking marked it’s uniqueness with exclamations and facial exhilarations of pure happiness. I mean usually you just don’t have time to look happy and smiley during sex. But we grinned and laughed like fools the whole way, finding fulfillment by satisfying needs that had never been satisfied before by anybody; or for that matter involving needs that had never been needed before by anybody.

As you know, she was a lot older. Twice my age, and that was kind of strange. It wasn’t a turn-off for my smooth-skinned, unwrinkled self, mind you. I remembered that once as a young teenager I had a time with a girl in her late twenties, and I thought, Boy! this is great! For you see, this was not just a slip of a girl—this was a woman! A full-bodied, solid, and mature woman. All over post-pubescent, sinewy, stringy me. Well this thrill was back, but multiplied exponentially in all of those aspects. It is true: she was not just older, she was better.

Better than my Abby? Don’t ask me that, because I can’t solve a paradox. And I could never understand fully any guilt I should be feeling. To me, this was my Abby; this was lovemaking with my Abby that I’d still be in love with twenty years from now.

We were spent, limbs draped every which way over conservative oak bed and mattress, our third tryst. This was our guaranteed destination on a trip that had begun on the sofa, made stops at the multi-colored room and the imperialistic French provincial and which had gotten to my conservative room via the ride of our lives. Destination guaranteed.

“Do you still love your Abby after twenty years?” she asked me, knowing precisely how I had used her.

“God, yes,” I replied.

“Good,” she said. “Good. I’m glad I was able to give you that.”

“And what did I give you?” I asked in return.

“You gave me back my Ralph,” she said. After a moment, she added, “And my Leslie.” My thoughts earlier had warned me about this. “Please don’t be upset,” she said. “It’s not a perversion, under the circumstances.”

“What is it, then?” I asked, but not threateningly, for I was still holding some part of her body, a part unknown to my closed eyes.

“That’s what Les was—my love for Ralph. Isn’t that what children are supposed to be, the fruition of love-making with one’s spouse? The expression of love, embodied? When that old hag gave me the news, she not only killed my son, she killed the only thing I had left of Ralph. So I gave them back another grandson to give me back my son, and with it I regained a part of my Ralph, a part as good as the whole Ralph.

“And I made love to you and had my Ralph back and my son, too. I made love to both, because they are together, joined by procreation, forever. Even though they’re both dead here.”

And then she cried, and I comforted her; as did her Ralph comfort her, and she felt that; as also did her Les—not the crippled, blind little boy, but the whole Les from somewhere. She felt his comfort also. And I had the deified honor to do that for her.