6

“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.